He Was Hired to Watch DOGMAN, Then Everything Went Terrifyingly Wrong…

Six Months Alone at Station Seven

I signed the contract in a glass-and-marble office building in downtown Portland, and I remember thinking the paper felt oddly heavy—like it had density beyond ink and legal language. I was twenty-six, broke, freshly graduated, and drowning in the kind of debt that turns your future into a spreadsheet full of red numbers. The job was advertised as wildlife observation in the Pacific Northwest. The pay was triple what any normal field research contract offered. The conditions were bizarre—six-month rotations, complete isolation, and a lifetime non-disclosure agreement with penalties that could flatten not only me but anyone tethered to my finances.

I signed anyway.

Not because I believed the pitch. I didn’t. I signed because the world rewards caution less reliably than it punishes poverty. I signed because I was tired of waiting tables, grading lab reports for professors who forgot my name, and watching loan interest bloom like mold. I signed because it was 2003 and I still thought “smart” meant “safe.”

I was wrong.

My name is Marcus Webb. I’m forty-seven now, living in suburban Oregon. I teach high school biology in a classroom that smells faintly of ethanol wipes and dry-erase markers. To my colleagues, I’m a normal guy who spent a few years doing fieldwork before deciding that stable paychecks and weekends were worth more than glory.

That’s the version of my life that fits inside polite conversation.

The other version—the true one—starts with an unmarked suite on the fourteenth floor and ends with a hand raised in the tree line, mirrored back at me by something that shouldn’t have hands at all.

## 1) The Email That Didn’t Belong

In early 2003, I’d just finished my master’s at the University of Washington. I specialized in large predator behavior—wolf pack dynamics, territory maintenance, interspecies competition. I loved the work. I believed in conservation. I believed that if we understood predators better, we’d stop treating them like villains in our personal stories.

Belief didn’t pay my bills.

I owed a little over $80,000. I lived in a basement apartment in Seattle where the radiators clanged like ghosts. I worked three part-time jobs: tutoring undergrads in statistics, doing weekend shifts at a café, and logging hours as a field tech for a professor who paid in stipends and vague gratitude.

Then an email hit my university inbox.

Subject: Unique research opportunity, qualified candidates only.

No logo. No signature block. Just a short message that said my academic work had been reviewed, and I’d been pre-selected for an interview. The salary listed was $90,000 per year, all expenses covered, plus a $50,000 completion bonus after three years.

I stared at the number like it might blink.

At first I assumed it was a scam. The wording was too clean, too confident. But it referenced details from my thesis that a random phishing email wouldn’t know—specific field sites, a methodology I’d used for boundary mapping, a paper I’d published that had exactly fourteen citations and three of them were mine.

A phone number followed, and a single instruction:

Call within 72 hours if interested.

I waited two days, trying to talk myself out of it. I didn’t like how the email felt—like a hook in the water. But debt makes you rationalize. Debt makes you brave in stupid ways.

On the third day, I called.

A woman answered on the second ring.

“Thank you for calling, Mr. Webb. Please confirm your full legal name, date of birth, and current address.”

No greeting. No company identification. Just paperwork spoken aloud.

I gave the information, throat tight.

A pause.

“You’ve been pre-screened and approved for an interview. Can you be in Portland this Friday at two p.m.?”

“Who—” I started.

“You’ll receive an address now,” she said, cutting clean through my question. She gave me a suite number in a downtown high-rise and told me to bring transcripts, my thesis, and two forms of ID.

Then she hung up.

The entire call lasted less than three minutes.

The address was real. The building existed. But when I searched the suite number, no tenant appeared. No business registration. No website. No listing in the building directory. It was as if the office belonged to a blank space.

That should have been my second clue.

It wasn’t.

## 2) Dr. Chun and the First Paper I Signed

Friday arrived wet and gray in that Pacific Northwest way that makes concrete look tired. I drove down to Portland in my beat-up Honda, parked in a garage that charged an insulting hourly rate, and rode the elevator to the fourteenth floor.

Suite 1440.

The door was unmarked. No plaque, no logo, nothing but a number and a clean, recently painted frame. I knocked.

A voice I recognized said, “Come in.”

