"The Generator":
The cabin we bought together was our thirtieth birthday gift to each other. Forty acres located outside a town without a stoplight but only with a blinking yellow sign at the crossroads. Then there was nothing but a forest, the snow and a dirt road that turned into a river each year in the spring. No power lines. We operated a generator for several hours per day and batteries for the rest of the time, hauled our water, and split our own wood. Dale had been dreaming of this place for years and claimed that it would cure him of something that the city could not. I followed him because I loved him and because I wanted this, too. Quietness. The lack of anyone who knew about us.
This is the part I reflect on now.
It was the second week of December, and Dale was gone to town, to get some propane and to send a package to his sister. Forty minutes of a ride each way. Meanwhile, I was supposed to stack wood before the snow started falling as there was that characteristic grayness in the sky. Now, you have to imagine that I have already done the same job many times to realize that something was wrong from the very beginning.
The first thing that seemed off was the dog. I mean, we had that old blue heeler called Scout. At around three o'clock in the afternoon, she suddenly stopped following me between the woodpile and the house. Instead of this, she began to bark to nowhere and stand by the tree line with the hair on her spine standing up. Now, I remember being annoyed at her and yelling at her to shut up.
I finished stacking wood at around four, exactly when it became dark. Again, I want you to imagine our cabin with one room downstairs and sleeping loft upstairs, which meant that when I was at the woodstove and turned around, seeing someone sitting at the table, I thought that this someone was my husband, who came home earlier than usual and somehow I did not notice his truck arriving.
It was not Dale.
He was in his forties. Thin in the way that suggested hunger rather than fitness. He was dressed in too heavy for indoors coat and had his hands folded as if he was waiting for the food to be delivered to him. He did not even get up when he saw me or showed any surprise whatsoever. Instead, he only commented, "You've got a nice setup here," as if we had been discussing this topic for quite some time.
I dropped the wood that I was carrying. Now, I remember the noise of the logs hitting the floorboards rather than the moment I realized that this man was not my husband and decided to run. By the time I started backing away, the second man appeared right behind me and prevented me from opening the door. It became clear to me instantly — like the wave hits you when you realize it in half a second — that these guys were inside our cabin long before I came in from the woodpile and Scout had barked for nothing.
I will not walk you through every minute of what happened next since some of it belongs not to me to describe in detail and some of it I have spent much effort avoiding repeating out loud. But I will tell you this. They were not there to rob us. This was their decision, not their mistake. They told me that about the isolation of our cabin, how clever we were to have picked such a place where it is hard to hear anything and how long they were observing the road and that everything they did there had been planned and not accidental. The second man had that hunting knife on his belt and he would touch it every time when he wanted me to keep quiet.
They tied my wrists with the piece of paracord from our own gear storage. Again, this part makes me wonder how they managed to steal this rope from us. They seated me at the floor beside the stove and the thinner one started talking to me, quite friendly. He asked me when my husband would return, how long the drive into the town was, and whether someone expected us for holidays. I lied and told him people were coming to us the next morning. I do not know whether he believed me, but I think that he was pondering on what to do with two of us instead of one.
This is what saved me — and here I want to tell you truthfully, because for a long time after that, I did not give myself any credit for it at all — this is the generator that did the job.
We ran it on the timer — that old diesel machine that kicked on every day at five-fifteen for the charging of the batteries and was placed in a shed some thirty feet from the cabin. At five-fifteen, as usual, the machine started making the characteristic noise of the diesel machine and I want you to believe me, that noise used to annoy me every evening of my life out there. The second man froze. He asked the other one whether it was normal. In the half a second when both of them were looking in the direction of the noise rather than towards me, I managed to get the cord so low that it became loose, soaked with snow-melted water on my sleeves.
I did not think, I just went out through the window by the stove. This was that window that stuck and that Dale was planning to plane for two years. One thing in that cabin that was never easy to open until that particular night when my hands found the way to open it. I ran in the forest in twenty-degree weather without a coat and here I want to be honest with you — I do not remember choosing the direction. I only remember running until the cabin lights disappeared behind me and then running further since I was not sure whether the two of them did the same thing.
