The

The My grandfather was a logger, a man carved from cedar dust and stubbornness, the kind who didn't scare easily and certainly didn't admit it when he did.

He carried stories like knots in timber, tough and hidden, only revealing their shape when the moment demanded it.

He loved a tall tale. He had a bear he claimed that followed him across job sites, a massive

creature missing a leg. He called him three legs, like they were old friends, like they checked into the same shift together.

Those stories had a grin in them, a wink, you knew when he was spinning.

But there was one story that never came with a grin.

If anything, he seemed reluctant to speak it, not because it was unbelievable, but because it revealed a kind of vulnerability he wasn't built to share.

It happened on a warm summer night in the 70s.

He had driven my grandmother up a forest road, a raw, narrow cut into the east side of the Cascade Mountains.

To show her a new viewpoint, his crew had carved out of the

hillside. This is a logger's version of romance. Look at what we made here. Look what we opened to the sky.

He stopped the truck. The windows were down. The radio hummed something soft and electric. Fleetwood

Mac, maybe blue Easter Cold, essentially the

soundtrack of a summer northwest drifting into the tree line. And then the pebbles began.

He thought it was just loose gravel, a deer kicking stones, nothing unusual.

But then the pebbles became rocks, hard, deliberate strikes on the hood, aimed, and then came the boulder, big enough to do real damage, big enough to push the truck off the road entirely if they'd been a dozen feet further along.

And the forest went silent.

My grandfather leaned out his window, craning his head upward to see what was moving above them, and that's when he saw it.

A figure, nine feet tall by the way he remembered.

A dark silhouette framed against the tree line, massive, unmoving, aware.

It stared down at them with a kind of wild, hypnotic intelligence, a look that wasn't confused or startled, was certain, as if it recognized them, as if it knew exactly

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