I enjoy stories about stories. Not in a Didion-esque “we tell ourselves stories to live” kind of way. I like examinations of all the ways we accept stories as part of our culture. I want to know about the things we tell ourselves without questioning, to look hard at the tales that serve as scaffolding for our communities and our personalities. I want to meet the people who hold up those stories.
I got interested in stories of fabled mythological creatures when I was a fourth grader in “Library Club”1 and was given the task of organizing my school’s extensive library of National Geographics in order. In doing so, I discovered the June 1977 issue, all about the Loch Ness Monster (yes, I still have this issue). My 10-year-old brain was thrilled at the idea of cryptids. And I’ve never lost that thrill — that we live in a world where people have long believed in Sasquatches and lake monsters and ghosts.
For a few years, I put myself on the Bigfoot beat. Once The San Francisco Chronicle sent me to spend three days in Northern California bear country to go “squatching” — meaning looking for Bigfoot — with James “Bobo” Fay, of the Animal Planet Show Finding Bigfoot. Spoiler: we did not find Bigfoot, and the story is, very sadly, behind a paywall. But here’s an excerpt of what a real-life Bigfoot hunt was like for us:
Over the next two days we do very little Bigfoot searching. We sit in camp chairs, listening to Bobo recall his Bigfoot encounters; a steady soundtrack of the Flaming Lips in the background. It’s clear there’s not much of a set itinerary.
Bobo’s got a million stories. There’s the time something spooked him in the woods so badly, he sprinted away and left all of his gear. The time he got an infection in his leg in Africa. Encounters with fans of Finding Bigfoot. We hear about his dog, his co-hosts. It’s just hard to tell what’s real and what’s not. We tell him about our lives, too: our dogs, our jobs. We talk about music constantly.
We decide to move camp. Scouring a topo map of the area, Bobo points out that some great squatching places butt up against marijuana farms in this area. We don’t want to stumble into the wrong place and end up with guns in our faces.
This isn’t the first time I’ve been warned about this. “If you want to go wandering through the mountains hunting or Bigfoot hunting you have to be really careful now,” Steven Streufert, the owner of Bigfoot Books in Willow Creek, cautioned me before our trip. “You’re potentially crossing a private property line and you could be walking into an armed pot grow with people with machine guns. Those people will kill you.”
We give up most of the day to driving around looking for a good spot. By the time the sun sets, I start to realize that the hard part about finding Bigfoot is actually finding a place to find Bigfoot.
It’s nearing dinnertime when Bobo gives up on Six Rivers and takes us to a cattle ranch near Orick, on the coast, where he says he’s had several up-close encounters. I’m not excited to be setting up camp in the dark again, but at this point I can tell Bobo really wants to impress us, so I play along.
As we pull up to the ranch in the middle of the night, a couple of 20-something-year-olds greet us to open the gate. “My sister is a huge fan of yours,” one of them tells Bobo. “She got your autograph once.”
It’s clear that in this part of the world, Bobo is a celebrity.
The legend of Bigfoot has made Fay a very successful man — or at least successful to the point that he drove a very nice truck and seemed to be recognized everywhere we went.
A similar story did the opposite for Bob Gimlin — the man who shot the famed 1967 Patterson-Gimlin film:
No one had ever gotten Gimlin sit down for an interview before I, somehow, convinced him to do so in 2016, when I wrote about him for Outside. Here’s a fun chunk:
The 84-year-old cowboy wore a black cattleman’s hat and sunglasses, an off-white coat with “Bob” embroidered in blue thread at the chest. His boots stated their intentions across the tile entryway of a roadside diner in Union Gap, in central Washington, pausing as he held the door for an elderly woman in a pink jacket.
“Come on in, young lady,” he said, his baritone voice all campfire smoke and truck engines. Bob Gimlin wears big hats and big belt buckles and drives a big pickup. He talks slow with a heavy drawl and seems to find a way to turn almost any conversation toward horses.
In a booth with vinyl seats, Gimlin ordered coffee and dumped in two creams, and told the waitress he wouldn’t be eating. For the next six hours, he told his story: who he was before he saw Bigfoot, who he became after, and why he stayed quiet for four decades after the film’s debut.
Recently I had a meeting where my colleagues joked playfully that if I’m working on a story, that means something very bad is happening. And yeah, I admit, given my specialties, I can be the bringer of bad news. I do hope my pieces are read a bit more carefully than that. I always hope to bring subtlety to my work, to help shine a little light on the stories we’re living with.
But I’m a fun person! I swear! Why do I care that you know this? I contain writerly multitudes, people. So this month, I’m relieving you of the sad and the bad and the scary and I’m just giving you some weird stuff from my archive. These hands have typed millions of words, and I might as well show them to someone.
Before journalism took over my life, I spent a ton of time writing fictional stories, and had the great pleasure of being in a Spokane writing group with some truly incredible scribes. The writing I produced during that time was all fiction. Nothing real! Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about getting back to writing fiction.
