Now, Mike and I have had a lot of great adventures together. We’ve been to the Arctic, Europe, Asia and Australia. We have seen communist China. We have been through a war. We have hunted in about 15 states and fished together in several more, plus in a few Canadian provinces. And on and on. So it’s been good.

Mike has written about most of those fishing and hunting adventures. But what he has never shared, other than experiencing it with me, is his deepest, darkest secret. The one experience in the local forest that he dare not share and does not really understand.

We had taken his 12-foot wooden row boat across the Allegheny Reservoir to Jackson and done some fishing. Caught a few nice smallmouth bass and a pike, or two.

Mind you, I would much rather chase ‘coons and ‘possums. I am a bluetick bloodhound. But fishing ain’t so bad either, although you can see where holding a fishing rod and reeling are challenging for me.

For a late dinner we pulled to shore where the bank was not steep and tied the boat to a stump. We both gathered wood and built the cooking fire close to the edge of the water where there was no debris to spread the fire. I’m not sure if that is the way it should be done, according to the rules, but it seemed most prudent at the time. The reservoir had just been flooded a few years before and nobody we knew was up on any special rules. Normally, we are very strict about following regulations.

Since it was starting to get dark, we decided to spend the night there. Just up the bank a few feet was a relatively flat patch with few roots and big rocks. There we laid on the bare ground to sleep.

Can you believe Mike usually brings a ground cloth and a sleeping bag? What a sissy!

Apparently a family of raccoons had smelled our dinner because they showed up shortly. Mike tossed them some of our leftovers, which was a major booboo. Once you feed raccoons you have companions for life, and they are not the most pleasant creatures to be near. They will bite at the slightest provocation, such as not giving them something to eat when they demand it.

Fortunately, as you know, I am about the worst enemy of raccoons so I got Mike out of that jam. When will he ever learn that what he considers kindness to lower creatures will usually come back to bite you in the butt.

So we are laying there in the very still night talking about past adventures. It is absolutely true that if you try to live life at the fullest you will always have great memories to recall. When out of nowhere there was a very loud, hollow “CRACK!”

“What the …,” Mike muttered. “Must have been a big limb breaking.”

But then another “CRACK,” followed by several more. It became obvious that the source of the sound was moving. Sometimes it was just seconds between the unsettling and every time shocking sounds, sometimes minutes.

Mike could not see what was making the sounds even though it was a clear night and the moon was bright. At best he saw a dull form. My bloodhound eyes are much, much better. But though I could see what was making the noises and how it was being done, still I could not grasp what it was. It was a shaggy sort of human form walking on hind legs. Its arms were long, and it was able to grasp a large stick and bash it against the sides of trees. It seemed to be able to pick hollow trees because all of the sounds were hollow.

So, no, even Mike does not know the entire truth of what happed that night on the slope of the Allegheny Reservoir. When he finally found a big limb of his own he cracked it against the side of an oak tree as hard as he could. That stopped the other critter and encouraged it to leave us be.

If any of this is a smidgen less than the truth, then I am not Bobo the Pandemic Bloodhound.