Something big got up in front of me, and it wasn't a deer or a bear.
The Meherrin River in southern Virginia is small and hard to reach. In its first sixty miles there is just one public access point and a couple of bridges, and every launch means hauling boats up and down steep, muddy banks. But it's full of wildlife and the fishing is great, and the teller lives nearby. One October he took three friends on his first overnight trip down it.
They waited for one friend to finish work, so it was dark by the time they put in. The teller knew of a sandbar about three hours downstream, the only spot with easy access to the woods for firewood, and they navigated there by flashlight.
They sent one man up the wooded slope above the sandbar to gather wood. It was about two hundred yards to the crest, and they watched his cheap flashlight bobbing up the hill. Then they heard a scream and saw the light coming back down fast. He fell a few times, his flashlight died halfway, and somehow he made it to the sandbar without running into a tree. All he would say was that something big had gotten up right in front of him, and it wasn't a deer or a bear.
After that they armed themselves and gathered whatever wood they could find along the bank instead of up the hill. Once a good fire was going, they realized they had left the tent back at the put-in. Three of them dug their sleeping bags into the sand around the fire. The fourth insisted on standing watch, and the teller lent him a rifle and a box of rounds. By about four in the morning the fire, the last flashlight and all four men were out cold.
They woke as the sun began melting the frost on their sleeping bags. They had anchored the boats at the bottom end of the sandbar, where the current held them in a small pool beside the woods. Just outside camp stood a tree about six inches thick at the base. About six feet up, it had been twisted, shredded and folded over, and the remaining twenty feet of trunk had been rammed down the bank and into one of their boats, which was partly sunk.
They took it as a warning. They waded out, freed the boat and left as fast as they could. The teller is the only one of the four who still paddles that river. He hasn't camped there since, though he says he would if he could find someone willing to come with him.