Several years back when I was still in the Boy Scouts program, our troop took a camping trip to Brazos Bend State Park. In case you didn't know, Boy Scout troops are organized into individual groups known as patrols, and each patrol has its own leader, unique patrol name, and patch. My patrol was called the Flaming Arrows at the time, complete with awesome flaming arrow patch. I don't think I was actually the elected patrol leader at the time of this trip, but the actual patrol leader wasn't able to go. So I ended up being named temporary patrol leader for the Brazos Bend trip. This was kind of a big deal for me because until that trip, I had never been patrol leader before. I never had the guts to run for it, even though some part of me knew I could win it easily. Another thing the patrol leader gets to do is select an assistant patrol leader, and since this trip happened during the brief time that my best friend Ben was still with the troop, he was my first choice.
Now, I'd been camping many, many times with this troop before in various state parks, but one thing still bothered me about camping at Brazos Bend. It's a wildlife reserve that's famous for one particular type of inhabitant: the ludicrous amount of alligators who call the swamps there home. I still wasn't entirely clear on how camping in an alligator-infested swampland was a good idea, but we were also being promised a trip out to the George Observatory to look at Mars, which was the closest to Earth as it was going to be for a very long time.
The trip was fairly uneventful up until the night we were supposed to go out to the observatory. It was the standard camping experience around the site, my patrol was busy doing what the oldest present patrol always did, which was to sit around and do nothing. The younger scouts were marveling at everything and obsessing over building their own little fires and cooking on their own, and our neighbor patrol had realized that their chuckbox didn't actually have any cookware in it because the last person to clean it never put any back in, so they were attempting to cook their meals on metal plates. After watching them warp about six of them, we decided to let them use our stuff because we were good, responsible scouts like that. Meanwhile the camp nuisances, a couple of kids who we'll just call Thing 1 and Thing 2, were busy fighting with each other and irritating everyone else around them. It seemed like it was always Thing 1's goal to piss off as many people as possible before running to his father for help when we finally turned on him, even though that never did much to save him. Thing 2 on the other hand truly believed that we were all his bestest buddies even though we pretty much universally hated him.
I'd actually been nice to the guy once and he'd decided that we were besties for life or whatever. He became my obnoxious, awkward little shadow from then on. Every year the troop went on two week-long trips, one in the summer and one in the fall or winter, and the fall/winter camp was at a little patch of hell on earth known as Camp Karankawa. This desolate patch of mosquito-infested bog was parked next to the San Bernard river. While the rest of south Texas could be a comfortable, sunny, dry climate, Camp Karankawa couldn't give less of a damn. It had its own weather system and was capable of being miserably cold and stormy while surrounding areas were pleasant. The year after, when the troop had gone out there for Fall camp, it had already reached that point in the week where it was sinking in that this year was not, in fact, going to be any better than it was last year, and we were all cold and angry. We ate our lukewarm breakfasts of box-eggs, meat substitute sausage and box-everything-else and then trudged off begrudgingly to our merit badge classes, so it was about that time that I decided I was tired of being Thing 2's friend. Instead of just telling him that, however, I decided to just give him something to do that didn't involve pestering me. So I decided to tell him a little story.
Off in the back woods down a mostly forgotten little trail at Camp Karankawa is an old car. It's anyone's guess as to how it got there, but the patch of woods where it rests is eerily quiet. It's a perfect setup for a good ghost story. So Thing 2 and I took a little trip back there, and I told him the story of how a man was driving home about this time of year on an elevated strip of highway nearby when he fell asleep at the wheel. His car jumped the guard rail and rolled down the hill, crashed through into this little clearing and ejected him from the car. Then I told him about how the guy was still alive, but the camp hadn't been established yet so nobody could hear him yelling for help, and because his legs were broken from the crash, he died slowly and painfully there in the clearing until animals came and dragged his corpse away. The little weirdo bought the story hook line and sinker, and I helpfully encouraged it every time he thought he felt cold or saw a ghost walk past in the forest. Then, as we were walking back to camp, the heavens opened up and fate smiled down on me and we stumbled across some scout's missing merit badge class schedule. The badges were unimportant, but what I did notice was that the correlating course numbers were A1, 2B, 3, 4A and 5. Anyone with half a brain could see that those numbers simply told what areas of the camp's map the scout needed to be in for those classes, and while I could see that I also saw something else. If you were to speak those letters and numbers out loud in a certain way, it sounded something like "I want to be free for a while." Which is precisely what I told Thing 2. And then I convinced him that it was obviously a secret message from a certain ghost, and that there were probably other things like this around. He stared at me with big wide all-believing bunny eyes and I sent him off to find them. For the rest of the week he was scampering around collecting trash, bits of paper and rock, and other people's schedules in an attempt to solve the mystery of a ghost which I almost completely made up.
