It was the only time in my life I knew I could not protect my children.
The teller tried to post this three times and deleted it each time, convinced it sounded ridiculous. They say that afterwards your worldview spins like a top: most days are normal, and some days aren't.
Around midday on Monday, October 18, 2021, they took their sons, aged seven and two and a half, to a small state park a mile and a half from home. The trail is about half a mile long and follows a creek to a fork, where there's a little beach about twenty feet long. Six people there would be a crowd. The boys knew it well, since it was one of three parks the family hiked every week.
As usual the older boy ran thirty to fifty feet ahead while the parent kept pace with the toddler. He reached the beach a few seconds before them. Then the younger boy started tossing rocks into the water on the left while the older one did the same about fifteen feet to the right, and their parent bent down to cuff a pant leg.
The seven-year-old screamed, a sound the teller calls bloodcurdling. He was falling backwards, kicking his legs. The parent followed his eyes across the creek.
On a big flat rock on the far bank, no more than twenty or twenty-five feet away, was an animal the teller couldn't make sense of. It looked big enough to clear the creek in a single bound. It had a barrel chest, and its pectoral, shoulder and arm muscles were shaped like a man's, only much bigger. Its eyes bulged and its snout was short and stubby like a hyena's. Its ears pointed forward, with tufts of hair on the sides and top of its head. It wasn't standing on all fours like an animal. It was crouched like a sprinter in the blocks, with heavy thighs and haunches.
Its head kept snapping back and forth between the screaming boy and the parent, alert like a dog waiting for a thrown ball. It looked as if it was either about to lunge or backing away. The parent scooped up the toddler and got between the animal and the older boy, and they made it back into the trail and out of its line of sight.
The parent yelled at the seven-year-old to run. He sprinted about thirty feet, sobbing, then stopped and turned around in a daze as if he didn't understand what was happening, and had to be told again. It happened three times. The animal never followed them.
The teller says the knife on their hip felt as useless as a pillow, and that it was the only moment in their life when they knew they could not protect their children. What has left the deepest scar isn't the animal. It's the moment they told their seven-year-old he might have to take his little brother's hand and run for the car by himself. They say their mind still tries to explain it away, but their focus at the time was crystal clear.