Things that go "Um...." in the night

After all the fuss and bother, the alarmed phone call to the sheriff and the trailcam and the rush to make sure all the doors were locked, I took comfort in the unlikely fact that it could have been a bear. 

It could have been a person, too—an intruder in the night skulking about in the woods near our house. That's what my son thought he saw, and that's the reason we were all alarmed.

Why, we wondered, would anyone be lurking in the woods near our house at night? When we lived in town youngsters would cut through our lawn to get to the high school, but our little house in the not-so-big  woods isn't exactly on the way to anywhere. You have to walk two-tenths of a mile up a hill to get to the house, and then the only thing to do is turn around and go back down to the road again or go further uphill into the trackless woods. Why would anyone do that on a cold dark night outside deer season?

So my son called the sheriff's office and they sent out some deputies just to take a look around, and my husband fetched the data card from the trailcam at the edge of the woods. We saw deer, raccoons, possums, squirrels, foxes, and turkeys, but the only people recorded on the card were immediate family. 

But then the person, if it was a person, could have gone another way--for what reason I could not imagine. We sometimes hear about thefts of tools and equipment from garden sheds and garages in our area, but what would an intruder hope to find in ours? If you want to walk off with my vintage collection of broken weed-whackers, be my guest. In fact I wish someone would.

The deputies, of course, found nothing, but what did we expect them to find? Nothing was disturbed and nothing was taken, so we're not expecting CSI to come out and collect DNA samples. "Better safe than sorry," said the deputy, and we all went back to bed.

But not to sleep. Well, I can attest that one of us slept—I heard the snoring. I kept drifting off and then jerking awake again—What was that noise? Raccoons disassembling the birdfeeders again, or maybe a deer ambling past or a possum or a groundhog or a fox, or maybe an intruder!

At the back of my mind was the murder case that came before me some years ago when I served on our county's grand jury. A twelve-year-old kid took the hinges off the family's gun cabinet, grabbed a shotgun, and shot his grandmother and aunt at point-blank range. As grand jury foreperson, I had to look at the crime-scene photos, and I had to look at the aerial photos of the route the kid took when he fled from deputies and hid in woods that looked very much like our woods. Who but a fugitive criminal would be running up into our woods by night?

Well, a drunk person might, or some wanderer who thought he'd found a shortcut. Or perhaps nobody at all. 

In the cool light of day, it all felt like an overreaction. My son saw or heard or experienced something running through the woods, something human-sized that sounded like  a person, but it makes no sense for a person  to be in our woods at night.

But it could have been a bear. Granted, we've seen no bear tracks, so it could have been  an incorporeal bear, a great big wad of imaginary animal lumbering through the woods and into our nightmares. I'd rather be haunted by an imaginary bear than by a thief or a fugitive or a lost hunter so drunk he doesn't realize deer season is over, but unless the CSI guys take an interest, I guess we'll never know.