I was flipping through some old stories the other day, and thought I’d let you read one this month. It’s called “Pets.” Originally it was published in the Lilac City Fairy Tales anthology, and was delightfully reprinted in the 2021 book Evergreen: Grim Tales and Verses from the Gloomy Northwest.
This story is inspired by one of my favorite urban legends: the tale of The Rathdrum Witches. It’s a solidly North Idaho story, and it grabbed me the instant I heard it, just like that National Geographic had when I was 10. Here’s an excerpt from a 1997 article in the Spokesman-Review, which describes The Rathdrum Witches as:
… an urban legend with a rural twist, cited by local folklorists, printed in several books and magazines and repeated breathlessly by Inland Northwest teenagers.
Bonnie Roth started hearing the tale in the ‘70s when her kids were teens.
“I had daughters, and, man, they were terrified by it,” said the Rathdrum librarian. “They drove those highways at night. … “
The highways in question are Idaho 41 and U.S. 95, the two settings used in the various recountings of the same story. North Idaho College folklorist Jim McLeod summarized it this way:
“Late at night, a man or woman, depending on which version you hear, is driving along and a group of hooded people form a human chain across the highway. They try to stop the car. The driver slows down and is going to stop - and decides the better of it.
“In some instances, he actually hits somebody; in other cases, he breaks the chain and drives through.”
I’m sure I could have done a piece of journalism about what the real story is behind this tale. But instead, I wrote a piece of fiction about it. So, I present that to you here. This is my not-real story about a thing people really believe in. It’s called “Pets.” I’d like to write more fiction soon. Maybe again soon. This story is a little weird, and a little fun, and I hope it relieves you from some of the bad out there.
PETS
By Leah Sottile
For decades, the Coven of the Dark Bird gleefully terrorized the townspeople of Rathdrum, Idaho. They stalked pastures, feeding on young calves in the dark and leaving only the flesh-bare bones behind. Sleepy farmers entered their hen houses in the mornings to gather eggs, only to find a pile of carcasses soaking in a fetid welter of blood.
Everything was perfect, until the Coven’s insatiable thirst for blood nearly ruined them.
On a warm summer night in June 1977, the witches waited silently along the side of a pitch-black stretch of Highway 41. There were no stars in the sky. No moon. Mother Earth held her breath.
A pair of headlights—the bright eyes of a yellow AMC Pacer—wound down the blacktop, its driver blind of the evil that awaited in the darkness.
As the car approached, the Coven joined hands and walked slowly across the road: A chain linked from edge to edge.
When the driver, Vern Walker, an alcoholic roller coaster operator from the nearby town of Athol, saw the human forms in the road, he jammed his foot down on the brake, and the Pacer fishtailed to a stop.
The man’s relief that he hadn’t hit anyone was short- lived. As he caught his breath, he noticed that the people —draped from head to toe in black robes—hadn’t scattered away from his speeding car. Instead, they held hands across the road. And they began moving. Gliding. The ends of this human chain walked to meet each other, forming a circle around his idling car, Vern leaned close to his window to get a better look.
“What in THE hell,” he muttered.
Vern reached his fingers for the door handle, as if some magnet was pulling him outside into the darkness, as if all of his life, he’d been incomplete, and the wholeness he craved was now outside waiting for him.
In the instant that Vern began to pull the handle, a flash of light glinted across his vision. A white glint of moonlight breaking through the dark sky behind him, flaring in the rearview mirror. A heavenly warning.
Vern jerked his hand back from the handle, looking at his palm as if he’d touched a hot iron brand. The dark figures were inches away now, their outlines vibrating like starved animals around a fresh kill. Their cloaked heads were practically pressing on the Pacer’s windows, their breath steaming the glass with a condensation of red droplets that dripped down the smooth surface.
Vern Walker didn’t think. He jammed his booted foot down on the accelerator and pinched his eyes shut, waiting to hear thuds and screams as his Pacer plowed through the fleshy human circle.
Instead he only heard the squeal of his tires. And when he opened his eyes, daring to look in the rearview, he saw just a lonely Idaho road behind him.
He pushed the gas further to the floor, and when he steered the car with a screech into the driveway of his home minutes later, he slammed it into park and hopped from the driver’s seat.
Standing in his driveway, the headlights still on, Vern Walker could see that his Pacer was blanketed in black feathers.
After Vern Walker got away and the secret of the Rathdrum Witches made headlines across the Inland Northwest, the coven retreated deep into the forests, far from flashlight beams and search parties and sniffing mongrels. They waited for a sign from Her Darkness.
Always before, Her Darkness had blessed the Coven with gifts. But after the man in the Pacer slipped from their circle, the witches were met with an abysmal silence. The night sky was quiet. The magic was gone. Their secrets had been revealed to the humans. They had been abandoned. They never stopped hoping.