The reception area looked like a stage set for “generic professional office.” Neutral chairs. A small table with a plant that looked too perfect to be alive. No receptionist desk. No magazines. No company literature. Just a door leading deeper inside.

The woman who greeted me stood as I entered. She was around fifty, dressed in a way that suggested money without bragging—tailored, practical, impeccable. Her expression was calm in the unnerving way of people trained never to reveal whether they like you.

“Mr. Webb,” she said, shaking my hand. “Thank you for coming. I’m Dr. Sarah Chun. Please sit.”

I sat. She remained standing for a beat, as if measuring me.

“Before we proceed,” she said, “you need to understand something. What we discuss today is classified. If you decide this is not for you, you’re free to leave at any time. But anything you hear in this room remains confidential.”

I nodded automatically.

“I need verbal confirmation.”

“Yes,” I said. “I understand.”

She reached into her briefcase and slid a document toward me.

“Sign this.”

It was a non-disclosure agreement—dense legal language, sweeping scope. It covered not only information but “methods, procedures, operational details,” and “existence of the program itself.” The penalties were absurd. The duration was my lifetime.

I hesitated.

Dr. Chun watched me in silence, not pressuring, just waiting in the way a cliff waits for gravity to do its job.

I signed.

She took the paper and finally sat across from me.

“You have a strong academic background,” she said, as if we were now in normal interview territory. “Your thesis on territorial boundary maintenance and interspecies competition suggests the analytical thinking we require.”

“What kind of work is this?” I asked.

“Field observation,” she said. “Remote station. Extended isolation. Independent operation.”

“That’s… unusual, but not unheard of,” I said carefully. “What species?”

A pause.

“We monitor species not currently recognized by mainstream zoology.”

I blinked, thinking I’d misheard.

“Our work involves collecting data on unclassified populations.”

“Unclassified,” I repeated.

“Yes.”

“Like—” I started, feeling heat rise in my face because the word that wanted to come out sounded ridiculous in that sterile office. “Like Bigfoot?”

Dr. Chun didn’t smile.

“The colloquial term is used,” she said. “We prefer ‘unclassified species.’”

I leaned back, half convinced this was an elaborate prank. “And you’re offering ninety thousand a year for this?”

“Yes.”

“For what, exactly? Looking for stories?”

“For observation and documentation,” she said. “We need trained professionals who can distinguish genuine phenomena from misidentification or hoaxing.”

I heard my own skepticism sharpen. “What organization is this?”

“We don’t have a public name,” Dr. Chun said. “We’re privately funded. We operate independently of government oversight. Our benefactors believe certain knowledge must be managed carefully.”

That sentence should have made me stand up.

Instead, I asked, “So what are we actually monitoring?”

Dr. Chun opened her briefcase and laid a folder of photographs on the table. She spread them out methodically.

Large tracks in snow—too big for wolves. Trees with claw marks far higher than any bear could reach. A blurred frame of something upright between trees, a shape that made my skin prickle even though my brain still insisted it was a trick of light.

“Our primary focus in the Pacific Northwest,” she said, “is a bipedal canid species. Highly intelligent. Highly territorial. Potentially dangerous.”

“You’re telling me—” I stopped, because saying “dogman” out loud felt like stepping into a tabloid. “You want me to observe… that.”

“We want you to follow the scientific method,” Dr. Chun replied. “You’re not being asked to believe. You’re being asked to document.”

Then she slid a thicker document toward me.

“The employment contract,” she said. “Read it carefully.”

I did.

Six-month rotations. One month off in between. No contact with the outside world during field time except weekly radio check-ins. Communication monitored and recorded. Equipment provided. Supplies cached. GPS-guided travel to station. No exact location disclosed until after signing. Liability clauses that acknowledged potential injury or death. A completion bonus contingent on full three-year completion without breach.

And the NDA—the same lifetime silence—tied to financial penalties so severe they felt less like deterrence and more like a collar.

I looked up at her. “This is insane.”

“It’s thorough,” she corrected.

“Have you ever seen one?” I asked, because if she said no, I could still fold the paper and walk away with my dignity intact.

Dr. Chun paused. “Yes. Twice.”

