Camera Shows Bigfoot Capturing a Man – Man’s Terrifying Sasquatch Encounter Story

Six Days in the Dark

A Sasquatch Captive’s True Story

I know you probably won’t believe me.

I wouldn’t believe me either, not if I were you—sitting somewhere comfortable, lights on, computer glowing, the world outside familiar and safe. If I were you, I’d think this was just another story. Another piece of fiction to pass the time.

But this isn’t fiction.

This is what happened to me in the six days that didn’t just change my life—they ended one life and started another. The same way a forest fire ends one forest so another can grow.

My name doesn’t matter. Not anymore. The company changed it on every piece of paper that left that town. The news used a different name altogether. The contract I signed—or agreed to, more accurately, with a pen shaking in my hand—listed me as “Employee 714-B.”

They can strip a name pretty easily.

But they can’t strip what I remember.

I. The Man I Used to Be

There was a time when I trusted only what I could touch. What I could weigh. What I could put on a checklist and initial at the bottom.

I was a logger. A good one. My father had been a logger, his father before him. We came from men who measured days in chain links and gallons of diesel, in the sharp bite of a saw blade through green wood, in the smell of pine pitch and sweat.

“If you can’t see it with your own eyes, it probably isn’t there,” my old man used to say.

He wasn’t a cruel man, not exactly, but he didn’t have patience for fantasies. Ghosts, UFOs, Bigfoot—those belonged to bored kids and late-night radio. Our life was trees and steel and schedules. You cut. You hauled. You got paid. You went home tired enough to sleep through anything.

By the time I turned thirty-eight, I was a site supervisor. I’d worked my way up from choker-setter to sawyer to the guy everyone complained about behind his back.

I took pride in that.

Being a supervisor meant responsibility. It meant I was usually the first one on site and the last one to leave. It meant paperwork, inspections, safety briefings, numbers on forms that had to match numbers on loaders and fuel tanks.

It also meant that when a contract came in—cheap, rushed, and a little suspicious—I was the one who said yes.

That contract was for a tract of timber in the Pacific Northwest, deeper than any job we’d had before. Forty minutes from the nearest town down a road so bad it killed cell signal and dampened conversation. Another hour beyond that on logging roads that were more idea than infrastructure.

The kind of place where, if something went wrong, help was at best hours away.

We were just glad for the work.

The economy had turned on us that year. The mill had cut shifts. Other outfits were shutting down temporarily, some permanently. Men I knew—good men who could drop a tree within an inch of where they wanted—were suddenly asking if I’d heard of any openings, just something to pay the light bill.

So when the company landed that contract, we didn’t ask why the other outfits had passed. We asked when we started.

II. The Town that Knew Better

The town itself barely qualified as one.

A single main street with a gas station that doubled as a general store, a diner with a flickering neon sign in the window, a bar attached to the diner, and a small, tired motel with doors that stuck in winter and buzzed with mosquitoes in summer. Population somewhere between three and five hundred if you counted everyone who lived within ten miles.

To us, it was base camp.

We’d finish the day up in the cut—chainsaws, feller-buncher, excavator with a grapple—and drop back down that horrible road, shocks squealing, teeth rattling, shoulders stiff and hands still buzzing from machinery. We’d hit the diner, eat something greasy, check into the motel, and sleep like the dead.

On the surface, it was simple.

But the people… they were not happy to see us.

They weren’t rude, exactly. No one spit on us or refused service. But the moment we mentioned where we were working, the air would change.

Conversations would die mid-sentence.

Eyes would go flat and distant.

Hands would fidget with receipts, napkins, anything to look busy.

The first week, I shrugged it off. Locals always had an opinion about logging. Some hated what we did—tree murderers, they sometimes called us. Others resented outsiders coming in and making money off “their” land.

The general store was the first place where I realized this was something else.

I’d gone in alone, needed some extra water jugs and a couple of tarps. Behind the counter was an old man with hands that looked like old roots—gnarled, scarred, thick-knuckled. He wore a plaid shirt that had seen too many winters and glasses that magnified his eyes.

He rang up my stuff slowly, each beep of the scanner oddly loud in the quiet.

“Up on Miller Ridge, are you?” he asked, not looking at me.

“Past it,” I said. “Cedar break, northeast side of the mountain. Contract for Clearline Timber.”

He paused.

For a moment, the only sound in the store was the cooler motor humming behind me.

“Old families up there,” he muttered, voice so low I almost missed it. “They don’t like company.”

I frowned. “Old families?”

He looked up then, really looked at me. His eyes were pale blue, almost washed-out, but there was nothing weak in them.

“Never mind,” he said after a long moment. “Forget I said anything.”

“I’ve worked near private land before,” I said. “We stay within the markers. No trouble. Your old families won’t even know we’re there.”

He gave a small, sad smile.

“They know,” he said. “They always know.”

I tried to press him, but he shut down. Bagged my items, took my cash, and turned away before I could ask anything else.

That night I told the crew about “old families.”

They laughed hard enough to shake the table.

“Probably some hermit weed farmers,” Benny, one of my sawyers, said. “We’ll send the monster squirrel to negotiate.”

The “monster squirrel” started as a joke and quickly turned into our coping mechanism.

Turns out we’d need it.

III. The Sounds in the Trees

The first week was normal.

Normal for us meant sunup to sundown labor, chainsaws screaming, engines growling, the smell of gasoline, sap, and sweat filling the air. Our camp was basic—two equipment trailers, a canvas canopy where we ate, a portable toilet, and a couple of folding tables scattered with tools, lunches, and coffee thermoses.

On the second week, the forest changed.

It started with the calls.

We were used to animal sounds. Even in the noisiest workday, there’s always a background track of life—birds chattering, ravens calling, the occasional distant scream of a hawk. At lunch, when the engines shut off, the forest usually rushed back in, loud and layered.

But these calls were different.

They came from deep in the trees, from somewhere beyond the reach of the sawdust haze and exhaust. Deep, resonant whoops that rose and fell in a way I’d never heard from any bird or animal I knew.

They weren’t random sounds either.

They came in sequences—three rising whoops, then silence, then two lower, drawn-out ones. Sometimes a faint answer would come from further away. The sound vibrated in your chest, like standing too close to a big subwoofer.

First time we heard it, we all stopped where we stood.

Engines went quiet mid-rev. A chain spun to a halt. A piece of half-cut timber leaned and settled into place.

