I Became a Fire Lookout in the Woods—You Won’t Believe the Strange Rules!

My name is Jack, and for a long time I didn’t live in my body so much as I lived in my phone. That sounds dramatic, but the numbers don’t lie. Fourteen hours of screen time a day. Not “up to fourteen” or “on busy days.” Fourteen. Seven of those hours I could pretend were work, the way you pretend fast food is a meal if you eat it at a table. The rest was just scrolling. Automatic thumb movements, muscle memory, tapping through apps I didn’t even remember opening. I woke up with my phone next to my face, checked emails before I got out of bed, answered messages while brushing my teeth, carried it from room to room like an IV drip. Most nights I fell asleep holding the damn thing, the screen dimmed to a warm glow like a nightlight for adults who were afraid of their own thoughts in the dark.

The rest of my life was one of those showroom apartments that looks like someone lives there until you realize none of the cabinets open. Expensive condo. Blackout curtains. Noise-canceling headphones. A fridge full of labeled meal preps I never ate because it was easier to tap a delivery app than to microwave something I’d already paid for. A fancy standing desk that was supposed to save my spine and instead just made my back hurt in a more expensive way. I bought things I didn’t need with money I barely cared I was making. There were weeks when the only actual voice I heard directed at me came through a headset on a Zoom call, filtered and compressed and lagging milliseconds behind.

I worked for one of those tech companies people write think pieces about. Open-plan office. Beanbags in the lobby like grown adults need a kindergarten corner to be creative. A cereal bar wall with twelve different kinds of sugar disguised as breakfast. Hallways where motivational phrases were painted in loud colors—“DISRUPT,” “INNOVATE,” “THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX”—as if anyone in that building was allowed to think outside the KPI dashboard. My job title was “Product Innovation Lead,” which meant everything and nothing at once. I sat in meetings where people said words like “synergy,” “vertical integration,” and “cross-functional leverage” without flinching, and the scariest part was that after a while, I said them too. I got rewarded for answering emails fast, for saying “good call” at the right time, for looking awake even when my brain was sludge. I was good at it. Very good. And the better I got, the less I felt.

There wasn’t one dramatic moment where I broke. No screaming resignation in front of the team, no viral video of me flipping a conference table. What happened was quieter and heavier. A slow accumulation of empty days until the weight of them made it hard to breathe. One night, standing in the office after everyone had gone home, I glanced up and saw my reflection in the glass. The city lights turned the window into a black mirror. For a split second I didn’t recognize myself. The face staring back looked like a well-dressed ghost—tie straight, eyes hollow, mouth set in the kind of neutral expression you wear when you’re too tired to have feelings about anything.

That image followed me home and sat on my chest while I pretended to sleep.

The next night, I checked my screen time report again. Fourteen hours. I stared at the number until the edges of it blurred. Then, for the first time in years, I asked myself a simple question I’d been dodging: if I keep living like this, what changes? The answer, obviously, was nothing.

The morning after that, I walked into the office, opened my email, and typed out my resignation. No big speech, no explanation. “Thank you for the opportunity. My last day will be…” The HR lady called it brave. My manager called it “a bold realignment.” My parents called it crazy. I didn’t correct any of them. I sold the suits, the desk, half the furniture, the condo itself. I put the rest of my life into a few storage boxes and a duffel bag. The only thing I kept that really mattered was the feeling that if I didn’t leave now, I never would.

Fire lookout training wasn’t some childhood dream. I didn’t grow up wanting to be the guy in a tower in the forest. I found the program the way I found most things—through a browser tab I don’t remember opening. Some article about “jobs for people who want to go off-grid.” There, buried between seasonal work in Antarctica and caretaking a lighthouse in the middle of nowhere, was a link to the national forestry service’s lookout program. Live alone in a tower. Watch for smoke. Report fires. Not a screen in sight, at least not the kind that pings. I stared at that description longer than I should have. It sounded ridiculous. It also sounded like breathing.

I almost didn’t apply. I came up with a dozen reasons why it wouldn’t work. They’d never accept me. I didn’t have the right background. I’d get out there and hate it. But one night, sitting on my condo floor with half my belongings boxed up and the rest looking somehow faker than before, I filled out the application. I told the truth. No outdoors experience. No forestry degree. Just a man in his thirties who was done living through screens and wanted to spend a season watching something that actually mattered.

They accepted me.

Training stripped away whatever illusions I had about romantic solitude. Boots that looked sturdy in the store turned into torture devices on eight-mile hikes. The first week, my heels blistered open so badly that every step felt like walking on broken glass. My hands, soft from keyboards, split and toughened under rope and axe handles. The maps were a maze of curves and lines that meant nothing until an old ranger showed me, patiently, how to read elevation like a story. You don’t just learn where you are. You learn what direction every drop of water wants to go when it rains, where fire would run if it gets loose, how sound curls through valleys and ridges.

