OK. 4am. Asleep in the ger. It’s 4am.
Jun. 24th, 2016 11:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/28XmYEv:
OK. 4am. Asleep in the ger. It’s 4am. It’s cold (got down to 51F last night), Z has stolen most of the covers. I wake up because it’s cold and I sort of have to pee.
I shuffle around and get comfortable again and decide I can wait a little longer to go indoors and pee. (There’s an outhouse quite near the ger but I sort of don’t want to use it, and when it’s cold out, there’s like, zero incentive.)
As I’m lying there, I hear a weird noise. A kind of humming noise, low. Maybe almost like a growl. It’s coming from the direction of the head of the bed, which faces eastward, toward a hill and the deeper forest. I listen to it in some alarm for a few minutes, and then the thing barks.
(Mystery behind the cut!)
It’s not really a proper bark, like a dog would make. There’s no voice. It’s just a really hoarse cough. It barks once or twice, then the growling resumes. And the growling is not a rattling growl, it’s very smooth, almost like a humming sound. It’s maybe closer, maybe not– we’re right near the creek, sound tends to carry, and with canvas walls it’s really hard to judge how far something is. It sounds like everything’s inside with you.
The thing continues to growl, and seems to move around, not like it’s cornered– it’s maybe closer, maybe farther. I get the feeling it’s moving around pretty quickly, maybe checking the area out. It stops and barks again, once, twice.
Finally Z wakes up and rolls his eyes over toward me and whispers “what the fuck is that?” which is what convinces me I’m actually awake.
“I have no fucking idea,” I answer him, and it barks, and growls some more. After maybe five minutes of this, near-constant growling with intermittent barking, during which the two of us lie there wide-eyed staring at each other (it’s dawn, the roof of the ger is starting to lighten and you can clearly make out the rafters), the growling sort of fades away, though a couple of times I’m sure it’s gone and then I hear it again.
Some Googling around suggests to me:
Not a fox– too shrill.
Not a bobcat– also too shrill.
Unlikely to be a black bear– bears tend to grunt a lot, and I really feel like we’d hear movement noises.
This thing had no voice, really; the bark was almost a coughing sound, no vocalization at all, just a percussive movement of air.
Other things to consider: no footfalls. We heard no crackling, no sounds of it moving in the brush; it must have stayed on the path, so I should go check the dusty path for prints before the chore truck goes past it. Whatever it was either wasn’t large and heavy, or stayed solely on the road. We also heard no breathing or sniffing sounds– again, either it was quiet, or it was farther away than I thought.
There’s a large bucket of chicken blood up toward the east end of the garden, where the farm manager was going to spread it around to deter deer from the new plantings. It could have been attracted by that. Why was it growling, though? It didn’t sound like there were two. So it was growling at something, presumably. It showed neither interest in, nor avoidance of the ger, which suggests to me that it didn’t get that close and didn’t detect that we were there. At 4am I was not feeling particularly brave about finding out what this thing thought of humans– the vast majority of animals would flee immediately, but if it didn’t, well. It’s not like I had any sort of defenses to hand. I don’t even have a big flashlight, out there. (I’m more paranoid when I’m alone, but the dude’s with me this week.)
Anyway. So: What lives in the Eastern Woodlands region of the American Northeast (in the upper Hudson River valley, nearish to Vermont, south of the Adirondacks), growls, barks hoarsely, but doesn’t snuffle or pant or grunt?
OK. 4am. Asleep in the ger. It’s 4am. It’s cold (got down to 51F last night), Z has stolen most of the covers. I wake up because it’s cold and I sort of have to pee.
I shuffle around and get comfortable again and decide I can wait a little longer to go indoors and pee. (There’s an outhouse quite near the ger but I sort of don’t want to use it, and when it’s cold out, there’s like, zero incentive.)
As I’m lying there, I hear a weird noise. A kind of humming noise, low. Maybe almost like a growl. It’s coming from the direction of the head of the bed, which faces eastward, toward a hill and the deeper forest. I listen to it in some alarm for a few minutes, and then the thing barks.
(Mystery behind the cut!)
It’s not really a proper bark, like a dog would make. There’s no voice. It’s just a really hoarse cough. It barks once or twice, then the growling resumes. And the growling is not a rattling growl, it’s very smooth, almost like a humming sound. It’s maybe closer, maybe not– we’re right near the creek, sound tends to carry, and with canvas walls it’s really hard to judge how far something is. It sounds like everything’s inside with you.
The thing continues to growl, and seems to move around, not like it’s cornered– it’s maybe closer, maybe farther. I get the feeling it’s moving around pretty quickly, maybe checking the area out. It stops and barks again, once, twice.
Finally Z wakes up and rolls his eyes over toward me and whispers “what the fuck is that?” which is what convinces me I’m actually awake.
“I have no fucking idea,” I answer him, and it barks, and growls some more. After maybe five minutes of this, near-constant growling with intermittent barking, during which the two of us lie there wide-eyed staring at each other (it’s dawn, the roof of the ger is starting to lighten and you can clearly make out the rafters), the growling sort of fades away, though a couple of times I’m sure it’s gone and then I hear it again.
Some Googling around suggests to me:
Not a fox– too shrill.
Not a bobcat– also too shrill.
Unlikely to be a black bear– bears tend to grunt a lot, and I really feel like we’d hear movement noises.
This thing had no voice, really; the bark was almost a coughing sound, no vocalization at all, just a percussive movement of air.
Other things to consider: no footfalls. We heard no crackling, no sounds of it moving in the brush; it must have stayed on the path, so I should go check the dusty path for prints before the chore truck goes past it. Whatever it was either wasn’t large and heavy, or stayed solely on the road. We also heard no breathing or sniffing sounds– again, either it was quiet, or it was farther away than I thought.
There’s a large bucket of chicken blood up toward the east end of the garden, where the farm manager was going to spread it around to deter deer from the new plantings. It could have been attracted by that. Why was it growling, though? It didn’t sound like there were two. So it was growling at something, presumably. It showed neither interest in, nor avoidance of the ger, which suggests to me that it didn’t get that close and didn’t detect that we were there. At 4am I was not feeling particularly brave about finding out what this thing thought of humans– the vast majority of animals would flee immediately, but if it didn’t, well. It’s not like I had any sort of defenses to hand. I don’t even have a big flashlight, out there. (I’m more paranoid when I’m alone, but the dude’s with me this week.)
Anyway. So: What lives in the Eastern Woodlands region of the American Northeast (in the upper Hudson River valley, nearish to Vermont, south of the Adirondacks), growls, barks hoarsely, but doesn’t snuffle or pant or grunt?
