I took a weekend camping trip with my dog on some BLM land off the canyon backroads outside Salt Lake City . I ' d camped there many times in this quiet space near the river , and hardly saw anyone else save the occasional passing dirt bike . I got to the site and started to unpack a few hours before sunset when this young smallframed Asian man stumbles into my area with a dumb grin . He speaks broken English and tells me he ' s been camping across the river and into the woods from my site for weeks by himself . I want him to leave me alone because solitude is precisely the reason I ' m there , but I ' m a gentleman so I entertain the small talk . We exchange names and where we ' re from while I gather dead wood from the forest floor for that evening ' s fire . His name was Hao . Hao eventually asks , Are you a Christian ? I tell him no , I ' m an atheist . He stepped back a bit , even though I was friendly and showed respect for everyone ' s beliefs . Hao tells me he ' s followed Jesus into this forest to pray , and I decide he must have a long prayer to tell to have been out there for so long . I ' m sure it ' s because I told him I was atheist that he soon closed our conversation and crossed the river by way of hopping boulders large enough to protrude the rushing water and into the trees toward his camp site . That was the last I ever saw Hao , but it wasn ' t the last I ' d hear from him . The rest of my evening was calm and quiet . I smoked a joint and read T . S . Elliot by the river , lazily tossing sticks for my dog to chase . I bent a dozen branches I ' d cut from birch trees into a dome to build a smoker for some fish I planned to catch in the morning . When the sun fell and that sudden desert night cold set in , I made a fire and played a string of Johnny Cash tunes on my guitar . A few times I wondered where Hao was and what he was doing and whether he could hear me sing from his place across the river . Overall , it was a normal and quiet night , at least until a couple hours after I fell asleep in my tent . I woke up to my dog whining , and he never whines . His big white eyes darted around in the dark , and I knew something was outside our tent and near . I remind myself the worst it could be is a bear , then throw on a knitted beanie and slide a full magazine into the Walther beneath my cot . I listen for footsteps , but the forest is dead silent . Even the river beside my tent flows in a whisper . The silence is broken by a sound from across the river unlike anything I ' d ever heard . A series of long drawn out screeches call through the dark between the trees like hot breath rushing through an instrument crafted with demon horns . I didn ' t know what made the sound , other than it wasn ' t human , but much like you can hear when the voice of someone speaking a foreign language is sad , I read desperation in these otherworldly screams , a begging for one ' s life . For hours after the screaming stopped , my dog and I were still too scared to move . I sat in my tent , watching fog cloud around my red , panting nostrils and gripped the handle of my gun with white knuckles , but the night remained silent until morning . When day broke and my camp filled with light , I unzipped my tent about halfway before I saw the scene outside of it and froze . The floor of my campsite was littered with fifty or so little wooden crosses made from sticks and barktwine from the forest . Among the crosses were hundreds of dried up wasp carcasses sprinkled around my tent , like someone had poisoned an entire nest and spread the victims ' remains around me like lawn fertilizer . I surveyed the crosses and wasps across the dirt ground , trying to make sense of it , wondering how it got there in the night , and all while I slept . I remembered the screams in the night as my eyes wandered across my campsite , and that ' s when I saw it , about five feet from the entrance to my tent centered in an empty circle or dirt among the crosses and wasps . A heart . A pig ' s heart . I knew what a pig ' s heart looked like , even if I didn ' t know what they sounded like while being slaughtered . My eyes followed a trail of frost bitten blood that dripped from the heart across the dirt and crosses and wasps until it paused at the river where at the opposite bank the blood trail continued , through the pale blue dawn light between the distant trees , deep into the forest .