The silence was the worst at first. City silence is never really silence. It’s air conditioners, traffic, muffled arguments through walls, sirens in the distance. Out there, on the first tower I trained in, night fell like a curtain and stayed down. Wind through branches. An owl sometimes. The soft tick of the old Osborne Fire Finder cooling in the dark. I lay awake that first week staring at the ceiling, hearing my heart pound, waiting for a notification buzz that would never come. My brain had been so trained to chase distraction that real stillness felt like withdrawal.

The job itself was simple enough to explain and endlessly complex in practice. Wake up. Make coffee. Log the weather—temperature, humidity, wind speed, direction. Step to the center of the tower where the Osborne Fire Finder waited, round and solid, a map stretched under its circular metal frame. Scan the horizon through the 360-degree windows. If you see smoke, you don’t panic. You don’t assume the worst. You take a bearing with the sighting device, line it up with the map, read out the azimuth. You pick up the radio, call dispatch, and calmly report the coordinates. They compare your bearing with one from another tower if they can, triangulate the source, and decide whether to send crews. You don’t fight the fire. You witness it and give people a chance to fight it before it’s too late.

When nothing burned—and most days, nothing did—you logged the nothing carefully. Cloud cover. Distant lightning. Little columns of dust where a rock slide might’ve happened. You hiked the nearby trails, cleared brush that was too close to the cabin, checked the water collection system, maintained the solar panels, patched leaks. You cooked simple food. You read. You thought. You watched your own mind like you watched the horizon.

After two full seasons, the restless itch that had once driven me to check my phone every ten seconds dulled into something quieter. I didn’t miss the city. I didn’t miss the cold glow of a hundred monitors. I didn’t miss the networking events where everyone pretended to like each other and nobody meant it. There was something brutally honest about the tower. Either you did your job or things burned. No one could bury your failure under jargon. You either saw the smoke or you didn’t.

At the end of my second year, I requested the most remote outpost in the district. I wanted the tower nobody else wanted. The one even the veteran lookouts thought was too isolated, too neglected, too easy to forget. The ranger on the phone told me exactly what I was asking for. The tower hadn’t been used regularly in years. It sat on a ridge beyond the service roads, deep in the timberline where the maintained trails faded into deer paths. There’d be solar panels for basic power, a rain barrel for water, a composting toilet, and not much else. No cell coverage. No quick rescue. Supplies would be air-dropped once a month if the weather cooperated. If not, I’d stretch what I had.

I told him it sounded perfect.

Most people think a fire tower stands alone, one lonely toothpick stuck in the middle of a forest. That’s usually true. But up here, on this ridge, there were two. Mine on the southern shoulder, and Henry’s three miles north on the higher peak, with a clean view of the northern slopes and the old quarry beyond. Henry had been my trainer my first season. He’d grown up in Wyoming in a family of park rangers and chosen the lookout’s life instead of the constant motion of ground crews. “I like seeing things coming,” he’d said when I asked him why. “I don’t trust other people to do it for me.”

Henry was built like a tree and moved like one too—slow, deliberate, with a sense of rootedness. He still wore the same patched canvas jacket he’d had the first time I met him. His cat, Lilac, was the only creature that seemed to come and go as she pleased, vanishing into the underbrush for days and reappearing without explanation. Every morning at seven, without fail, he’d crackle onto the radio.

“Morning, Jack. South tower, you alive?”

“Unfortunately,” I’d answer, and he’d chuckle that quiet, gravelly chuckle of his.

We talked about simple things. Weather fronts building on the horizon. Wind direction shifts. Branches fallen across trails. Sometimes, when the weather was decent and I needed an excuse to stretch my legs, I’d hike the three miles up to his tower. He’d meet me on the ladder halfway with a hand extended like I might fall, even though he never once slipped. He ate soup straight from the can, always chicken noodle, always the same brand. He’d been doing this long enough that routine wasn’t a crutch for him. It was a ritual.

Four days into my first season at the remote tower, Henry showed up in person earlier than he ever had before. The sun was barely clear of the ridge, the air still carrying the damp chill of night. I saw his figure cutting through the trees from the south deck and felt a little ripple of unease. People out here didn’t change their patterns for nothing.

He climbed the ladder, stepped inside, nodded once, and sat down at my small table like he owned the place. I poured him coffee without asking. He took the mug, wrapped his big hands around it, and stared at the steam for a long moment.

“You notice anything strange?” he asked finally.

I thought about it. I’d seen a handful of deer on the slope below, a fox raiding something near the rain barrel, birds chasing each other through the treetops. One coyote had howled far off during the night. Nothing unusual for a place like this. I told him so.

Henry nodded, took a sip, and then said, “Sit down a minute.”

