He just smiled and shrugged, and didn't say a word.
In July 2015 the teller, their wife and their two small chihuahua-beagle brothers set off on a first family camping trip up the California coast toward Oregon. It was the wife's first night ever in a tent, and the dogs' too. Their first stop, for a single night, was Albee Creek Campground in Humboldt Redwoods State Park, a well-spaced campground with bear boxes, fire rings and flush toilets about fifty yards away.
Right behind their tent stood an old stump about three feet high, left from a tree cut down decades before. The wife leaned on it while they wondered how long ago it had been felled. After a steak dinner cooked over the fire, they locked every scrap of food in the metal bear box and turned in, with the dogs on their little beds between the two sleeping bags.
Around two or three in the morning the teller was lying awake, trying to get comfortable, when their wife nudged them hard and whispered that something was touching her.
The teller rolled over and in the faint moonlight saw it: something pressing against the tent wall at her head, six to ten inches off the ground, then pulling away as if it had heard them. She whispered that they should go out and look. The teller had no intention of doing that. They told her to keep still and quiet, and she edged away from the wall.
The dogs were the strangest part. At home these two bark at every person, dog, cat, squirrel, possum and raccoon that comes near the yard. Now they were shivering hard and completely silent, curled between the wife's legs and trying to burrow into her sleeping bag.
After a little while they heard something moving gently away through the leaves. They couldn't tell how big it was. There was no other sound and no smell. Fifteen or twenty minutes later the teller finally went out with a flashlight and swept it around, mostly to let anyone out there know they were awake. There was nothing. The nearest trailer, a hundred feet or so beyond the stump, and the sites across the road were all dark.
Neither of them slept again. In the morning the ground behind the tent was too hard-packed to hold prints. But on the old stump, where nothing had been the evening before, sat several small, smooth, polished stones, the kind you'd find in a riverbed. The teller allows that their neighbours could have left them, though they had only seen two adults at that site and no children.
When they handed in their pass, the teller asked the ranger which animals were around. Bears were rare now, he said, and he hadn't seen one or any sign of one near Albee for a year or two. There were deer, a few elk and the usual raccoons, squirrels and foxes. The teller asked whether any of those would come up and touch someone through a tent wall. The ranger just smiled, shrugged, and didn't say a word.
The teller makes no claims. They only point out that any small animal would have set the dogs off barking, and that night the dogs didn't make a sound.