"It was a handsome animal as far as I could judge. It was slender but well fed. Its skin and hair appeared to be healthy. That was what made this creature appear other than human."
"The summer I was 8 years old, my family went camping for the first time. Despite no obvious lack of experience, my parents chose to take their children wilderness camping on the eastern shore of Lake Superior. It was, in more ways than one, a learning experience for everyone involved. For instance, the water of Lake Superior in the height of summer worms all the way up to about 1° Celsius 33 Fahrenheit, so swimming is pretty much off the menu, and at night during the height of summer, the temperatures along its shores dropped just a whisper above the freezing point of water. Also, giants are living in the forest, giants that will watch children on the beach during the day and peer into your tent at night. Somehow, that little tidbit of information failed to make it into the Provincial Park brochure. Worse, when I privately confronted my father with questions, he responded with anger, refused to answer, and, worst of all, swore me to secrecy despite these rather disturbing incidents.
I love camping, especially with my family. We love the woods, streams, lakes, and meadows. I understood that dangerous planted animals were sharing the planet with us, but that was no reason to avoid camping, hiking, or fishing. You're mindful of poison ivy, snakes, and moose and elk, you not approach a bear and her cubs, you gave wild boars a wide birth, kept your eyes and ears open and basked in the peace and the bounce of the wild places the first in the hills have been a life boon to my mind and spirit. Yes, giants are living in those forests and roaming those hills but for the most part they allow us to visit their territories without making their presence obvious or otherwise messing with us for the most part.
I think that it was the fifth or sixth year (1971) of our family's camping vacations when we went to Lake Kipawa in southern Quebec. Kipawa is a place that my mother's family had taken her as a girl and although my parents certainly had not discussed such things with the children. I get the impression that my mother and father considered the lake and its islands to be a safe place. I witnessed bears and their cubs swimming the channels between one island and another and had enjoyed one close encounter with a moose that had swam a mile or two across the lake to our island, passing no more than 10 feet from me before disappearing into the forest behind a camp. I've been sworn to silence about the giants, however, so I kept my eyes and ears open and my fears and opinions concerning the forest talk to myself.
This was our second visit to Kipawa, so the place felt pretty familiar, and for the first week we were there on our own. But during the second week, my grandfather, grand uncle, and their sons arrived, staying in the family cabin on a different island a mile or so by boat from where my immediate family was camped. We did visit the cabin, but for the most part, the boys kept themselves jealously guarding their fishing spots or something but keeping their vacation very much separate from our own. So it came with something of a surprise when my grandfather showed up at our camp one afternoon and commandeered the oldest boy, myself, for an exploration of Dead Bear Bay. Naturally, I was pretty excited to have a chance to explore. What boy would not jump at a chance to investigate a place with a name like that? It never occurred to me to wonder why my grandfather chose me to assist him rather than his son, my uncle, who just happened to be very nearly my own age of 14.
We made our way into Dead Bear Bay, and I understood why my grandfather had needed a second set of eyes on board. The water of Lake Kipawa was a marvel to me. It was amazingly clear that depending on the lighting, it was possible to see more than 100 feet into the depths. This proved somewhat troublesome for me as I have a rather acute fear of heights, and passing from the deeper water of the channel into the shallower bay with the sun on my back I was presented with the vision of a craggy cliff face extending from the surface to a few hundred feet into the black depths. Fighting back a sudden wave of nausea and vertigo, I spun around and focused my eyes on the bottom of the boat, trying very hard not to throw up. My grandfather immediately shouted at me, cursing me for not doing my job, looking out for the huge boulders that choked the shallows. My grandfather arrested the boat's forward motion by kicking the tiller of the outboard motor to one side. I tried to explain what I was experiencing glancing over the side but found that we were bobbing just short of the edge of the cliff. The shadow of the boat danced below us on the rock face for 50 or 60 feet. This was possibly the worst place for me to attempt to regain control of myself. My grandfather cut my explanation short; he was not, as he angrily pointed out, looking for excuses, but expected me to do my job. I responded to his curses and his criticism of his daughter, my mother, and her child-rearing skills by suggesting that it might help me to do my job if he would actually explain what he wanted me to do. Apparently, it should have been obvious to me that my grandfather was trying to determine whether or not there was a navigable passage up through this narrow strait of shallow water that stretched between two islands from Dead Bear Bay to the good fishing and the next Bay to the north.
