The Meddybemps Prowler

The rain sounded different in the woods. Billy had lived here his entire life but was still struck by how the sound of rain coming down differed here versus almost anywhere else. Even on a mundane trip to Machias with his parents for groceries, if it happened to be raining it was an audibly different experience compared to being in the middle of the forest. In town, the rain only has the surface of old, cracked pavement to resonate against. In the forest it creates a symphony against the soft cushioned floor of pine needles, the crisp red leaves nearing their autumnal end of attachment, and anything else that happens to be on the ground: fallen branches, pine cones, blown down trees. 

How he came to be here at this exact place and time is a matter of minor complexity. A side effect of living in such a rural area is that kids find industrious ways to show each other how clever and cool they are. The usual cliques are still there, but here there are really just two overriding segments of teenage society: the 'in' crowd and the outcasts. You were 'in' if you were on a sports team, or a cheerleader, or maybe you just possessed that certain cool factor that worked in your favor. Here that could still mean you were into ATVs and hunting, everyone was, but you also needed something extra to set you apart from the standard breed of redneck kid that lived in these woods.

The Meddybemps forest. It's known around Downeast Maine as the place the Prowler lives. You can grow up here and believe through the immortality of youth that it's all bulshit, but you can't grow up here without at least being aware of what people say and what they claim to see. Over time more and more people that he trusted had shared their own stories. Like most things, teenagers could still exhibit some repudiation toward this, but deep down no one was fully able to swallow the idea that it was all a hoax. And so, during the fall of his junior year at Naraguagus High School the 'in' thing came to be hunting the Prowler. And he was desperate to be 'in.' He had lived his teen years perpetually on the cusp of coolness never quite realized, but a safe distance from the misfit dredges. He existed and most people barely noticed he was there. He wasn't outgoing enough to do anything drastic to challenge his plight, but maybe he could find the Prowler, or at least figure out what it was that people were seeing in the woods.

It seemed like as good a way as any to break free from the life of the wallflower. He longed to stand out but was unsure how else to detach from the background. He had set to seeking. He hated to call it hunting as he wasn't entirely sure what his intentions were. He always carried his shotgun. If he did find the Prowler, he wasn't confident enough in his marksmanship in a panicked state to rely on accuracy. Shotguns afford a level of forgiveness in that way, but at the cost of needing to be within close range. As thick as the woods were, he'd never be taking a long shot at anything anyway. It's not how the Maine woods work, especially the Meddybemps.

The Prowler was known to inhabit a certain pocket of these woods that encompassed about five square miles. It doesn't sound like a huge area and it's not in the grand scheme of the world, but these woods are dense and not super conducive to exploration. There are constant hills, thick undergrowth, a canopy that light struggles to penetrate at any time of day, and the Denys River splits it neatly in half with its narrow, but deep gorge that it has eaten for itself over the millennia.

It was the gorge that had done him in, not the Prowler itself. He made a foolish mistake in trying to cross it, got a foot trapped between some roots growing out of the bank and fell down the steep embankment, ringing his head off a large boulder on the way down. Presently he didn't remember this happening. He was just laying there, no longer in the gorge, but still very much in the dense forest, listening to the rain fall and wondering at how different it sounded in these woods compared to anywhere else. He thought about how the rain sounded at school, in Ms. Peters' English class with his eyes fixed on Kristi who sat left diagonally in front of him. He'd had a thing for her since they started high school. She had yet to acknowledge his existence. He recalled how the raindrops gathered in pools on the large rectangular windows that lined the wall behind her, all of it a blur like it would be in a photograph, a dark background to beauty. The rain was so muted there, like everything else that wasn't her.

And as a twig snapped to his right and he caught sight of a brown patch of fur above a foot both too large and too woolly to be human, he was still young and alive enough to have a fleeting sense that maybe he'd done it. Maybe he'd broken free from the background. However this played out from here, he was assured a starring role in the story and this was an odd bit of comfort to him. There was, of course, fear. It was intense, but it wasn't panic. The fear was paired with something new and serene. He was awake and aware enough to realize that death was likely near, but he was also close enough to it to see through the mirror of existence and on the other side there was a beauty in clear focus.

Whatever happened next, he had won.