I was awakened by blood curdling screams coming from my companion’s tent in the middle of the night. “Are you okay? Do you need help?” I shouted into the darkness. “Yes…Heelllpp, aiiiyeeeeee,…” and so on. She later told me she didn’t know she was capable of screaming like that.
She was out of the tent by the time I got over there, standing there shaking and whimpering because there was a mouse in her tent. So I empty out her tent, corner the mouse and was about to crush it, and I hear her behind me, “no, don’t hurt it, it’s cute.” The loudest screaming I ever heard, and it’s cute? Her screams gave me such a shot of adrenaline I couldn’t get back to sleep for an hour or more. Cute?
It was a nine-day trip on the upper Missouri, she was otherwise a solid paddling companion and we became good friends. We often laugh at the cute mouse story. But that was my most scarey bump in the night. Second place was at a car campground when two raccoons nabbed some food from a neighbors site and were up in a tree fighting over it and making hideous screaming noises at each other. I was unaware of their vocal ability.
A weird one was at 9-mile on the Saint John ( Maine). There was a cable system there for crossing the river in a small bucket-gondola, and I’d pitched my tent not far from the steel tower from which the cable was suspended. Wicked bad weather that night—snow and howling wind, and in the middle of the tumult I hear the sound of the cable operating, complete with a click, like the bucket is docking. I stuck my head out the tent and shined a light, but all I could see were blackness and wind-driven snowflakes. I heard the noise repeatedly, but in the morning, no tracks in the snow or any other sign the cable had been operating. I’ll never know what I was hearing, and I think my imagination just turned those noises into something that wasn’t happening. It’s weird what your brain will cook up when it can’t explain what the senses deliver to it.
