◆ PARALLAX

Three nights running now, my Olympic site, between 2:00 and 2:20am: a single hard knock, a pause of maybe forty seconds, then two more in quick succession. Wood on wood, not a gunshot, not a branch coming down -- I know what both of those sound like up here. Same bearing all three nights, roughly NNE, up the slope. I am NOT saying the B-word yet. I am saying I have answered it twice with my own knock and the second time something answered back, closer, and my dog would not leave the truck. Trail-cam frame from night two below. It shows nothing useful, which I am posting ON PURPOSE so nobody can say I cherry-picked. Be honest with me. I would rather look stupid than fool myself.

02:11 06°C 02-02-2002

Send me the WAV, not the cassette dub, if you have it -- the dub will have eaten the attack. The reason knock recordings matter is the envelope: a falling branch has a messy, multi-impact decay; a deliberate strike has one clean transient and a short woody ring. I ran your night-three clip and the attack is a single sub-5-millisecond transient, three times, evenly spaced. That does not rule out a person. It does rule out "a branch fell," which is what half this thread is about to say. Spectrogram attached.

Wildlife biologist, board skeptic, here we go. Before anyone gets excited: barred owls bill-clack and do a knocking display, beavers tail-slap, and a buck will rake and crack a sapling in a way that carries a long way on a cold still night, which is exactly your conditions. "Evenly spaced" is also what a human does, and humans are common in the Olympics. I will grant Annie that the envelope is interesting. I will not grant that interesting equals unknown primate. No body, no bones, no road-kill in a hundred years of logging trucks. That absence is data too.

Thirty years tracking timber country, so let me be the boring one. Knocks alone are nothing I can work with -- I need ground. Squatch, what is the substrate up that NNE slope? If there is anything castable up there, get a clean cast, photograph it in situ with a scale BEFORE you lift it, and do not, for the love of god, "clean it up" with your thumb first. Half the casts I get sent are ruined before the plaster sets. And Stan is right that a rutting buck cracks wood. He is also, in my experience, a little too fond of the buck.

Cat -- substrate up there is mostly duff and root, bad for prints, but there is a seep crossing the game trail at the saddle and THAT held something. Photographed in situ with a tape before I touched it, as instructed. Single impression, no clear second one, ~37cm, but the mid-tarsal break people argue about is not obvious to me and I am not going to pretend it is. Polaroid scan below (the in-situ 35mm is still at the lab). Tell me what is wrong with it. Somebody always finds something and they are usually right.

Better than most. The tape is in the right plane, the lighting is raking, you did not stand in your own light -- good. Two cautions. One: that medial edge is soft, which in wet seep mud can mean a real foot OR a print that slumped, and from a Polaroid I cannot tell. Two, and listen to me: there is a man who works your general area who SALTS sites with a carved overshoe and then "discovers" them a week later. I am not accusing you. I am telling you the photo you took next week from the same spot could be his, not the animal's, and you would not know. Date everything. Trust the seep less than you want to.

Methodology, since that is the only thing I am useful for. Hang your cams in PAIRS facing each other across the trail, not one looking down it -- then anything between them is on two frames from two angles and a hoaxer has to fool both. Time-sync them. And put a cheap thermometer and a dated card in frame on the first shot of each card so nobody can claim you back-dated. The knock is a lure to keep you up the hill; the discipline is what survives contact with this forum.

Eleven cams here in PA, thousands of frames, and I will save everyone time: 90% of "anomalies" are an out-of-focus animal too close to the lens at the IR flash, which blows out white and loses all detail. Your night-two smear, Squatch, is textbook that. Here is one of mine from last week that LOOKS like a hunched figure at the wood-line and is, when the next frame fires, a deer with its head down. Posting both is the only honest way to post either.

23:48 PA 01-29-02