There’s a particular stillness that falls when someone who never wastes words decides to have a serious conversation. I sat on the stool next to the logbook and watched him eat a few spoonfuls of soup straight from the can. Everything about him looked the same as it always had—same jacket, same calm eyes, same way of cradling the can like it was a delicate thing. He didn’t rush. He didn’t fidget. The only hint that something was off was the way his gaze avoided the windows.

“I think there’s a wendigo nest nearby,” he said eventually.

The word snapped through the air like a dry twig. I actually laughed once, a short, incredulous sound, and then stopped when I saw he wasn’t smiling. He lifted a hand, palm out, to cut off whatever I was about to say.

“Not sure,” he said. “But I’ve been keeping track. And we’re going over some rules either way.”

I’d heard the legends, the way most people have. Campfire stories about cannibalistic spirits in the winter woods, monsters with endless hunger, long limbs, empty eyes. None of it belonged in the same category as weather reports and fire danger indexes. But the look on Henry’s face didn’t leave room for jokes. It was the face of a man who’d seen enough strange things that his scale of “impossible” had shifted quietly over the years.

“Rules,” I repeated. “Like tower rules?”

“Exactly like tower rules,” he said. “Just… older ones.”

He held up one thick finger.

“First one you already know. Lights out after midnight.”

That was standard practice at most towers anyway. Light pollution is the enemy of night vision. If you blast your eyes with lantern glow, you’re blind to distant smoke columns. Out here, on solar power and a backup generator, waste was stupid. I’d been switching off around eleven without thinking.

“Lights attract what you don’t want,” Henry added. “Insects, birds off their natural cycle, curious hikers. And maybe other things.” His mouth tightened around that last part. “Keep them low. Keep them brief. After midnight, let the night be night.”

He lifted a second finger.

“Rule two,” he said. “Supply drops every Sunday, usually morning. You’ll hear the plane around nine. It doesn’t land. They’ll do a low pass and drop a crate near the south trailhead. You hike down and get it. Thirty minutes each way if your legs are still good.”

I nodded. I’d read a version of that in the orientation packet. Food, water, batteries, maybe something extra if dispatch liked you.

“You’ll get your basics,” Henry went on. “Dry goods. Canned stuff. Sometimes luxuries. Bacon if you smile enough at the folks on the radio. Orange juice on holidays, if you’re lucky. I told them we’ve got a new man up here. You’ll probably eat better than me for a while.”

“Then I’ll share,” I said.

“You’d better,” he said. A tiny smile ghosted across his face and vanished.

He lifted a third finger. This time his hand was steady, but there was something in his eyes that wasn’t.

“Rule three,” he said. “Never wear red.”

I blinked. “Never… what?”

“No red clothes. No red hats. No red packs. No bandanas. No gloves. Nothing,” he said. “You see someone out here wearing red, you tell them to take it off. If they don’t, you walk them back to the boundary yourself.”

I waited for him to laugh. He didn’t.

“It’s posted on some of the trailheads,” he said. “Not all. The language is vague. ‘Bright colors discouraged in this region.’ Some of the rangers mention it during briefings, some don’t. But for us?” He tapped the table with a finger. “For us it’s not optional.”

“That’s… weird,” I said, because it was the only word I trusted my mouth with.

“It’s not a fashion thing,” Henry said. “It’s to stop it from seeing you.”

The word “it” landed heavier than anything else he’d said. Not a bear. Not a mountain lion. Not “them” as in poachers or hikers or illegal campers. It.

“So what is ‘it?’” I asked, the skeptic in me rising for one last stand. “The wendigo?”

Henry stared out at the tree line like he expected the forest to answer for him. He chewed, swallowed, and then shook his head slowly.

“I don’t know what it is,” he said. “I think it’s like what people call a wendigo. Or something older. Or something worse. The name doesn’t matter. Doesn’t change what it does.”

“What does it do?” I asked.

“If you see it,” he said quietly, “you’re already too close.”

There was a pause long enough for me to hear my own heartbeat in my ears.

“You’ve seen it,” I said, more statement than question.

Henry didn’t flinch. “I’ve seen enough to follow the rules,” he said. “That’s all you need to know right now.”

He stood, walked over to his battered pack, and pulled out a plastic bag bulging with clothes. He handed it to me. Inside were jackets and shirts in muted greens, browns, greys. All worn. All serviceable.

“If you brought anything red,” he said, “put it in here. Keep it in the tower. Locked.”

I thought through my gear. Forest green jacket. Dark blue shirts. Black hoodie. Grey hiking pants. No red. Then I remembered the bandana tied to my food crate, a deep, cheerful red with little white patterns—a stupid carryover from city life. I’d tied it there so I could find the crate fast among the rest of my stuff.

“One bandana,” I said. “That’s it.”

“Good. Bag it,” he said. “You think this is excessive. I can see it in your face. But I don’t invent rules, Jack. I just survive long enough to repeat the useful ones.”

