I have a pretty good record when it comes to finding missing people. Most of the time they just wander off the trail or slip down a small cliff and can’t get back. Many of them remember the rule to stay where they are, so they don’t go any further. But there were two cases where that didn’t happen. Both stayed with me and made me take this job more seriously. The first one involved a young boy who went berry picking with his parents. He and his sister stayed together, and both disappeared at almost the same moment. Their parents lost sight of them for only a few seconds, and that was enough. We found the girl quickly, but when we asked about her brother, she said the “Bear Man” took him. She said he gave her berries and told her to stay quiet because he wanted to play with her brother for a while. The last time she saw him, he was sitting calmly on the Bear Man’s shoulders.

Our first thought was abduction, but we never found any sign of another person in the area. The girl insisted it wasn’t a normal man. She said he was tall, covered in hair like a bear, and had a strange face. We searched for weeks. It became one of the longest operations I’ve ever been part of, and we never found a single trace of the boy. The second case was a young woman hiking with her mother and grandfather. According to them, she climbed a tree to get a better view of the forest and never came down. They waited at the base for hours, calling her name before asking for help. We searched everywhere, but there was nothing. No sign that she had climbed down, no tracks, nothing at all. It was as if she had simply vanished into the air. I still don’t have any explanation for that.

A few times I went out searching with only a tracking dog. Each time, the dog led me straight to the base of steep cliffs. Not hills or rocky slopes, but sheer vertical walls with no way to climb. It always felt wrong. In cases like that, we usually find people at the top of the cliff, or miles away from where the dog takes us. I’m sure there is some explanation, but it never sat right with me. There was also a recovery case that I will never forget. A nine-year-old girl fell from an embankment and was impaled on a dead tree trunk. It was a horrible accident. I still remember the sound her mother made when we told her what happened. She saw the body bag being loaded into the ambulance and let out a scream that didn’t sound human. It felt like something inside her broke completely. Later I heard she took her own life weeks after losing her daughter.

Another time, I was sent out with another SAR officer because there were reports of bears in the area. We were looking for a climber who hadn’t come back on time. We had to climb hard ourselves to reach where he was supposed to be. We found him with a broken leg, stuck in a narrow gap. He had been there for two days and the wound was already infected. We got him onto a helicopter. Later, a medic told me the man kept talking about how everything had been fine until he reached the top. Someone was already there. No climbing gear, just a parka and ski pants. When the climber approached, the man turned around and had no face. Just nothing where it should be. The climber panicked and fell trying to get down. He said he could hear that faceless thing descending during the night, making low, muffled screams. I’m glad I didn’t hear that story directly from him.

One of the most disturbing cases happened during a night search for a girl who got separated from her group. The dogs picked up her trail, and we found her curled under a rotting fallen tree. She had no shoes, no backpack, and she was in shock. She wasn’t injured, so we started walking her back. The whole time, she kept looking behind us and asking why the man with black eyes was following. We saw no one. We thought it was just shock. But the closer we got to base, the worse she became. She asked me to tell him to stop making faces at her. At one point, she stopped and screamed into the forest, saying she wouldn’t go with him and wouldn’t give us to him either. Then we started hearing something around us. A strange, rhythmic sound, like a deep cough or something insect-like. It’s hard to explain. Near the station, she turned to me, eyes wide, touched my shoulder, and said he told me to hurry because he doesn’t like looking at the scar on my neck. I do have a small scar there, hidden under my collar. I have no idea how she knew. Right after that, I heard that same sound right next to my ear.

The last thing is the strangest of all. I don’t know if this happens in other SAR units, but it happens often enough that we stopped questioning it. No one talks about it. We were told not to. If you ask, you won’t get answers. When we go deep into the wilderness, thirty or forty miles in, we sometimes find stairs in the middle of the forest. Just stairs, like someone took them out of a house and left them there. The first time I saw them, I asked about it. I was told not to worry and never go near them. Everyone said the same thing. At first I wanted to check them out, but the warning was clear. Now I see them often enough that I just ignore them.