It had either disappeared or gone straight back up the way it came.
The grandfather in this story was not a man who scared easily. Born in Alberta in the early 1930s, he was raising his younger brothers on his own by the age of nine, rode the rails west at fourteen and ended up working in a pulp mill around Vancouver. He boxed bare-knuckle for extra money, learned to track and hunt, and eventually bought a wooded acreage with his wife, where he built houses with his own hands and kept horses, dogs and farm animals.
The trouble started with a horse. His younger daughter, about eight at the time, was riding through the trees on the property when the horse stopped dead and refused to move. She smelled something like rotting garbage and meat. The moment she pulled the reins, the horse spun and bolted for the house, nearly throwing her. It was never the same animal again: it kicked at her and threw itself backward when she climbed on, and once it ran her toward the road and bucked her into the path of a car, which swerved just in time. The horse was given away.
Then animals started going missing, and one of the hunting dogs was hurt in a night attack. The grandfather set traps and slept in the hayloft for several nights with a shotgun and a rifle, expecting a fox, coyotes, wolves, or maybe a hungry bear. Nothing came, and he went back to sleeping in the house.
The next day his daughter was playing near the treeline with the injured dog when it sniffed the air, put itself between her and the woods and started growling. Her father came out, stopped, and called to his wife for his rifle. He pointed at one treetop that looked thicker than the rest and was moving very slightly. Whatever sat up there was at least six feet tall. As he aimed, a pair of wings began to open, and he fired.
It was a chest shot with a high-powered rifle, and he heard it crash down through the branches. He ran in with the dogs, but at the spot where it fell there was only a pile of broken branches. The dogs circled, unable to pick up a scent. There was no body, no blood and no trail. He searched the woods for days and found nothing, but the animal killings stopped.
Decades later, when he was dying, the grandfather kept talking about the thing he had seen, calling it an alien and saying it was coming back for him. The family had never heard fear in his voice before. A few nights before he died, too weak to stand by himself, he somehow got outside with his rifle. His wife woke to a gunshot and found him lowering the gun, staring into the dark. His grandchild, who shared the story, likes to think it was one last shot at the thing that troubled the family all those years ago.
