I was probably very close to it with my back turned.
The teller has spent twenty years as a land surveyor across Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama and the Carolinas, much of it deep in national forest where they don't see another person for days. They are completely at home in the woods. They carry a pistol every day, and sometimes a short rifle, because of bears, feral dogs and the occasional illegal grow operation.
In late summer 2018 they were surveying about five hundred acres around a small Army Corps of Engineers lake in the north Georgia mountains. It was steep country, all ridges and hollows choked with mountain laurel, bordering a large tract of national forest. They were working alone with a robotic total station, the kind of instrument that lets one person do the job of a crew.
They had just spent a while hacking a five-foot-wide sight line with a machete up the property boundary to the top of a ridge, about 350 to 400 feet. Then they walked back down the slope to set up the instrument, headphones in, listening to a podcast.
When they looked back up the line, someone was walking slowly across the opening near the top. It looked hairy and seemed to be wearing a hat. It stopped, reached up with a large hand to grip a branch of the tree beside it, and looked down at them.
Their first thought was a hiker on the ridge, which happens now and then. But it was in the high nineties that day, far too hot for the shaggy brown jacket it seemed to be wearing. As it kept staring downhill, they could make out pointed ears on top of its head and a long snout. Then it turned and walked slowly out of sight.
They pulled out their headphones, and only then noticed that the woods had gone dead silent. In a Georgia summer the insects are deafening, and now there was nothing.
They waited a few minutes, then made themselves climb to the top of the ridge to fetch their equipment, which they seriously thought about leaving. The vegetation was pushed over in the direction the figure had gone. They looked at the tree it had walked behind and realized the low branch it had reached up to grab was about six feet off the ground. The jacket had been fur. That was when the fear really hit.
They could hear something moving a short way off, where it had gone. They started the forty-five-minute walk back to the truck, and all the way they could hear something moving along the ridge above them, keeping parallel. They didn't stop to find out whether it was following.
They know bears well and say this was not a bear. The pistol gave them no comfort at all. What stays with them is that minutes earlier they had been at the top of that ridge with their back turned and podcast playing, probably within yards of it. They told only two people for years. Their advice to anyone who works alone in the woods is to keep your ears open, and above all to watch your kids.