My wife heard it first, cows mooing in wild distress. The crying rose to a crescendo as if something was into them, and then fell off suddenly…Photo by Daniel Vogel on Unsplash

Disturbance In the Night

Bill Burkett
7 min readApr 21, 2021

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I BUILT THE FIRST FIRE of autumn in the fireplace and it drew well immediately. Wood stored in the garage is so dry it burned almost invisibly. I wrote a letter and was working on another when something interrupted and brought home to me how close we are to the mountains.

My wife heard it first, cows mooing in wild distress. The crying rose to a crescendo as if something was into them, and then fell off suddenly. We listened and I was hot to go see what it was but she said no very firmly. I turned on my duck-hunting lantern, but the beam wouldn’t reach the back fence of our pasture, let alone to where the noise was. The wind breathed cold. I strained my ears. My wife said the sound was not milk heaviness — farm-raised, she knows that sound. Something was making them afraid. But what? Bold coyotes? A cougar? Possible.

Or the baby-stealing Bigfoot of Northwest legend, cousin to the Himalayan snowman?

Absurd thought.

But I went and locked the windows in the bedroom. Our baby son was sleeping quietly. I consulted Junkanoo the cat. She was sleepy, tail curled primly around her flanks. I consulted Harry the Labrador in the garage, curled in a black ball in his blanket. From the garage maybe he couldn’t hear the ruckus out there. But he would read the wind with his incredible nose and sound off if something prowled close. He certainly challenges human intrusion readily enough in a roar no one would attribute to a Labrador.

It is good to have the dog and cat to consult. Junky has always been good, her quiet feline abrupt awareness of something warns you without the intruder being warned. And Harry’s deep-throated bay might give an intruder pause while I arm myself. Perhaps it was no more than bovine bad dreams. Harry stirs to drink sparingly from his water dish and look at me curiously. Junky unwinds and comes over for an ear rub. Far aloft, a grumbling jet brings a jolt of dissonance to one who has spent the last year aboard continent-spanning flights, and in taxis and hotels surrounded by miles of concrete where a different kind of predator lurks.

City man. Ghetto man. Barrio man. Fearsome enough in their dark skulking.

But not causing that cold sharp bracing fear that strikes on the edge of untamed land when cows begin to cry on a forested slope that leans out of the big dark foothills. Cows that seem to cry Man come save me. Man, something is after me in the dark. Man, help me.

Imagination? We didn’t imagine the crying. But now all is quiet out there, an eerie quiet after the clamor. I look at my .30–30 leaning quietly in the corner and wish I had gone to confront the fear.

(Excavating a life lived on paper some years ago, I found these words in a hit-or-miss journal I kept my first year of residence in the Pacific Northwest, on a rural plateau far from city lights. Eventually I included it in a collection of short stories of which the image above is the cover.

(Tonight I got to mulling over those times. The small towns up there almost literally pulled up the sidewalks at night. The big unending silence was unsettling after a noisy, crowded urban year in LA. Where police and ambulance sirens were a constant nighttime melody, and a lot of places stayed open twenty-four hours. The only all-night place within easy driving distance on the plateau was a small dimly lit Stop N Go with limited grocery items, coolers for beer (no sales after 2:30!) and soft drinks; cigarettes and chewing tobacco, and a gas pump. If the plateau was not haunted, it felt like it was. Sasquatch tales were common.

(Bigfoot was almost as accepted a reality as “blue wolves” and grizzly bears. I made friends with a gruff old gunsmith whose hobby was rock-hounding. His wife designed remarkable jewelry from stone he cut and polished in his shop between firearm repairs. Hanging out in his shop, where he taught me reloading and scope mounting, I liked watching him work both on guns and stone. I finally asked him about Sasquatch stories.

(He said the absence of recent Bigfoot sightings didn’t mean the tales could be disregarded. Nobody had seen Ol’ Griz in the local foothills for decades. He himself had been the last one to see a mating pair of blue wolves, twenty years ago. Did that mean Bigfoot and grizzlies and blue wolves were extinct, or simply better at avoiding humans? He voted for the latter.)

It was forty years before I wrote Skook. For a while the novel was almost as popular in Amazon sales as my fiftieth-anniversary edition of Sleeping Planet. Most reviews were kind. Looking back over my old notes, it occurred to me that the night the cows cried for help was the night the Bigfoot story sprang forth full-blown. But lurked in my subconscious mind all those years, until I started writing for publication again. People sometimes ask writers where their stories come from. Sometimes it’s a difficult question to answer. In this instance, I think I know.

Excerpt from Skook:

The boy was there, sturdy four-year-old legs trying to propel him beneath the lowest strand of rusted wire. Harry had him by the seat of his corduroy britches and wouldn’t let go, though the boy’s feet pummeled him. Harry rolled his eyes back at me like it’s about time you got here. I went to my knees, grabbed the overalls, and bodily hauled the boy back through the fence. He let out a blood-curdling yell of protest.

Something screeched in answer from an old apple orchard across the neighbor’s field.

The town dogs shut up as if a switch had been thrown.

Harry, mildest of dogs, bowed his neck and let go that terrifying growl again; he remembered that particular screech. I tucked the boy under my left arm, kicking and fussing, and got the .454 reversed into firing position in my right, thumb on the hammer.

“Stay, Harry!” I said sharply.

I could feel him getting ready to go through the fence with an old score to settle. But I couldn’t go with him, not this time; and he would be overmatched alone.

“Stay!” I said again. He lay down, reluctance in every line of his body. But his training prevailed.

“Good dog!” I told him. “Good Harry! You caught him before he could go through the fence. Good dog!”

Then all the distant bear hounds opened up at once, ready to go to war. The town dogs got their courage up and joined in. Cutting through their racket came one final fading inhuman screech, retreating beyond the old orchard. It sounded frustrated. I waited there in the blackberries, unwilling to turn my back, unwilling to try to walk backwards toward the house. When Harry finally relaxed and reached up and licked the boy’s face, I felt the tension flow out of me. When we got back to the house, my wife was waiting on the deck.

“What were those dogs going on about?” she said. “Coyotes? Or a bear in those apples back there?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

She looked at the boy. He had quieted and was now happily riding my shoulders, hands twisted in my hair. “I thought he was in his room,” she said.

“He went out the window. He was all the way to the back fence when Harry caught up with him.”

She had the Northwesterner’s typical blasé attitude. “Boys will do that. Go exploring.”

“That’s too far to go exploring on his own!”

I was angry at her with no real justification. She had no way to know why I was upset. If she remembered the night it all began, she certainly didn’t remember it like I did. Because I never told her everything that happened.

“You’re just being paranoid,” she said. “Didn’t you ever go exploring when you were that age?”

“I lived in a city when I was that age.”

“Poor you.” She tightened her lips when she noticed the pistol I had shoved down in my pants behind my hip to carry the boy. “I hope the neighbors didn’t see you carrying that cannon around out there.”

I had nothing to say to that. I put the boy down on the deck. The front of his overalls was covered with mud and grass stains from trying to crawl through the fence. The elephant bell continued to toll and the wind still carried our scent to the foothills. But the danger was past. For now….

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Bill Burkett

Professional writer, Pacific Northwest. 20 Books: “Sleeping Planet” 1964 to “Venus Mons Iliad” 2018–19. Most on Amazon for sale. Il faut d’abord durer.