We stared into the tree line as if squinting hard enough would push the forest back and reveal what had made the noise.

“Moose?” someone offered weakly.

“Moose don’t sound like that,” I said, but my voice didn’t sound like mine.

Benny broke the tension. “Monster squirrel,” he yelled. “He’s real pissed you cut his favorite tree.”

We laughed. Too loud. Too long.

But after the laughter faded, more than one pair of eyes drifted back to the dark spaces between the trunks.

Then came the footsteps.

You don’t think about footsteps in a forest unless you’re hunting or being hunted. Everything has a weight and sound—deer, elk, bear. Even raccoons have a particular rhythm to their movement.

These were… off.

During lunch breaks, when we sat on stumps or tailgates with our sandwiches, the forest around us sometimes fell strangely quiet. In that silence, we would hear it: something big walking just beyond sight.

Branches snapped. Underbrush parted with a heavy shuffling. You could hear weight in it, a careful placement of steps, like something that knew its strength and tried not to show it.

Every time one of us turned to look, the sound stopped.

At first we blamed it on elk. Then we blamed it on nerves. Then we blamed it on the monster squirrel, again and again, forcing jokes where our fear should have been.

But fear doesn’t give up easily.

It finds other ways to push in.

Like the handprints.

IV. The Handprints

It was a Tuesday morning.

The sky was a flat gray, the kind of morning that promises either rain or the kind of damp that crawls under your clothes and lives between your bones. We pulled into camp half-awake, trucks crunching over the compacted dirt and rock.

I was the first one out of the truck.

I always checked the water tank first thing. You don’t work men hard without plenty of water around. I walked toward the big white plastic tank and stopped dead.

Mud.

There had been a light rain during the night, enough to turn the ground around the tank into a dark, sticky mess.

And in that mud were two handprints.

They were unlike anything I’d ever seen.

Five fingers, clear as anything. Not paws. Not a bear’s pad with claws. Hands. The width of the palm was close to ten inches. The fingers were thick, long, each one pressing deep into the mud as if whoever—or whatever—had placed them there weighed hundreds of pounds.

I put my hand down next to one of the prints.

My hand looked like it belonged to a child.

“Hey!” I called out, my voice higher than I liked. “You guys need to see this.”

They came over, one by one, then clumped together in that way men do when staring at something they’d rather not understand.

“Jesus,” Benny breathed. “That ain’t no moose.”

“Must be the monster squirrel,” another guy said, but his voice cracked.

We joked. We took a few pictures with our phones. We made comments about some joker sneaking in during the night to mess with us.

That explanation didn’t hold for long.

The prints were too deep. Too… right. If someone had faked them, they’d spent a lot of time on the details—the way the thumb sat lower than the fingers, the slight twist of the hand as if it had leaned its weight on the tank.

No one admitted to making them.

Eventually, we stopped talking about them.

But every time I walked past that spot, I looked down, half-hoping the prints had filled in, half-afraid they hadn’t.

They stayed visible for days until work traffic and sun dried and scuffed them away.

By then, the smell had started.

V. The Smell

On some mornings, as we climbed out of the trucks, an odor would hang in the air, heavy and foreign.

People think of forests as smelling clean. Pine, damp earth, sap, cold air. But the woods have their own rot—it’s just usually mild, a background note.

This smell was something else.

It was thick and musky, like wet fur left in a sealed tent. There was an acidic, almost sour note to it, undercut by something that reminded me faintly of old gym socks and damp soil that hadn’t seen the sun in years.

It hit the back of your throat and stayed there.

“It’s a bear,” one of the guys said the first time the smell rolled over camp.

“Then it’s one sick bear,” I muttered.

Along with the smell came the quiet.

Forests are rarely truly silent. Even when animals are resting, you hear wind, insects, the subtle creaking of trees shifting against each other.

But sometimes, in the middle of the workday, there would be a moment—a minute, maybe more—where it was like someone had hit a mute button on the world.

Engines would die for refueling or to swap saws. The men would move slower, catching their breath, wiping sweat. And in that lull, there would be… nothing. No birds. No buzzing. No distant calls.

Just blank, heavy silence.

The kind that presses against your eardrums and makes you aware of your own breathing.

The smell would seep in, and I’d find myself scanning the edge of the forest, looking for something I couldn’t name. I’d catch other guys doing it, too—eyes narrowed, hands idle, posture tense.

But as soon as the machines roared back to life, the spell would break.

We’d keep working.

What else were we supposed to do?

VI. The Last Evening

It was the Friday of the second week when everything broke.

We hit quitting time around five. The men were beat. They moved slower, loading up the trucks, storing tools, securing fuel cans. We were all thinking about town—hot showers, real beds, a beer that wasn’t lukewarm.

“Head on out,” I told them. “I’ll finish the checks. See you at the bar.”

They hesitated. The woods pressed in around us, shadows lengthening between the trees. The air felt heavy, like the moment before a storm.

“You sure?” Benny asked.

“Yeah,” I said, forcing a smile. “I’ll be right behind you. Hour, tops.”

They left in a convoy, engines growling, dust billowing behind them on the logging road.

I stood there and watched the dust hang in the air long after the trucks were gone, a pale cloud against the darkening green. The noise of the engines faded, leaving only the wind in the treetops.

It should have been peaceful.

It wasn’t.

I climbed into the excavator to do my last inspection. The cab was familiar, almost comforting—the worn seat, the levers fitting my hands, the faint smell of oil and old coffee.

I set the clipboard on my lap and began ticking off boxes.

Hydraulic lines intact.

Tracks tensioned.

Fuel levels.

Battery.

Pins.

Linkages.

The light was fading fast. The open clearing around the equipment was drenched in gold, but the trees had already turned dark, the spaces between trunks sinking into black.

It was while I was noting the last line item that I noticed nothing.

No birds. No wind. No insects. Just a dead, suffocating silence.

And beneath that silence… breathing.

Slow, heavy, deliberate.

Coming from just outside the excavator.

VII. The First Look

I lifted my head.

They stood at the edge of the clearing, side by side, thirty feet away.

Two figures, too tall, too broad, too wrong to be anything my mind wanted to accept.

At first, my brain tried. It grabbed at every rational possibility like a drowning man grabbing at branches.

Bear. Just a bear. Standing on hind legs.

Bears don’t stand that long. Bears don’t have arms that long. Bears don’t stare at you like that.

