A Chilling Pursuit
Evading nightmares and axe murderers in the mountains of eastern Pennsylvania.
In the woods, I always dream of axe murderers. Not mutants, like in Wrong Turn, or witches, like in The Blair Witch Project, but escaped convicts—madmen on the hunt to spill innocent blood.
It started on the night of my first camping trip with the Boy Scouts. I woke up at midnight paralyzed with the fear that someone might come for me under the cover of dark. I didn’t sleep another wink. For every subsequent foray with my troop, I never slept outside and always chose the top bunk furthest from the main entrance. That way, I’d have plenty of time to escape if the troop leaders couldn’t stop the villain in time.
As a scout, none of my worst fears came true. But I was still wary. In my teens, I began exploring backcountry trails in New York and Pennsylvania with my friends. Like me, they were city boys with no survival skills and only the faintest idea of how to use a pocket knife for protection. So once the sun dipped below the tree line, and they pointed out a potential campsite, my concern was not whether we were close enough to water or far enough from the trail so that other travelers wouldn’t see me poop. Instead, I wondered, How easy would it be for a criminal to find us here? And how quickly could I throw my friend’s body in front of my own to save myself?
Only once did I manage to close my eyes and not startle awake to a nightmare.
It was January 2011, and the sun had long set by the time Jeremy and I arrived at the Thunder Swamp trailhead in eastern Pennsylvania. It hadn’t been snowing when we set out from Bayonne. But stretching far beyond the trailhead, at least a foot of snow and ice covered the footpath. We plowed ahead regardless, stringing our sleeping bags to our packs, turning our headlamps to their brightest setting, and hiking until we lost sight of the trail markers.
“Let’s make camp on top of that hill,” Jeremy said, pointing to a clearing twenty yards from where we’d strayed from the trail. “In the morning, we’ll figure out the way.” I trusted his instinct. The snow was shallow in the clearing, and we’d be high enough on the hill to detect any axe murderers before they were on top of us.
It was already below 10 degrees when we started unpacking the tent. We worked quickly with our gloves off. But despite our Phelpsian pace, our fingers throbbed by the time we’d clipped the last plastic snap to the pole. We dove inside but experienced no relief. The temperature would dip below zero within an hour.
That first night, Jeremy asked God to supernaturally deliver extra hand warmers into our bags. I asked Him not to let us contract hypothermia in our sleep. We were too cold to think about the danger that lurked just miles ahead.
Looking back, I can’t believe Jeremy and I went to Thunder Swamp in those conditions. We were 21, more valiant and stupid than we are today. But we also knew that in six months, we’d both graduate college, get married, and move away from each other, likely forever. We had one last opportunity to be together in the solace only nature provides, and we had to take it.
Our first outdoor adventure had taken place four years earlier, weeks before setting off for college in different places. That time, with Mickey and another high school friend, we ventured north into the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. Jeremy had handled the planning and, in his original draft, we were to recover from our trek at Mickey’s aunt’s house in a small hamlet just west of the Connecticut border, then make our way to Thunder Swamp. But after we got off Mount Pharoah, heavy storms were in the forecast, and we decided not to risk it. “We’ll get back to the swamp one day,” Jeremy said after crossing it off our itinerary.
The next summer, we headed overseas, camping for three weeks in backyards and on hillsides across Scotland. For two years after we got back, we continued to imagine new places we’d venture to before graduation. But, as a trio, none of those trips ever came to fruition. The clock was ticking, and Thunder Swamp was the only place on the list within driving distance by that final January of our adolescence.
Because I didn’t have a car, I needed to borrow my parents’ Chevy Cobalt. They were wary, I’m sure, of letting me venture into the tundra in their front-wheel-drive. But instead of saying no, afraid that I’d glide their car into a tree, they said sure, why not?
Before I left the house, my dad outfitted me in his heaviest winter coat and a pair of thick camo gloves he’d used for hunting during winters in Kansas. At a store on the way, I bought two large Three Musketeers bars (for the calories I’d burn, of course) and a black ski mask that covered nearly my entire face.