My mouth went dry.

“Both times unmistakable,” she added. “And both times at distance.”

“What did it look like?”

“Like something that shouldn’t exist,” she said, and her voice changed slightly—not emotional, just honest.

The room felt colder.

I thought about my loans. I thought about the years of scraping. I thought about how even if this was nonsense, I’d get paid to sit in a cabin and watch deer walk past cameras.

And a smaller thought—quiet, dangerous—whispered that maybe the world was bigger than my textbooks.

I signed.

Dr. Chun’s pen left my hand. My life, in a sense, left with it.

## 3) Training for a Subject They Wouldn’t Name

They put me in a hotel outside Portland. Every morning a car picked me up and drove me to an unmarked building that looked like a warehouse. Inside, it was a lab and training center dressed in industrial clothing.

I was the only trainee.

The staff—maybe a dozen people—never gave full names. First names, sometimes. Or last names without first names. Or call signs that felt too neat to be real.

They trained me on equipment that, in 2003, was years ahead of anything I’d seen in academia:

Night-vision trail cameras with clarity that bordered on unfair.
Audio recorders tuned to frequency ranges that made my ears ring when tested.
Infrared motion sensors and thermal triggers.
A data-logging system that could tag time, coordinate, and sensor type automatically and back up via satellite in bursts.

They drilled protocols into me until I dreamed in checklists.

How to photograph tracks: multiple angles, scale objects, depth measurement, stride length, substrate notes.

How to collect hair and scat: gloves, sterile bags, contamination avoidance, location marking.

How to document tree damage: height, claw pattern, directionality, bark type, age of mark.

How to approach kill sites: perimeter survey, wind direction, evidence preservation, minimum time spent.

Everything was built around one core instruction:

Observe. Do not engage.

One trainer—an older man who introduced himself as Richards—spent an entire day teaching behavior patterns.

“They’re not wolves,” Richards said. “Don’t put wolf assumptions on them. They’re apex predators with near-human intelligence.”

“How dangerous?” I asked.

Richards didn’t hesitate. “Seventeen observers have died in the forty years we’ve run this.”

I stared.

“Most deaths were the observer’s fault,” he added. “Too close. Too curious. Too brave. Or too stupid.”

“That’s not reassuring,” I said.

“It’s realistic,” he replied. “Follow protocols, respect boundaries, and you’ll likely be fine.”

On the last day, Dr. Chun met me again.

“You’ll be transported tomorrow,” she said. “You will not be told your location. Once you’re there, you’re on your own. Weekly radio check-ins on Sunday at noon.”

I swallowed. “Any final advice?”

She looked at me the way a doctor looks at someone who’s asked if something will hurt.

“Do not romanticize what you’re studying,” she said. “Curiosity can be fatal.”

Then she handed me a small packet.

Inside was a second NDA and a single phrase printed on a card, as if it were a mantra.

You are not the top of the food chain.

I laughed once, nervously.

No one joined me.

## 4) The Hike In and the Cabin That Watched Back

The van that picked me up had no windows in the back. The driver didn’t speak. We drove for hours—roads shrinking from interstate to highway to county road to logging track. Eventually the van stopped at the edge of forest where a man waited with a pack and a set of keys.

“I’m your supply coordinator,” he said. “You’ll hear me on the radio once a week. I’m your only contact.”

He handed me the pack. It was heavy enough to tilt me forward when I lifted it.

“This has everything you need to reach the station,” he said. “Follow the GPS. Six-mile hike. Trail is not marked.”

He gave me the keys.

Then the van drove away.

The forest swallowed the engine sound within minutes, leaving me with only wind and my own breathing.

The hike took nearly four hours. Old-growth cedar and Douglas fir crowded the light. The ground was slick with moss. Streams cut across the terrain like seams. By the time I saw the station, sweat cold on my back, I’d started imagining how easy it would be for someone to simply… disappear out here.

The cabin looked like it had grown from the forest rather than been built: logs, muted paint, green metal roof. Solar panels angled toward the thin sky. A shed thirty feet away. Shutters on the windows like eyelids.

Inside: sparse but clean. Bunk bed. Propane stove. Desk with monitors. Shelves stacked with supplies. Wood stove.

