Hallowe'en Type Story

In the spirit of the Season. Not really connected to Hallowe'en, but this still gives me nightmares to this day.

When I was working for Lignum we were sent out to the Moffat Lake area to do a few reconnaissances of blocks that had just been planted. The first one we got to we had to follow a stream up the hill and around to a connecting road and count spruce saplings.

Since I was still in recon training I just had to follow and make sure none were missed. I got momentarily distracted by a pretty design on the ground made by the sun shining through the leaves and the wind shifting the leaves. It took another moment or two to sink in. There was barely any wind, not to mention this was a cutblock - so NO TREES.

I bent down to get a closer look at the ground. What I seen was so horrifying I couldn't even react right away.

SPIDERS. All about the same size, black with thin white stripes across their back. There was a layer about an inch thick of Spiders on the ground, crawling over each other, as far as I could see.

I shrieked and leaped onto a nearby boulder, probably defying some laws of gravity. My coworkers turned and asked what was going on and I told them to look at the ground. They similarly shrieked and leaped onto some other handy boulders. These were people that worked in Forestry for years, walked through all sorts of forestry situations on a regular basis, and this was still something they hadn't seen before.

Luckily we all had our good forestry pants on, so we tied the bottoms shut tight around our boots and I secured mine with some ribbon. We still had to finish the recon so we did it running, calling out tree numbers and trying not to think about how soft each step was.