Finally, I found that fence line belonging to the neighbors, feeling my way and not seeing it in the dark, almost two miles away, past midnight. I knocked at their door with my hands that I could no longer close due to cold. The Sheriff's department took forty minutes to arrive there. Dale, as it turned out, was stuck behind the jackknifed truck in the town and was sitting in the traffic, no idea and listening to the radio the whole time.
They caught both men four days later at the gas station in two other counties. I will not name them. I do not want to give them any more space than they have already taken in my life.
We sold the cabin that spring. Dale wanted to try again elsewhere, where neighbors would be closer than two miles. For a while, I told him I agreed, but I was not lying exactly since I had not yet tested it out. We live in the city now. That radiator clicks on itself automatically every night at five, making that metal groan and hissing and for one half of a second, my whole body stops before my brain tells me what is happening.
I still count the wood, or books, or whatever is stacked at the door. I do not know why. Some part of me needs to know exactly what is in the room before falling asleep in it.
Good night. Lock your doors.
"The Dog":
Firstly, I must admit I heard the truck first. I didn't. I heard the dog.
No barking — this is the one detail you don't expect to learn about an anxious dog. Our dog named Rosie did not bark. She rose up from her rug near the woodstove and grew stiff and still as a fencepost and began to growl low at the door as if knowing something that I did not.
This was our third winter living in the cabin off-grid. Our cabin was situated on sixty acres outside a town in the Cascades, so tiny it didn't even deserve a traffic stoplight; only a blinking yellow light, placed there after some child was run over on the bike. Living off grid meant the propane, a generator we used for two hours each night to keep the freezer cold, a wood stove which used up a whole cord of pine every three weeks. My husband, Danny, was three days away on a journey down to his brother's shop in Yakima and mobile service on our ridge was a joke — you needed to walk to the top of the driveway and hold your phone above your head as if surrendering to somebody.
I presumed that our dog was growling at a deer. It was possible for a deer to come up close to our cabin some nights, brazen and eating the low branches from the blue spruce my husband had planted the very same year we bought this land.
After that the motion-sensor, solar charged porch light switched on.
I looked out of the kitchen window and there was a man standing at the edge of the light. He was still not moving but just standing there in the canvas coat, hands buried in his pockets, looking at the house as if studying it.
I did not scream. You should know this because people kept asking me for years why I did not scream, as if it was a natural thing, a correct thing to do, and my not doing it was abnormal behavior. I did not scream because somehow an old animal part of my brain understood immediately that if I screamed I would inform him that I had noticed him and not screaming could grant me several seconds of surprise.
I turned off the kitchen light.
Our cabin became completely dark the way it only happens out here — no streetlights, no haze of any distant town, just the orange coal eye of the wood stove and whatever moon was hidden behind the clouds. I was standing at the window with my heart beating so hard that I could feel it in my teeth and watching him not moving. Ten seconds, thirty, a whole minute — he was waiting to see whether the darkness meant that I went to bed or if it meant that I have seen him.
Rosie's growl had changed into something closer to a hum, the sound which I have never heard from her before and have not heard since — a constant one as if coming from some wire under the tension.
I managed to think. This is the part of my story I am proud of, although the pride is not quite the word — somehow a part of myself, twenty eight years old woman and alone on a mountain, managed to sit inside of the panic and start making a list.
Doors: front door, deadbolted. Back door, leading from the mudroom, which I was not sure about because my husband went out that morning to check the propane gauge and I honestly did not remember whether I have heard the bolt turning. Windows: single panes, the kind that comes out of the frame if you press on them wrong, which I thought before as the maintenance problem and thought now as the entirely different problem. Phone: dead zone. Truck: gone with my husband. Gun: my husband's rifle, stored in the bedroom closet, unloaded, because we had a rule concerning children visits and never thought before that it was going to become important to me.
I moved on my sock feet in the darkness, not to the bedroom yet, but to the mudroom, because if the back door was not locked, everything else I was planning was meaningless.
The bolt was thrown. Thank God, the bolt was thrown and I stood there for a while with my hand flat against the cold wood as if feeling through it whether he was on the other side.
