There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

I’ve always felt most comfortable out in the wild green outdoors. Even as a child roaming alone through the softwood lowlands of southeast Arkansas or the upland hardwoods of Mississippi, I don’t remember fear. Deep respect, yes, and wonder. The only time I’ve ever felt afraid, prior to this, was in 1984. I was nine. My family was camping in Chicot County and my uncle was supposed to join us, but never arrived. Around midnight, I was still awake and my dad told me to come with him to go looking and make sure he didn’t miss the turn. We hopped into his truck and drove down a rough county road until we reached a highway. Behind me a pecan grove pushed back towards the Mississippi river held back by a wood-post fence. Across the road was a thick, luscious soybean field pushing up against a barbed wire fence. For reasons I still don’t understand and that he denies ever even happening, my dad told me to get out of the truck and sit on the fence to see if my uncle drove by. He was going to head down the road a ways to see if he was pulled over somewhere looking for the turn-off. I perched up on the fence and away he went.

I remember sitting for the longest time, listening to the undulating wave of cicadas and watching constellations of fireflies. It was bright under a near-full moon and I could see across the field forever. My eye caught movement far to the south of the field. Something was moving low and fast through those soybeans, roughly shaking the plants in a straight line parallel to the highway maybe fifty yards away. It never broke through the top of the plants, but was hauling ass northward. I watched it with curiosity as it moved but that soon turned to fear when it got directly across from me and stopped. No movement. The field was absolutely motionless. I remember getting a cold chill down my back and breaking out in sweat. It felt like all of my senses just expanded exponentially. I could feel the day’s triple-digit heat still radiating off of the blacktop, the grain of the weathered fence post under my hands, the scent of honeysuckle somewhere behind me curling out of the pecan grove.

Then it began moving directly toward me, as fast but feeling faster than it was running before. I wanted to scream but couldn’t. I pulled my feet off the middle post and drew them up to perch as high as I could on that fence. There wouldn’t be any running, no way I could move that fast. Scared to take my eyes off the field, I could still tell peripherally that my dad’s headlights weren’t anywhere on that long Delta road. The soybeans stopped shaking about two, maybe three feet from the edge of the field.

That’s where my memory ends. I don’t know how long I was perched on that fence or when my dad arrived. He claims no memory of the event and I’ve lost contact with my uncle to confirm it. We camped in that area so many times during my childhood that it was just another night to all of them, anyway. That was my first time ever being afraid. The second time was last December.

December 2023, at the end of Christmas Break, Momma and I decided we wanted to go out on a winter hike. Kat, the collaborator of many of these hiking tales, has been spending the past few years deeply involved in the exploding mountain biking scene in Northwest Arkansas. We had a couple of days at the end of the school break, so we decided to revisit one of our first hikes together and go from Shores Lake up to White Rock Mountain.

It was one of those just perfect Arkansas December days. Temps up near the mid-50’s during the day and just barely dropping below freezing at night. The boys are mostly grown now. Bear Bait is finishing up college, playing in the Razorback Marching Band and working on graduating next May with three degrees simultaneously (Psychology, Sociology, & Criminology – yeah, I’m a little proud). Kit is also in college studying to be a teacher. Squirrel is nearing the end of High School and still goes out into the wild with me – though not as much. BeckBeck is also in high school and into mountain biking with his dad. As it tends to go, the boys were all busy being young adults so for this hike, it was just going to be me, Kat, and Momma. We loaded up and decided to take the western loop as it is prettier, tends to have more water.

It was mostly uneventful, but there was one near tragedy where Momma slipped on a rock and took a backwards fall down toward a tumble of boulders. She landed miraculously nestled between two of them with her backpack (filled only with clothing and a sleeping bag) cushioning her fall. It gave her the TBI spookies, though, so we were slow going for the rest of that day. So slow, in fact, that we weren’t going to make the top of White Rock Mt. by nightfall. No worries. We found a clearing not too far off-trail that afforded a decent view of the mountain and had an established fire ring. In the fast and early December dusk, we threw up the hammocks and got a fire started.

Kat and I, once we catch up on the kids and work, typically don’t have a lot to say around the campfire. The night was moonless and dark. We sat around the fire until it got too cold to sit, so we were standing just enjoying the warmth and the comfortable silence that comes from having spent almost two decades backpacking together. Momma is a talker, though, so we were listening to her flutter from topic to topic when I noticed a sound not dissimilar to the echo of an axe hitting hardwood. Thock. Then two more. Thock. Thock.

I didn’t think much of it. Seemed a ways off and sound carries funny at night in the mountains. We could see the blinking campfires of a couple sites atop White Rock. Maybe it was someone chopping firewood. The second time I heard it, it was closer and I glanced to Kat who was looking in that direction. He looked back at me and I arched an eyebrow. He nodded. When there was a pause in Momma’s story, he said, “Maybe rocks falling?”

“Too regular. Comes in threes.” Momma asked what we were talking about. “Shh, listen. Hear that knocking noise?” We waited. Then it happened again. “Doesn’t sound like fireworks. Maybe, though?” We were a couple days away from New Years. “Gunfire?” “This late at night? Could be. Franklin County ain’t Madison, but it’s close.” We were standing there, night vision ruined by the fire, listening intently for the next knocking sound. Momma starting to get nervous, edged closer to me.

I’ve been playing in the woods for as long as I could walk, blessed to grow up in a generation where we were abandoned to explore armed only with BB guns, a good stick, and the faith that our face on a milk carton would eventually get us found if we were out too long. I’ve heard all manner of nocturnal screams from owls to coyotes to mountain lions. What we heard next, none of us can explain.

From the edge of our firelight, opposite the direction we heard the knocking, came a “WooooOOOOooooHOOOO!” that sounded similar to a drunk Spring Break sorority girl mixed in with a hoot owl but failed to convincingly be either. Momma launched herself behind me and buried her forehead into my back. Kat and I turned toward the noise. And there it was, the second time in my life, almost 40 years later, I was scared in the woods.

And then nothing. Nothing else. An uneventful rest of the night. I didn’t sleep very well, but sleep I did. We saw frost flowers in the morning. Ascended to the top of White Rock the next day. When we got home, both Kat and I hit the internet to try and find anything at all that sounded like what we heard. We shared Youtube links of different owls and native nocturnals. Nothing. Talking to Grunt later, he being quite a squatch fan, told me that about tree knocking and how it is indicative of cryptids. I did a little more reading. Being from the southern end of Arkansas, I’d never heard of the Ozark Howler before. I won’t go so far as to say I’m a believer. But, damn, I sure can’t explain it any other way Horatio.