Jeremy and I would be in Pennsylvania within two hours, fearing nothing but time.
The morning after the first night on Thunder Swamp, we rose like mummies from our sleeping bags, blinded and half-frozen. Before dozing off, we’d zipped them so tight that only our mouths and noses were exposed. But the cold had still made its way down to our bones. Even worse, my jeans, which I’d laid out along the edge of the tent, were frozen in a solid sheet of ice. Jeremy had been smarter; he’d worn polyester snow pants he’d bought for $2 at a thrift store in Grand Rapids. “Women’s fit is actually a lot more comfortable than men’s,” he said, seriously, when I asked why they were violet and missing a wiener zipper.
But there were at least three pieces of good news. For one, a crazed criminal hadn’t slaughtered us in the dead of night. My skull hadn’t been pierced through the center by one of the giant icicles that hung from the branches above our tent. And, on a lighter note, Jeremy remembered to pack propane and check his camping stove before leaving to ensure it worked. We welcomed the flame, which we used to boil tea and make oatmeal. After our bodies and souls had sufficiently defrosted, we set out to find the trail we’d lost the night before.
Once we did, we were glad to discover no other bootprints in the snow. An axe murderer might’ve been lurking in the woods, but he hadn’t gotten out in front of us yet. After a few miles, we relaxed, taking a moment to stop and admire the winter wonderland before us: the snow-covered pines and clear running creeks that broke up the endless sheet of glacial white, which covered the bogs, beaver ponds, and swamps the trail was named for. As usual, Jeremy and I lost ourselves in the typical conversations of childhood friends: recalling old memories, cracking up at inside jokes, and talking about everything and nothing at the same time.
Everything was just as it should be. And then we saw the trail of blood.
We were both frozen in place at the sight of it. “Rizz, get out your knife,” Jeremy whispered before pulling a combat blade from his jacket pocket.
I knew it. I fricken knew it. The axe murderer had come for us.
My eyes bounced around like pinballs, searching wildly for the enemy. I looked up into the trees: he might be perched on the branch of a tall pine, waiting to jump us. I bent down. He could be burrowed in a hidden den or inside of an igloo he’d built just far enough away from the trail so that his poison darts could strike us undetected. We’d be paralyzed as he dismembered our bodies.
Summoning all my courage, I asked Jeremy, who was standing stoically beside me with his eyes closed and his weapon drawn, what he thought had drawn the blood.
“Wolves,” he said, with a confidence bordering on hubris. And then he bent down to touch one of the red stains in the snow. He raised his index and middle fingers to his nose, closed his eyes again, and inhaled. “It’s fresh,” he whispered.
I fumbled for my dad’s Rough Ryder—I’d chosen the small pocket knife over the buck knife with the decorative handle he’d bought me from a truck stop as a boy and instantly regretted the decision. Motion of the ocean, not the size of the wave, motion of the ocean, not the size of the wave, I muttered, attempting to reassure myself that three inches was enough to get the job done. I swung open the blade. It was rusted and dull, but I pressed my thumb against the spine regardless, poised and ready to strike.
“I don’t think it’s wolves,” I whispered back. “Could it be an escaped convict? Or a cannibal? Maybe he hasn’t tasted blood since he was locked up, and he knows we’re out here.”
“Look at this,” Jeremy said like the grizzled host of an outdoor TV show. Off to the side of the blood was another trail. Yellow drops dotted the snow. He again bent down, examining the marks, and wafted the scent up toward his nostrils. “I’ve smelled wolf urine before,” he said. “This is it.”
Suddenly, the woods came alive with the sound of violence.
Jeremy jumped up and swung his knife in the air. Just as I turned my back, I was shaken to the core by another sound, more piercing and blood-curdling than the one before it.
AHHHHHHHHH! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
I faced Jeremy. He was screaming at the top of his lungs.
“What the frick are you doing, dude?” I scrispered1. “You’re gonna get us killed.”