They were upright. The closer one was dark brown, almost black in the fading light. The other had lighter, grayer hair. Their bodies were covered in thick fur, matted in places, with debris clinging here and there—bits of leaves, small twigs.

Their shoulders were massive, broader than any human shoulders had a right to be. The arms hung low, hands near their knees. The hands were enormous, fingers thick, tipped with blunt nails.

Their faces…

That’s what broke me.

Their faces were almost human, and that “almost” is what made everything worse. Heavy brow ridges over deep-set eyes. Wide, flat noses. Wide mouths. The skin of their faces was leathery, darker than the surrounding fur, especially around their noses and lips.

Their eyes were what I remember most.

Dark. Focused. Not animal curiosity. Not the vacant stare of something that only half-understood what you were.

They looked at me like a man looks at another man.

They knew I was there.

They knew I understood that they were there.

The clipboard slipped from my hands and clanged onto the metal floor.

The sound exploded in the quiet.

Both heads turned fractionally toward the noise. The darker one shifted its weight.

Then they began to walk toward the excavator.

Not charging. Not loping. Not some animal burst of speed.

Just a measured, deliberate walk. Each step covering more ground than three of mine would.

My body refused to move. My mind screamed to run, to hide, to wake up, to blink and reset the world.

They reached the tracks in seconds.

One of them—dark fur, taller, broader—set a hand on the side of the machine and pushed.

The excavator rocked.

A multi-ton machine. Rocked like a kid’s ride-on toy.

Another push. The cab jolted, my head hitting the glass with a dull thud. My hands found the armrests and squeezed hard enough to hurt.

They made sounds to each other—low, rumbling tones, almost like speech stripped down to its rawest elements. The sound vibrated in my chest.

That broke the spell.

I lunged for the far door.

The metal handle was slick with sweat. I wrestled it open, half-fell out of the cab, landed badly, my knee hitting stone. Pain shot up my leg. I scrambled to my feet anyway.

My truck was across the clearing. Thirty yards.

I ran.

I don’t remember my feet hitting the ground. I remember only the wild sound of my own breath, the way my heart felt like it was trying to punch through my sternum, the distant awareness that I was making way too much noise and none of it mattered.

The air behind me changed.

I didn’t hear steps. I felt them. The ground trembled, a faint shudder with each massive footfall.

Halfway to the truck, instinct clawed at me to look back.

I didn’t.

Ten yards. Five.

My hand closed around the door handle, slick with sweat and dust. I yanked.

Something hit me from behind.

The world turned white for a second, sound ripping away.

My chest exploded with pain as my body slammed into the side of the truck. The metal actually crumpled under the force, groaning, then buckling. My ribs folded, something inside popping like knuckles.

I slid down, landed on my ass, back against the dented door.

When my vision cleared, it was there.

Three feet away.

Close enough that I could see individual strands of fur. Close enough that I could see the yellow tint to the whites of its eyes. Close enough that I could smell it—heavy musk with a rot note, like something wild and old and not meant for confined spaces.

Its chest rose and fell in slow, powerful breaths. Its eyes locked onto mine.

Then its hand came forward, fingers spread, blotting out its face, blotting out the world.

Everything went black.

VIII. The Journey Into the Dark

Concussion steals time.

I came back to myself in fragments, as if my mind were a broken mirror and each shard reflected only a sliver of reality.

First: movement and pain.

I was on my back, being dragged by my wrists. The sensation of rocks and sticks scraping my spine broke through the fog first, a raw rasp against skin already bruised.

The sky above was a blur of dark branches and deepening sky, swinging in and out of view as my head lolled side to side.

I tried to move my legs. Nothing. Tried to speak. Only a small croak came out.

The hands holding my wrists were huge. I could feel fingers curl almost completely around my forearms, skin rough with callus or some animal equivalent.

My head throbbed with every jolt.

Darkness washed over me again.

Next time I woke, the movement was different.

I was slung over a shoulder, belly down, head and arms hanging on one side, legs on the other. Each step jarred my chest, cracked ribs grating. The smell was overpowering. Fur brushed my face, damp and coarse.

I forced my eyes open.

The ground moved far below—patches of moss, underbrush, roots. The height made my stomach flip. We were deep in the forest now, no sign of the clearing, no sign of the road or camp.

My body tried to panic. My mind shut it down the only way it could.

I passed out again.

After that, time became a flicker show.

Flash of rock.

Flash of trees.

Flash of darkness.

Voices—those deep, rumbling conversing sounds.

Cold air.

Heat from the body carrying me.

And then, finally, stone against my back, solid and unmoving, and blackness so complete I thought I’d gone blind.

IX. The Cave

When sight returned, it didn’t return all at once.

It came as the faintest awareness of shapes. A sliver of gray somewhere above. A shifting texture in front of me that slowly became a wall of stone.

I lay on cold rock, my clothes damp with sweat and something else—water, maybe, or the residue of whatever path they’d hauled me through.

Every breath hurt. My chest felt tight, as if a belt had been cinched too hard around my ribs.

I tried to lift my head.

Pain flared white-hot behind my eyes. The world spun. For a moment I thought I was falling, though my body didn’t move.

Then I heard it.

Breathing.

Not mine. Deeper. Slower. More than one source.

In the darkness around me, something big exhaled, inhaled, exhaled again.

I couldn’t see them yet, but I knew they were there.

The smell told me that—stronger in here than outside, concentrated, layered. Animal, yes, but also something else. Something lived-in. A den scent.

I lay absolutely still.

Time passed. Minutes, hours—I couldn’t tell. The blackness stayed. My eyes kept trying to adjust to light that wasn’t there.

Slowly, very slowly, a dim glow began to seep into the space.

Not from above. From deeper in the cave, somewhere behind the wall of darkness.

As the light strengthened, shapes emerged.

I was in a large chamber, bigger than any room I’d ever been in. The walls were rough stone streaked with mineral veins, water stains running down like faded tears. The ceiling vaulted high above, disappearing into shadow even with the faint light.

Around the edges of the chamber, passages opened like mouths. Some wide and low, others narrow and tall. They led off into deeper darkness.

And across from me, maybe twenty feet away, sat three of them.

The two from the camp walked toward me in memory—the dark and the light-furred—sat side by side. Between them, slightly smaller, was a third. Its hair was a medium brown, its body less massive, proportions just a bit less heavy.

They sat cross-legged, backs against the stone, hands resting on their knees. Their eyes were all on me.

