I woke up at 5 am to leave for my friend’s house on Monday morning. My friend, Richard, had invited me to go hunting with him at his cabin and 200 acres of land up in Montana for two weeks. Needless to say, both of us being avid hunters, the prospect was very inviting to me and I accepted without hesitation.

Accompanied by Richard’s six faithful hunting dogs that he took with him on every hunting trip, we left out and arrived at his hunting lodge at around 10 am that day. We spent the rest of the day unpacking, putting the dogs in their large pen that he had taken weeks to build, scouting the area since it had not been hunted since last year, and putting up our stands and blinds. I picked a small meadow at the base of a large hill to place my blind, which is essentially a small, camouflaged tent. We then went to bed early, since we needed to be in the woods before daylight.

Our alarm went off at 4:30 am, and we hurried to jerk our camo on and get our guns ready. It was 5:45 when I got to my blind, and the frosty morning was alive with the sounds of squirrels and birds all around. I had waited a little while when a young buck stepped out in the meadow. As I was waiting for him to stop and give me a shot he unexpectedly went very alert, raising his head up and giving a loud snort, looking back toward the edge of the woods to the right of where we came out. The strange way he acted caused me to hesitate a little out of curiosity, thinking maybe it was a larger deer, but as he calmed down and continued to feed I began to put the crosshairs on him. I had pulled the safety off and was just about to pull the trigger when he suddenly bolted with no warning towards the way he came. As I lowered the rifle I saw a glimpse of something dark going back into the woods, but knowing that there were wolves and bears around, I dismissed it as that and waited the rest of the morning out, but never saw anything else. Oddly, it seemed that after this event the usually continuous activity of the small animals around went nearly silent, leaving only the odd birdsong.

We both met at the lodge and had a long lunch and a small nap, then went back out into the woods for the evening at around 3 pm. The woods were silent. Not a squirrel bark, not a bird song, nothing disturbing the leaves at all. Disappointed, I decided to leave before dark since it seemed like a waste of time to stay any longer. However, just as I was getting up, I heard something from behind the blind rush away in what sounded like a great hurry, but by the time I got the blind unzipped it was long gone, leaving only a faint smell, sort of like a wet dog and stale breath. Once again, I wrote this off as a curious wolf or coyote and, though it seemed odd for it to get that close without alerting me beforehand, I didn’t think too much of it.

We both returned to the lodge empty-handed, Richard reporting the same eerie silence as me, and went to bed early, both of us exhausted and slightly frustrated. The dogs woke us up at 2 am, barking wildly like they were looking right at something. Though we both went out several times, neither of us saw anything, yet the dogs certainly seemed sure that something was there. They didn’t stop barking until about 4, and by that time we had to get up and get in the woods. Though we were a little annoyed from getting little sleep, we knew things like that happen sometimes and were eager to get back in the woods. At around 6 am, it started snowing heavily and so we both went back because of the lack of visibility, and at around noon the snow stopped, leaving about 4 inches of snow on the ground. Like the day before, we went back to our blinds at around 3. After a while a large buck stepped out, and I managed to get a good shot at him, and found it easy to track him up by following the blood and tracks in the snow. He had gone down a small ravine, and as I crossed it I came upon a sight that I would never forget. Lying across my deer was a creature like nothing I had seen before. Long, thin and lanky, the roughly man-sized creature was shaped vaguely like a wolf or a big cat, and was a black/slate gray color, with short bristles all over its body and longer quills going down its back, tapering down its long whip-like tail. Its head was sort of reptilian, lacking a pronounced forehead unlike most mammals, and the teeth were distinctly non-mammalian, all of which being a uniform, curved shape, similar to a shark’s tooth but longer. It had large, opaque eyes and short, finely pointed ears, and its limbs ended it five-fingered hand-paws, complete with long hooked claws. The thing was greedily tearing into my deer, giving no sign of noticing me though I had hardly made a quiet approach, having to walk through the snow. I stood in shocked paralysis for a few seconds before bringing my gun to my shoulder and taking aim, yet when I pushed the safety off, the slight click instantly alerted it and it immediately charged for me like a bolt of lightning. Hurriedly, I took a shot and the bullet grazed by its shoulder, sending it running through the snow at an awkward, loping gait. I was so unnerved that I didn’t even take the time to get what was left of my deer; I just quickly started making my way back to the cabin, barely controlling my urge to sprint as fast as I could. I had just reached the trail to the lodge when something hit me like a train, plowing me into the ground and pinning me there. Screaming, I turned and saw the creature on top of me, tearing at the many layers of cloth and denim covering my chest and neck. Even in though I was overwhelmed in terror, I noticed that the thing smelled very strongly of rotten fish and foul, stale breath, mixed with wet dog. I tried reaching for my knife, yet I had barely drawn it before the animal pinned my arm down and fastened its teeth into it, shaking violently. I drove my knees into its belly over and over, but it just slung me by my arm against a tree, and back onto the ground, nearly knocking me unconscious from the pain. I managed one more scream before I felt the cloth rip from my chest like a wet napkin, and the creature’s claws were just digging into my skin when I heard dogs baying, and the creature froze. The behavior from this fearsome monster could be described as nothing short of terrified at the approach of the pack of frothing hounds. It bowed up, stepping back slowly and snarling, bearing its wicked, blood-coated teeth. The first and fastest dog charged in, and had to leap back to avoid a swipe from its clawed hand, yet by that time the other five had arrived and they drove it away from me with a volley of howls and snaps. The dogs had backed it up against a large tree, and it finally turned to fight. However the dogs were experienced in this sort of confrontation as Richard had used them several times to hunt black bears and wild pigs, and when it tried to get ahold of one dog, the others tore into its flanks and legs, forcing it to stop its pursuit and defend itself again and again. And when it tried to climb the tree or run away, they wouldn’t let it get far before they dragged it down again, exhausting it in the brutally effective fashion of dogs. Eventually they were all at an impasse; baying hounds staying just out of reach of the animal’s claws and teeth, and exhausted, malformed monster trying desperately to defend itself from the snapping jaws of the hounds. Though battered, I managed to drag myself into a sitting position and pulling my gun from by back, I aimed and fired, hitting the thing in the breast and causing it to bolt a little ways before the dogs dragged it back down, where it lay still. I then evidently passed out because Richard found me unconscious a little while later, bloody and half frozen to death from my ripped clothing. He then somehow managed to lead all the dogs back from the beast, all the while carrying me to the lodge on his back. I woke up when he got me back, and he explained that when he heard the shot, he had gotten the dogs so that they would track my deer, but they had refused to stay with him, and tore away towards where I was. He then left the dogs there with me while he went back on his atv to see if he could get the creature back so that we could maybe find out what it was.

