I'm writing this the way I'm writing this the way I kept it, plain, dated, as close to the sequence of events as I can get it.

I've learned that when you try to dress something like this up, you start lying without meaning to.

You lean on drama because the truth sounds thin on the page, but what happened to us up there

didn't need help.

It needed a record.

That's all I can give you.

I'm going to use a few fake names, and I'm going to blur one location by about 10 miles.

Not because I'm afraid of the thing that did it.

If it wanted me, it could have taken me any time. But because there

are people still living off those back roads, and because I don't want someone with a weekend

of confidence and a new knife deciding to go looking for a story. I grew up in Minnesota, south

enough that up north was a place you went for a week in July and talked about all year.

Cabins, fishing, bonfires, the whole postcard.

But my dad worked iron and timber when he was young,

and he kept friends scattered through the range and along the border lakes.

When I was a kid, he took me with him on a few trips that weren't vacations.

They were errands, drop-off parts, help a buddy fix a winch, haul a trailer,

stuff that took you off the main roads and into the long empty geometry of logging cuts and black spruce and lakes that look like spilled ink.

My dad was not a superstitious man.

He didn't talk about ghosts.

He didn't talk about Bigfoot.

If anything, he was allergic to that kind of thing.

...