Somebody Restacked Our Firewood Into A Circle While We Slept

Backcountry site, no road for six miles, two of us, one tent.

We collected firewood in the evening and stacked it the way you stack it: a heap, roughly, next to the ring, because we are adults and not architects.

In the morning it was a circle.

Every log laid end to end, forming a ring maybe two metres across, with the fire pit in the middle. Every cut end facing inward. Nothing missing. Nothing broken. The kindling was in a separate small pile at the top of the circle, like a full stop.

We did not do it. My friend did not do it as a joke, because he is not funny, and because he was as white as I was.

There is no wind that does this. There is no bear that does this. A bear would have taken the food, and the food was in the bag, in the tree, untouched, exactly as we hung it.

What gets me is the time it must have taken. That is a slow, careful, patient job. Somebody — something — spent maybe twenty minutes, in the dark, four metres from our heads, arranging wood.

And neither of us woke up. And I am the lightest sleeper you will ever meet; I wake up when the fridge changes its mind at home.

We packed up in about nine minutes. That is a record. We walked out fast, and neither of us said much, and at the trailhead my friend finally said: "Cut ends in."

I said yes.

He said, "That means it wanted us to see the cuts. It knew we made them."

I have thought about that sentence for four years and I have not managed to put it down.

Maybe it was another camper with a strange sense of humour. Maybe it was somebody working out something in their own head with the only material available.

But it was four metres from where I was sleeping, and it was quiet enough that I did not wake, and it worked in the dark, and it went away.