skulking along

Those strange creatures are out there for sure, skulking along at the margins of believability, much as they move at the edges of our vision, ever only seen fleetingly. I’ve seen inexplicable lights in the sky that I always end up explaining away as orbiting satellites, but that’s not to say the appeal of that Close Encounters of the Third Kind sort of thought about stepping aboard the mothership hasn’t occurred to me—though the starship is not so much about escape as it is about transcendence. Imagine the chance to live among the stars.

Kal-gonn, take me away 

Much as I’ve seen such lights, I’ve also heard strange noises back in the woods in the dead of night. Heavy footsteps, snapping branches, and the huffing breath of some unseen, and so unknown, creature. They always keep their distance from the campsite, moving deep among the trees the way a pike swims through the thickest weeds when it knows you’re there, and if I were the kind of person who watched too many gory slasher flicks, I might worry that a windigo was out there, its lips chewed to shreds (because until it claims a body for a meal, it gnaws on itself).

I know though, even without seeing it, that that huffing, stomping shadow out there beyond the reach of the firelight is in no way malevolent. I have every faith that it is Sasquatch, a creature not unlike myself, and he, she, or it is just trying to get along from day to day, seeking after the rudiments necessary for survival, but still willing, or perhaps needing, like myself, to be drawn away from the mundane grind of doing those things that need to be done to stay fed and warm in order to indulge his, hers, or its curiosity and marvel at the sight of a pair of relatively hairless creatures sitting near fire, making peculiar gestures with their hands and arms and vocalizing in odd, thin voices that really have little to no chance of carrying from hilltop to hilltop.