I had spent most of the night racking brain, trying to rationalize whatever it was I’d come across at Otis’s cabin. I couldn’t. It didn’t make sense, and the only scenarios that did make sense were, terrible. The lights, the shadow, the truck speeding off, it didn’t sit right, and why didn’t those dogs I’ve been helping feed make a peep!  

The next day, Saturday, the clearing looked unchanged, which somehow made it worse. The cabin sat quiet under the trees, no smoke curling from the pipe, no dogs sounding off as I approached. The blood on the shed latch was dried hard, but was clearly fresh. I’d been in and out of this shed 2 dozen times or more and had never seen it.   

I left it alone and walked over to the cabin, knocked, and called Otis’s name. He didn’t answer so I  peered into the front windows, cupping my hands to the glass. No lights were on and the drapes were shut. The place didn’t feel ransacked or abandoned, just empty in a way that suggested the man who lived there had left in a hurry without meaning to explain himself. And still, no dogs. I checked the back of the house and ultimately the kennel, but there was nothing in the back of the cabin to suggest foul play, and the kennel was empty.    

I turned toward the shed and argued with myself over whether I should go in. I checked the back door, which someone had used last night to get to Otis’s truck, and the decision was made for me – it was unlocked. There was no blood on the knob or the door itself, inside or out.   

I slowly opened the door and searched in the dark for a light switch. I found one close to the door and the shed illuminated. There were light smear marks on the dusty floor, 2 feet wide, some blood streaks here and there. The trail lead from the front of the shed to the rear wall where the freezer had always sat. As I made my way over to it, I could see it had blood on it as well, the front handle and a small streak on the front side.   

I went straight to it and swung open the top, careful not to touch the blood, but anxious to get inside and get to the bottom of things. The black garbage bags I thought I’d spotted the night before were inside, untied, but twisted shut. They were sitting on the left side of the freezer in a section Otis typically kept open, the same spot I’d place any coons I dropped off for his dogs.   

I unwound the first bag and could see, stacked haphazardly but unmistakable, deer meat. Quarters and chunks shoved in fast, not wrapped or trimmed the way they would’ve been if someone had taken their time. It looked like the work of a man trying to keep meat from spoiling while something else pressed on him hard enough to make neatness feel unimportant. Immediately I could feel the tension starting to leave my body as I checked off one gruesome scenario after the other in my head. There wasn’t anything crazy about this, I told myself. Otis must have shot a deer….and then decided to flee his home in the middle of the night with at least one other unknown assailant, so quickly that he forgot to lock the door behind him. I checked the second bag and it was the same story, packed full of fresh deer meat. 

I was leaning over the chest freezer, twisting the second garbage bag shut, when I noticed a clear, Ziplock baggie to my right, neatly placed on top of Otis’s meat stash. I didn’t notice the contents until I did a double-take, and there, pointing right at me from within the bag, was a finger.  

Not the whole finger, just the end, nail intact, pale from the cold. It took a second for my mind to catch up to what my eyes were seeing. I held myself still and looked again, slower this time. The bag was sealed. Clean. Set there deliberately. I slammed the lid shut and hurried out the back, not wanting to make any more discoveries inside the shed.   

I rushed out of the shed and walked around it and the cabin again, slower, paying attention to what was missing as much as what remained. No dogs. No truck. No sign Otis had planned on staying gone. By the time the light started to thin and the woods began stretching shadows, I accepted what the place was telling me: Otis was gone, and somebody was missing a finger. I left Otis’s place, carrying the image of that freezer with me like a stone in my pocket.  

 All week it stayed there. Every quiet moment filled up with headlamps moving through fog, with that engine coughing to life and disappearing down the road, with the neat little bag sitting on top of chaos. I replayed it until I couldn’t tell where memory ended and invention began. By Friday, I was resolute in my decision on what to do next. Whether on my own or with the help of the Game Warden or Sheriff, I was going to get to the bottom of this mystery.  

I turned out that night in a different spot, closer to the WMA entrance and farther from Otis’s place, wanting a hunt that felt ordinary before I stepped back into anything that didn’t. Red struck quick and honest, her voice rolling clean through the hollows, and for the first time all week my shoulders eased. She treed twice before nine, both solid trees that had her chasing tracks throughs briars and across multiple creeks. She took her time with both tracks, and I got lost for a few minutes listening to the show, trying my best not to think about what the night still had in store for me.  

By the time I checked my watch it was just past 9:15 p.m., two coons bagged, Red riding high and proud. I decided two was enough. Otis’s freezer was already looking pretty full with all that mysterious deer meat, so I loaded up Red and made my way toward his place.  

I’d never driven to Otis’s spot, and I wasn’t about to start now. I parked on the ridge like always, about a hundred and fifty yards out, and walked in from there, .22 in hand. There was a dirt road that led to his property, but it didn’t connect to the WMA. The only way onto it was to leave the woods entirely and wind through 5+ miles of private land.  

Relief hit me about 50 yards out when I noticed a faint curl of smoke coming from the stovepipe, and a dim light glowing on the porch. As I approached, Otis’s dogs announced my arrival, and as if on cue, the lights of the cabin flickered to life and Otis came out the front door to see what all the barking was about. 

