Prologue
When I was five I got lost in the forest. My hometown is surrounded by forest. Its also remote. The nearest cities are a four to nine hour drive away and you have to use a ferry to get to the main highway. Supply semi-trucks always come in Tuesdays and Thursdays every two weeks and the airport only has two flights a day. As a child much of the roads in town were just gravel, I've skinned my knees a lot learning to ride my bike, it's a town were everyone knows everyone and secrets are pretty much non-existence. And whenever people from out of town come in everyone watches them…closely under an air of open friendliness.
My family lived in the more remote part of town. A long stretch of road with heavy bush coming right up to the gravel. Its all cut down now, about five meters into the forest and the roads paved but there is no street lights save for a few here and there but still no one likes driving down that road. Its too empty. Especially at night.
Despite everything no one fears the forest. Much. Kids are always warned to be careful of the lakes and rivers and of bears but nothing else. Hunting and fishing is common activities and whatever fear you have as a child of going into the wild for the first time is talked away by parents and grandparents.
When I got lost I had been playing in the yard, my father was away at work, my mother inside doing whatever, cooking or cleaning or watching TV, she would often look out our big bay window to check up on me as I played. Our house even nowadays looks like it was just suddenly dropped from the sky into the forest. Our driveway is small and not easily seen from the road. If I wasn't seen in the yard she would go outside and yell my name and often I would pop out of the nearby forest where I had been playing some imaginary adventure.
But this one afternoon I didn't come running when called and after she had gone outside and checked the path which led down to the river bank, yelling my name the whole time she knew something was wrong. She called my father, the rest of the family and they spent the rest of the day looking for me until it became clear that I was missing.
Everyone in town helped with the search. It lasted almost three days. And on the fourth night I was found sleeping, wrapped up in a huge, huge black suit jacket on my family deck when they had returned to rest up to go out the next day to look for me. No one could explain it other then that maybe I had been kidnapped by an outsider but no one could remember see anyone in town or who matched my description of the man I often spoke of afterwards, a very tall man with long arms and legs and a face I couldn't see…I don't remember much during my time lost but my mother was a very Godly woman and was convinced it was my guardian angel.
But as I stand staring out my living window at the tall figure in the forest I can't help but wonder maybe she was right…or maybe even wrong…