Today is Friday the 13th, and Hollywood has just released a remake of the 1981 horror classic of the same name, featuring everyone's favorite hockey mask-wearing, machete toting, backwoods psycho. That's right, folks, Jason Vorhees of Camp Crystal Lake fame is back- bigger, badder and bloodier than ever! I'm hoping to catch a showing of it this weekend if Danielle lets me out of the house.
As a child of the '80's, I grew up on cheesy horror movies, like Friday the 13th, the Halloween series, and the Elm Street flicks. Mom always said watching those types of movies would warp my psyche in some way, but so far I haven't noticed anything. The thing about all those movies, were they simply were not scary to me. Sure the had a few "jump" moments but overall they were, badly acted, horribly written and poorly directed. They were just fun. As far horror movies go, there are very few that I would label as truly terrifying and disturbing. Movies like, The Shining, The Exorcist, and the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Now those are a couple of films that really mess with your head, get under skin and cause you to sleep with the light on.
But I would have to say that one of the most gruesome tales that I've ever heard in my life was one that was told around a campfire in elk camp.
The year was 1997. I was fresh out college and as a graduation gift, Dad had paid for my bulls tags on my very first elk hunt in the mountains of Colorado. Everything about that first hunt was intimidating to say the least. Every aspect of that country was so much bigger than what I was used to back home in North Carolina. I remember walking into camp that first day after stepped off the plane in Hayden and just staring out into the vastness of those mountains. For what seemed liked hundreds of miles, there was nothing but remote wilderness and dark, foreboding forests. To a greenhorn like myself, even though it was beautiful and awe-inspiring, the land also had a loneliness to it, that sent a cold feeling of dread through my bones.
I began thinking that soon I would be out there wandering those vast expanses, possibly alone. I had heard stories from my father and other members of our camp, about elk hunters becoming lost and nearly freezing to death in these hills. And what kind of creatures lurked in those dark forests-bears, coyotes, mountain lions, Sasquatch, the Blair Witch? My overactive imagination was once again beginning to get the best of me. Elk season hadn't even started yet, and I had already begun to psyche myself out.
Just before dark on that first day, a dust-covered Dodge pick-up pulled into camp. A robust man resembling an elderly teddy Roosevelt climbed out of the cab and was immediately greeted by my Father and my cousin Ray. It turned out that this gentlemen was a local boy from back home, who had moved to Craig several years earlier to try his hand at being a professional outfitter. He was on his way to his base camp at Roaring Fork Creek to meet his clients, when he decided to stop in and say "hey" to us Mills river boys.
He stood by the old propane stove inside our tent, attempting to keep the cold off and for the better part of an hour, he spun hunting tale after hunting tale to the members of our party. He had a very pleasant nature about him and was a natural story teller. If the outfitting business didn't work out for him, I thought, he could make a killing at public speaking. After listening to one humor us elk story after another, my mood began to brighten and I felt less anxious about the upcoming hunt.
But then from out of nowhere, our guest paused and his light-hearted tone changed and his facial expression became very serious. And as if he were speaking directly to me, he proceeded to tell undoubtedly the most gruesome tale I had ever heard in my life.
His macabre tale began like this:
A couple of years ago, a local young man from Craig decided to head up in the mountains to do a little elk hunting. It was late October and by that time of the year, the Elkhead Mountains were already blanketed in several feet of snow. The man left his house well before dawn that morning, but after he failed to return home that evening, his wife hysterical wife called the sheriff. Soon, search teams and volunteers were scouring the mountains looking for the man. But the deep snows and frigid temperatures slowed their progress.
Our guest, who was relaying this story to us, was also called by the authorities to aide in he search, since he was a local outfitter and knew the terrain. Well, it turned out that our guest was indeed the individual that found the unfortunate hunter. He found the man, lying face down in a pool of frozen blood, twenty feet from a dead bull elk. It didn't take a CSI unit to piece together what had happened. Apparently, the young man had shot and killed a bull elk, but at some point while he was skinning the animal, his knife slipped and severed his femoral artery in his groin.
The man died of severe blood-loss within seconds.
Now, as if that was not morbid enough, the story kept going. Due to the fact that the hunter was found in such a remote and inaccessible area, the only way to return his body to Craig for a proper burial was by horseback. But due to the fact his corpse had been exposed to sub-zero temperatures for several days, it was too frozen and stiff to lay over the back of a horse. So there was only one option for out guest: he sawed the corpse in half at the base of the torso and tied the halves to the side of a pack horse.
Good. Lord. In. Heaven. What did I just hear? What he had just described to me was something I would expect to see in some B-Grade horror flick on late-night cable. Not something that actually took place in the same area I was now "on vacation." I mean good grief, I was literally camping where frozen dead men are hacked to pieces and stuffed into panniers.
Fortunately, nothing as gruesome, as that story has yet to befall me or any of the other regular members of our elk hunting party. We have had a couple of accidents involving horses, but that's a story for another time.
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