When I was a teenager I hunted with hounds about three days a week. There are some things I saw out in the woods at night that were truly so odd that I’d lose all credibility to tell them. But two or three of us would see the phenomena at once, so they weren’t hallucinations. I’ll tell one that is more open to interpretation.
We had a friend from Wales out with us. He was a city man and never had been out with hounds. He was living with us for the summer, so we thought we’d exercise the dogs and hunt some coon along the creek banks in the mountains when night fell. The dogs ended up treeing after dark a far way into the woods. We took a gun thinking we’d shoot the coon out for the dogs. My father and his friend stayed behind.
It ended up there was no coon up the tree but a cougar. Nothing our dogs hadn’t seen before but it was not legal to kill the cougar. We didn’t have leashes and some of the dogs were owned by an old man who was hunting with us and he had stayed at the trucks, so the hounds wouldn’t come off a tree or follow us if we called them.
We had to get back to the truck with all the dogs, so we devised a plan. We wanted to scare the cougar into running back towards the truck, where the men on the road could catch the dogs as they came out of the forest and load them into the dog boxes. We stood beside the tree opposite to the direction of the truck and riled the hounds up to make them sound as frightening and intimidating as possible. Then we threw rocks and sticks at the giant cat. Everything seems like a good idea while you’re doing it.
The lion did not like this treatment and soon was scooting down the tree. It clung to the trunk only ten feet above me. I hooted and hollered at it, trying to frighten it in the other direction. Instead, it leaped right for me. I fell backwards to avoid it and it shot right over me. The hounds were in a frenzy and ran headlong after it down the mountain, away from the truck and I was rolling away downhill. My welsh friend was terrified. His eyes stuck out like hard-boiled eggs. He thought the lion had gotten me for sure. He came running, yelling out for me, “Adam! Adam!” I got up and showed him, I was fit and fine.
We ran after the hounds until we were completely tuckered. We got more and more lost as the cougar fooled a dog here and a dog there until the pack was strewn across many miles of mountains and valleys. We had no idea where we were. A hound would wander to us every hour or so. Sometimes they’d come in pairs or three at a time.
We had a radio, so we radioed the men back at the road, my father and a great old houndsman that was with us that night. They hadn’t a clue where we were either, of course. We asked them to honk and lead us out of the forest. I don’t remember if we could hear the honking or not. I don’t think we could but we saw a bright light ahead of us through the forest. We guessed it was the headlights of one of the trucks, so we went toward it.
We ended up on a dirt road that had not been used in more than 15 years. Trees had grown tall all over that road. There wasn’t a tree on the road that didn’t touch another tree with its branches. That’s how many trees were growing on this old road, to give you an idea of it’s age and lack of use.
Still, just up ahead, we saw the bright light, as bright as car headlights. We went toward it. After a long time going toward it, we knew that it could not be stationary. It kept the same distance from us, no matter how long we walked. We walked for several hours following that mysterious light. It could not be a car, as no car could make it onto that road. It wasn’t motorized as far as we could hear. And there’s no reason I can create for why a man would be several hours walk into the darkest parts of the woods in the dark of the morning, other to follow hounds of course.
That little road ended up following a great ravine, a gorge that we could not cross. On the other side, we heard honking. We turned on the radio and asked if our friends were honking. They said yes. We asked if they could shine their lights into the forest for us to follow out. They did. We couldn’t see their lights at all. Even when we got within yelling distance, the forest was so dense, we couldn’t see the headlights of their trucks. But we could see the light we were following. I don’t know why we trusted that light. Probably because we had no other choice. We knew it was a 7 hour hike back the way we had came and we couldn’t cross the chasm that separated us from our trucks. So we marched on.
The light of dawn came and with it, the light in the forest disappeared. I still wonder what that light was. That little overgrown road opened up into a circular truck turn around. There was a gravel road attached to it. We told my father over the radio that we had found a gravel road. He and our friend who had stayed behind came and picked us up. They thought we were crazy for being lost in the first place, as they said they saw our lights in the forest the entire time. I don’t think they did see our lights. I think they saw what we saw, whatever it was. A bright light in the forest.