Evan

I knelt, gloved up, and took measurements.

I photographed the punctures with a ruler for scale.

I looked for tracks in the dirt around the head and shoulders.

There were tracks.

That was good.

Tracks are the closest thing to a confession you get out there.

But these didn't help the way I wanted them to.

The soil was a mix of sand and clay, and the night dew had hardened it enough to hold detail.

I found several sets of cattle prints and some deer.

I found coyote tracks, but they were the casual kind, not the frantic circle you see when scavengers first find a carcass.

And then I found one print that made my stomach do a small, involuntary drop.

It looked like a dog track, but wrong in the same way a mannequin looks like a person from far away and then suddenly doesn't when you get close.

The pad was too elongated.

The toe arrangement was slightly off.

The claws were present, but set at an angle that suggested weight distribution I couldn't fit into a normal gait.

I measured it.

just over four inches long, almost three and a half wide.

That's a big canine, bigger than most coyotes, bigger than most domestic dogs you'd see out there, but not impossible.

What bothered me was the stride.

I followed the impressions for a while until they faded into harder ground, and the spacing between prints changed.