I wasn't going to do a podcast today. I was going to take a day or two off. But I was in here this morning and I came

across this story and I thought, I got time to do this one. I'll do one story in this podcast.

All right, here we go. In 1975, I lived in rural Connecticut on four acres of wooded property.

There were over 60 acres of woods and tobacco fields beyond that.

I remember sitting on the back stairs and hearing a monkey.

Not a roar like a gorilla.

It was a monkey.

I told my mother what I heard and she said,

well, it must be just a bird.

And then she made me come inside.

Every afternoon when I was 16 years old, I would take my Norwegian Elkhound up into the woods for a walk and at a certain point, I'd let him off the leash.

Leaving my back door, I had to walk up an old dirt farming road that no one used beside my family,

and then go up an incline through the woods before they broke into the tiniest clearing.

Each time I reached the clearing, I'd hear three knocks on a tree somewhere off to my right.

Now, this happened every day, and there were three knocks every time.

I didn't think much of it at the time, though it did stick in my mind.

One day after I reached the tree knock point, my dog became unusually clingy, and I heard

something pacing me, and when I stopped, something pacing me and when I stopped it stopped

and when I walked forward it walked too. I wondered if it was a deer and I kept walking.

When I let the dog go off the leash, he didn't run through the cornfield at the next clearing

like he usually did. This time he stayed close by me.

And then one spring day I was running after it rained and I found cougar tracks paralleling mine.

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