On the desk sat a binder labeled:

OBSERVER MANUAL: READ IMMEDIATELY

I did.

It was over 200 pages and it read like a mix between a field guide and a contingency plan for an apocalypse.

Routine protocol. Emergency protocol. Psychological self-assessment. Equipment troubleshooting. Evacuation procedures. A section titled “Subject Proximity Events” that included rules like:

Do not run.
Do not shout.
Do not point weapons unless attacked.
Maintain posture.
Avoid eye contact unless the subject initiates it.
Do not approach offerings.
Do not leave food outside the station.

That last line was bolded.

I assumed it was about bears.

I was wrong.

That night I lay in the bunk listening to the forest. It wasn’t quiet. It was alive in a thousand small sounds—wind through needles, distant water, small animals moving through brush.

And then, once, far away, a call rolled across the valley.

Deep. Resonant. Too long to be a wolf howl. Too layered to be an elk.

It sounded, with sickening similarity, like something trying to speak through teeth built for killing.

I slept in fragments.

In the morning, I began routine: camera check, overnight footage review, sensor logs, audio scanning. Normal wildlife at first—deer, elk, bear.

For two weeks the work was boring, and boredom felt like relief.

Then day sixteen arrived.

## 5) The Eight-Second Clip That Shattered My Skepticism

I was reviewing overnight footage from a camera about a mile north of the station. Most clips were the same: deer passing, raccoons, a bear’s shoulder too close to the lens.

Then a clip timestamped 2:00 a.m. loaded, and my stomach turned over before my mind even understood why.

The camera faced a small clearing. For several seconds nothing moved.

Then something stepped in from the right.

It was upright. Tall. Easily seven feet, even with a slight crouch. Covered in dark fur. The head shape was wrong—too large, with a pronounced muzzle.

It crossed the clearing in seconds, movement fluid and confident, then vanished into the left-side trees.

The clip lasted maybe eight seconds.

I watched it again.

And again.

And again, looking for seams, artifacts, glitches.

The metadata checked out. The footage didn’t stutter. The rest of the recording was stable.

It wasn’t a bear. The proportions were wrong. The gait was wrong. Bears sway. This moved like something balanced on two legs as a default, not an exception.

It wasn’t a person, not out here, not at two in the morning, not moving like that.

My hands shook as I logged it.

I filled out every field: time, date, camera ID, location, description. I flagged it as a significant observation, which triggered satellite upload to the research team.

Then I sat back at the desk and stared at the dark monitors as if they might explain what I’d just seen.

The most frightening part wasn’t the creature.

It was the realization that the people who hired me had built an entire system around expecting this.

They weren’t chasing rumor.

They were managing a known variable.

Sunday came. At noon I did my radio check-in.

“This is Station Seven,” I said, voice thin. “Observer Webb reporting.”

“Copy Station Seven. Status,” the coordinator replied, calm as a weather report.

“All equipment functional. Health good. Supplies adequate.” I swallowed. “I have a significant observation. Camera seventeen recorded bipedal subject at 0200 on day sixteen. Footage is clear.”

A pause.

“Copy that. Footage received. Continue standard protocols. Anything else?”

No excitement. No disbelief. No questions.

“Nothing else.”

“Understood. Next check-in Sunday. Stay safe.”

The radio clicked off.

I sat there in the quiet cabin, understanding something I hadn’t been ready to understand:

Whatever I’d just filmed wasn’t a discovery.

It was a routine.

## 6) Tracks with Thumbs and Trees That Looked Like Messages

Over the next three months, I recorded seventeen more significant events.

Some were distant—a shape at the edge of infrared range, a moving silhouette between trunks.

Some were clear enough to make my skin prickle:

Tracks: massive canid-like prints with five toes and something that looked disturbingly like an opposable thumb impression at an angle that made no sense for any known animal.
Tree markings: vertical bark strips, gouged high—eight feet, sometimes more—too precise for bear scratching. Patterns repeated across different trees like a boundary language.
Kill sites: deer taken down and partially consumed in a way that didn’t fit wolves or bears. Selective removal of organs. Minimal tearing on muscle groups. Almost… deliberate.