Back at Brazos Bend, however, there were no such conveniently creepy car wrecks to pin ghost stories to, so we were pretty much stuck with him. He wasn't even in our patrol, but his own patrol had made it clear how much they hated him and it also didn't contain me, his bestest ghost-busting buddy, so we got landed with him most of the time.
Finally, it was the part we'd all been waiting for. We were going to go to the observatory to look at Mars. We all packed up into the van and headed down to the George Observatory where we took our places at the back of the line and proceeded to sit on benches and railings and be bored out of our minds for an hour or two while the adults talked with the people at the desk. Finally the adults showed back up, gathered us all around and told us that we weren't going to be looking through the telescope because evidently we needed reservations beforehand to actually use the good telescope. Our alternative option was to wait in a really long line to look through the much less impressive little telescope, but nobody cared to do that. We'd already been out there long enough and another scout had gotten sick, probably because his dinner was cooked on a metal plate, and puked all over the place. So we packed up into the van and headed back to camp.
When we arrived there, it was immediately clear that something was not right in the camp. A strange haze and odd smell hung over the entire place, and something just seemed amiss. That was when somebody pointed out the smoldering remains of what had previously been Thing 2's fanny pack (he was the only scout in the troop who wore a fanny pack). We all thought it was hilarious until we realized that the smoldering chunk of burned crap it was sitting on top of was actually the remains of my patrol's ice chest containing all of our food for the next day. Evidently, someone had left a kerosene lantern burning on top of our ice chest when we left, and the local raccoon population decided they were in the mood for a midnight snack. When they couldn't get the ice chest open, they burned it to the ground because they're evil little creatures. I'm sure that's not exactly what happened, but at the time we were all pissed off because we had no food, and for all we cared the raccoons were some sort of animal mafia who had organized this from the beginning. We didn't even take solace in the fact that some raccoon out there had probably burned the piss out of himself when he knocked the lantern over. The fire was still burning in some places, however, and needed to be extinguished. So because my patrol was the primary victim of the raccoon arson, we had to be the ones to go fill the water tub and bring it back to camp.
Troop 325's water tub was a large metal basin that, when full of water, took at least two scouts to carry. Therefore, it was necessary for three of us to venture out into the night to fill it. Two to hold the bucket, and one to hold the flashlight. Naturally, Ben and I were voluntold to go out along with a third scout. Ben held the flashlight, I held the empty basin, and the third scout just kind of came along with us.
I remember what happened next like it was a scene from the Blair Witch Project. There was no moon that night, and the trail was extremely dark. We had gone out far enough that the light from the campsite couldn't be seen anymore behind us. We had just reached a large clearing around the area where the water faucet should have been when suddenly I hear Ben yell. I looked up to see where his flashlight was pointing, and there it was.
We were face to face with a creature unlike any we had seen before. It was long and thin with a long tail like a cat, but it had a narrow face like a dog. It had strange scale-like coloration, a dark eye mask like a raccoon, a mouth full of needle-like teeth and two large, glowing green eyes. Either someone's incredibly ugly dog thing had gotten off its leash, or we had just encountered the Chupacabra, but whatever it was we didn't care. What we cared about is that it made a strange noise and started moving towards us. Now, Ben was holding a maglite with steel casing. I was holding a heavy metal washtub, and the other scout had a walking stick, and as Flaming Arrows, we did what we had to do.
We dropped everything, screamed like sissy girls and went tearing blindly through the woods back toward the campsite, because none of us felt like being devoured by some nightmare creature of the bog. We burst back into camp vehemently refused to go back out into the dark anymore that night. Finally, after the adults were sure that none of us were bleeding and we weren't hysterical anymore, one of them went down the trail to retrieve the wash bucket and flashlight. He came back and reported no strange creature, so it probably only preyed on scouts. We spent the remainder of the evening shining the flashlight around the camp and into the trees to count the pairs of raccoon eyes watching us and trying desperately to sleep knowing that some Yeth Hound creature still prowled the night nearby. There were no further attacks that night, and the only other disturbance was when Thing 1 decided it'd be funny to piss on our tent in the middle of the night. We were only able to sleep again after the adults had informed Ben that he wasn't actually allowed to force Thing 1 to do a thousand push-ups in the mud as punishment.
Looking back on the incident now, it's fairly obvious to me what happened that night. When I think back on some oddly colored creature with catlike features, a doglike face and an odd prowling nature, it's almost tempting to assume that it was actually just a fox and not some demonic entity bent on devouring our souls. I'm fairly convinced however that it was, in fact, the dreaded Catcoondillo.
-The Sarcastic Soul-
Lol excellent story. :D
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