“It’s an intimidation tactic,” he said. “If it’s a Black bear, you’re supposed to scare it into retreating.”
“I thought you said it was wolves,” I answered back sharply, annoyed and no longer sure my best friend had any idea what he was doing.
“Wolf and bear urine are remarkably similar,” Jeremy said before crying out once more into the forest.
My ears rang, and my heart pounded in my chest. “We gotta get out of here,” I said, watching my heavy breath evaporate before my eyes.
“No, let’s go back-to-back,” Jeremy responded. “We’ll rotate in a circle, one step at a time. That way, we have a 360-degree view of the forest, and no man or beast can sneak up behind us.”
Then, another cracking sound, followed by another. Before we’d left Bayonne, I’d run a Google search to quell my worries of violence. Not 40 miles from the trail were two state prisons. I couldn’t believe it. Were we really being hunted?
AHHHHHH!!! AHHHHHHHHHHH!!!
Terrified, I joined Jeremy in his maniacal screaming. We circled back-to-back, swinging our knives to block the poison darts and arrows flying in our direction. Then we heard a final wave of sound like a round of bullets.
Jeremy squealed. “Jacie! Jacie!”2 I shouted, calling him by the name only the people who love him most know. “Are you hit?”
He lifted his hand from his side: no blood. No entry point. These weren’t bullets. They were the sound of branches creaking and shattering. Fifty yards from the trail, we could just make out an enormous evergreen falling from the weight of the ice and smashing everything in front of it. We breathed out, feeling only minor relief. Because there was still the matter of the blood.
“Okay, now let’s take a few steps,” Jeremy said, composed again. “Keep circling.”
We twisted like a top, rotating cautiously as we plodded forward. The trail of blood grew thicker with each footstep. I felt Jeremy moving behind me. He was breathing in short bursts as if swinging a set of nunchucks at his side.
“Dude, what the heck are you doing?” I asked, confounded by his karate chopping.
“I’m practicing with my knife,” he said before emitting more variations of hoo, ha, ha, and hoo.3
After circling in the snow for five minutes, I heard tiny feet scurrying. It sounded like a pack of dogs. Howls and shrieks followed their movement.
“Coyotes,” Jeremy said, bouncing his weight off my back. I knew little of coyotes—only that they were smaller than wolves, larger than foxes, and that I probably couldn’t kill one by hand. Jeremy ran up the trail, swinging his knife and shouting. I followed close behind him.
The blood trail led us to a carcass in a clearing 20 feet from the trail. Not a coyote in sight. What lay there instead was a half-eaten buck: its antlers torn from its head and entrails devoured. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. “Whoa,” I said as Jeremy’s eyes locked with mine.
“Coyotes are vicious,” he muttered, and I could hear the disappointment in his voice. “But they’re also delicious.”
“Dude, we’re not eating coyotes,” I said, putting away my weapon.
“Never say never,” Jeremy said, refusing to put away his.
We observed the carcass for some time, then gathered ourselves and continued the hike. For the next eight hours, I never stopped thinking that something—it no longer mattered if it was a man or a coyote—was out there watching us. In all the stories I’d read or seen about the outdoors until that point, I’d sterilized the threat of the natural world by focusing not on the danger but on the idyllic vision of a brave explorer blazing forward. In my visions, I was always the hunter and rarely the hunted.
We set up camp, ate more oatmeal and Vienna sausages, and drank tea brewed with pine needles like I’d seen Bear Grylls do on Man vs. Wild. The temperature neared zero for a second night, and the ground was too frozen to venture far from the trail. The sounds outside our tent were haunting, nothing like the sirens and shouting of neighbors I was used to in the city. Wild animals shrieked, branches creaked, and the wind howled. We felt so alone out there, but I knew we weren’t alone. So we laid down with our knives within reach.
After falling asleep, I was roused awake in the middle of the night. It was dark, and I was wearing my face mask, but I could hear movement outside. Then I saw Jeremy’s stiff body drug half outside of the tent. The coyotes had gotten him.