And the sounds.

The vocalizations were the worst because they always arrived when I was trying to convince myself I could sleep.

They weren’t wolf howls. They weren’t cougar screams. They weren’t elk bugles.

They were deep, layered, with a tonal complexity that made my brain keep trying to assign meaning. Sometimes they came as call-and-response, from ridge to ridge, like something communicating across distance.

I recorded them. Tagged them. Uploaded them.

And tried not to imagine what it meant that I was living alone in the center of something territorial.

On day eighty-three, I saw one with my own eyes.

## 7) The Clearing and the Amber Eyes

It was late afternoon. I was hiking to a camera station about a mile and a half from the cabin. The trail was more suggestion than path. I pushed through undergrowth, stepped over slick logs, and emerged into a small clearing.

I froze.

At the far edge, about fifty yards away, something stood upright facing away from me.

It was enormous. Seven and a half feet, maybe more. Muscular in a way that wasn’t bulky like a bear but proportioned like a… person. Dark brown fur covered its body. The head was unmistakably canid—wolf-like, scaled up to match the body.

Its ears—pointed, mobile—twitched and rotated as if sampling sound.

My training kicked in hard.

Don’t run. Don’t move fast. Don’t make noise.

I stood still, barely breathing.

Then the ears turned toward me.

Slowly, deliberately, the creature turned its head and then its shoulders until it faced me fully.

We made eye contact across the clearing.

The eyes were amber. Bright. Focused.

Not the flat stare of an animal deciding whether you’re food.

The look of something evaluating.

It stared for what felt like minutes but was probably less than ten seconds. Then it made a low rumble—felt more than heard—that sounded like acknowledgement.

Not aggression.

As if it were saying: I see you. I’m aware. I’m choosing.

Then it turned and walked away into the trees with a calm confidence that made me feel, for the first time in my life, like an intruder on land that didn’t belong to me.

Back at the cabin, I documented the encounter in exhausting detail—body morphology, gait, vocalization, behavior. I sketched what I could remember.

That night I didn’t sleep.

I kept seeing the eyes—intelligence without apology.

And I kept thinking of Richards’s phrase:

near-human intelligence.

“Near” suddenly felt like a coward’s word.

## 8) Debriefing and the Question They Wouldn’t Answer

My first rotation ended in September. I hiked out to the logging road, found the van waiting, and rode back into civilization like a man coming up from underwater.

The hotel room in Portland felt obscene—hot water on demand, soft bed, the hum of distant traffic like a lullaby.

The next day Dr. Chun debriefed me.

“Excellent documentation,” she said. “Some of the clearest footage from that station.”

“What are they?” I asked. I didn’t couch it in joking terms anymore. “What are these things?”

“That’s what we’re trying to understand,” she replied. “We have theories.”

“Like what?”

“An evolutionary offshoot that remained isolated,” she said. “An undocumented species that avoids classification through behavior and intelligence.”

“And how many?”

“We operate seventeen stations across North America,” she said. “Activity at all of them. Several hundred individuals, maybe more.”

“What’s the end goal?” I pressed. “What happens with the data?”

Dr. Chun closed her laptop and looked at me carefully.

“The goal is understanding,” she said. “Understanding before public exposure. Because public exposure would be catastrophic.”

I wanted to argue. I wanted to demand transparency. But the contract was a tight ring around my throat, and the money was already paying down my debt in a way that made me feel both relieved and compromised.

I went back for a second rotation.

Winter in the Cascades is a lesson in endurance. Snow stacked. Sun disappeared for days. The cabin creaked with cold. My mind began inventing voices just to break the silence.

The creatures didn’t vanish in winter. If anything, their sign became clearer—tracks in fresh snow, markings stark against stripped bark, vocalizations sharper in cold air.

In February, I captured footage that changed my understanding again.

Two of them—one larger, one smaller—stood near a frozen creek. The larger broke the ice with a series of controlled strikes. Then it stepped back and watched as the smaller one tried. When the smaller struggled, the larger demonstrated again with a different technique.

It wasn’t just behavior.

It was teaching.

Problem-solving. Knowledge transfer. Intentional instruction.

During my radio check-in, the coordinator sounded genuinely moved for the first time.