That was about a day ago and Richard has been gone since. I have plenty of food for the dogs and I for now but these six dogs eat a lot. The food that we brought for them is outside, but frankly I'm too weak to go outside in the freezing weather to get it, and I'm too petrified to even try. For the past few hours the dogs have progressively become more agitated, pacing and occasionally staring at the door and giving low growls, the hair on their backs standing on end. But for the past 20 minutes it's escalated to where they're barking wildly, scratching and chewing at the door to get out. Richard took both guns with him for some reason. My injuries are keeping me from being able to do more than half-crawl along the floor, and I can't even get on the bed anymore. I just heard a solid thud against the door, loud enough to be heard above the cacophony of the baying hounds. The sound of the dogs is deafening now, and I've managed to get a hold of my knife, which I'm clutching white-knuckled, backed against a corner of the wall. The dogs have gnawed open a hole in the bottom of the door, and I just got a very strong smell of rotten fish.

This started off strong, but I feel like it petered off towards the end. It definitely feels more like an urban legend than a creepypasta, as there's no real scare when the narrator manages to confront and attack the monster, but it's still interesting and pretty well-written. As I mentioned, it does trail off a little towards the end in terms of quality, it feels like you get a little lazy with your writing after you describe the monster. All in all, a nice little story. Good work.

Yeah lol this is my first pasta and I wanted to do something a little different. I also felt like the description and confrontation was the climax, and I wasn't sure exactly how to cut it off at the end. Any suggestions?

Perhaps after Richard goes to try and find the creature, have him not come back, have the narrator say that it's been a day since Richard left, the narrator is too scared to go outside, and the dogs have been growling and barking for the last hour?

That would definitely put more of a creepy spin on it, if that's what you want.

Fixed.
That any better?

You've got a lot of technical skill, but I think the pacing is off somewhat. The action is rather prolonged, mostly by descriptive passages and the somewhat dispassionate tone of the narrator. I'd suggest shorter, punchier sentences around the action, and certainly more than a few line breaks- they are pretty important despite not technically altering the words in any way.

I imagine you have a pretty vivid image of the monster in your mind, and it certainly shows in the description of it, but I must say that's another area in which you could cut back- as it stands, it's rather calm and naturalistic, almost scientific, in the passage where the creature appears.

Allow your readers to fill in some of the gaps themselves- your writing is more than capable of establishing this thing's primal wrongness without your having to describe it in such detail. I've made the same mistake myself- I had a really vivid image of a setting in my mind (the story being based on something I had done), and wanted the reader to picture it just as I saw it. Not only did that lengthen my story (it was 6000 or so words by the end, War and Peace by Internet standards), it also interrupted the flow and diluted the tension.

On the other hand, I thought there were points which could have done with some fleshing out- not least Richard's encounter with the thing, and his subsequent return presumably leading to his death- that flashes by in a few sentences after the main action. I have to admit, I was geared up for an ending where the hunter, unknowingly delirious with the cold, has drilled a park ranger or a girl scout.

ooo, I see. Thanks for the advice, I'll keep it in mind