“Jacie! Jacie!” I screamed. Suddenly my eyes filled with tears. “Jacie!”
“You animals!” I shouted, flicking open the dull blade of my weapon and preparing to fight to the death.
“Dude, chill!” Jeremy shouted back before I could take a swing. “I’m peeing.”
I had no way of knowing that the tent, which Jeremy had also bought at Goodwill, had some kind of doggie door in the corner that he used as an emergency pee hole. It was too cold to go outside, he explained, so he had slid his body halfway through and suspended himself in a plank while emptying his bladder.
“Dude, you’re peeing uphill!” I shouted as the warmth of the urine made its way underneath the tent.
Jeremy slid his way back inside and shrugged. Eventually, we both zipped our bags up to our faces again and fell asleep to the sounds of the forest.
That morning, we awoke and continued our hike. The sun was brighter and the snow, which had iced over, shimmered like diamonds. For the next eight miles, nothing eventful happened. We hiked and talked, talked and hiked, until coming up on a county road that intersected the trail. There was still some way to go, though I wasn’t sure I could do it. Jeremy removed a glove, licked his index finger, and lifted it up to the wind. “This is the road back to the car,” he said with absolute confidence.
“Let’s go back,” I said. I’d had enough of Thunder Swamp. Soon after putting out our thumbs, a gray-haired man in a pick-up truck pulled over. He was the forest ranger. “What in the world are you boys doing out in this weather?” he said.
We hopped in, and he told us about how he had moved to Pennsylvania after retiring in Oregon. He was some kind of naturalist evangelical who believed in feeding deer by hand and sharing the gospel with hitchhikers. “We’re Christians too,” we said, sparing him the trouble of explaining our religion to us. We told him about the deer carcass. “Oh yeah, the coyotes are bad out here in eastern PA,” he said. “Much bigger than what we see out west. Ain’t no wolves left to kill ‘em, and there’s plenty of deer to eat.”
Our new friend pulled into the parking lot where I’d left the Cobalt. The car was there, untouched. We thanked him for his kindness, got out, and readied ourselves to return to Bayonne.
I never thought those nights on Thunder Swamp would be the last I’d spend in a tent with my best friend. In the 13 years since I’ve only camped three other times. After I left home, my mom threw out my hiking gear because she said it was taking up too much room in the basement, and I never bothered to replace any of it. But I still have overnight adventures I’d like to take. In some sense, I even miss those dreams of axe-wielding villains coming for me under the cover of night. I miss pursuing or being pursued by wild animals because that meant I was still out there exploring. And today, at least, I have several larger, sharper knives to take into the woods with me.
Let them come for me, I say. I’ll be ready this time.
Before you leave, support my work by buying me a coffee or ordering a copy of my first story collection, Big Head on the Block.
You can also listen to me tell stories on YouTube and Spotify.
Scream-whispering. This is what Jeremy, Mickey, and I always called it when we’d listen to screamo bands in high school and wonder how they managed to sound that way in their recordings.
Pronounced Yahtzee. I went into detail in “Creating Yanzek Hestal,” the story of how he inspired a superhero I’d created for a creative writing class in high school.
I’d seen him do this before. Four years earlier, the first night we camped in the Adirondacks, Jeremy insisted that we behave like true outdoorsmen. “I’m not going to eat anything that I haven’t killed by my own hand,” he said before grabbing a small hatchet and venturing out among the brush. Mickey and I assumed it was a practical joke. Jeremy tiptoed his way behind a large pine. “A family of chipmunks,” he scrispered from twenty yards away. In a quick motion, he flung his hatchet while grunting like Maria Sharapova on a forehand winner. The hatchet landed in the dirt “Rats!”
This went on for an hour, Jeremy creeping up on rodents and pouncing or swinging his blade to no effect. He mimed martial arts moves that looked like they’d been copied from a Jean Claude Van Damme flick, PYAAAAAAA! he’d shriek with each throw. We watched in bemusement until our friend relented and rejoined us on a stump by the fire, where a can of Vienna sausages was already waiting for him.