Appalachian Grandpa Tales: The Little People of Kepchki

I sighed as I took in the destruction in the shed.

It had been like this all week and I was getting a little tired of it.

Something had been breaking into our sheds and chicken pen, and I was at a loss to determine what it was. It was big, but it was also smart, and neither doors nor windows seemed to bother it much. It ate meat, as the four new chickens we had just bought could attest, and grains, as our ripped open sack of fish feed and chicken feed could attest. I had wondered if it might be a young bear cub, but Grandpa thought it might be a fox, given its craftyness.

“Any luck, boy?” he asked, stumping up beside me with a leather smile.

“Nothing yet. I tell ya, Gramps, this thing is tricky.”

When I had replaced the twist of metal on the chicken coup with a hook lock, it had gotten around it. When I replaced the hook lock with a crossbar on the shed, it had gotten around that, too, coming in through a window. Whatever this thing was, it was smarter than your average possum, and I was beginning to wonder what exactly I was dealing with.

“Maybe it's the little people?” Grandpa put in, smiling as he said it.

“What? Like the fairies you throw bottles for?”

“Not quite.” he said, “More like the ones I saw in Alaska. They could just walk in and out of places and they were wicked smart too.”

I opened the door on the varment trap and wrinkled my nose as I pulled out the bait that Lennie had given me at the Trading Post. It smelled like old cheese and bad blood, but he said it would attract all kinds of things. Most scavengers couldn’t resist it and even some of the larger predators would find it tasty. I made sure to sprinkle some corn around it and even set some of the mutilated chicken carcass in there as well, for good measure.

“Sounds like quite a tale,” I said, “Wanna tell me about it?”

It was coming on dark now, the sunset making the sky glow a deep red, and Grandpa nodded as he set off for the house.

As the darkness fell, we sat around the kitchen table, drinking cold beers as Grandpa reminisced.

“It all started with a briefing from the base Colonel and a strange report from some lookouts.”

He had assembled my unit, what was left of it, and we were about twenty in all. We’d had some new blood come in, raw recruits, most of them, but there was talk that they meant to send us to the front line. They were starting to push back against the Nazis and they needed just about every hand to make it happen. The problem was that we weren’t in Alaska to stop Germans, we were in Alaska to stop the Russians.

The United States Military had decided that Russia might decide to swoop in after the war and take back the rich oil deposits in Alaska, or that the Japanese would come in and beat them to it if the war went south for us. They also had some suspicions that the Native population were working with the Russians and meant to turn on us, but that was all malarky. John said there were lots of stories about how the ruskies were worse than we were to the Natives and that any notion that they would welcome them back was preposterous.

“The fact of the matter is, the Russians subjugated us harshly, splitting up families and using children and wives as leverage against tribal attacks. The United States hasn’t treated us much better in the past, but currently, we are mostly ignored and tolerated. This is considered progress.”

It didn’t sound so great to me, and he said it with a sad smile that let me know he was practicing his gallows humor.

Anyway, I’ve gone off trail, the reason for the meeting was that some of our lookouts had seen something strange on a nearby island, a little patch of land called Kepchki.

Now, Kepchki was little more than twenty miles from the center in any direction. They had a small population of elk and lots of native birds nested there in the warm months. The fishing around the island was supposed to be particular choice, but the Natives did not, as a rule, go to the island. John wouldn’t say why, but I suspected it had something to do with cultural superstition, just like the woods near the town. The island had trees and it had fresh water, probably other resources, but the Army was concerned that the Reds or the Japanese might be using it as a listening post.

“Our lookouts have seen what they think might be people moving around on the island. Intel says it's nothing definitive, no confirmed sightings, but the lookout guys think that it might be “humanoid in appearance”.”

“Humanoid in appearance” was something the lookouts used to describe lots of stuff. Small bears, monkeys, hell, even large otters, or so I’ve been told, have fallen under humanoid in appearance. Its ass covering language, or so we used to call it. You got a glimpse of something, and it might be nothing, but in case it is something, you call it in anyway.

