I grew up in a small rural community in eastern Tennessee.

We're located on I-75 equal distance between Knoxville and the Kentucky State line.

Although I don't remember the exact years of these encounters, I'm now 56.

I must have been around 14 or 15 when the first incident occurred.

My mom and dad were friends with a family that lived up the road from us.

They had several boys, the youngest of them being about my age.

When we were at their house, we would hang out with the boy who was my age and his two brothers

who were a little bit older. We'd swim and hunt and hike and do whatever

we thought was fun to do at any given moment. Meanwhile, my dad had a drinking buddy and my mom had a friend to talk to.

One day their youngest son and I were out wandering around the mountain above his house and

doing what teenage boys do when we came across an abandoned strip mine.

We were walking along what had once been a road and we came to a pile of dirt that was 12 feet

high. It had deliberately been placed there to keep vehicles out.

These days it wouldn't have stopped at ATV, but back then ATVs were unheard of.

We were 15 feet from the roadblock

when my buddy told me to go on ahead.

He had to take a dump.

Yes, that's the way people do it. If you got to go, you got to go and you just go right there in the

woods. I've done it many times. Since I had no desire to watch that, I kept walking. About the time I put my foot on a huge

pile of dirt, something on the other side of it roared. It was a kind of loud tooth rattling angry roar that told me that this thing was big and it was pissed.

I passed my buddy who was running with his pants still around his knees and I jumped over the bank from the road

and didn't stop until I got back to his house a mile away. My buddy did a pretty good job of keeping pace,

...