Every instinct screamed at me to scramble backward, to run, to claw my way into one of those tunnels and never stop. My body recognized that it was hopeless and stayed where it was.

When I shifted my weight, wincing, the dark one made a sound—a short, low grunt.

The other two responded with similar noises.

The message was clear: stay.

So I stayed.

X. The First Days

The first day was nothing but fear.

Fear that they would move, that they would come closer. Fear that they wouldn’t. Fear that this was the place I would die.

They watched me with unnerving stillness. Occasionally, one would adjust its posture, scratch at its side, or rumble a phrase to another. But their focus never really left me.

I tested small movements. Rolling from my back to my side. Sitting up slowly, every muscle protesting.

Each time I moved too quickly, they vocalized—a sharp barked sound or a low-throated note. Warning.

It took me a long time to realize they were setting boundaries.

By what I think was the second day, my thirst overshadowed fear.

My mouth felt like it was packed with cotton. My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. Pain in my ribs, my head, my back—they all receded before the simple, overwhelming need for water.

I tried to lick condensation off the rock beside me and nearly laughed at myself.

One of them saw that.

The lighter one rose. Even standing, it moved with a quiet control that seemed at odds with its size. It walked toward me, shoulders rolling gently with each step.

It stopped within arm’s reach and extended one massive hand.

For a moment, I thought it was going to grab me.

Instead, it dropped a pile of things on the floor between us.

Berries. Some crushed and dark, some fresh and bright. Roots or tubers of some kind—long, pale, fibrous. Strips of raw fish, glistening, pink-white and slippery, still smelling of river and blood.

It grunted softly and stepped backward.

I stared at the food.

Then at it.

Then back at the food.

It nodded once—just enough movement to be recognizable—then turned and went back to its place against the wall.

The hunger in my gut tore at my pride.

I crawled forward and picked up a berry, sniffed it, then hesitated.

Across the chamber, three pairs of eyes watched me.

I ate it.

It was bitter, but safe enough. I ate more. Tried a piece of the root—woody, but edible. The fish was harder. Every instinct screamed at me to cook it, but there was no fire, no tools.

I tore off a small piece and chewed.

The texture made me gag, but my stomach begged for anything.

By the time I stopped, the pile was half gone.

The creatures murmured to each other, low and almost… satisfied. The smaller one made a series of rapid, higher-pitched sounds and leaned forward, staring at my hands, at the way I picked up the food.

Later, when I tried to stand and stumbled, clutching at my ribs, the dark one gestured with a jerk of its head toward a side passage and made an insistent sound.

I didn’t understand at first.

It repeated the gesture, more sharply.

I moved in that direction, step by painful step.

The passage opened into a smaller chamber with a slit of light above and the sound of running water bouncing off the stone.

A narrow stream cut through the floor, clear and cold, pooling in a shallow basin before vanishing into another crack.

I dropped to my knees and drank like an animal.

By the time I dragged myself back into the main chamber, my lips and chin were numb from the cold, but some small part of me felt almost human again.

The three of them watched me return, then settled as if a box had been ticked on their mental checklist.

Feed. Water.

Prisoner: maintained.

XI. The Beatings

On what I think was the third day, I tried to escape.

They left together, all three, rumbling down one of the main passages. Their footfalls echoed through the cave, slowly fading.

I waited.

Minutes stretched.

No sounds but the distant drip of water.

My heart pounded so loud I was sure it could be heard.

I got up.

The first few steps were agony. My ribs flared. My head swam. Muscles that had spent two days on cold stone spasmed and protested.

I forced myself toward one of the side passages. Not the one with water—another, slightly larger, leading into unbroken darkness.

I had no light, no torch, nothing but my hands and memory.

But I had to try.

The air in the passage was cooler. The stone under my feet slick in places. I moved slowly, fingers brushing the walls, counting steps under my breath as if I could map my way out with numbers.

At the first fork, I chose the path that led upward.

Up meant surface. Meant air. Meant hope.

The cave system was a labyrinth.

Passages split, rejoined, twisted back on themselves. In one place, I had to squeeze sideways through a narrow pinch point, shoulders scraping. In another, the ceiling dropped so low I had to crawl.

Every noise I made—every scrape, every ragged breath—felt too loud.

I don’t know how long I was gone before I heard them.

At first it was just a faint echo, hard to distinguish from the constant drip and the whisper of air through cracks. Then it became clearer.

Footsteps.

Voices.

They were coming back. Fast.

Panic took over.

I tried to backtrack, but the cave twisted time and space. Every junction looked the same. Every rock seemed familiar. My careful count of steps disintegrated in terror.

I took a wrong turn and ended up in a dead-end pocket. Cold stone pressed against me on three sides.

I backed out and almost ran straight into them.

The dark one filled the passage ahead, blocking it entirely. Behind me, the lighter one emerged from another side tunnel.

Trapped.

The dark one reached out and grabbed my arm.

I might as well have been a child.

Its fingers wrapped all the way around my bicep, squeezing just shy of bone-breaking pressure. Pain shot up my arm.

I shouted—something between a curse and a plea.

It yanked me forward as easily as a man might drag a bag of feed. My feet slid, scraped, caught on rocks. My injured ribs protested with every jolt.

When we reached the main chamber, it released me with a shove.

I flew more than fell, landed hard enough to feel something inside my chest give. A sharp, burning pain flared along one side.

I gasped, but air wouldn’t come.

The three of them loomed over me, making loud, aggressive sounds. Not random. Not chaotic. It was language stripped down to emphasis and tone.

I didn’t need words to understand.

Don’t.

Do.

That.

Again.

Oddly, there was no elaboration. No further violence. Once I stopped trying to crawl away, they backed off. The message had been delivered.

On the fourth day, I tried again.

People talk about survival instinct like it’s always smart.

It isn’t.

Sometimes it’s the wild, stupid insistence that you’d rather die running than sit still and wait.

This time, I chose a different path. Watched more carefully. Marked certain rocks in my mind. I moved faster despite the pain.

I got further.

A section of the cave narrowed until I had to turn sideways and inch along, rock pressing into my ribs, breath shallow. I thought, just for a moment, that I’d found something—air that smelled slightly fresher, a faint hint of wind on my face.

Then their voices echoed behind me.

Closer.

No time.

I tried to push forward through another tight squeeze and got stuck. Panic flooded me. I shoved backward, scraping my shoulders and chest, clawing my way back into the wider tunnel.