We sat there as the sun went down, the forest slowly changing color from green to gold to black. No lights came on in Henry’s tower across the ridge. None came on in mine until well after he’d left and I had double-checked every window latch for reasons I couldn’t quite name.

That night, after Henry disappeared into the trees with his usual unhurried stride, I rummaged through my pack, found the red bandana, folded it into a small, tight square, and slid it into the bag with his other clothes. I sealed it, shoved it under my bunk, and turned off the lantern earlier than I needed to.

Once he’d mentioned the color, I started seeing it everywhere in my memory. Bright red rain jackets on gear catalog covers. Neon windbreakers in stock photos of happy hikers. Kids on urban sidewalks in cherry-colored backpacks. Back in the city, red was safety—something you wore so hunters wouldn’t mistake you for a deer, so rescuers could spot you from a helicopter. Out here, according to Henry, it was a beacon for something you didn’t want attention from.

The next time I hiked over to his tower, a few days later, I brought the patched propane hose he’d helped me fix and a bag of jerky and dried fruit from my latest supply drop. He let me climb the ladder without a word and motioned me inside with a tilt of his head.

Instead of sitting at the table, he walked straight to the far wall and grabbed the small blackboard I’d seen him use to track wind direction. He flipped it around. The back wasn’t a chalkboard at all. It was a corkboard covered in paper.

Missing persons flyers. Ranger field notes. Newspaper clippings. Handwritten pages ripped from notebooks. At least twenty of them. Different faces. Different ages. Men, women, a couple of kids. Some local, some from other states. Some hikers, some campers, one part of a hunting party that never made it back to the truck.

“One thing they all have in common,” Henry said.

He stepped aside so I could see better. It took my brain a few seconds to notice it, and then I couldn’t unsee it. Red. In almost every photo, in every description. A red cap. A red flannel. A red backpack. Red gloves. In the black-and-white clippings, the word “red” had been circled in pen where it appeared in the description. “Last seen wearing a bright red jacket.” “Red shell rain coat.” “Red day pack shaped like a cartoon character.”

“These go back about five years,” Henry said.

“Why haven’t I heard about this?” I asked, leaning closer. Most of the clippings looked like local media—the kind of stories that fill small-town papers and never make it into the national cycle. Lost hiker. Search called off. Family asks for privacy.

“You wouldn’t,” he said. “County keeps it quiet. No panic. No tourism hit. No questions from higher up. Official line is people get lost, weather changes fast, terrain’s rough.”

“But they know,” I said. “The rangers. Dispatch. Somebody knows enough to make a rule.”

“They know just enough to be nervous,” Henry said. “Every station’s been told to discourage red without making a big deal of it. ‘Wildlife reasons.’ ‘Hunting confusion.’ That kind of thing.”

“And out here?” I asked.

“Out here,” he said, “it’s not theory. We’re the ones who actually see where trails go cold.”

He went to a shelf, reached underneath, and pulled out a leather-bound notebook. The cover was worn soft. When he opened it on the table between us, the pages inside were a mess of sketches, timestamps, rough maps, photos taped in with yellowing tape.

“This is mine,” he said. “Not official. I don’t hand this one over at the end of the season.”

The open page held a drawing. Pencil, no color. Something tall and too thin, its arms hanging almost to its knees. The legs were long and slightly uneven, like one hip sat higher. The head was big and round, with no ears and wide, circular eyes that seemed to stare even in graphite. The mouth was drawn as a wide, gentle curve that nonetheless felt wrong—a line just slightly downturned at the corners.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Henry said. “But I saw it four months ago. About a mile past the quarry trail.”

I looked up sharply. “You saw it,” I repeated.

He nodded once. “Storm came through in June. Bad one. Wind took down half the dead snags along the east ridge. I went to check for blowdowns. About halfway, the woods went still. Not quiet. Still. Like everything was holding its breath. Birds shut up. Squirrels froze. Even the wind dropped. I know that feeling. It’s the forest saying something’s out of place.”

He turned a few pages. Photos of broken branches, a flattened patch of grass, something like a footprint in damp soil. “I looked down toward the quarry clearing,” he said. “That’s when I saw it. Walking through the open like it owns the place. Long strides. Arms swinging slow. Didn’t rush. Didn’t sneak. Just moved.”

“And you’re sure it wasn’t a person?” I asked, because my brain needed the option.

“I know people,” he said. “People hunch. They watch their footing. They carry packs. This thing walked like the ground was built for it. And besides…” He tapped the photo. “People don’t leave prints like that.”

The footprint photo looked wrong even before I registered why. The heel impression was narrow, the main pad elongated, and the toes—there were six of them—spread wide like fingers, splayed out as if gripping the soil. Each toe imprint was distinct, deep at the tips. It made my skin crawl just looking at it.

“Found those two days after,” Henry said. “Same area. No boot prints nearby. No tire tracks. No camping trash. No sign of anything but deer and those.”