Ten years passed. The orange moon was low in the sky the night the twins came to the Coven. They called them Elisheba and Baal. The mother-sisters doted on the girls, spoiling them like small queens. The Coven trained the twins in the ways of the black. They toughened their tiny bare feet, walking across rough sticks and hot coals. They lit their hair on fire and showed them how to will it into smoke. They drank mud and at night, their naked bodies jittered and quaked around raging bonfires.
It wasn’t until the eve of their 10th birthday that the old witches showed the girls how to kill. The girls followed as the Coven skipped through the forests, bewitching rabbits and deer, freezing them like statues and pulling sharp blades across their necks. The girls filled tall wine glasses with the fresh blood and drank deeply of the metallic redness.
Their mother-sisters looked on proudly as the twins stumbled across the uneven forest floor, cackling and laughing.
“I see Her, Sheba!” Baal yelled. “The Dark One! We are Her pets! We are the blessed ones!”
But Elisheba saw something different—something that pulled and nagged deep inside her. A voice whispered that she was not blessed, that her path and Baal’s were not one, but two. She shivered at the thought, unsure if she ached with longing or dread.
Age and booze hadn’t been kind to Vern Walker, but he needed the bottle to be able to drive home from work. He couldn’t even count the number of times he’d been pulled over for speeding through the dark stretch of Highway 41, but they always let him go. Everyone from Rathdrum believed Vern Walker’s story about the witches in the road.
It was October again. Late. Vern stood in the gravel parking lot of One Eye’s Tavern and tipped a bottle of Jack to his lips, draining the amber liquid before chucking the empty bottle into the woods.
Vern hopped into his truck—a big red thing with a gun rack loaded with two shotguns across the back window— and fumbled the keys into the ignition. The beast coughed to life. Vern threw it into gear and hit the gas, sending a blizzard of pebbles and dust into the darkness.
On the road, the Coven was waiting.
Elisheba and Baal held hands in the center of the chain as Vern Walker’s truck came into view a mile down the straight road. The Coven moved steadily, slowly, unfolding in a line across the pavement.
The Coven was silent as the headlights approached, but Elisheba’s breath quickened, her chest rising, falling as if she’d been running. Baal squeezed her hand tight.
Vern Walker’s eyes were nearly shut as the line of dark figures came into view—the image he’d been waiting ten whole years to see again every time he drove home from One Eye’s. The image shocked him sober, and the man slammed the brake and cranked the wheel, sending the truck careening sideways toward the witches.
He’d practiced this hundreds of times: Vern threw the vehicle into park, lifted his Browning Double Automatic off the top rack behind him and kicked the driver’s side door open with his foot. He pointed the barrel toward the dark line before him. He didn’t aim. He just started shooting.
One by one around her, as Elisheba watched the shot spray them all, her mother-sisters exploded into a fog of black feathers. She grasped at Baal’s hand, only to feel air pass between her fingers—her sister, too, lifting into the air in an explosion of fluttering black plumage.
Vern Walker stopped shooting when he saw only the girl remain. He walked slowly toward her, his gun hanging at his side.
Elisheba gasped for air. She felt as if she were drowning, or maybe that she was truly breathing for the first time.
Vern stopped in headlight beams and raised the shotgun to his shoulder. The truck idled and sputtered.
“What in the hell are you?” he yelled.
Elisheba looked toward the black sky above, searching for the moon—any sign from Her Darkness.
The man didn’t wait for an answer. He pulled the trigger. Elisheba flinched, and braced for the hot singe to hit
her chest, waiting for feathers or blood or something else she couldn’t yet imagine. But when nothing came after the gunshot, she peeked through her lowered lashes at the road before her, only to see Vern Walker’s face, frozen in a smirk of drunken victory. The shot spray hung in mid-air between them. The truck was silent.
Elisheba stared and blinked, looking behind her at the deserted road where her mother-sisters had stood, and when she knew she was alone, she let out a sob of relief, raising her face to the stars.
She walked around the shotgun blast, touched Vern Walker’s rough stubble and then lifted his feather-light frozen body into the bed of the red truck. She carefully steered the pickup toward town and into his driveway, hesitating on the turns as to not to send the man tumbling.
The world remained still when she lifted the shotgun from his rough paws. She slung it over her black-cloaked shoulder, lifted the black veil that covered her face, and walked down Highway 41. Visible and unafraid.
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I read this when you first posted it and I'm a little freaked out still. So, well done!
A former manager told me that he once heard something scream in the woods that he "could not explain". I laughed at first but then saw that he was dead serious about it, and he was a pretty normal guy. This was in north-central British Columbia where a lot of weird crimes and missing people happen. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a sasquatch coven in the deep woods.
Love your writing, Leah. Have you watched Season One of "Yellowjackets?" If you've not, I think you might enjoy it. Sharply drawn, fascinating characters and excellent writing. I don't know what happened to Season Two but it does not work well. The dialogue seems fabricated, the plotline gets lost, etc. But Season One is magnificent.