Evenly spaced. Coming from a steep slope where there were no trails.”
“And then?” Anna whispered. “Silence,” said Mrs. Henderson.
“Not quiet. Silence. The birds stopped. The insects stopped.
It felt like the whole forest was holding its breath.”
She gripped her husband’s hand. “We turned around and went home.
I couldn’t have walked another step in that direction.”
Anna felt the hair rise on her arms.
Only a few hours after those knocks,
her brother had set up his tent in that very forest.
The third witness was the hardest to find.
Silas Blackwood lived at the edge of the national park,
in a cabin his family had held since the 1890s.
A third-generation hunter and tracker, he trusted no one in a uniform,
and barely anyone out of one.
It took Anna three visits just to get him to open the door.
“I’m not here to bring you trouble,” she told him on the porch,