He flipped through more pages. More sketches of the tall, thin figure at different distances. Branches broken eight, nine feet off the ground. Claw marks on bark that weren’t from any known animal. Notes about strange stillness and sound.

“I don’t know what it is,” he said again. “But I know what it follows.”

“Red,” I said quietly.

He nodded. “Every time someone vanishes out here, that detail shows up. Red jacket. Red cap. Red backpack. Color sticks out to us. Maybe it sticks out to it, too. Maybe in a different way.”

“Why not close the whole area?” I asked. “Why not call in big guns, shut down the trails, tell the world there’s something dangerous out here?”

“Because no one wants a monster on the record,” he said bluntly. “Fire, they can budget for. Storm damage, they can log. Bears and cougars, they can put on pamphlets. Something they can’t explain that’s been picking off people in red for five years? That’s a career-ender for whoever signs that report. So instead, we get quiet rules.” He flicked a finger toward the board. “And people like us who know better than to wear bright colors.”

“What do we do, then?” I asked. “Just… watch?”

“We do our job,” he said. “We watch. We log. We keep idiots from wandering where they shouldn’t. And we follow the rules.”

I went back to my tower with his notebook lodged in the back of my mind like a splinter. For a few weeks, nothing happened. I got used to the rhythm of the place. Wake, scan, log, hike a bit, repair what needed repairing, listen to the radio. The forest breathed around me in slow, steady cycles. Cloud fronts rolled in and vanished. Rabbits chewed on the grasses near the tower. Once, a black bear lumbered through just beyond the clearing without looking up.

I almost convinced myself the corkboard and Henry’s sketches were just the accumulation of a man alone with his thoughts for too long.

Then, one clear morning a little after nine, I saw a flash of red through the scope.

The north trail cut through a stretch of forest that looked almost tame from a distance. Gentle slopes, scattered pines, a few open patches where the underbrush thinned. I checked it twice a day out of habit. That morning, the light was perfect, the air crisp. I swept the binoculars from the west ridge toward the quarry access—not expecting anything but trees—and caught movement.

A person. Backpack. Hiking boots. Moving steady along the narrow dirt path, heading north toward the area Henry had marked in his notebook. I adjusted the focus.

Red.

A bright red windbreaker, zipped to the throat.

I felt the bottom of my stomach drop in a slow, sick way, like an elevator descending too fast. My first rational thought was that he was off-route. No casual hiker should have been that deep. There were no designated campgrounds out there. No scenic overlooks on the maps. Nothing to draw a normal person that far in unless they were very lost or very determined.

I flipped on the tower’s loudspeaker and grabbed the mic.

“You on the north trail,” I called. “Red jacket. Hold up. You’re off-route.”

The hiker didn’t react. He didn’t even turn his head. He kept walking, same steady stride, eyes forward.

I tried again, louder. “Red jacket. Stop where you are. This is a restricted area. Please respond.”

Nothing. The man didn’t flinch. He just kept walking, like the sound didn’t exist for him.

I grabbed the radio. “Henry, you got eyes on the north trail?” I asked.

His reply came back immediately. “I see him,” he said.

“He’s not responding,” I said.

There was a silence that stretched just a hair too long. Then Henry’s voice came back, lower.

“We’re going now,” he said.

Five minutes later, we met at the base of my tower. Henry already had his pack on, first aid kit clipped to the side, expression even more stone-like than usual. I stuffed an emergency whistle and a flashlight into my own pack, slung it on, and fell into step beside him.

We took a maintenance path, narrower than the main trails but quicker. The forest was bright and beautiful and all wrong. Halfway to the north line, I realized what was bothering me.

No birds.

No insects.

No rustle of small animals in the underbrush. Just the sound of our boots on the dirt. The absence pressed against my eardrums until they almost hurt. I slowed without meaning to. Henry’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t comment. He didn’t need to.

We heard the hiker before we saw him—the dull, regular crunch of boots on packed earth, unhurried, like a metronome. We followed the sound until the trees thinned and the forest opened into a clearing near the quarry fence. He stood at the far edge, motionless, staring straight ahead into nothing.

“Sir,” Henry called out. “You need to stop.”

No reaction. No flicker. No tilt of the head.

“Sir,” Henry tried again, louder. “You’re heading into a restricted zone. Turn around and talk to us.”

Nothing.

We closed the distance carefully. Up close, the man looked wrong in a different way. Mid-thirties, maybe, a few days of stubble on his jaw. Backpack straps hanging loose like he’d never tightened them properly. Boots laced, but sloppy. His hands hung limp at his sides. His eyes didn’t track us as we approached. They didn’t track anything. They were open and glassy, fixed on a point in the distance that wasn’t there.

Henry stepped in front of him and reached out slowly, like approaching someone sleepwalking. He placed a firm hand on the guy’s shoulder and turned him around.

