The Buck

Location: Appalachia

Classification: Witness Account / Regional Folklore

Status: Unverified

Evidence Summary

The hunter had been in the stand since before daylight.

By sunrise, the woods had settled around him.

Nothing unusual.

A few squirrels moving through the leaves. Birds calling farther down the ridge. Once, something small crossed the trail beneath the stand without stopping.

Then everything went quiet.

He heard the brush move sometime after eight.

Not the quick scramble of a rabbit or the careful steps of a doe.

Something heavy.

It moved slowly through the thicket below him.

He raised his rifle and waited.

A deer stepped through the brush.

A buck.

Big.

Bigger than anything he had seen on the property before.

For several seconds, the hunter simply watched it through the scope.

The rack was enormous. The body beneath it was thick through the shoulders and chest. It stood broadside perhaps sixty yards from the stand.

It should have been the best deer he had ever seen.

Instead, he lowered the rifle.

Something wasn’t right.

Years later, when asked what he had noticed, the hunter couldn’t explain it.

The proportions looked right.

The antlers looked right.

It moved like a deer.

But looking at it produced the same feeling as recognizing someone from a distance and realizing, as they came closer, that you had never seen them before.

The buck took another step.

The hunter raised the rifle again.

He settled the crosshairs behind the shoulder and fired.

The shot cracked through the woods.

The deer didn’t flinch.

It didn’t jump.

It didn’t run.

It simply stood there.

The hunter stared through the scope.

He worked the bolt and chambered another round.

The deer hadn’t moved.

He fired again.

Nothing.

No stumble.

No blood.

Not even the twitch of an ear.

Then the deer turned its head.

Not quickly.

Slowly.

Until it was looking directly up at the stand.

The hunter later insisted that this was the moment he became afraid.

Not when the first bullet appeared to miss.

Not when the second one did.

When it looked at him.

The two remained that way for several seconds.

Neither moved.

Then the deer turned its head back toward the trees.

It walked across the clearing.

Slowly.

Without urgency.

It disappeared into the brush.

The hunter remained in the stand for nearly an hour before climbing down.

He found where the animal had been standing.

He found both places where his bullets had struck the earth beyond it.

He found tracks leading into the clearing.

He found tracks leaving it.

There was no blood.

No hair.

Nothing indicating that either bullet had touched the animal.

He never hunted that stand again.

The story would be largely forgotten until decades later, when similar accounts began circulating throughout Appalachia.

The descriptions vary.

Too tall.

Too thin.

Legs that seem slightly too long.

Eyes that don’t look where a deer’s eyes should.

Some witnesses describe animals that walk strangely.

Others describe nothing unusual at all.

Only the certainty that what they were looking at was wrong.

Today, those stories have a name.

Not Deer.

The name is new.

The feeling isn’t.

Archivist's Note

Some things look exactly like what they are supposed to be.