The traditional route that my grandfather and his brothers had used for decades required an hour or more of travel across open water around the island. My grandfather wanted to find a better way passing through the narrow protected shells that bisected what was in reality a single island and cutting 20 minutes off the trip. He proposed we idle forward with him at the tiller and with me calling out turns to the left and the right to avoid sometimes house-sized boulders that lurk just inches below the surface. I took a moment to assess the situation. The passage to the north was likely less than 2 miles long and, in places, appeared no more than 50 feet wide. The two halves of the island were heavily treed and tall drowned trunks rose out of the water on either side of of sorry on either side like weather pillars it looked like a really impractical way to get to the good fishing spot but I could see the darker waters of the open bay to the north beckoning. I could understand whose urge to try the shorter route closer at hand top of the submerged cliff the water between the boulders was 30 or 40 feet deep. The tops of the those boulders reached to just below the surface and the spaces between the boulders might be 30 or more feet in width. The sky was partly cloudy, and the sun was in a good position at our backs to light the way ahead. The wind in the protected area between the wooded heights to the east and west was almost non-existent. The surface of the water was almost glossy, and only a gentlest of swells made it to us from the far bay. Coming back might prove to be more difficult with the sun ahead of us, but it might just be possible to do this thing.
I sometimes wonder how my grandfather would have reacted if I had refused to cooperate but decided that his proposal was reasonable. I took up a paddle to fend us off the rocks if necessary and told my grandfather to come right starboard. He corrected, swinging the bow violently right, then just as violently left, very nearly toppling me out of the perch in the bow port. This is a boat for God's sake. Fine, I snapped, bring us to starboard. Then Grandpa brought the boat around, and with only a few bumps and rubs, we managed to proceed far more than half the length of the straight, making very slow progress but having had to back out of a false lead only a couple of times.
As we got further to the north, the water became more and more shallow and it became easier and easier to see whether a gap between the rocks was passable even as the spaces between the boulders became narrower and narrower. Eventually, however, we reached a point where the passage appeared to be completely blocked. The water was deep enough, 45 feet, but the tops of the boulders were no more than an inch or so beneath the surface and the spaces between were measured at inches as well. I slid over the side and stood at the top of the nearest boulder. ‘What the hell do you think you're doing?’ my grandfather demanded. I get back in the boat. I refrained from pointing out that he had rejected earlier attempts at explanation and walked back and forth to top the boulders from one side of the straight to the other a distance of no more than 40 or 50 feet. It was amazing how flat and uniform the tops of those boulders were. The glaciers from 100,000 years before had done a very thorough job smoothing out the Canadian Shield. I finished my inspection. There's simply no place where the boat could float past unless you want to try dragging the boat over the boulders, I replied, getting back in the boat as he insisted this is as far as we can go. My grandfather fumed and made his way to the bow, having to confirm with his own eyes that what I had reported was, in fact, the truth. In his frustration, he banged that aluminum hull into the nearby rocks more trying to get the boat turned around. We had done making our way to that point; finally, I slid back over the side, picked up the bow, and walked the boat around to the point the way we had come.
As I had expected, the sun's glare in the water made it harder to see where we were going, but it did help to know that there was a way back. Of course, we do not know the way south any more than we had known the way north, and so there were just many false starts and retreats. It seemed to me that we had been more to the eastern side of the strait on our way north, but we're tending more to the western side of the strait on our way back every time that we were forced to reverse out of a narrowing path. My grandfather seemed to get more and more frustrated, and there was only one other person in the boat that he could blame. I held my tongue and kept my eyes on my task. As lookout, I concentrated on getting us back to the open water with as little conflict as possible.
Then, all at once, I felt an uncomfortably familiar cold prickling on my scalp. Suddenly, I knew something was watching us. I lifted my eyes from the water and swept the area around us, but at first, I did not see how something could be watching us. The strait at that point was fairly wide. The forested heights to the east down the west were a few hundred feet away, but the eyes felt much, much closer. There's a narrow reef of granite reaching out from the western half of the island, forming a kind of wall alongside our path, the western limit to the navigational part of the bay. The reef was mostly submerged, but there were a few spots where it rose above the surface. Closer to the island, there was a stand of dead trees rising from the water near at hand. Elevated stretches were dotted with the thick trunks of what might have been cedar trees long dead, the bark stripped away and the underlying wood polished to a uniform silver gray. The very few branches remaining attached to those trunks were thick and broken off short, extending no more than five or so feet from the trunks.
