Don't laugh.

Ok, I was on the NY section last July and something came upon my campsite that I couldn't then, nor now, identify.

I'd set up a stealth camp about 100 feet off/outta sight of the trail in a shallow hollow behind one of those numerous rock walls. Yes, I had a dozen hardboiled eggs hanging in a nearby bag- but that's not important right now. Anyway, let me set it all up 4 you:

About two hours prior to sundown I'd walked twenty yards away from my camp to cook dinner on some large rocks. It was very quiet. After cooking our meal I heard an unexpected snorting sound from close by, not too many yards away. Not far distant was a rather large rock with a noticably cavernous hole underneath it into which a grown man could've crawled, toward the direction from where the sound came. I disregarded it, like any masculine ape would do, and proceeded to tend to my simmering rice mix. I never mentioned what I'd heard to my girlriend (why scare BOTH of us?), but she was rather curious afterwards when I dutifully "relocated" camp 100 yards downhill from that damned gaping chasm below the rock.

Then darkness fell, and we laid down to sleep. Within an hour something stirred us awake.

It would be best described as a snorting sound, phonetically like "shhhhh, shhhhh!", very close by. It was not a small animal, judging by the lung power of the thing. There were heavy footfalls nearby in the leaf-covered ground, but not the clumsy type one would expect from a bear.

To be honest, it scared the crap outta me and my girlfriend in in our tent. But here's the thing- when I stormed out all "Billy BadAss" with my headlight, there was nothing to see. I went back to my sleeping bag and pretended to be confident. She didn't buy that 4 one second. Not too long after relaxing from that event, it happened again. But this second time, there was more than one thing walking through the leaves not more than 75 feet from the tent.

The next day @ RPH shelter we ran into "Kurly", a lovely '06 thru-hker, who told me it was probably just deer. She did her best, but I wasn't convinced. I'm thinking it might have been wild boar, or perhaps some stray "good ole' boys" come up from down south for the summer feediing season, I dunno.

Please help me sleep more soundly in the future...
B.B.