The hiker blinked as if slapped. His pupils adjusted. His mouth opened a bit.

“You okay?” Henry asked.

The man swallowed. “I… thought I was heading back,” he said, voice hoarse.

“You weren’t,” I said. “You were going the wrong direction entirely.”

He looked around, confusion settling over his features like fog. “I don’t remember turning off,” he said. “My GPS said—”

“There’s no marked loop out here,” Henry said. “No reason to be this far in. What’s your name?”

“Derek,” he said. “I’m alone. Three-day hike. Came in from the south trail. I was just… following the arrow on the screen.”

While Henry kept him talking, I drifted to the edge of the clearing where the dirt sloped toward the quarry fence. Something about the bare ground there drew my eye. The soil was unusually exposed, as if nothing had grown there in a while. I saw shapes impressed in the dirt that weren’t our boot prints, weren’t Derek’s.

They were too big.

I crouched. The prints were spaced far apart, longer than my foot by several inches, rounded at the heel, and the toes—six of them, fanned wide—stood out sharply. The impressions were deep, much deeper than they should have been in that kind of packed earth. I pressed my hand against the center of one, fingers splayed to match the positions of the toes.

The dirt there felt cold.

Not cool from shade. Genuinely colder than the air, like something huge and heavy and not entirely natural had been there very recently. The hair on the back of my neck rose like static.

“Jack,” Henry called softly.

I rose, brushing dirt from my palm. Derek’s color was coming back. He’d drunk water, his eyes less vacant now, embarrassment creeping in as the fog lifted from his expression.

“We’re heading back,” Henry told him. “We’ll put you on the right trail. When you see a ranger station, check in. Tell them where you were.”

Derek nodded, dazed. “Yeah. Yeah, okay.”

“And throw that jacket out,” Henry added, nodding at the red shell zipped up to his throat.

Derek glanced down at it and frowned. “What? Why?”

“Because you don’t want to keep something that almost got you killed,” Henry said, voice flat.

Derek didn’t argue. Whether he believed us or not didn’t matter. He agreed just to keep moving.

We walked back with him until the forest stopped feeling like it was holding its breath. The birds started up again, tentative chirps building into familiar patterns. A squirrel darted across the path. By the time we hit the main southbound trail, Derek’s steps had steadied. Henry gave him instructions to the boundary gate and watched until he was out of sight.

On the hike back to our towers, neither of us said a word. My mind replayed the blank look on Derek’s face when we’d turned him, like someone waking from anesthesia. The prints in the clearing. The way the ground had felt wrong. The heavy silence around the quarry.

When we got back to Henry’s tower, he didn’t bother with coffee. Instead, he walked inside, dragged his field notebook from under the shelf, flipped to a page labeled “Observations,” uncapped a red pen, and wrote the date. He added: “Male hiker in red jacket intercepted at edge of quarry clearing. Presenting confusion, disorientation, missing time. Six-toed impressions fresh in soil. Forest silence before contact.”

“We didn’t see it,” I said quietly.

“We did,” Henry said. “We just didn’t see it with our eyes.”

After Derek, the forest felt different. Not louder or quieter, just… aware. I found my gaze drifting to the northern ridge whenever I scanned the horizon. Even on calm days, even when the air was clear and no smoke touched the sky, I couldn’t stop myself from checking that direction twice, three times.

I spent two evenings in a row going through Henry’s notebook. Map coordinates. Dates. Little arrows showing directions of tracks. The word “red” underlined again and again. Everything circled the same locus: the old quarry and the cave system beneath it.

“The quarry’s the heart,” I said to Henry on the radio one night.

“Stay away from the heart,” he answered immediately.

“We can’t just leave it,” I said. “We’re sitting here watching a problem that keeps eating people. We saved one guy. How many did we miss?”

“We’re not hunters,” he said. “We’re lookouts. We watch for fire. We don’t go running into the flames with a bottle of water.”

“What if the fire lives underground?” I asked.

Silence crackled on the line.

“Jack,” he said finally, “we don’t know what’s down there. You start wandering into caves with god-knows-what, that’s when the missing becomes three instead of two.”

He wasn’t wrong. But the thought of doing nothing dug at me. Up here, “nothing” isn’t neutral. If you see smoke and don’t report it, the nothing you did becomes someone else’s everything when their house burns. It felt the same way with the quarry. We had enough to know something used it. Something that liked red. Something that left bodies but not always where anyone could find them.

There was a supply shed behind the ranger cabin near my tower, half-buried in weeds, door swollen from years of rain and neglect. I’d glanced inside once early on, taken inventory of the usual stuff—shovels, old hose, spare hand tools—and closed it again. Then, one night, reading through an old inspection report, I saw a line that made my pulse jump: “Lockbox in back shed (explosives, quarry work). Verify integrity every five years.”

The last verification date was almost ten years ago.