They were there.

This time, they didn’t bother with subtlety.

The lighter one caught me first, an open palm driving into my chest. The blow launched me backward into the stone wall. My ribs screamed. A crackle snapped through my torso like breaking branches. My vision flashed white.

I slid down the wall, gagging. Air wouldn’t come. Pain was everything.

They each grabbed an arm and dragged me back like a sack. My heels banged off rocks. My head lolled. I couldn’t even curse.

When they dropped me in the main chamber, I couldn’t move for a long time.

Ironically, that beating may have saved my life.

It taught me something: I wasn’t getting out by blind sprinting.

If I was going to escape, I’d need to understand them.

XII. Watching the Old Families

On the fifth day, I stopped behaving like prey and started behaving like an observer.

They left in the morning, all three together, as they did most days.

I lay still, eyes half-closed, listening as their movements faded.

I counted in my head.

One hundred. Two hundred. Eight hundred. A thousand.

When I could no longer hear even an echo, I stood up, slowly, testing my legs.

The cave was vast, but their pattern was not.

I had noticed the day before that they always departed through the same main passage, a wide tunnel sloping gently upward. They moved in single file, the dark one first, the smaller one last.

Now I followed at a distance they couldn’t measure: their hours vs. my minutes.

The passage curved, rose, branched. At each split, I forced myself to think like them.

Which way would something that big prefer to move? Which tunnel carried faint traces of their smell? Which path had their footprints—huge, flat, toe-aligned impressions in dust and silt?

I followed those.

Every few minutes, I stopped, stood absolutely still, and listened.

Once or twice, I heard their calls faintly from outside—the same whoops we’d heard at camp. Now, hearing them from this angle, filtered through stone, they sounded more structured, like signals.

I memorized the route as best I could.

Left at the tall narrow split. Right at the three-way where the air felt cooler. Straight through the section with the low ceiling and jagged floor.

After what I guessed was a quarter of a mile, the passage began to steepen. The air grew thinner, carrying just the faintest hint of something that didn’t belong to the cave.

Outside.

I didn’t let myself go all the way.

Not yet.

I turned back, retraced my steps, and forced myself to walk slowly into the main chamber. When they returned hours later, I lay on the rock, playing dead or asleep.

They didn’t seem to know I’d left.

That afternoon, I did it again.

Each time, I pushed a little farther, building a map in my head. The cave route became a string of mental beads.

Dark one, smaller one, lighter one. All three, out. Silence. Then: my steps. My map.

Back in the main chamber, when I wasn’t exploring, I watched them.

They were not random beasts.

They had a routine.

Morning: leave. Midday: return briefly with some food, share it, rest. Afternoon: leave again. Early evening: return with larger hauls. Night: settle.

I saw them drag in a deer once. Full-grown buck, antlers broken partially on one side. They’d snapped its neck clean. They proceeded to tear into it where they sat, eating skin, meat, organs, cracking bones between their teeth to suck out marrow.

The smaller one was fed last, but it also received more of the softer parts—liver, some of the fat.

Family.

The way they touched each other—small, casual brushes of hands, a knuckle against a shoulder, a head leaned for a moment against another’s side—was unmistakably familial.

The smaller one was curious. About everything.

It watched me the way I’d seen kids watch stray animals at campsites. Not unkind, but with a careful wariness. It tilted its head when I moved my fingers. It leaned forward when I coughed, making little high-pitched sounds I could almost mistake for questions.

Once, when I shifted and winced, grabbing my ribs, it rose on impulse.

The dark one snapped a sound at it—a sharp, cutting note.

The smaller one flinched and sat back down.

Some lines, even kids don’t cross.

XIII. The Plan

By the end of the fifth day, I had three things I hadn’t had before.

A rough map in my head.

A sense of their schedule.

And the realization that my body was deteriorating faster than my courage.

I was losing weight. I could see it in the hollows of my wrists, the way my belt hung looser. The food they brought me kept me alive but not strong.

My ribs hurt with every breath. My head still ached from the initial blows. Bruises covered most of my torso and legs.

Another week in that cave, and I might not have had the strength to climb even if the exit were five minutes away.

So I decided.

Morning of the sixth day.

Then or never.

That night, sleep came in jagged pieces. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw their faces in the half-light, their watchful gazes, the dark mouth of the tunnel leading up and out.

I didn’t know what would happen if they caught me again.

Maybe nothing more than another beating.

Maybe more.

Maybe nothing worse than being dragged back to the stone for another week. Maybe I’d simply… stop. Stop trying. Stop thinking of escape as possible.

That scared me more than the beatings.

I didn’t want to become something that accepted the rock and the dark as the world.

When the faint light seeped into the main chamber—the only sign I had that somewhere, the sun was rising—they stirred.

They ate.

They grumbled to each other in those low voices.

Then, as usual, they left.

Dark one first. Smaller one next. Lighter one last.

I lay still.

Waited.

Forced myself to count, not speed through it, not cheat. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. All the way to three hundred, then five hundred, then a thousand.

Then I got up.

XIV. The Climb

The passage was no different than it had been the day before.

But it felt different.

Today, it was the only path between me and a life that might still belong to me.

I moved as quickly as my injuries would allow. My lungs burned early, that familiar copper flavor in the back of my throat. My ribs flared with each breath, each step, each small twist of my torso.

The route unwound in my brain.

Low ceiling here. Watch your head.

Turn left at the rock that looks like a broken tooth.

Straight at the fork where the air is cooler.

Right where you can smell damp moss.

The passage grew steeper.

I had to use my hands often, pressing my palms against rough rock, feeling my skin break, blood slicking under my fingers.

In some places, the passage narrowed. The rock scraped my shoulders and hips. I turned sideways, squeezing through, feeling stone press against my ribs, compressing my lungs.

I paused several times to listen.

Nothing.

Except… something.

At first I thought it was my imagination. Then it grew slightly stronger.

A hint of air that didn’t smell like them. That didn’t smell like cave. It smelled like cold outside—leaf mold, faint sap, damp wind.

I climbed faster.

The darkness thinned. Just a touch. Far ahead, around a bend, a faint suggestion of color shifted.

Light.

My legs shook. My arms shook. My whole body wanted to fold.

I kept going.

Another bend. The faint color became a soft, pale glow.

