When night closes on the Ottine Swamp, a strange region of near impenetrable thicket and bog along some ten thousand acres that flank the San Marcos River below Luling, southwest of Austin, something goes wrong with our evaluation of everyday life forms.
Something that no one can quite describe, but that many have experienced, is abroad in that small jungle and its outlying postoak thickets. To understand this, consider Berthold Jackson, an A&M graduate engineer and woodsman who knows the Ottine as well as you know your backyard. A strong-faced resolute man, he has stalked that something for more than thirty of the sixty-odd years he has lived beside the swamp.
As with countless others--night hunters, fishermen--he has found it, as often as not, stalking him: three times, close indeed. It was like something that let you see only its movement until it elected terrifying visibility.
That is precisely what he described over early coffee on a fine spring morning. His comfortable brick home occupies a knowl just south of Ottine's fringe, yet his thoughts were following a night hunter's soft carbide light-- a head or waistband mount. And he was in that jungle with his friend, Johnny Boehm of Gonzales. Long earlier, their dogs had run loose; they were alone.
"Johnny was behind me, maybe fifty yards," Jackson said. "I could see his light, and he could see mine. The danged thing got right between us.
"We could see the brush move." He gestured the rippling movement of passage. " We could hear brush snap underfoot. But we couldn't see a thing except that brush moving. Not the thing itself. And that close, an animal's eyes would show like headlights."
"You've never actually see it? I asked.
"Just its movement. And I've put a big light on it; so have others, more than once. Nothing!" He thought awhile. "I've read its track-- like small woman's hand except it comes to a point at the base of the palm, and there's just a stump where the thumb ought to be. I've heard it, nights. I've heard just about every animal's cry: this one is somewhere between human and animal-- like nothing you've ever heard in your life."
Steeped as he is in the ways of forest things, Jackson placed this creature's weight at well over a hundred pounds. "Yet." he added, "we've doubled back and seen limbs it stepped on and broke." He shook his head. " It could weigh more--like an ape."
"When you heard it...," I began.
"We went in after it." He pointed toward the woods east of the Warm Springs Foundation at Ottine. "Black dark in there: it moved too fast. We heard it dead ahead, then all at once, a quarter mile north."
I must have looked skeptical, for Berthold Jackson began to name more than a dozen substantial citizens in Luling or Gonzales who had close-encountered the thing. O.J. Behrendt, longtime maintenance engineer at the foundation, knows it's his neighbor.
"Billy Webb and Buddy Brown," Jackson recalled, "and Ab Ussery: talk to them; they're in Luling. They were running a trotline one night, planned to camp there. The thing came along the bank: they could see those bloodweeds moving as it followed them.
"Billy told me later, "You better talk to Ab: he just tried to walk on the water.' Well, I ran into Ab and hoorawed him, and he said, "Heck, if you think I was scared, you ought to have seen Billy Webb; he wouldn't run that line past the middle sinker, not near that bank.' "
"And all they saw was movement?"
"And heard it; the bloodweed was dry. A big light, and they weren't twenty feet from the bank. They forgot all about camping the night."
I broke in with the legend of long ago indians, pursued by Spaniards. Both left the known trail, and the bog got them all. Maybe their phantoms?
"Mud boils got 'em," he said. "Big around as a room and no bottom at fifty feet. They used to be all over, but they're drying up now. Anyhow, I don't figure it's a ghost."
"You keep on about animals," I said, "but you've never heard of one like this."
"What else could it be?"
Well," I said, "what do you call it?"
"Same as all the others who know this swamp. The thing."
Jackson recalled Brewster Short and Wayne Hodges: they were grown now, but he'd known then since they were young. For most of their years, they'd hunted and fished these bottoms. One night their dogs hit something and ran it (or perhaps, I thought, from it). At least two miles, they ran to the foot of Lookout Hill at the entrance to Palmetto State Park.
"They got one dog in," Jackson recalled. "Wayne was in the back of the car, holding his hound, and Brewster was calling in the others. All at once, Wayn'es dog bristled all up and started howling. When he did, something reared up on the back of the car. Wayne looked around, and all he could see was big and gray.
"Brewster looked around and yelled, 'Good God Almighty!' He threw it in gear and left those two dogs still running." Jackson's eyes narrowed. "Wayne's plenty brave, always was. But when he got home, he moved into his mother and dad's bedroom."
Jackson's cousin, Lamar Ryan, also experienced Lookout Hill. "He was up there one night, courting his wife-to-be. Something grabbed his back bumper and started bouncing that pickup forward. From the edge, it's a good drop.
"Somebody trying to scare them, Lamar figured: he jumped out quick and ran all the way around it. Nothing there: nothing at all. And nowhere to hide, not in full moonlight. They got out fast."
Jackson's last experience with whatever stalks the swamp was six years ago. Differentiating carefully between what he knows first hand and what he's heard, second hand, he still left evidence that something is yet there.
"Some folks moved in a trailer house, across the highway where I picked up those tracks. I don't know them, but my son asked if anything funny happened, and he said the fellow didn't stop talking for half-an-hour.
"Said once or twice something had shaken the house like a box. Said they'd hung his wife's best dress on the line and had come home to find it torn in half, and each half rolled in a ball and stuck under each bed.
"And--now this is hearsay--she thinks she saw something. This time it was little, not big like Wayne saw--say, the size of a boy, but it had a face like some kind of animal she's never seen."
"It changes sizes," I suggested, the thought-projection theory whispering in the back of my mind. "Also its appearance. Why not?"
"Hell, I don't know what it does. I know I spent fifty-four months in World War II--Saipan to Okinawa--and the only time in my life that my hair has stood straight on end is when I've looked right at it and couldn't see a thing.
"Doctor says I shouldn't." He tapped his heart. "But I'd like to give it one more real try." Again he looked across where the San Marcos edges from its dark swamp. "But I won't go back in again, not without enough dogs and men...and all of us with rifles."
Driving away from my camp at Palmetto State Park, itself within the fringe of Ottine Swamp, I thought it necessary to reassure you who may find it as pretty a camp as I have, many, many times.
Of course, the campsites are on solid ground, and the swamp lies out beyond. The record shows no quiet camper's ever having been molested in that park.
But then, who among all of us would venture that surrounding jungle at midnight?
Berthold Jackson is a rock-solid Aggie, a brave man whom I respect, and a woodsman with few peers. But I shall not be with him when and if the Thing of Ottine Swamp finally determines to confront him.
--
How it changed my life:This interview was compiled by Ed Syers, Kerrville, Texas, published by Texian Press, submitted for your viewing pleasure.
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