I didn’t tell Henry the first time I pried the shed door open with a crowbar. The smell of dust and dried metal rushed out, thick and stale. At the back, behind shelves, sat a heavy, climate-controlled lockbox bolted to the floor. The lock was old but not impossible. It took me an hour with tools and a lot of quiet swearing to crack it.

Inside, wrapped in marked paper and plastic, were charges. Small ones, shaped for focus, labeled with old quarry company logos and dates decades old. Detonator caps. Coiled wire. A manual trigger box the size of a brick, its casing scratched from long-ago rough handling.

They should have been gone. They should have been cleared out when the quarry operations stopped. The fact that they weren’t felt like another unofficial secret layered on top of the others.

I did tell Henry after that.

“You’re insane,” he said. “They’re older than you are.”

“Will they still work?” I asked.

“Probably,” he admitted grudgingly. “That’s the problem. You mishandle one, it takes your hand, your face, and maybe half the tower with it.”

“We don’t need the tower blown up,” I said. “We need a cave sealed.”

“Jack,” he said, very carefully, “do not go near the quarry mouth alone.”

“I won’t,” I lied.

I left before dawn two days later, the world still grey and delicate with early light. The air was cold enough to sting my lungs. I packed the charges wrapped tight, wire, and the trigger box into my pack, alongside a headlamp, extra batteries, and a coil of rope. No radio. No flare gun. If anything went wrong inside, no one was getting to me in time anyway, and I didn’t want to risk flare light advertising my presence.

The path to the quarry had always felt longer than it looked on the map. That morning it felt endless. Every crack of a branch underfoot sounded too loud. Every shadow between trees looked deeper than it should have. The closer I got, the more the forest thinned, replaced by rock and scrub. The birds cut off in the space of three steps. One moment, there were calls all around, the usual layered chorus of a living forest. The next, there was nothing but the sound of my boots and my own breathing.

The quarry itself was a scar—an open wound carved into the side of the ridge. Old stone piles, rusted metal equipment half-swallowed by moss, the faint memory of human industry drowned by time. The cave mouth yawned at the base of the rock wall, dark as a hole punched in the world.

I stopped at the edge and listened. No wind funneled out. No animal smells. Just that odd, dense absence that had started to feel familiar. I switched on my headlamp but kept the beam low, not wanting to throw light too far in and alert anything inside before I knew what I was facing.

The tunnel sloped down gradually, just enough that I had to lean back a bit to keep my footing. The air temperature dropped a few degrees. The smell changed from dry forest to wet stone and something else beneath it—old rot, stale air, the metallic tang of slow decay. The floor under my boots shifted from dirt to stone to a mix of both, pitted and uneven.

The tunnel widened into a larger chamber without warning. One second I was hemmed in by rock on both sides, the next my headlamp beam was swallowed by space. I froze just inside the threshold and swept the light in a slow arc.

Bodies.

For a moment my brain refused to process what I was seeing. Then the shapes resolved.

There were dozens. Some collapsed where they’d fallen. Some slumped against rock. Bones picked clean in some places, clothes hanging loose in tatters. In others, desiccated skin clung to bone, faces hollowed but still recognizable. A few were fresher, if that word can ever apply. Flesh sunken, but not entirely gone. Colorless hands. Dark hair. A red strap here, a red sleeve there. A backpack with a cartoon character face faded but still grinning.

I recognized some of them from Henry’s corkboard. The boy with the red-pack photo. The woman with the bright rain shell. The hunter in the vest. Every missing story that had ended with “search called off” had a full stop here, underground.

For a moment I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. The air felt thick, pressing into my lungs like water. The only sound was the faint drip of moisture from the ceiling somewhere in the dark.

Then something moved in the back of the cavern.

I swung the beam toward it before I could think better.

It was hunched over something on the ground. Long arms bent at odd angles, fingers—too many of them—pressing into flesh as it lifted a piece to its mouth. The head was big and slightly too round. The eyes, when they turned toward the light for half a second, were wide and reflective, catching the beam like an animal’s and yet too focused. The mouth worked in slow, patient motions, chewing. It didn’t hiss. It didn’t roar. It didn’t even flinch the way an animal would when suddenly illuminated. It just watched the light slide over it, blinked once, and went back to feeding.

My body made the decision I was too frozen to articulate. I took one slow step backward. Then another. I didn’t turn. I didn’t run. I moved the way you move around a sleeping dog you aren’t sure you trust, except this was no dog and it was very much awake.

When I reached the tunnel again and the walls closed in around me, I turned and walked, not fast but not leisurely, up the slope until the light from the entrance brightened. Only once I was outside did I let myself breathe in fully.

I didn’t hear it follow. That didn’t mean it couldn’t.