The Colonel was putting together a small group to go out and investigate, and I was selected for it. John was asked to go as well, the brass thinking his knowledge of the area might be useful, and they put about six of the recruits under us to back us up. John and I had a reputation for handling ourselves, and I think when we found those boys and brought John’s nephew back from the woods, it went a long way to speaking for our character.

So, they piled all eight of us into a pontoon boat and away we went for Kepchki.

The waters were pretty fair that day, and as we rode, I asked John why his people didn’t take advantage of the islands resources?

“A place like that in Appalachia would have been hunted, clear cut, and settled for sure.”

John looked like he didn’t want to say, but he trusted me, and finally came out with it.

“Legend says that the island is home to the Ircenrraat.” he finally said, keeping his voice low.

He had to repeat it for me a couple of times, and I told him it was a bit of a mouthful.

“Their little people, not of our world but similar. They are said to be able to step in and out of our world and they like to hunt and gather as we do. They have been sighted on the island before, but they don’t like to be disturbed. If we see them, we should leave. They aren’t hostile, but they don’t like being disturbed and they can turn violent.”

“We have something similar back home. Grandma always talked about not encroaching on fairy land, and your Ircenrraat sound a lot like them.”

We came to the shore then and as we stepped off, I left four of them to make camp as we slunk into the brush. The trees here were more like furs I had back home, and the ground was carpeted with needles and limbs. The ground was stoney, but the soil was rich and brown. It felt moist as I took a handful of it to test, and I figured there might be bushes that had nuts or fruit somewhere on the island too. It was good soil, and it must have taken a lot of fear to keep the natives from it.

We had walked a short way before I discovered that we weren’t the island's first explorers.

We were moving slowly, keeping an eye on our surroundings, when John tapped my shoulder and pointed off to the left.

“Tent,” he whispered, and as I squinted, I did see something that looked like a tent pole jutting up near us.

I got the boys in order and we crunched as quietly as we could towards the potential enemy camp.

Well, they were potentially enemies, but I doubted they would be raising many alarms when we happened upon them. We came on a few tents, the poles the only thing left besides some fur scraps. No canvas on these puppies, and the metal poles were old and less uniform than the ones the Army gave us. Sitting around the remains of what could charitably still be called a fire pit were three skeletons, picked clean and grinning. There was a lonely food tin next to one of their feet, and one had a bottle clutched in his bony fingers as if he needed only to lift it to his disappeared lips. All of them grinned merrily as if to invite us to the party, and it was a sobering sight.

We checked around, but there was very little to find. The tin was free of labels or legends and the bottle was brown like medicine glass but bore no signs. The skeletons wore the scraps of clothing they had died in, but time had mostly eaten these away as well. The tent was no help either. The furs had been dissolved and the metal was just crude poles. They could be American or Russian or Martians for all we knew. It seemed likely that the cold had killed them, but as the two recruits moved off, John pointed to the ribs of the one holding the bottle.

They were chipped as if something had pierced between two of them.

“A knife, maybe?” I suggested, but John only shrugged.

We hit the other side of the island about an hour later, but we wouldn’t see anything else until our trip back.

We had decided to criss-cross the island during the day, not really keen on staying the night after finding the old campsite. We would eat dinner and pack up at sunset, hopefully marching back to the barracks by nightfall. We were coming back towards our boat, maybe twenty minutes from where we had left the others, when we heard something. It was a perfect baritone, sounding like someone singing from the bottom of a well. I called for a stop, and we all got low as I pulled out my binoculars and started looking for the source of the singing.

I found it picking up sticks near the juncture of two furs, and it was an odd little creature, to be sure. It was a perfectly normal human, though shrunk to the size of a toddler. I don’t mean it was a little person, though that's the closest I can come to describing it. It had a long beard and a thick set of eyebrows. It appeared hairy, though that may have just been furs. There was something on its belt, a knife or a small ax, and it rolled along comfortably as it collected wood. This was a normal day for this creature, something it had done a thousand times before, and it was no more wary of its surroundings than I would have been in my own woods. The song it sang was deep and old as the hills, its voice like nothing so much as rocks rolling down a mountain.