When I was coming back through the kitchen, the porch light had turned off — motion sensor. It meant that either he had gone away or had stopped moving.
I want to say that I knew right away that he had stayed there and it would be the second case. No, for one minute, one stupid and hope-full minute I allowed myself to believe that he was some hunter who got confused, scared by the dog and the dark house and was already halfway back to wherever he had parked his car.
But then I heard the window in the back bedroom – the guest room, the one facing the woods, the one which my husband kept saying that he would re-glaze and never did – giving the special sound that old wood makes under some pressure from outside.
I pulled the rifle out of the closet with my shaking hands which were not mine at all. Shells were in the coffee can on the top shelf, and I dropped two of them to the floor before seating the last one correctly, and every sound which I made felt to me like a gunshot, like my announcement to the whole mountain.
I did not manage to load the gun in time. I need to mention this, because in the most convenient version of my story I am standing there, holding the loaded gun in my hand like some kind of a movie hero, and that is not the truth. What had really happened is I was still fumbling with the second shell when I heard the window frame cracking and understood, with a clear cold certainty, which had nothing to do with the fear anymore, that I had maybe four seconds before the man entered my house.
Rosie appeared in the hallway like a car wreck.
She had been sitting at the front door, hackles raised up, and something in the sound of that window frame changed her mind and sent her down the hallway past me to the guest room, and what I heard next was not a dog barking, it was a dog fighting — a sound with the teeth in it, furniture being knocked over, a man's voice – the first human sound he had ever made all night — not words, just pain.
I came around the doorframe with the rifle up, shell seated, the safety off, and saw him half inside and half outside of the window, my dog's jaws clamped on his arm, both of them thrashing in the broken glass and the cold air from the mountain rushing in through the broken window, and did the only thing left to do — I screamed — finally, now, when it did not matter anymore whether he knew I had seen him — and told him that if he took another step inside of my house I will shoot him with all the bullets I have.
He believed me. I think that mostly because Rosie had already made the choice for him. He yanked himself free of her with his torn-off coat sleeve and fell back out of the window and into the dark, and I heard him running, actually running, falling through the brush near the tree line as if he was something that stopped being a man and returned to being just an animal which wants to live.
I did not sleep. I sat in the hallway with the rifle across my knees and my bleeding dog licking my hand between the shakes, until the gray Cascade dawn rose through the broken window and I could see well enough to walk to the top of the driveway and hold my phone above my head.
They found him nine days later, two counties away, breaking into another hunting cabin, which was unfortunately empty at the time. He had been watching our place for over a week, it turned out – a trail cam near our property line which my husband checked two times per season had him on four times, always at dusk, always just standing at the edge of the trees.
I am still living off-grid. People ask me how it is, after that, and the honest answer is that the mountain did not scare me. A man did. And I would rather live somewhere where I can hear a dog growling than somewhere where I can not hear anything at all.
We re-glazed that window ourselves, the two of us, that spring. I keep the rifle loaded now.
"The Cabin":
My name is unimportant here. What is important is the cabin. It was built by my uncle in the seventies, forty minutes past the last plowed road, by a lake that will freeze so solid by December that you could drive a truck across it, if you were stupid enough to try. No power lines stretch to it. No cell reception. There is only one way in — by snowmobile, or not at all. And that is precisely the reason I loved it.
I stayed there alone that winter. Alone, for four days, with my book pile (which I did not touch), and sufficient wood to last two weeks if I was careful. I need you to know that I was careful. I checked the propane. I checked the generator. I checked the door lock twice before bed, because this is something you do when you are a woman alone, forty minutes from any other human being. I did everything right. I need you to know this, because this is not going to matter.
On the second night, I was woken up by a noise at 2:14 AM. I will never forget the time, because it was marked by the little clock on the counter – the only source of light in the entire room that I could stare at for many seconds without comprehending what woke me.
The floor creaked. Not the usual floor creaks of the house that you learn to ignore after living there for a while. Different creaks, heavier creaks – the kind of noise a house makes when something walks across it that has never walked across it before.
