Oh, stop growling. I'm just going to shut the water off.
The teller lives in northern Minnesota in a single-storey house on an acre and a half, with hundreds of acres of protected state forest behind it and thousands of acres of state park across the highway. He has been an avid outdoorsman all his life. He has hunted black bears, and he once came nose to nose with one at its den, where it only snapped its jaws at him, which is what black bears do. They don't growl. He knows wolves and coyotes too.
On a summer night in 2014, around eleven, he was watching television when he remembered he'd left the garden sprinkler running. He went out the back door, across the deck and down three steps into the dark yard, and turned toward the outdoor tap at the corner of the house.
As he stepped off the deck, he heard a long, low growl. It came from behind a bush at the corner of the house, about fifteen feet from him and about five feet from the tap. It wasn't especially loud, but it was very deep and guttural, the sound of something with big lungs and a big throat. It was unlike any animal he had ever heard.
In that situation he would normally freeze, or run, or at least look toward the sound. Instead, a strange, complete calm came over him. It wasn't euphoria, just a deep serenity. He actually said out loud, "Oh, stop growling, I'm just going to shut the water off." He kept walking until he stood about five feet from the growl, calmly turned the tap off, turned his back on it and strolled inside to his easy chair. He never even looked.
About half an hour later the numbness wore off, and it hit him: what on earth was that, and what had he just done? He went back out to the deck and saw nothing. He hadn't smelled anything either.
He points out that this calm is completely out of character. Not long afterward, stepping out onto the same deck after dark, a deer snorted nearby and he fled inside like a child.
He has read that people who report encounters with aliens sometimes describe being flooded with calm. He wondered whether whatever was behind that bush had somehow made him feel safe, as if to tell him it meant no harm. Its growl, he thinks, was only what a big animal sounds like when it says "that's close enough."