Wes Coffey
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Nothing made a sound.
No owls, no coyotes, no wind.
The woods were as silent as a room with the door closed.
I started to let myself believe it was over.
Then the ladder moved.
It wasn't a shake or a bump.
The entire ladder shifted.
The base scraped against the ground.
The bolts that held the platform to the tree groaned.
Whatever was at the bottom of the ladder had grabbed it and pulled, not hard enough to tear it away from the tree, but hard enough to let me know it could.
I grabbed the platform rails with both hands.
My bow fell off my lap and hit the platform with a clatter that sounded like a gunshot in the silence.
I didn't care.
I held on.
The ladder went still.
Five seconds later, it moved again.
This time it was a single hard jerk.
The stand tilted three or four inches to the left before the bolts and straps caught it.
One of the ratchet straps made a popping sound.
I heard a metallic ping as something, a bolt or a nut, hit the ground below.