Skinwalker Reserve

Darkness Prevails (0:00)

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Darkness Prevails (1:36)

Do you believe that dreams sometimes have meanings? Might they be premonitions, warnings that could keep your life from ending horribly one day? This story might be for you.

When wildlife researchers begin to track a wolf, they start to realize something is very wrong with it, something that might be horribly contagious. This story is titled Skinwalker Reserve, and it was sent to me by Jessica Miles.

This is a tale from the Break Room.

I've had the same dream since I was six or seven years old. I'm going to tell you about it first. And it's going to sound like it has nothing to do with the rest of this. But it does.

In the dream, I'm a kid again, and I'm in my bed in the house I grew up, which was a two-story farmhouse outside of Marshfield, Wisconsin. It's the middle of the night when my dad calls me downstairs. He says my name, Joe, like he used to. So I get up and go out into the hall, and the light at the bottom of the stairs is off.

I start to go down, but that's it. I never get to the bottom. Sometimes I get two steps down. Sometimes I even get most of the way. I wake up before I get there every time, and I wake up feeling like I just barely missed getting hit by a car. And I have no idea why.

My mom took me to the doctor about it when I was eight, because I was waking the whole house up. The doctor said it was night terrors. And that I would grow out of it.

I didn't really grow out of it, though. It got less frequent. In college, it happened maybe twice a year. Usually during finals. My dad thought it was funny in a sort of hurt way. He'd say, what am I doing down there that's so bad? And I never had an answer for him. Because in the dream nothing happens, he's just calling me.

I'm 34 right now. I no longer work in wildlife. But this story is about when I did.

I got my degree in wildlife ecology from UW-Stevens Point. I did what I thought everybody does after. Bouncing around between seasonal tech jobs, which pay about 15 bucks an hour and put you up in whatever building is closest, well, closest to falling down. I banded ducks in North Dakota and I did a lot of browse surveys. I spent one miserable summer counting fish in a ware in Alaska. I got bit by so many noceums my eyelids swelled shut. What I wanted to work with was carnivores. You may not know it, but everyone in this industry wants to work with carnivores. So in the spring of 2016, when I got an email back about a tech position on a wolf project in the Northern Rockies, I was ready to say yes before I finished reading it. This project was a few years into a study on how wolfpacks were using a big chunk of national forest which had a lot of new logging roads punched into it. They wanted to know if wolves were using the roads to hunt, avoiding them, that kind of thing. It meant collaring as many wolves as we could across four packs, then following the data around. We would visit kill sites, set up trail cameras, collect scat, and there was a lot of driving and a lot more walking.