Then, finally, I saw it:

A narrow slash of daylight at the top of a sloping tunnel—a jagged opening in the rock no wider than a doorway, but taller, cutting across the darkness like a wound.

The air pouring through it was cold and clean. It hit my face and lungs like medicine and knives at the same time.

I almost sobbed.

The opening wasn’t quite big enough to walk through comfortably. I had to scramble up the last few yards, fingers clawing at jagged footholds, boots slipping on loose stone.

At the lip, I turned sideways and squeezed.

For one terrifying second, I thought I wasn’t going to fit.

Rock scraped my chest and shoulder. My ribs screamed. I exhaled, forced myself to flatten more, and shoved with everything I had left.

And then I was out.

XV. The Mountain

Sunlight hit me like a physical blow.

I squinted, eyes watering. For six days, the brightest light I’d seen had been a dim blue-gray smear in the cave.

Now the sky arched vast and pale above, brushed with thin cloud. The forest stretched below in endless waves of dark green. Cold air rushed past my face, carrying the smell of pine and soil and life.

I was standing on a steep, rocky slope.

Below me, maybe twenty feet, the treeline began. Tall evergreens stood shoulder to shoulder, their branches whispering.

Behind me, the opening I’d squeezed through was just a crack in the cliff face, half-hidden by lichen and shadows.

If I hadn’t been inside, I’d never have noticed it from the outside.

Every part of me wanted to lie down right there on the rocks and let the sun soak into me. Let my eyes and lungs and skin reassess what reality was.

But I didn’t have that luxury.

They could come back at any time.

Maybe they’d return to the main chamber and find me missing and follow my scent through the caverns. Maybe one of them already knew about this exit.

I started down the slope.

The rocks were loose, small stones sliding under my boots. Twice I lost my footing, fell hard, scraped my palms raw on the sharp edges. My ribs punished me for each fall with a wave of hot pain that left me gasping.

I didn’t stop.

When I reached the treeline, the forest swallowed me.

The contrast was dizzying.

In the cave, sound traveled predictably—one echo overlapping another. Here, it bounced between trunks, muffled by moss and needles, amplified by hollows in ways that confused my sense of direction.

I had no compass. No map. No clear idea where I was relative to the road or the camp.

But I knew one thing: down.

Downhill meant eventually hitting forest roads, streams, or human signs.

I picked a line that sloped generally downward and began to walk.

Every few minutes, I had to stop and brace myself against a tree, my legs trembling. My breaths came short and wheezing. Sweat chilled quickly in the cold air, making me shiver.

At some point, I found their footprints.

Pressed deep into soft ground near a small drainage.

They were even more terrifying in daylight.

Huge. Maybe sixteen, seventeen inches long. Five toes. A heel wider than my hand.

I knelt beside one and stared.

The edges were crisp. No debris had fallen into them yet. They were fresh.

I changed direction immediately, angling away from where the prints led.

I didn’t know if they were from hours ago or minutes. I had no intention of finding out.

Not far along, I heard them.

The calls.

Closer now. One from the left, higher and urgent. Another in answer from somewhere behind me.

I froze.

My heart slammed against my ribs.

I eased myself down into a hollow at the base of a giant tree—one of those old-growth monsters that had somehow escaped most of humanity’s attention. Its roots formed a kind of cradle. I pressed myself into it, pulling fallen branches over my legs, trying to become part of the earth.

Heavy footfalls passed nearby.

Branches snapped. Something large pushed through brush, breathing slow and deep.

The smell followed it, faint but unmistakable.

It moved away.

I stayed there longer than I needed to, shaking, teeth chattering, every muscle clenched.

The second time I had to hide was under a fallen log.

The wood was rotten, infested. Bugs crawled over my hands and neck as I wriggled underneath. I didn’t care. My face was inches from damp soil, my own breath bouncing back at me.

Footsteps again. A shadow passed across the thin cracks of light between bark and ground. Another faint waft of musk.

They were close enough that, if I spoke, they would have heard me.

Silence eventually returned.

And I moved on.

XVI. Back to the World

It felt like days before I saw the road.

In reality, it was probably only a few hours—maybe half a day at most. Time stretches and collapses in moments like that.

The trees began to thin, not in a clear-cut way, but in a gradual easing of density. Then I saw it:

A strip of raw earth, rutted with tire tracks, wide enough for trucks.

The logging road.

My knees almost gave out.

I staggered onto it and looked both ways.

One direction wound upward, back toward the higher slopes, toward the camp and the cave. The other angled downward, toward the valley and the town.

I turned downhill.

If you’d seen me, you wouldn’t have thought “Sasquatch captive.” You’d have thought “drunk,” maybe, or “injured hiker.” I moved in that loose-limbed, stumbling way that doesn’t quite qualify as walking.

My shirt was torn in several places. One sleeve was missing entirely. I’d lost my hard hat and gloves somewhere back in the cave or on the mountain. My pants were ripped, stained.

My boots were somehow still on my feet, laces intact. They felt like the only part of me that belonged to my old life.

The road wound on.

Every turn brought a surge of hope—maybe the next bend would reveal a glimpse of the valley. Maybe the next incline would be the last.

The sun moved across the sky, shadows lengthening.

At last, through a break in the trees, I saw the town.

Tiny buildings crouched in a patch of open land. The glint of metal roofs. The faint, distant shapes of cars.

I don’t remember the last stretch well.

One moment I was on the road. The next, I was cutting across a field behind the general store, tall grass slapping my legs. Then gravel under my boots. Then the cinderblock wall of the store rising in front of me.

My body finally decided it had done enough.

My knees folded. I hit the ground hard in the narrow alley between the store and the building next to it.

Voices shouted.

Feet pounded.

Hands grabbed my shoulders, rolled me onto my back.

The world tilted, then snapped into darkness.

XVII. The Official Story

I woke up in a bed that smelled of disinfectant and old linen.

The ceiling above me was textured plaster, faint cracks spidering out from a water stain in one corner. A fluorescent light hummed overhead, not quite silent.

On my left, a monitoring machine beeped slowly. On my right, a window showed a strip of gray sky and the tops of pine trees.

My chest hurt worse than ever.

So did my head.

“This is going to sound like a dumb question,” a woman’s voice said, “but do you know where you are?”

I turned my head.

A woman stood beside the bed, late fifties maybe, hair streaked gray and pulled back in a loose bun. Her face was lined, but her eyes were sharp.