There was a section of rock above the cave mouth where freeze-thaw cycles had carved long, deep cracks over the years. If I placed the charges there and the blast went right, the top layer of rock would collapse inward, sealing the entrance like a cork. It wouldn’t kill whatever was inside—not necessarily. But it would trap it, or at least slow it, make it harder for it to drag bodies in and out.

My hands shook as I unpacked the charges, wired them in series, and flattened them into the cracks. Sweat crawled between my shoulder blades despite the cold air. Every small sound made my heart punch against my ribs. By the time I’d run the wire back up the trail to a safe distance and set the detonator box on the ground, my fingers felt numb.

I double-checked the connections once, then again. There are moments when you commit to an action that you can’t take back. Standing there with my thumb on the trigger, the forest holding its breath around me, I knew I’d just walked into one.

I pressed the button.

The explosion slammed into the air like a physical thing. The ground shuddered under my boots. The sound bounced off the surrounding ridges, echoing back in overlapping layers. Dust and stone fragments belched out of the quarry mouth in a thick, roiling cloud that rolled across the ground like fog. Birds tore out of trees along the ridge line, shrieking.

Then came the lower, grinding roar of rock collapsing inside on itself. It went on longer than I expected, a long, terrible rushing as tons of stone shifted and settled. When the dust finally started to clear, the cave mouth was gone. In its place was a jagged wall of rock and debris, piled high, packed tight.

Nothing moved in the new shadow it cast. No sound emerged from behind it.

I waited there until my ears stopped ringing. Until the birds, timid at first, started up again in the distance. Then I turned and walked back the way I’d come, every nerve feeling like a wire stretched to breaking.

Henry didn’t yell when he found out. Yelling would have been easier to deal with. Instead, he listened to me describe the bodies, the creature, the blast, and then he sat very still for a long time.

“Quarry entrance?” he asked when I finished.

“Sealed,” I said. “Solid, far as I can tell.”

He nodded once. “Good,” he said. “You’re an idiot. But a useful one.”

We didn’t report the explosion in full detail to dispatch. We logged it as controlled demolition of an unsafe abandoned quarry structure, carried out with pre-existing materials. That was technically true. We didn’t mention the nest. Or the six-toed footprints. Or the way the forest had gone still as a grave.

Weeks passed. Then months. Supply planes continued to buzz overhead on Sundays, dropping crates that thumped onto the clearing near the south trail. Bacon showed up often enough to keep Henry’s faith in the system intact. The radios crackled each morning at seven. “Morning, Jack.” “Morning, Henry.” We talked about wind shifts and lightning storms and the occasional bear sighting. No hikers in red appeared in my scope again. No new missing flyers went up on Henry’s corkboard.

You’d think that would bring relief.

Instead, every uneventful day felt like a coin landing on its edge, balanced and waiting. The forest out here was old in a way that didn’t care about our towers or our rules or our fragile sense of victory. The quarry was one wound sealed, but the ridge was full of cracks and hollows. Water carves new channels when one is blocked. Fire jumps lines. Things that have lived for a very long time don’t give up just because one of their dens collapses.

We went back to work because that’s what lookouts do. You watch, you log, you climb the ladder every morning and circle the Osborne, scanning every degree of horizon for the first sign of trouble. You listen to the birds. When they shut up all at once, you pay attention. When the wind dies in the middle of a gust, you pay attention. When the forest goes still and you catch a flash of red where it shouldn’t be, you remember the rules.

Lights out after twelve.

Supply drops on Sunday.

Never wear red.

Sometimes, late at night when the lantern is off and the only light comes from the thin strip of stars between the tops of the windows and the shadowed crowns of the trees, I lie on my bunk and listen. The tower creaks softly as it settles. Owls call. The heart of the forest beats slow and deep. And every now and then, just as I’m about to slip under, I feel something like a thought pass through the back of my mind:

The quarry wasn’t the only place.

I don’t know what’s out there. I don’t know if “wendigo” is the right word or if that’s just the closest thing we’ve got. I don’t know if what I saw in that cavern was alone or part of something larger. I don’t know if the others out here in other districts are keeping their own corkboards covered in faces framed in red. I just know that the forest on this ridge is older and stranger than the maps admit, and that if the world understood half of what walks between these trees after dark, the trailheads would empty overnight.

You might be listening to this because you’re curious. Maybe you like stories about strange things in stranger forests. Maybe you’re planning a camping trip and thought it would be fun to hear from a lookout. Maybe you’ve spent too many hours on your own phone and you’re daydreaming about disappearing into the woods like I did.

That’s fine.

Come out here if you have to. Hike the trails. Breathe the air. Let your brain quiet down for the first time in years. But do one thing for me, for Henry, for Derek, and for all the faces on that corkboard.

Be careful.

Pay attention when the forest goes still.

If your GPS tells you to turn onto a path that isn’t on the map, don’t.

If someone like Henry tells you there are rules, listen.

And whatever you do, however much you like the color, however good it looks on your gear in the catalog—

Don’t wear red.