My grandfather yelled at me as the boat rubbed along one of the boulders but I ignored his wrath, bended us off then closed my eyes to reduce the distraction of sight and reached out for the source of my discomfort long before I realized that I could walk into a place to know whether there were others around. I have no idea how I can do this. That has proven useful from time to time. I raised my chin and swung my head from side to side, zeroing in on the watcher by feel rather than vision. Within seconds I knew that my face was pointing directly towards whatever had us in his sights. I opened my eyes and was instantly confused. I was staring at a branch 20 feet above the water, somewhat ahead of us, no more than 50 feet away. There's nothing there. The silvery trunk of the cedar was stripped of its bark and four or five feet of branch with this distinctive twisted wood grain, but nothing else.
Meanwhile, my grandfather kept us moving forward, and the hull brushed along the edge of a second boulder. ‘What are you doing?’ he demanded. ‘The rocks aren't up in the trees.’ ‘No,’ I replied, sounding alarmed and quickly applying the paddle to ease us past the obstacle but there is something in that tree. My grandfather scanned the nearby tree trunks. 'I don't see anything,' he growled, turning his attention back to the guiding boat, but I could not keep my mind on the boat and the rocks. I could feel something watching, and we were only getting closer. I directed my grandfather but immediately returned my attention to the tree and that branch in particular. Could something have ducked behind the trunk when it saw that I was about to look? Squirrels would do that, only this watcher was still watching. I could feel its eyes upon me. I knew it was in plain sight, but I just couldn't see it. I checked on the progress of the boat, decided that we were okay for the moment then looked back to the branch. We're almost even with the tree and no more than 30 feet from its base if I was standing on that branch. I realized it would not be impossible for it to jump into the boat as it passed. I stared at the branch, willing myself to see what was there, and became aware of a strange pressure in the back of my head. Reflexively, I pushed back against that pressure, and a weird kind of mistiness appeared above the branch like the vapor pouring out of a freezer when the cold air is rushing out but opaquely dense, only this mist was not falling. As I continued to push, the rolling mist seemed to become more transparent in spots, and I caught fleeting glimpses of the creature hidden by the mist.
The first thing that I saw was its face, but my eyes seemed to slide away from its gaze, and I took in details of its body more easily. The mist continued to form and dissipate, alternately hiding portions of the creature and then revealing some other detail. It was hard to see, but I was forming an impression of the thing in the tree. The next thing I noticed was the hair that covered his body was 6 or 8 inches long and moving gently in the slight breeze. This hair was silver gray, much like the tree in which it was perched. The creature appeared to be standing on the branch, squatting on its heels. I could see its toes, but its feet were mostly covered in the hair from its lower legs; the toes looked like those of a human, only really thick and seemed to have knees projecting out in front of it. The hair on its knees appeared to be worn thin. The long hair disguised the edges of its body but seemed to have a head and shoulders on one end and feet and knees on the other. It was a little late for a shiver to run through me, but one did. Its right arm was tucked in its lap, its upper arm held close to its body, and its forearm hidden in the long gray hair of its abdomen. The trunk at the height of the branch was easily 3 feet in diameter, but its left arm wrapped all the way around the back of the tree, and his left hand was plainly visible on the side of the trunk facing me. The creature had impossibly long arms, and those arms ended in hands - his thumb and fingers were splayed out on the smooth wood of the trunk plainly. The hair of its forearm extended past its wrist and over the back of its hands, but the thing had fingers and a thumb. I could see the gray, leathery skin forming creases at the joints of each finger, and the creature had fingernails.
For an instant, I lost sight of it as my mind raced trying to make sense of what I was seeing, and the gray mist closed in and shrouded the creature from my sight. I understood from my first camping experience that there were giants in the forest but this one was very different from the ones that I had encountered. Before squatting on the branches, probably only 4 feet from its toes to the top of its head, although I imagine it would have been closer to 6 feet or more if standing upright, and it was gray. The last one that I had seen had been the reddish brown of dead pine needles. Was I looking at a savy child, a teenager? Concentrating, I pushed back as hard as I could, and for a few seconds, I could see the creature clearly. I made a quick confirmation of my previous observations: hands, feet, knees, shoulders, then focused on the creature's face.
