The Black Sap of the Hoh
Gwendolyn Good
Approx. Word Count: 1,245
Nobody talks about the winter of 1898 up on the Olympic Peninsula. If you ask the locals in Forks or Aberdeen, they’ll just say it was a bad year for logging. Lots of men packed up and went back east, they’ll tell you. But my great-grandfather was a bucker for the Pacific Timber Company back then, and the journal he left behind in a rusted tin box tells a completely different story.
It explains why the woods out here feel like they’re watching you. It explains where the monsters came from.
According to his notes, the camp was set up deep in the Hoh Rainforest. If you’ve never been, it’s a place that feels almost prehistoric. The rain doesn’t just fall; it hangs in the air, soaking right into your bones. The moss drapes over the Douglas firs like thick green cobwebs. The crew was thirty men, led by a foreman named Silas Crumb. Silas was a mountain of a man, six-foot-five, with a temper that made the rest of the crew walk on eggshells.
By November, the easy timber near the river was gone. The company bosses in Seattle were screaming for more board feet, so Silas pushed the crew higher up the ridge, into a valley the local Quinault guides refused to enter. They called it something in their language that meant “the quiet place.” When the logging crew got up there, they understood why.
There were no birds. No squirrels chattering. Just the suffocating silence of ancient wood.
In the center of this valley was a grove of western red cedars that defied logic. They were huge. The smallest one must’ve been thirty feet around. But the bark was all wrong. It wasn’t the usual reddish-brown; it was a sickly, pale gray, almost like dead skin.
Silas didn’t care. He just saw dollar signs. He ordered the men to rig up the springboards and get the crosscut saws biting into the biggest tree of the bunch.
My great-grandfather wrote that as soon as the teeth of the saw broke the bark, a horrible smell hit them. It wasn’t the clean, sharp scent of fresh pine or cedar. It smelled like rotten meat and wet earth. A few men started dry-heaving, but Silas threatened to dock their pay, so they kept on pulling the saw.
About three feet deep, the tree started to bleed.
It wasn’t normal sap. It was pitch-black, thick as molasses, and warm to the touch. When it splashed onto the sawyers’ hands and faces, it burned like lye. Seven men got covered in the stuff before the tree finally gave out with a crack that sounded like a cannon firing. When it hit the forest floor, the ground shook so hard that two of the riggers got thrown off their feet.
They spent the rest of the day bucking the massive trunk. The seven men who had been splashed with the black sap, Silas included, couldn’t seem to wash it off. No matter how hard they scrubbed with river water and lye soap, the black stain stayed on their skin, sinking into their pores.
That night, the fever hit them.
The journal describes the camp devolving into a nightmare. The infected men lay in their bunks, sweating through their wool blankets, groaning in a pitch that sounded less like human pain and more like a dog whimpering. My great-grandfather was tasked with bringing them water, but they wouldn’t drink. They just stared at the ceiling with bloodshot eyes.
By the third day, the physical changes started.
It started with the hair. The men were sprouting thick, coarse, dark brown hair all over their bodies. It pushed out of the black stains on their skin, growing inches in a matter of hours. Their jaws seemed to swell, pushing their teeth out of alignment. Silas, who was already a giant, seemed to be stretching. The seams of his trousers ripped. He lay on his bunk, his breathing heavy and wet, chewing on the wooden frame of his bed like a teething animal.
The rest of the crew was terrified. A few packed their bindles and tried to hike back down to the river in the dead of night, but a freak snowstorm blew in, trapping everyone in the valley.
On the fifth night, the screaming started.
My great-grandfather wrote that he was awakened by a sound that made his stomach drop. It was a roar, deep, guttural, and loud enough to rattle the tin roof of the bunkhouse. He grabbed his lantern and a pickaxe and ran toward the foreman’s cabin.
The door was smashed off its hinges. Inside, the place was a wreck. The wood stove was overturned, and the heavy oak desk was splintered into kindling. Silas was gone.
Down in the main bunkhouse, chaos had broken out. The other six infected men had torn through their restraints. They weren’t men anymore. They stood easily over seven feet tall, completely covered in thick, matted fur that smelled of that same rotten-meat sap. Their faces were stretched, flat-nosed, and primitive. Their eyes, catching the lamplight, shone with a terrifying, wild yellow glare.
One of the riggers, a young kid from Portland, tried to stop one of them with a hunting knife. The creature didn’t even flinch. It just swatted the kid aside with a huge, hairy hand, sending him crashing through a glass window.
They didn’t attack the rest of the crew though. That was the strangest part. They just looked at the uninfected men with a strange, dull confusion, almost like they were trying to remember a past life. Then, one by one, they turned and ducked out the door into the freezing blizzard.
My great-grandfather followed their tracks the next morning. The footprints in the snow were barefoot, impossibly large, and sunk deep into the powder. The tracks led straight up the mountain, past the tree line, disappearing into the crags and caves of the Olympic range.
The surviving crew members abandoned the timber. They hiked out two days later when the snow broke, leaving thousands of dollars of prime wood in the quiet valley. When they got to Seattle, the company men asked what happened to Silas and the others. The crew made a pact on the trail to lie. They said an avalanche took them. Who would believe the truth? That the forest had defended itself by pumping poison into the men cutting it down? A poison that didn’t kill them, but turned them into something that belonged to the woods.
My great-grandfather never logged again. He moved to Tacoma, got a job at a hardware store, and never went camping or hiking for the rest of his life.
But sometimes, when the wind blew hard off the Puget Sound, carrying the scent of wet earth and pine, he would lock all the doors and sit by the window with a loaded rifle. Because he knew that they were still out there. The men who were poisoned by the black sap. They wander the deep woods of the Pacific Northwest, living in the shadows, growing older and larger, breeding in the quiet places where human feet don’t tread.
People call them Sasquatch or Bigfoot, thinking they’re some kind of missing link or overgrown ape. But my great-grandfather knew the truth. They aren’t animals. Not originally, anyway. They’re just the logging crew of 1898, paying the price for cutting down something that should’ve been left alone.