October skies

Rose filmed them using the night-vision filter. Julian sat next to Grace, both of them leaning against a moss-covered hump in the ground, looking out across the large clearing at the tree line around them. It was pitch black, save for the faint light intermittently cast by the moon as heavy clouds scudded across the sky.

They spoke in hushed voices, barely more than a whisper, as Julian interviewed her. And out there, amidst the trees, her microphone picked up the wonderfully atmospheric creakings, rustlings and nocturnal cries of the wilderness at night.

‘You ever seen anything out here, Grace? You know… whilst you’re out patrolling the woods?’ whispered Julian, the pupils of his wide eyes entirely dilated as he stared edgily out into the darkness around them. The emerald-green grainy composition of night vision lent the scene an eeriness that Rose knew was going to look good — anticipation of something about to happen.

Grace shook her head. ‘Nope, can’t say I have. Get to hear a lotta things, though. The woods are as alive in the night as they are in the day… mebbe more so,’ she replied, her breath puffed out into the cool night air.

Rose had headphones on. She could hear only what the directional mic was getting. To her it sounded delightfully creepy. A light breeze was teasing the firs and spruces around them. The swaying branches produced a chorus of conspiring whispers in the background.

‘Why do you think there are so many weird sightings and urban myths around these woods and mountains?’ Julian asked, cutting into the silence.

Grace measured her quiet reply. ‘We got a lot of history here in Blue Valley. I guess when you got a bunch of history, you get a bunch of boogieman stories.’ She smiled. ‘We ain’t so used to having a lot of history around us, not like you Brits are.’

Julian nodded and smiled.

A branch snapped out in the darkness and Julian jerked nervously, spilling coffee from the mug he was cradling in his hands.

‘Uh… Grace, what the hell was that?’ He swallowed anxiously, his prominent Adam’s apple bobbing like a fisherman’s float. Rose smiled at the grainy-green display in front of her.

Jules plays the fool so naturally.

‘Nothing,’ replied Grace calmly, ‘just dead wood falling. It happens. Relax.’

‘God, I hate woods,’ he gasped with a cloud of vapour. ‘Anyway, you were saying?’

Grace nodded. ‘History. We got a lot of it here; Indian history, followed by settler history. You know Emigrant Pass isn’t that far away from us.’

‘Emigrant Pass?’

‘It’s the one and only way through the Sierra Nevadas. At least, it was back in the 1850s when something like half a million people were migratin’ west,’ she continued. Rose listened intently to her dry throaty voice; a mesmerising monotone of Midwest vowels, back-woods charm and a lifetime of Marlboros.

A perfect voice for storytelling.

‘They called the route a number of things back then; the South Pass trail, the Emigrant Trail, the Freedom Trail… I guess you’d know it best as the Oregon Trail. It was the route settlers were taking across the wilderness to Oregon. There wasn’t one fixed trail though. It was a bunch of different east-west routes that mostly followed the Platte River towards the Rockies. Those trails criss-crossed each other, each one promising some kinda shortcut that beat the others. But no matter how much they all twisted and turned, they all came together in the end. They converged at one critical point.’

Grace pulled out a cigarette and lit up. The flame of her lighter flared brightly across Rose’s view screen, and then it flickered out a moment later.

‘Emigrant Pass. Half a million stories came through that gap in the mountains.’ She pulled on her cigarette, her lips pursed and lined like a puckered tobacco pouch. ‘And they was superstitious people back then. Many strongly religious types, devout types, you know? Like the Mormons, for example.’

Julian nodded.

‘You ever hear the saying “seeing the elephant”?’

‘Nope.’

‘It was a myth that grew up along the trail. All the hazards of that journey, the terrain, the weather, disease, crooks, Indians… it somehow all got rolled up into one frightening mythological beast — the elephant; the size of a mountaintop, or a storm front, or the size of a broken cart wheel. If you caught a glimpse of the elephant ahead of you in the distance it was meant to be an omen, an omen to turn back right away, and go no further. And you sure as hell did that and thanked God you saw the elephant from afar, and not up close.’

Julian looked out into the darkness. Rose instinctively panned the camera away from him in the direction he was looking — towards the tree line across the clearing. ‘Do you think we’ll see anything tonight?’ he asked.

Grace laughed — a loose rattling sound like a leather flap caught in a wind tunnel. ‘Maybe we’ll see that elephant, eh?’