Tales From the Burning Prairie

Sometimes the boundaries between city and country are difficult to determine. The city outgrows its original limits, in fits and spurts, in bits and pieces. A neighborhood attached to town on one end will project out into what used to be pasture. Not so bucolic, these projections. They stick out awkwardly, like gangly arms from too-short sleeves and bony ankles peeking under high-water pants. I grew up in one such neighborhood.

When we moved in it looked typical of its ilk. Sod yards, no real trees. Not trees for climbing anyway, only sad, scrawny things held up by lengths of garden hose-covered rope. They seemed inadequate to the task of surviving in Tornado Alley. And indeed, the first real storm season took most of these pathetic specimens right out of the ground. And all the houses looked the same, which has probably been a common complaint since people moved out of caves. I can just hear early hut-dwelling housewives complaining about the hut her poor husband built out of mud, sticks, and hard-won pelts. How their hut looked just like every other hut in the village. That was my mom’s chief complaint, not her only one, mind you, but the one she trotted out most often.

I didn’t mind, there were lots of kids to play with and a Mom-and-Pop store at the end of the next street over. There were also woods on two sides of our neighborhood. We were very close to the river, not close enough to flood but close enough to smell the mossy, fishy smell of it if the wind blew just right.

Those woods, the woods they carved our neighborhood out of, were reportedly haunted or cursed. No one could pin down exactly which one, but either haunted or cursed, we didn’t venture into those woods. None of the stories, about Indian Burial Grounds or escaped lunatics, were likely true. But we weren’t taking any chances.

Until one day, in the summer I turned eleven, when a group of us decided to stare in the face of death, and walk through the woods.

Six of us, including me, set out that day. Me, of course, Francie, Lucky, Wade, and the twins Mitzy and Jo, intrepid warriors all. We had heard the latest rumor: there was a bear in those woods. He had escaped from the zoo or a circus, or was someone’s pet that got too big too handle. One of the boys, probably Lucky (that was his honest-to-Pete birth certificate name), had a bag with stuff we thought we should take with us. We took food, in case we got lost and hungry (no water of course), a flashlight, a length of rope totally unsuited to securing a bear, and Wade’s little pea-shooter .22.

Parking our bikes in front of the barbed wire fence at the edge of the woods (so people searching for us would know where to start), we went in. Looking back, having seen a real forest or two since then, I can say that it wasn’t much of a woods, more overgrown than anything. But to six small to middling kids, it seemed like the Black Forest, dark and forbidding all on its own. The twins held hands, but the rest of us were desperately trying to prove how fearless we were, so we walked spread out. We were scared half-out of our pants, so it should come as no surprise that we huddled together like sheep at the first odd sound.

“It was just the wind,” somebody said. But there was no wind. Nothing penetrated those trees, not wind, not sun, we couldn’t even hear any bird calls, just the growing sound of the river, sluggishly picking its way through the land. Oh, and the smell. At first we thought it was the river, stinkier than usual. But the river didn’t have that rotten meat smell, that skunky smell. The smell got stronger and stronger the further in we walked. Then we began to see them, the animals, or what was left of them. They were mostly small animals-rabbits, raccoons, and squirrels. Then we found a dog, and then another. At least we thought it was a dog, it was hard to tell because there wasn’t any fur on it.

But mostly we found bones, lots and lots of bones. Scattered or piled, there were little bones all around us, they crunched underfoot as we walked. The tiny bones were clean and dry and bright white. Wade began to pick some up, but the rest of us didn’t want to touch them. The rest of the girls and I started to complain of the heat. It might not have been the thickest woods, but the trees wouldn’t let even a stray breeze pass. It was shady, but it just made the August heat darker. We had just about had all the creepy we could take and were all turning back towards home, when we heard something, footsteps maybe. There was a rustling caused by something we couldn’t see, but the sound was getting louder. And the smell was getting stronger. From the heat or the smell or fear, I don’t know, but Francie threw up on her shoes.

Then the sounds stopped. Francie began to run back to her bike, making retching noises all the way. The rest of us looked at each other and followed in Francie’s gruesome wake. I don’t remember climbing through the fence on my way out, maybe I vaulted it. I got on my bike and rode across the field until I got to the spot where my street ended. As the rest of the kids pedaled furiously away, I stopped and looked back. And I saw the bear, only it wasn’t a bear.

The thing was shaped like a man, a very large man, covered in black hair. Even an acre away, I could tell it was huge; it was nearly as tall as the trees at the edge of the woods. Those trees were easily three times my height. The wind picked up a little and blew a whiff of that awful odor right in my face. It looked like it was shaking its fist at me, like an irate neighbor. ‘You kids get off of my lawn!’ It could have chased me down, even then, and added my bones to its collection but it didn’t move.

Seeing him and smelling him will live in my memory forever, but not a single day passes that I don’t remember my last moment with the monster. He raised one foot and slammed it on the earth so hard that I could feel a tremor an acre away. And then he screamed.

We moved away not too long after that. I was relieved to leave that cookie-cutter house behind, even gladder to get so far away from the woods and the monster that lived there. Nobody else saw him that day and I learned to never tell what I had seen. I couldn’t escape my memories, though, so I took him with me everywhere I went. And sometimes, deep in the night, deep in dreams, I can still hear him screaming.