I recognized the room from small-town hospitals I’d seen before—it wasn’t quite a hospital, more like a clinic grown too big for a house, then crammed into one anyway.

“I… town?” I croaked.

“Marback Clinic,” she said. “You’re in Marback. I’m Dr. Kline.”

A big man stood behind her near the doorway. Sheriff’s star on his chest, uniform shirt stretched across a belly that had seen too many years of stress and coffee.

He studied me with a look that mixed relief and wariness.

“I’m Sheriff Dwyer,” he said. “How’re you feeling?”

“Like I got hit by a truck,” I managed.

“Not far off,” the doctor murmured, scanning a chart.

They checked my vitals, did the usual routine. Pupils. Reflexes. Questions about my name, the year, the president. My brain, somehow, still worked well enough.

Then came the question the sheriff had been waiting to ask.

“What happened out there?” he said.

I hesitated.

The truth sat just behind my teeth, heavy and dangerous. The images flickered through my mind: the handprints, the faces at the edge of the clearing, the cave, the family watching me eat.

“I was taken,” I said quietly.

“Taken?” he repeated.

“Something… some things took me,” I said. “From the camp. Friday night. I don’t know how long I was out. When I woke up, I was in a cave. Underground. With them.”

“Them who?” he asked.

“Big,” I whispered. “Tall. Hair… all over. Faces like… like ours, but not. Strong. They… they kept me there.”

The doctor put a hand on my arm.

“You’ve been through a major trauma,” she said gently. “Concussion. Broken ribs. Dehydration. It’s not uncommon to have… vivid impressions afterward. Dreams. Delusions. The brain tries to fill in the gaps.”

“I know what I saw,” I said, but my voice lacked force.

The sheriff’s gaze didn’t leave my face.

“You’re saying you were taken… by what? An animal?” he asked carefully.

I looked at him.

His eyes were tired in a specific way—a way that said he’d seen more than drunks and domestic disputes.

“You know what I’m saying,” I said.

A long silence stretched.

He held my gaze, then glanced at the doctor.

“Give us a minute?” he said.

She hesitated, then nodded. “Don’t push him,” she said quietly, then slipped out of the room.

The door clicked shut.

The sheriff pulled a chair over and sat down.

“I’m going to tell you something,” he said, voice low. “You can decide what you want to do with it.”

I watched him.

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, hat resting on one thigh.

“There are stories about those woods,” he said. “Been around longer than this town. Longer than the logging outfits. My granddad told me some. His dad told him.”

I swallowed.

“Stories about old families,” I whispered.

He nodded once.

“Families that keep to themselves,” he said. “That don’t like people pushing too far in. Stories about loggers who went missing. Hikers who didn’t come back. Hunters who heard things and never talked about it again.”

“You believe me,” I said.

“I believe you believe what you’re saying,” he replied. “And…” He paused, as if deciding how much he wanted to share. “I’ve heard those calls. Same as you. Out on patrol one night. Echoing through those trees. I’ve seen shapes I couldn’t explain. Prints I couldn’t match to any animal I know. So, yeah. I’m not calling you crazy.”

Relief and dread hit me at the same time.

“But here’s the problem,” he continued. “Belief doesn’t matter. Not when it comes to what goes in the record. The company’s already been in touch. The state, too. They’ve got an official version ready to go.”

“What version?” I asked, but I already knew.

“That you got turned around in the woods,” he said. “Hit your head. Wandered for days. Dehydration. Exposure. Maybe some hallucinations. Found by hikers who heard you calling.”

“No hikers,” I said. “I walked into town.”

He gave me a tired half-smile.

“Not according to the story,” he said. “And stories are what everyone’s going to remember. Not truth.”

Something in my chest went cold.

“There’s nothing on paper about old families,” he said. “Nothing in any official database. If I file a report that says ‘Abducted by unknown bipedal forest primates,’ I lose my badge. My pension. My credibility. And it won’t help you any.”

“So what then?” I asked.

“Then the suits come,” he said. “And they make it all neat and tidy.”

He was right.

They came the next day.

Two men in dark suits and expensive shoes that didn’t belong in that clinic. Their haircuts probably cost more than my monthly car payment.

They introduced themselves with names I didn’t catch—legal, corporate, risk management. Their smiles didn’t reach their eyes.

They asked how I was feeling, told me how glad the company was that I was alive, that they’d been “worried sick.”

Then they slid the papers across the blanket.

XVIII. The Price of Silence

The settlement agreement was only a few pages long.

The language was dense where it needed to be and simple where it had to be.

In exchange for a lump sum payment deposited directly into my account and six months of medical leave at full pay, I agreed that:

I had become disoriented in the forest while performing my duties.
I had suffered injuries consistent with a fall and subsequent exposure.
I had received appropriate support and assistance from the company.
I would not pursue any legal action.
I would not publicly attribute my injuries to anything other than the “accident outlined above.”

There were more clauses. About confidentiality. About non-disparagement. About arbitration instead of court.

I skimmed most of it.

One of the suits tapped the signature line politely.

“We understand you’ve been through a lot,” he said. “This is just to ensure everyone is protected. The company takes safety very seriously.”

The other suit smiled. “We’d hate for any… misunderstanding about what happened to get in the way of your recovery, or your future employment.”

The words were mild. The meaning wasn’t.

“What if I don’t sign?” I asked.

They both gave me the kind of look you give a child asking what happens if they don’t go to school.

“Well,” the first said slowly, “we’d hate to see this turn adversarial. Litigation is messy. Expensive. And ultimately unproductive. We’d have to make the case that your… recollections are compromised by your injuries.”

The second suit spread his hands. “And unfortunately, that would follow you. Any future employer who calls for a reference, any background check… it could get complicated.”

The sheriff’s words came back to me. Stories are what people remember. Not truth.

The company didn’t need to threaten me physically.

They threatened to bury me in doubt.

“Six figures,” the first one said gently, pointing to the line where the payment amount was printed. “That’s a lot of security for a man in your line of work. Medical bills taken care of. Time to heal. Maybe a chance to transition to something less… hazardous.”

My hands shook.

Not just from anger.

From fear. From exhaustion. From the knowledge that I had no photos, no video, no physical evidence. The camp was gone—they’d moved fast to clear it. My co-workers would say whatever they’d been told to say. The sheriff had already bowed to the official version.

All I had was my word.

And my word wouldn’t stand against the weight of their story.

So I signed.

I sold my silence.

The pen scratched across the paper, and that was that.

