Eski

In the shadows of the forests of the West, where no-one in their right mind chooses to go, there are a thousand unheard howls collected in as many years just behind the trees. Just outside this forest, the townspeople talk about what they don’t hear when they walk those woods. Where there should be the chittering of wrens and jays, it’s only silent. And when one turns one’s back, they can feel the eyes they don’t see, and a prickle’ll run down your spine until you leave. If you leave.

My great-great grandma told my grandma who told me about the boy who ate and died and then ate in those woods all those years ago. They say it was a hundred years, some say two. Some don’t know and say a thousand. I think it’s less.

They said an Indian man and his boy were out hunting one day. Something happened to the boy’s father. He either slipped and broke something, or he died right out. This part of the story is always different. I don’t know. The boy stayed with him. Don’t know if he was lost, or in despair.

When the men from the tribe went looking for them, they never found the boy. The father’s body was all torn up with chunks bitten out of ’im though. At first they thought it was coyotes. But the teeth marks didn’t look like a coyote.

After that, any children that played in those woods went missin’ a lot. Sometimes it was days, and they’d find pieces of them, here and there. Sometimes it was forever and there was nothing found, but the mother’s said they could hear their babies crying. Sometimes they’d go, but eventually they stopped trying because they knew they wouldn’t come back either.

Eventually the tribe moved out of those mountains and white people moved in. They told the settlers to stay out of the woods because that first boy was still there in those woods and he was hungry. Well, they just laughed and moved right in. But over time, people started talking again; wondering about that boy.

His name is lost to time it’s been so long. Even great-great grandma didn’t know his name. The locals started calling him Eski in my great-grandma’s time. This was account on a man named John Donovan. It’s said he lived and trapped in the woods then and one day in the fall, when the leaves were falling off the trees, he’d somehow got himself lost a few days.

When they found him, hungry and thirsty, he was stammering and it sounded like he was saying “Esk…esk….eski.” Later, when his mind was right again, he said he was thinking about the word ‘escape’, because by then, it was the only human word he knew.

They said he only spoke of it one time, and then left town.

My friends went into the woods on dares. I never did. I knew better. I haven’t been there in years.