 “Man am I glad to see you, Otis. Where the heck have you been?” We shook hands and he invited me to take a seat on one of the two empty rockers on his front porch. He calmly told me he had a pot of coffee brewing that would be ready in a second, then he asked “how many did ya’ll away with tonight?”.  “Ah, two, she got two tonight, both great tracks.” I said, fighting back the urge to just shout “why do you have a finger in your freezer!”. I watched Otis’s hands, folded across his lap as he slowly rocked back and forth. There were no scratches, no bandages, and most importantly, no missing fingers. “I didn’t hear her, did you turn loose somewhere else?” Now I’m sweating with anticipation. “Yes, Sir. We turned out closer to the southern entrance. It’s not as thick as it is up here, much easier walk.”  

 Otis got up to grab the coffee and I stayed on the porch by myself, trying to figure out how to bring up the drama of the past week without being too obvious. There was a slight sense of fear that began to creep in. I didn’t take Otis for a violent man, but I also can count the number of fingers I’ve found in a friend’s freezer with one, finger. If it wasn’t his, who’s was it? Otis returned with two mugs of fresh coffee, handed me a mug and as he sat back down in his rocking chair he asked, “did you happen to come by some time last week?”  

I froze, mid-sip, and leaned forward in my chair. I had no reason other than curiosity itself to be at his place last Saturday night, let alone go inside the mans shed without any dead coons to leave for him. I didn’t touch anything the night of the event itself, but that next day, Saturday, I opened the unlocked rear door to the shed. I opened the freezer, and then I rushed out. The light…the shed was pitch black, and I had turned on the lights. Did I forget to turn them off? Is that why Otis is asking me if I came by last week?   

I could hear my Grandfather’s voice, clear as day, “son, integrity means doing the right thing, even when nobody’s looking”. “Yes!” I almost shouted it. I could barely contain my emotions. I told him about the previous Friday night, the lights, the truck peeling off and of course, the blood. “I came back the next day, Saturday, to see if maybe I missed something in the dark, but you were nowhere to be found, neither were your hounds.” I told him about letting myself in the unlocked back door of the shed, watching for movements or a signal of some kind that showed the slightest bit of concern from Otis’s face, but nothing happened. He listened without interrupting, sipping on his coffee, emotionless, as if he’d already heard the story.   

I apologized for going in without his permission. “Between the blood on the front door lock, the drag marks, and blood on the freezer itself, curiosity got the best of me, and I opened the freezer, partly to make sure you weren’t in it!” I told him as I took a breath and waited for a response.    

“I was hoping that was you”, he said softly, as he settled back in his rocking chair and began to fill in the gaps. The previous Friday afternoon he’d shot a doe that wandered onto his property. It was a bad shot, and he tracked her into the WMA, unable to locate her until just after dusk. Two deer hunters were in the area, about a mile from where they’d parked their truck. Both had headlamps in case the walk-out ran long. They came up on Otis with the deer down and offered to help field dress her before dark finished closing in.  

“One of ‘em rushed it,” Otis said. “Hand slipped as he was working to get the hide off. Took the tip of his finger clean off.”  

Otis said both hunters started hollering back and forth, and while one worked to help his buddy stop the bleeding, Otis noticed the fingertip and shoved it into his pocket without thinking. He hustled them back to the cabin, taking the injured man inside to get his finger bandaged up properly. While he did that, the other hunter hauled the meat into the shed freezer, then went to get Otis’s truck and pull it around front. Otis must have told him the combination to the lock; the truck was always unlocked with the keys stuck on top of the visor.   

“That’d be the lights you saw,” Otis said, nodding once.  

He drove them out to where they’d parked and then led them to a cut through that would get them out of the WMA faster and on their way to the ER, which was about 30 minutes away. When he got back home, he found the fingertip still in his pocket, bagged it, and put it in the freezer before rinsing up and hitting the sack, never giving a thought to the blood he left behind. Early Saturday morning he left the cabin at 5am to drive out of town for a funeral, having dropped his dogs at a friend’s place Friday night so he could leave before daylight.  

The story settled into place between us, solid and ordinary. The embarrassment came a second later, when I realized how much of it I’d let the woods write for me. Otis looked at my face and gave a small nod. “Happens,” he said. “The night gets ahold of things sometimes.”  

 We sat in silence for minute, and I couldn’t help but think about all those crazy scenarios I’d dreamt up. The silence was quickly interrupted by Otis’s dogs, and then a voice drifted in from beyond the clearing, faint but polite, carried on the cool air.  

“Mr. Otis? Is that you?”  

We both stood to our feet. Two figures stepped into the edge of the clearing, headlamps bobbing in the dark, one of them raising a bandaged hand as they came closer.  

“We wanted to say thank you,” the man called. “And… the hospital said that fingertip might help, if it’s still around.”  

Otis looked back at me, a slight grin emerging, then nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s still cold.”  

 And standing there, watching the truth walk out of the woods under its own power, I understood then how fear fills in whatever you leave empty, and how the woods don’t lie—they just don’t bother explaining themselves.