I tried to keep completely still and convinced myself that it was simply wind, blowing snow off the roof, as it sometimes does. I thought about it for nearly a minute, and that is a very long time to spend in the dark persuading yourself of something that you do not believe at all.
Then I heard the second noise, slightly nearer the door, accompanied by the sound of breathing, which is not mine.
I want to be honest with you regarding what happens to the human body under the effect of fear, because it is not quite what you would expect. I didn't scream. I didn't move. My body made a decision before my brain processed it, and that decision was: become nothing. I turned my face toward the wall and made myself breathe like I am asleep, in and out, calmly, while every fiber of my body screamed to run away.
The door did not open then. Not at once. Whoever it was, he stood in the hallway outside my room for what felt like an hour and probably lasted for ninety seconds, and then the floor creaked again and he moved away, toward the kitchen.
And that is when I realized the worst of it. This wasn't somebody who entered just five minutes ago. There was a familiarity in the way he moved in the darkness, without stumbling and without hesitating, the practiced quietness of somebody who knows this house perfectly well. He had been in my cabin much before I heard him. Hours, maybe. Maybe even before I fell asleep.
I didn't have a phone that worked in this place. I didn't have a car – I had a snowmobile outside, but it was too far away, I needed to pass whoever was standing in the other room to get there. What I had was a window in my room, painted shut somewhere around the Clinton era, and four minutes to decide something, before my mind stopped functioning properly.
I decided to choose the window. I pried the old paint seal off with the help of a picture frame, as quietly as a person ever can, while in the same time somewhere behind the wall I heard the kitchen cupboards being opened. Not slammed – opened one at a time, carefully, like somebody checking the stock. Like somebody who expected to stay here.
There was a crack from the window, loud enough in that silence to sound like a gunshot. I didn't wait to see if he had heard it. I went outside into the snow that was knee-deep, wearing socks and t-shirt, in eleven degrees of air temperature, feeling like getting smacked by a wall. And I ran for the shed, where my uncle kept the second snowmobile, the old one, that doesn't always start on the first try.
And it started on the second one.
I want to say that I looked back and saw the silhouette of the shape in the doorway, lit up by the light I left on in the kitchen. This is the way a survival story would usually go. I did not look back. Never. In all the times that I have been telling this story since then, I never looked back once. I put that snowmobile in gear and rode it through darkness and trees without goggles and without gloves. And I didn't stop until I saw the orange glow of a gas station sign on the county highway and I drove straight up to the curb, smashing into the locked door, until a teenager of eighteen or so came out of the back room to see what madwoman is hammering on his window in the middle of the night.
The police went there two hours later. They found the back door pried open at the frame, which I did not notice in the darkness, and a mattress in the loft above the kitchen – the loft I never use and which I have planned to nail shut for months – where this mattress had apparently been sleeping. Food from my own pantry, eaten and stacked back the way it was before – as if somebody was trying to pretend that nothing happened. A knife from my kitchen block, missing.
They never caught him. This is the part people always ask me to soften when I tell this story, and I will not. There was no arrest, no trial, no name for that shadow in the hallway. Only a case number and a detective who stopped answering my calls around the eight month mark, and a cabin that our family sold two years later because we could not bring ourselves to ride that road again.
This is what I think about at nights, sometimes, more than the fear itself. I think about how the cupboards were being opened one at a time. About the care that this took. Whoever he was, he wasn't a man, trapped in the wrong place, panicking and searching for the exit. He was a man, taking his time in the house, which he decided belonged to him for the night. And the only reason I am alive to tell you this story and not a story of myself that somebody else would tell is that the floor creaked four feet ahead of time.
This is what they never tell you about surviving something like this. You do not win. You just happen to be on the lucky side of the coin toss. Sometimes I go back into the woods, in daylight, with other people, and I still love the silence of this place. But I check the locks twice now, and I have never fallen asleep in a house where I cannot see the door.
So when you are lying in bed tonight, and the house makes a noise it usually doesn't make – the floor creak, the wind against the roof – you will probably think that it is nothing.
It most likely is.
Mine usually was too. Up until the one night when it wasn't.
Sleep well.