I prepared to tell the boys that we would go around, when the crash of a rifle drowned out John’s warning.

One of the recruits, Gibbs I think his name was, had seen it too as he peeked through his rifle scope. He had seen it and probably jumped to the conclusion that it was an enemy. There was a lot of hurtful propaganda about those of Asian descent in that time, and this kid probably thought he had stumbled on a Japanese spy. John had seen him a moment too late, his own binoculars trained on the little thing, and his shout had come in time. The bullet hit the creature, but it was like shooting a brick wall with a peashooter. It stumbled, never really losing its footing, and when it turned to look at our position, I knew we were in trouble.

It seemed to fall into itself, its body pulling into a stormy hole that it drug closed behind it, and I yelled out for the rest to run!

We took off through the furs, but we were not alone.

Gibbs and the other one, I forget his name, were not as adept in the woods as John and I, and it showed. They tripped and stumbled over roots that we missed entirely, and when Gibbs cried out in pain, I reached back to catch him. The kid thought he’d twisted his ankle, but I saw the source of the problem. A little arrow was sticking out of his lower leg, and as I offered him a shoulder, I reached down and broke it off.

The woods were suddenly full of grunts and growls, little projectiles flying out to stab and prod as we ran for it. He likely hadn’t even hurt the creature, but it was mad now, and mad goes a long way. John called out that the beach wasn’t far, and we ran for our lives as the brush crackled under many feet. There had to be at least a dozen of them, and I could see furry bodies and hair creatures as they moved about. They gnashed their teeth, teeth too big for their childish faces, and I knew now what had stripped those bodies in the clearing. They may not be violent, but scavengers will scavenge, won’t they? I tossed a prayer to the man upstairs, hoping for a little luck, and as we came out of the trees, I sighed in relief.

We probably looked like explorers at the end of a native film, and the irony of that statement isn’t lost on me.

We scared the hell out of the kids we’d left at camp, and they looked confused when I told them to get to the boat. They wanted to pack the gear, to grab the supplies, but I told them to grab their rifles and leave everything else. One of them ended up in the boat without his boots, another one leaving his coat behind, but as we shoved out into the water, I expected that the arrows would follow us on our way.

Nothing came to the shore, however.

Nothing followed us into the water, and as we floated out into the bay, the others asked what had happened?

Before Gibbs could start in, I overrode him.

“We ran up on some polar bear cubs and the mother wasn’t far behind. We barely made it out alive, and it's a wonder that she didn’t chase us into the bay.”

Gibbs gave me a look, but my look was stonier.

It told him flatley not to press it, and just to learn that sometimes caution is best.

We went back and told the brass about what had happened, and they figured that the bears were what had been seen. The lookouts didn’t see anything on the island after that, other than our gear which they sent a unit back to get later. Gibbs never talked, thankfully, and John and I agreed to never speak of what we had seen there. The old stories were right, and the island was the property of the Ircenrraat.

I opened my mouth to ask a question, but that was when I heard the snap of the trap from the shed.

Grandpa and I set out, flashlights bobbing, and found a very angry fox sitting in the little cage as he yelped and begged to be let go in his high, unknowable voice.

Grandpa chuckled, “Sometimes, though, its just a crafty fox with too much curiosity for its own good. We’ll let Glimmer set him loose somewhere far from here. No sense killing him for being smart and hungry.”

We left him to stew for the night, Grandpa yawning as we returned to the kitchen table.

“I stayed in Alaska for quite a while, but the war couldn’t last forever. Maybe next time I’ll tell you about its end, and how I ended up staying in Alaska for longer than I meant to.”

Grandpa’s yawn was contagious and I told him that sounded like a plan after a big yawn of my own.

With the mystery of our food thief solved, it was time for some much deserved rest.