The storm came on the second night of my camping trip. Weather could change fast this high up in the mountains, but this one I could see coming a long way off. By the time it arrived, a couple of hours after nightfall, I had my camp as battened down and squared away as possible. My tent was double-staked, with extensive ditching, all my gear was stored and secured, and my wet weather gear was at hand.
I had been hiking up into the wild, remote mountains since I was a little kid, originally with my grandpa, but after he passed, mostly by myself. I got up here as often as I could, but at the very least annually. Occasionally others would join me, but I was usually alone, which suited me fine. And through all those years, I had weathered many a storm.
But this was like nothing I'd ever seen before. There were the usual winds, lightning and thunder, which was plenty terrifying and exhilarating enough, but on top of that there were strange, shifting colors; blues, purples, greens and yellows, and very weird sounds. A long, continuous groaning alternated by something that sounded like a chainsaw were foremost, but beside that there was a bell-like knelling, strange alien screams and a very high-pitched whining noise that physically hurt.
The storm seemed to rage on for a couple of hours before it abruptly stopped, a change so sudden it was startling in itself. After all that roaring noise, the relative silence was extraordinary, and then I realized I was hearing bird songs. At about the same time, I recognized that I was seeing the glow of sunlight through the nylon fabric of my tent, and I was flabbergasted. Had I passed out? By my reckoning, it shouldn't even be midnight yet.
And then I stepped outside, and found the world turned on its head. I had been camped on a reasonably level spot on a high mountain meadow, a few dozen feet away from a rushing mountain stream. Now I was standing in a clearing in a forest, surrounded by huge, towering pines whose trunks seemed to be almost orange.
"What the fuck?" I said, and my voice sounded strange in my own ears.
Shafts of sunlight pierced the towering canopy here and there, and from the angle of the light I guessed it must be around noon. Like any pine forest, it seemed gloomy and hushed, but after a moment I recognized the distinct sound of rushing water.
I must have stood there for several moments, stunned by the changes in my reality, but I've never been one for particularly deep thinking, so I found myself moving off in the direction of the sound of the river, or stream, or whatever it was.
There were enough gaps in the trees for me to see that there was high ground around me in several directions, so I was starting to think maybe I had just wandered down off the mountain and then had some sort of blackout or something, forgetting all about it. Maybe I had hit my head: I was fair to partly clumsy, after all.
Within a few hundred yards I came upon a fast-moving creek, and in a few dozen more I found myself standing atop a pretty big waterfall, the water cascading down in a series of short steps, maybe 50 or 60 feet or more before winding away. The scene was spectacularly beautiful.
Then I heard a woman's voice speak from practically right next to me, and I was so startled that I nearly jumped over the edge. I think I even shrieked a little, and if I didn't at the sound, I surely did when I saw who was speaking to me. Or what.
"Holy shit, it's bigfoot!" I blurted in startlement. The woman- the creature standing there regarding me calmly was furry. Well, her bottom half was, anyway. And her arms. And where she wasn't furry, she was brown as a bear. And she had horns. And no clothes at all, only a couple of bags held up by straps that crisscrossed between her pert little tits.
She spoke again, but the words were nonsense, in some language I'd never heard. It was pretty clear to me that I had stumbled into some sort of bizarre furry role-playing game, and this girl was really into her role.
I shrugged helplessly. "Sorry- I'm just lost. I'm not part of your group. Do you know where the nearest road is?"
She cocked her head at me, then cautiously began picking her way over the rocks in the stream towards me. This gave me a chance to get a pretty good look at her. Her costume was out of this world. It even featured little goat-like hooves, which made her nimble movements all the more impressive: they must have been hell to walk on. She stepped daintily into the water a couple of times, and I thought that couldn't be good for the material, but then I noticed her knees bent the wrong way, and no costume could mimic that so well, and I began to feel distinctly weirded out.
She hopped up onto the bank and grinned up at me, and I realized she was less than 5 feet tall. At 6'2, I towered over her. She spoke again, in what I thought might be a different language, but one no less strange, and I shrugged helplessly.