Overnight in New Mexico

The three of us sat on folding chairs around the table where Dick had the microphone plugged into a tape recorder and directed toward the high-altitude evergreen forest and the sheer granitic bowl behind and above it. On the table also were three magnum revolvers and three blue enamelware cups of red wine. “I don’t expect anything the first night,” Dick McCuistion said. “Let’s forget about a watch, shall we?”

The sound was the familiar half-human howl, beginning with a whoop, sustaining itself on the exhalation, and lasting three and a half minutes by my watch. It was a cry such as a man — a nine-foot-tall one — could produce; a headvoice bonded to a deep chest tone. “Well,” said Dick when the echo had exhausted itself within the bowl, “that didn’t take long, did it?”

We were camped at 11,000 feet, directly beneath Conejos Peak in the San Juan Mountains of southwestern New Mexico and immediately west of the San Luis Valley, which has a long and well-attested history of paranormal occurrences. Five years before, Dick, then a wildlife biologist with the US Bureau of Land Management office in Kemmerer, Wyoming, had had a similar experience while elk hunting in the mountains near Leadville, Colorado. On this particular expedition we were joined by biologist Keith Gilbert of Kansas, who’d had a close encounter with a strange but unseen creature while fly-fishing the Conejos River a couple of years before. “I guess we’ve been discovered,” Dick said. “Sounds to me like the word is on the street already. I think we can look forward to an encounter tonight, after all.”

We secured the camp and Keith checked the curiosity baits he’d devised and rigged to the alarm system on his pickup truck. Then Dick and I retired to the camper and turned in fully dressed, with the loaded twelve-gauge shotguns between us and the Bionic Ear at the heads of the sleeping bags. At midnight I took the watch from him and was roused from my own bag three hours later by a gathering, rushing sound from the Ear, like some mysterious energy field bearing down on the camper and accompanied by heavy footfalls in the background. I was considering waking Dick when there was another sound: a sharp click, like one rock striking cleanly against another. The headphones roared in my ears as I threw off the bag and shook Dick awake. Together we listened to the recording, which had also picked up something else: five measured hollow knocks at a distance.

“Something pounding a log with a stick — classic primate behavior,” Dick suggested in a whisper. “I’ll take the watch until dawn.”

In the morning the three of us scouted the woods for evidence and came upon a number of beds, all of them plainly made by elk except for one, where a faint print, like that of some large, soft-footed thing, was barely visible in the thin mountain soil beneath the matted grass. We spent the afternoon patrolling on horseback and lay down with the sun after Keith had checked his baits with their waxed tabula for handprints and I snubbed the horses to the rear of the trailer as sentinels.

We awakened all at once to find ourselves outside the camper clutching the shotguns amid flashing lights, a wailing siren, and a truck horn sounding, while from somewhere in the darkness Keith was shouting “False alarm!” The mechanism had malfunctioned and activated itself. Dick scanned the tree line with his night vision apparatus and Maglite before we returned to the camper, where I slept soundly for another couple of hours before rising again to relieve myself and found the horses standing rigid at attention, ears forward as they stared across camp into the wilderness’s black heart. Beyond the yellow shine of their eyes, two points of red light that could have been spots on the surface film of my eyes winked from the darkness directly above a clump of low scrub pine.

Just past dawn we sat by the built-back fire eating the MREs Dick had brought along and drinking tea, with the Bionic Ear in place on the table and the revolvers beside it. After breakfast Keith loaded his truck for the drive home to Kansas while Dick watered and grained the horses. “If you guys were to stay overnight again, I think you’d be all right, probably,” he said.

Dick shook his head. “They had us surrounded last night. I know you think these things are basically benign, but I’m not so sure. My Marine training taught me that when you’re told to surround something, it’s in order to take it out.”

“So what do you think?” I asked him when the pickup had disappeared down the two-track. “Is it in there, or isn’t it?”

“It’s in there.”

“Then — what is it?”

“For now, I just want to call it a Being. Something much smarter than it’s ever been given credit for.”

“Did you catch those red points in the Maglite last night?”

Dick was startled. “What red points? You didn’t tell me about that.”

“I forgot. Do you think it’s important?”

“They’re reported to have red eyeshine,” Dick said.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 2024 World edition.