“That footage is remarkable,” he said. “The research team is… impressed.”

“What does it mean?” I asked.

A pause.

“It means they’re more like us than we thought,” he said quietly, “and that makes the ethics more complicated.”

I didn’t understand that line fully until my third rotation.

## 9) The Line I Crossed: Offerings

By my third rotation, I was good at the job and uncomfortable with the job. The better I got at predicting their movement, the more I felt like I was participating in something that had the shape of surveillance rather than science.

I started doing something I wasn’t supposed to do.

I left offerings.

At first it was small—bits of dried meat, a piece of fish from a stream. I told myself it was an experiment. A way to see if they’d accept food associated with human scent.

But I know the truth: I was trying to turn watching into relationship, because relationship felt less ugly than spying.

The offerings disappeared within a day or two.

Then I started seeing the same individual repeatedly on the perimeter cameras: a large male with distinctive scarring on the right shoulder. Easy to recognize. Easy to track.

In my private notes—never in official logs—I called him Scar.

Scar appeared closer to the station over time. Not threatening, just present. Always at distance, always aware.

One evening I was chopping firewood when I felt eyes on me with the same certainty you feel rain on your face.

I looked up.

Scar stood at the tree line, about a hundred yards away.

We stared.

I lifted one hand slowly in a wave.

He tilted his head, studying.

Then—so casually it felt like mockery—he lifted his own hand in a mirror of my gesture.

Not paw. Not foreleg.

A hand.

Five fingers, long, tipped with claws.

He held it for maybe two seconds, lowered it, and disappeared into the trees.

I did not report that.

Because the moment didn’t feel like data.

It felt like acknowledgment.

And acknowledgement meant the boundary between observer and subject wasn’t one-sided.

It meant I was being watched back.

## 10) The Night Scar Defended Me

In August, near the end of that third rotation, something happened that cracked my last comfortable illusion.

I was inside reviewing footage when the outside sensors triggered in rapid sequence. The audio feed picked up vocalizations—multiple, agitated, aggressive. I checked the perimeter cameras.

Three of them approached the station.

Not Scar.

Their body language—yes, even on grainy night footage—looked hostile. They circled, testing, vocalizing in sharp bursts. The manual had prepared me for “subject proximity events” but the reality of three large, intelligent predators evaluating my cabin like a problem to solve made my throat close.

Training said: stay inside, lock down, wait.

I stayed.

Then Scar appeared.

He came fast from the treeline, positioning himself between the station and the other three. The confrontation that followed was the most unsettling thing I’ve ever watched: loud, escalating vocalizations, body postures that looked like negotiation and threat and dominance all braided together.

It sounded like an argument.

At one point, one of the intruders stepped forward and Scar’s posture shifted—weight forward, shoulders lifted, a clear physical warning.

He didn’t back down.

After several minutes, the three intruders withdrew into the forest.

Scar remained for a moment, standing in the clearing near the station, looking toward my cabin as if checking that the threat had passed.

Then he made a softer sound—lower, different, almost… calming.

And he left.

I sat at the desk shaking.

He had defended the station.

Defended me.

Not out of territorial instinct—the station wasn’t his, not in any way that made biological sense. Not because of food—I hadn’t offered enough to justify risk.

The only explanation that fit was the one I didn’t want to accept:

A relationship had formed, however thin.

And if a relationship could form, then the ethics were no longer theoretical.

They were personal.

That night, for the first time, I felt ashamed of my cameras.

## 11) The Question That Ended My Contract

At the next radio check-in, I asked what I’d been avoiding for two years.

“What happens to the data?” I said. “What’s the end goal?”

A pause.

“That’s above your clearance,” the coordinator replied. “Your task is observation and documentation.”

“I need to know,” I insisted. “I’ve been doing this for over two years.”

“I can’t discuss that. Continue your work. Follow protocols.”

He added, almost impatiently: “Don’t overthink it.”

But overthinking was all I had in that cabin besides silence.

By the end of that rotation, paranoia had taken root. Maybe they were benign. Maybe they were conservationists with secrecy as a shield. Or maybe they were collecting information for military or corporate purposes—containment, elimination, exploitation.