My eyes still wanted to slide away but I kept facing my gaze back on the target. The hair on its head seemed much longer than on the other areas of its body, but that might merely have been my impression as wisps of hair drifted across his face, moving with the breeze but not obscuring the features to any great detail any great degree. The hair on its head appeared to be cleaner, straight, and flowing but not particularly neat. The hair did not cover its face but did blur the demarcation between its head and its neck. In fact, its head seemed to sit directly on his shoulders, but that might have been an effect of all that hair hanging down and flaring out across his shoulders. As near as I could tell with all that unruly hair, its skull was rounded at the crown. It had no more hair on its cheeks or jaw than I did, but its eyebrows were thick and darker than the hair on its head. It may have had a brow ridge, but its eyes did not appear to be particularly sunken. Those brows shadowed its eyes, but as close as we were to one another, it was obvious that it had wide-set brown eyes, the color of chestnut. It had pronounced cheekbones and skin that looked like soft, gray glove leather. Its mouth was a little unsettling. It seemed twice as wide as my own although I would have to guess that its head was no larger than mine. Its lips were thin, but they were apparent. Its nose was fleshy and wider than I was used to in the people with whom I was familiar, but it seemed to fit the rest of its face. Its nostrils were hooded, and I was only looking up its nose because I was viewing it from below. Wide eyes. Wide mouth. Wide nose. All appeared proportional; it all appeared right. It all appeared to fit, all except its jaw. Once again, the hair framing its face made the lines hard to define. I had no idea what its ears looked like, for instance, or whether it was male or female, but its jaw seemed heavy and had no chin more than anything else. That was what made this creature appear other than human. Honestly, it was a handsome animal as far as I could judge. It was slender but well fed. Its skin and hair appeared to be healthy. Its nails were not obviously dirty and did not appear to be broken. I focused my attention upon its eyes. It appeared to be studying me in much the same way that I was observing it. It appeared to be amused.
Grandpa asked in a voice just barely more than a whisper, ‘What is that?’ My grandfather glanced at me and shifted his eyes to the tree but immediately returned his eyes to piloting the boat. ‘What is that?’ he demanded in an angry tone of voice. ‘The animal squatting in that tree!’ I snapped back, pointing for emphasis. ‘Quit screwing around. Damn it! I brought you along to keep you as lookout, not to be asking dumbass questions.’ ‘Grandpa,’ I responded, allowing my tone to match his own. ‘Look me in the eye and tell me you don't see anything squatting on that branch.’ My grandfather twisted his head and looked directly at the branch, but immediately swung his head back towards the bow, locked eyes with me. ‘I told you to stop screwing around.’ He said in a low, dangerous voice. ‘Tell me!’ I persisted, lowering my voice as well but in a respectful way, not a threatening one. ‘Tell me you do not see anything unusual in that tree.’ My grandfather broke eye contact with me, sat clenching his jaw, and said nothing more. I looked back at the creature perched in the tree; its head had turned to follow us as we moved past as I stared at it. I silently asked, 'What are you/' I heard no reply, but my blood ran cold as the creature met my eyes - a grin. A disturbingly inhumanly wide grin split its face. It understood exactly what it had done. That realization terrified me.
My grandfather sat in stony silence the whole way back to the camp. I did not continue to pester him for answers, although I felt certain that he had seen something. I felt angered and betrayed at his stubborn silence just as I felt at my father for refusing to speak with me about such things. I was certainly not the first teenager to decide that adults were sometimes out of their minds. My grandfather brought the boat to shore and allowed me to climb out of the bow, but he stayed in the boat and called my mother over. He glared at me until I moved off to where I could not overhear, and he held 10 feet off while speaking with his daughter. Their conversation was very short. I sat on a boulder at the edge of our camp with my back to the adults, seething with adolescent indignation.
My mother approached me but stood at my back rather than joining me on the rock. ‘What happened between you and your grandfather?’ She simply sounded hurt or perhaps disappointed with me. ‘What did he tell you had happened?’ I demanded, angrily. ‘He wouldn't say.’ My mother spat back. ‘John, you've always been my most cooperative child. Why would my father tell me that you wouldn't listen or obey simple instructions?’ It was just not fair. I want to explain exactly what had occurred but my father had swore me to secrecy concerning the forest people. I can neither lie to my mother nor tell her the truth. ‘Do you know of a place called Dead Bear Bay where the bay gets shallow and it's full of rocks just below the surface?’ ‘Certainly,’ she replied, gesturing to the water. The island is in Dead Bear Bay.’ ‘Yeah, well, your dad wanted to find a way into the next bay to the north. He took us to this narrow channel choked with boulders and expected me to guide us around every rock in the place. It was impossible to get through there and impossible to avoid every bit of granite in the way. Every time he ran us up against a stone it was me not paying attention and me not doing my job.' My mother seemed satisfied with this explanation and said what she could to comfort me. I felt ashamed that she would offer comfort. To this day, I regret that because of an oath to my father, I could not offer her the whole truth.”
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R61SLMVaMRA
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