American Fork Canyon

They put me up the canyon for the summer to run equipment on the road job.

Company trailer. Single wide, hauled up Highway 92 and leveled on a gravel pad past Tibble Fork, close enough to the work that I didn’t have to drive the switchbacks twice a day in the dark. Me and the dog. Trip’s a heeler mix, good in the truck, better in the woods. Not a nervous dog.

The first week was nothing. Generator, propane, a cot, the river loud enough to sleep to.

The knocking started the second week.

Not on the door. On the wall, low down, near where the frame sits on the blocks. One knock, spaced out, then another. I figured a branch, or the trailer settling, or a bear working at the garbage I’d been careful to lock up. I got up with the flashlight and there was nothing. No tracks I could find in the dark. Trip wouldn’t come outside with me. That was the part I kept turning over. He always comes outside.

By the third week it was most nights. They’d come after the generator went quiet. First the knock, then the whole trailer moving. Not wind. A trailer that size doesn’t rock in the wind. This was a push, slow, from the low corner, enough to slide a coffee cup across the table and set it rattling. Then it would stop and something would move around outside, heavy, taking its time on ground I’d have needed a flashlight to cross.

And the sound they make. I don’t have a good word for it. Not a howl exactly. Longer than that, and lower, and it came from more than one place. Some nights it was off across the drainage. Some nights it was close enough that I felt it in the floor. Trip would get down in the corner with his ears flat and make this high whimper I’d never heard out of him, and I’d get down there with him, rifle across my knees, and we’d wait it out.

I never once saw anything clear. That’s the thing nobody wants to hear. I’d look out the little window over the sink and there’d be a shape too tall against the trees, or I’d tell myself there was, and by the time I got the light up there’d be nothing but timber.

I stopped sleeping. Ran the machine all day on no rest and came back and sat up in that corner with the dog.

I finished the contract. Asked the foreman if I could bunk in town for the last two weeks and told him the generator quit. That wasn’t why.

Trip still won’t go up that canyon. Plants at the mouth of it and won’t load back in the truck until we turn around.