@jeff-mc-2-2
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No, first when I got out I was just making sure I didn’t let the kids out in any danger, when I first looked around I couldn’t see anything , then after I let them out the hand appeared . It stuck out because it was holding the branch down , it might have heard us coming and just froze, then when the kids bailed it wanted to see better. I only felt fear when I realized what it was , I would like to say I felt like I was being watched before that, but I didn’t. I can’t stress enough how perfectly still it held the branch down, that was pretty weird, the hand was wrapped around about a 2 inch diameter branch where it had a hold. What I was seeing was the front of a fist and the top of the hand. I could see tufts of hair roughly between the knuckles that were around two inches long. It’s funny what the brain does, it’s like it runs through a list of what it could be , a tailless squirrel was first which is weird but not impossible , tufts of hair made it weirder then it hit me what it was and my brain was still arguing with me. I tried not to stare after that, just constantly glancing, I didn’t want it to know it had been seen. Long time hunter, if you stare at a deer even if it can’t see you it soon knows it’s being watched, when hunting I never look directly at them until the last moment. It seems to work . I really just wanted to act casual and get out of there without it understanding it had been seen. Like I said , my youngest girl did see it, I told her to ignore it and stop staring. She had a perplexed look on her face but did look away. I explained it to them on the ride out of there what I believed it was. Oh and I forgot to mention no smell, no sound whatsoever, I will say when I went over to where it was I was feeling physically ill from fear and had to force myself to go because I had to know if I could get a glimpse of it. I would like to see a full view but from a distance.
Around 1994 in the summer my kids (4 kids 9-15) and I planned a game where we were going to try and fish as many “waters” as we could in a weekend. We got to Sheep Creek Friday night and fished it in the morning – caught fish had breakfast and continued fishing and screwing around. I looked at a map to see if we could get in another area before we went south to the Snake River and Tucannon. I saw a small mountain lake and we decided to hit it before we left, it was around 10 miles away. On the way to it we stopped around 11 am to have lunch. There was about a 15 foot creek crossing the road and I stopped on the north side before crossing to fix lunch. Woods were thick so I stopped and got out first to look around before letting the kids loose. I Set them free , told them to stay out of the creek and put down tailgate to pull cooler out to make sandwiches. I was still looking around making the sandwiches and saw a tailless squirrel sitting on a branch about 60 ft away on the south side of the creek , it had tufted hair on its back and my brain was trying to figure out what I was looking at . It dawned on me that it wasn’t a squirrel it was about a 7 or 8 inch wide hand holding the branch down. I know it sounds weird but I didn’t want to scare the kids (or me) so I chose to ignore it. If it wanted to be hidden I wanted it to stay that way.
I had an SKS laying in the bed and slid it down and put a 30 round magazine in it while finishing the sandwiches, the 30 rnd mag is a retro kit and a pain to put on but it couldn’t see what I was doing. It is roughly equivalent to a Win 30-30 but semiauto. The kids who were standing beside me asked me why and I just said to be safe while we were stopped.
I finished making lunch while continuing to keep an eye on the hand, it never moved, it was perfectly still and stayed that way for around ten minutes. I had my back to it passing out the food, my youngest daughter who was around 9 at the time was chomping on her sandwich and asked me while pointing behind me what that was, without looking I told her it was a squirrel . After continuing to stare behind me she said, dad that is not a squirrel. I said I know ignore it.
It helped that you couldn’t see beyond the hand it was pitch black underneath the big fir tree.
I told everyone to hurry up, eat and get in the truck. After everyone was in I looked up, the hand was gone, and the branch was back up around 18 inches where it was supposed to be. I had to go look so I crossed the creek and walked over to where it was standing, this time with the rifle viewable. Nothing was there, the floor was thick in needles, no prints, the branch was at my shoulder I am 6’4”. I can’t tell you how measly my rifle felt, I forced myself to look all around but saw nothing and went back to the truck and went back the way we came , told the kids it was too late and we had to get to the snake and cross the dam before dark. My daughter brought it up driving off the mountain and we did talk about it, my sons were mad I didn’t tell them but I wanted everything to be “normal” and get the heck out of there. I think it was curious, maybe about the kids, maybe about the kids eating, maybe. I don’t believe you can assign a characteristic based on one “animal” , another one might have never come that close. I do know it knew what it was doing, it knew I couldn’t see it standing in the dark of that tree even though it was a bright day.