They shook my hand, told me I’d made a smart decision, and left as quickly as they’d come.

Three days later, the money was in my account.

XIX. After the Cave

The body heals faster than the mind.

The ribs knit with time and rest. The bruises faded. The cuts and scrapes scabbed and peeled and left faint scars, more remembered by me than visible to anyone else.

But the inside?

That was different.

I tried, once, to walk in a forest again.

A small state park not far from the city where I ended up. Well-marked trails. Families with kids. Joggers. Dogs on leashes. Safety everywhere you looked.

I barely made it fifty yards.

The moment the trees closed around me, the air cooled, and the light shifted, my chest tightened. The smell of damp earth and leaves dragged me back to that cave, to those tunnels, to the sound of their breathing in the dark.

My vision tunneled.

I grabbed a tree for support and slid down its trunk, gasping, heart pounding fast enough that I thought it might burst. Sounds warped. Laughter from a kid on the trail ahead became a distorted echo.

I stumbled back to the parking lot like a drunk and sat in my truck for a long time before I could trust my hands not to shake on the wheel.

I don’t go into forests anymore.

I avoid pictures of forests.

Sometimes even the smell of damp mulch after rain in the city makes me tense.

The nightmares are worse.

I wake up convinced I’m back on that stone, with nothing between me and them but air and fear. I can smell them. I can taste the cave in the back of my throat. I hear those rumbling voices, those warning grunts when I move too far in the wrong direction.

I lie there in the dark of my apartment, staring at the ceiling, telling myself over and over:

You’re home. Walls. Windows. Locks. City sounds outside. No caves. No woods.

Sometimes it works.

Sometimes it doesn’t.

I left logging.

Took a job in construction in the city. Still work with my hands, but now it’s concrete and steel instead of trees and soil. Big structures. Straight lines. Noise that all comes from human machines.

There’s comfort in that.

At night, surrounded by streetlights and traffic and the glow of other windows, I can almost convince myself that the world is exactly as science says it is.

Almost.

Because no matter how loud the city gets, there’s a part of my mind that hears other sounds.

Whoops, far off in the dark. Heavy footfalls on leaf litter. Breathing.

XX. Why I’m Telling You

You might wonder why I’m breaking the agreement, even like this, anonymously.

Why risk it?

Part of it is selfish.

I need to tell someone.

Carrying this alone is like carrying a weight in my chest that no X-ray can see. Sometimes it feels like my ribs healed around it, bone grown solid around a truth I’m not supposed to speak.

Part of it is… something else.

Respect, maybe.

For them.

I’ve had years to think about what happened.

Why they took me.

Why they didn’t kill me.

They could have. Easily. They proved that with every effortless shove, every time they dragged me like I weighed nothing, every time they cracked bone without meaning to.

But they didn’t.

They fed me. Gave me water. Stopped me from leaving, yes, sometimes violently. But they also never crossed a line they easily could’ve crossed.

Maybe I was a warning.

Maybe my disappearance was meant as a message to the company: stay out. Maybe, in their own way, they believed that returning me—alive—would say enough.

Maybe they thought I would tell others.

If that was the idea, then they overestimated how much weight my words would carry in a world that measures truth in documents and video and peer-reviewed journals.

But I can give them this much: I can tell you.

I don’t know what they are in scientific terms. A relic hominid. Some branch of primate that avoided the path we took. Something altogether different.

To me, they are the old families of those woods.

They have homes. Routes. Food rituals. Ways of communicating. Lines they won’t cross, and lines they’ll enforce.

They are not our monsters.

They’re something older, that tolerated us until we pushed too far.

We cut into their territory with our machines and roads and contracts, thinking the world belonged to whoever had the right papers.

They answered without papers.

They showed me what we weren’t supposed to see.

And when I ran, they let me go. Or maybe they lost me for a moment. Or maybe they decided what they’d done was enough.

I’ll never know.

But I know this:

They are real.

Not stories. Not drunk camper tales. Not blurry shapes in hoaxed photos.

Real.

I spent six days as their captive.

I spent six days as their responsibility.

They broke my ribs.

They also kept me alive.

So believe me, or don’t.

Think I’m crazy. Think it was all a hallucination brought on by injury and isolation and fear. The company would like that. It makes the world neat again.

But neat isn’t real.

Real is messy.

Real is a man lying on cold stone in the dark, hearing something breathe that he’ll never be able to explain to people who sleep under roofs and think walls are the whole world.

Real is understanding, in a way you can never un-understand, that you are not alone at the top of the food chain, or the intelligence chain, or the ownership chain.

There are places that are not ours.

There are families that are not ours.

And they’re older than our contracts.

XXI. The Man I Am Now

The man who drove into those woods two weeks before all this started believed the world was simple.

Work hard. Follow the rules. Trust what you can see and touch.

The man who walked out—stumbling, broken, half-mad with fear and relief—is not that man.

He knows that some truths don’t go on paper.

He knows that nature is not limited to what we’ve named and cataloged.

He knows that caves can be homes, and that not all homes have doors, and not all people are human.

I still have the money.

It sits in an account, numbers on a screen that don’t match what someone with my background “should” have.

Every time I look at it, it feels dirty.

A payment not just for my injuries, but for my silence. For letting the official story stand unchallenged.

So here’s my challenge.

My story.

They can keep their records neat. Their lawyers can sleep easy.

But somewhere in the deep woods of the Pacific Northwest, in a cave system that doesn’t appear on any tourist map, a family of beings lives their lives.

They hunt. They eat. They watch.

They remember.

Sometimes, late at night, when the city noise dies just enough for me to hear my own thoughts, I wonder if they ever think of me.

The strange, fragile creature they pulled from a machine and carried home. The one who tried to run—twice. The one who sat on their stone, eating their food, drinking from their water, watching them as they watched him.

Maybe they tell stories, too.

Maybe there’s a low, rumbling legend in their language about the human who wouldn’t stay where he was put.

I’ll never know.

I’m not going back.

But you know now.

And maybe that’s enough.

Maybe the old families got what they wanted after all.

Maybe this story, passed from you to someone else, and then to someone else, is its own kind of warning, the same kind the old man at the general store tried to give me with his tired eyes and quiet voice:

Some places aren’t meant for us.

Some families aren’t ours to disturb.

We ignore that at our own risk.

I learned that in six days in the dark.

And I will carry those six days with me for the rest of my life.