Everything Went Silent And I Understood, For One Second, What Prey Feels Like

I want to describe a thing that has no evidence at all, and I am aware that this makes it worthless to most of you, and I am posting it anyway because I have not been able to put it down for eleven years.

Solo camp, second night, sitting by the fire at maybe nine in the evening.

The wood went silent.

I know that sounds like a line from a film. It is a real thing and it is horrible. The insects stopped first — you do not notice insects until they stop, and then the silence has a hole in it exactly the shape of them. Then the birds. Then, and I have no idea how this is possible, the wind seemed to stop, or at least the trees stopped answering it.

And my legs stood me up.

That is the honest sequence. My legs did it. My thinking arrived about a second and a half later, and by then I was already standing, facing the dark, with my heart doing something medical.

I have never in my life felt so completely, unarguably WATCHED. It was not fear of the dark. It was the specific, physical knowledge that I was inside the attention of something, the way you know when a person in a room has stopped talking and is looking at you.

It lasted maybe forty seconds. Then the insects came back — not gradually, all at once — and my knees went, and I sat down on the log so hard I bruised myself.

I put the fire up as big as I dared and I sat with my back to it until dawn, and nothing came, and nothing was there in the morning: no tracks, no hair, no broken branches, nothing. Nothing at all.

That is why I have never posted it before. There is nothing to show you.

But something switched the wood off, and something switched it back on, and in between, every animal in that valley and my own body agreed on the same thing, and I was the only one of us who needed convincing.