The Stranger in the Woods_ The - Michael Finkel

His thieving raids became considerably more challenging, as cabin owners upgraded locks and installed
security systems that were far more complex than any he’d dealt with during his brief time in the workplace.
Surveillance cameras became both difficult to incapacitate and widely used.
And despite his fanatical caution on his thieving raids, during which the primary rule was never to break
into an occupied cabin, the law of averages began to catch up with him. He finally experienced what he
called “an anomaly.” Or maybe he got a touch sloppy or overconfident, after so many hundreds of
successes.
One midweek summer evening in 2012, Kyle McDougle, whose family has owned property on North
Pond for generations, decided to stay alone at the family’s cabin. McDougle was twenty at the time, and had
heard hermit stories all his life. His grandfather especially liked telling them. McDougle was working for a
fiber-optics firm, driving around in a big company truck that couldn’t fit on narrow roads, so he left the rig
some distance away. It was probably the only time in his life, McDougle says, that he didn’t park a vehicle in
the cabin’s driveway. He crawled into a sleeping bag in the cabin’s upstairs loft.
“I wake up and I hear someone on the stairs and I see a flashlight,” recalled McDougle. He shouted a
greeting and got no response, and knew right away it wasn’t a family member showing up in the middle of
the night. “I didn’t have a flashlight, or a knife, or a gun, and I’m trapped upstairs, so my immediate thought
was to scare him, so I yelled, ‘Get the hell out of here!’ plus a whole bunch of swearwords, shouting at the
top of my lungs.” With this, the intruder immediately retreated or maybe tumbled down the stairs—“It was
bang, bang, bang, bang, bang,” said McDougle—and fled out of the cabin.
McDougle never saw the trespasser, but he noted that the screen was popped out of one of the cabin’s
windows and propped against a wall. “I was obviously very freaked out. I called the police, but there wasn’t
a heck of a lot they could do.”
Knight felt terrible about the incident. “I hate to think that I scared someone like that,” he said. “That
really bothers me.”
As Knight aged, the population of North Pond gradually increased, a few more homes built or expanded
each year, families growing, more people in the forest. Knight was alert for unusual sounds. He often heard
hikers, but not too near his camp, and on those rare occasions when he sensed a person while he was moving
through the trees, he had plenty of time to dash away and quietly hide.
Except once. It was during the day, sometime in the 1990s, before he began walking almost exclusively at
night and never on trails. He was on a lightly traveled path, and came around a bend, and with no advance
warning, there was someone else. Knight can’t say what the hiker looked like—he made no eye contact. He
tried to put on a nonchalant face, but he felt panicky. Neither man stopped. Knight said, “Hi,” and the man
said, “Hi,” and they continued on their separate ways.
This was his only encounter for more than twenty years. Then, during a cold winter day, while Knight
was ensconced in his camp, he heard a group of people in the forest, postholing through the snow. The steps
grew louder and nearer, tree branches snapping like firecrackers, Knight’s distress rising, until he made the
decision to step out of his camp and assess the situation. He didn’t want to be seen, but he couldn’t risk
anyone stumbling upon his home.
He walked a dozen quiet steps and there they were, breathing heavily in the crisp air. Three men, three
generations of the same family—son, father, and grandfather—tromping happily through the woods after a
day of ice fishing. Knight ducked down, he said, but it was too late. He’d been spotted. According to Knight,
one of the men shouted, “Hey!”