You hear that? This guy just ran into El Chupacabra!
The teller is a big man, a medical professional, an outdoorsman and, in his words, a biology nerd. He's comfortable in the dark and doesn't panic. On October 22, 2005, a few days into quail season, he went hunting in the Mojave Desert near Joshua Tree and Yucca Valley, with a friend's Jack Russell terrier for company. He parked his Jeep where two of the area's countless dirt roads crossed.
He stayed out past sundown to fill his bag limit, and by the time he started back along the road, full twilight was setting in. At a crossing marked with stop signs, the terrier suddenly froze mid-trot, hackles up, growling, a complete change in an easygoing dog. The teller's first thought was javelina, and all he had was a shotgun loaded with birdshot.
On the far corner of the crossing, about forty feet away, something was walking with the strutting gait of a rooster, but without the head-bobbing. It was about three feet tall from head to foot and, by its bulk, forty or fifty pounds. He clipped the dog's leash to his belt and waited for it to move on.
It lingered on the corner for a minute. Then, without a flap or a sound, it made a standing leap about nine feet straight up and landed perfectly on top of the stop sign.
He loaded two fresh shells. When he looked up, he saw its eyes, and the biologist in him noted two things at once: they faced forward, which suggests a predator, and they were enormous for its size, which suggests an animal that hunts at night. A silent, nocturnal, forty-pound predator that could jump nine feet was now looking down at him from a high perch.
He fired both barrels. When the echo died away, it was still sitting on top of the sign, making odd little chirruping sounds that sounded remarkably like sneezing. While he reloaded, it hopped down and ran off through the brush on the next corner.
When the dog had calmed down, he jogged back to the Jeep, then drove back to the crossing and put his lights on the sign. It was peppered with shot, most of it centred right where the animal had been sitting. It had taken two loads of birdshot at forty feet and sneezed at him.
On the way out of town he told the story to a clerk at a gas station, who laughed and called to his coworker in Spanish: "You hear that? This guy just ran into El Chupacabra!" The teller says he had a second encounter about ten years later.