I had no evidence for those darker theories.

But I also had no transparency.

And in a system with no accountability, the absence of evidence is not comfort. It’s a warning.

When I returned to Portland for debriefing, I told Dr. Chun I wouldn’t come back.

“You have a contract,” she reminded me. “Three years.”

“I’ll forfeit the bonus,” I said. “I can’t keep doing this.”

She studied me with that neutral expression that had never once softened.

“What changed?”

I hesitated, then told the truth.

“I developed a relationship with one of them,” I said. “Not intentionally. But it happened. And I can’t keep treating intelligent beings like research subjects.”

Dr. Chun sighed, as if I’d confirmed something she’d expected.

“This happens,” she said. “Observers get too close. Usually it ends badly.”

“Has it ended badly for me?” I asked.

“Not yet,” she said. “But you’re compromised.”

She slid termination paperwork toward me.

I signed.

Then they put me through three days of psychological interviews that felt less like therapy and more like security screening—questions about my mental state, my intentions, whether I’d speak, whether I’d try to contact others.

I passed.

They paid me what I’d earned, minus the bonus. After taxes and loans and expenses, I walked away with enough to start a new life—but not enough to buy forgetfulness.

I moved back to Seattle, got certified to teach, and tried to live like a man who hadn’t seen a hand rise from the trees.

## 12) The Phone Call Fourteen Years Later

Time didn’t erase it. It just put layers of ordinary life on top.

I married. I taught. I graded papers about cell structure and Mendelian genetics with a strange, private irony. I coached students through lab safety and scientific skepticism while carrying a memory that didn’t fit inside mainstream science.

I tried—quietly—to find the organization again.

Nothing.

No corporate records. No public filings. The accounts that paid me were untraceable in any way that mattered. It was as if the entire operation existed in a bureaucratic blind spot built on purpose.

Then, in 2018, my phone rang from an unknown number.

I answered because teachers are trained to answer unknown numbers; it’s usually a parent.

A familiar voice spoke.

“Mr. Webb. I hope you’ve been well.”

Dr. Chun.

My blood went cold in an instant.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“We need experienced observers,” she said. “The program has expanded. Certain populations are becoming more aggressive. We’d like you to consider returning. One rotation.”

“No,” I said immediately.

“The compensation would be significant,” she continued, unbothered. “Double your previous rate.”

“I’m not interested.”

A pause—just long enough to carry weight.

“The non-disclosure agreement remains in effect,” Dr. Chun said. “I trust you’ve honored it.”

It wasn’t overt. It didn’t need to be.

It reminded me that the contract wasn’t just paper. It was a leash held by someone who could still find my number after fourteen years.

“I haven’t said anything,” I said. “And I won’t. But I’m not coming back.”

I hung up.

They never called again.

But the call did what it was designed to do: it reminded me the program continued, and it reminded me that I was not as free as I pretended to be.

## 13) Why I’m Writing This Like a Story

I’m not handing you proof. I can’t. The equipment, the footage, the samples—none of it belonged to me. Even my logs were property of the program. The only thing I have is memory, and memory is the cheapest evidence in the world.

What I can give you is the shape of what happened—an account that is specific enough to feel real, and careful enough not to become a map.

Because I believe one thing Dr. Chun said was true: public certainty would be catastrophic. Not because the creatures are “monsters,” but because humans treat anything unknown like either a trophy or a threat. Sometimes both.

So if this reaches anyone, let it reach as a warning about secrecy and ethics, not as a treasure hunt.

I took a job that promised wildlife observation and paid like hush money.

I learned that some truths are managed like hazards.

And I learned that intelligence doesn’t always wear a human face.

I still think about Scar—about the mirrored wave, about the way he stepped between my station and the others like I mattered.

I don’t know if he was protecting me specifically or protecting the stability of his territory. I don’t know if he understood the cameras or if he simply tolerated them as one tolerates a strange bird. I don’t know if my offerings meant “friend” or “odd human habit.”

What I know—what I can’t unknow—is that when he looked at me, he looked like something making choices.

And if something in the forest can make choices, then the question isn’t whether it exists.

The question is what we owe it—and who gets to decide.