Terror

it is 3 am. we are sleeping in a small two-man tent.

something large and heavy collides with our tent and seems to fall on it, thrashing briefly before getting off.

we awake screaming.

there is no interval between waking, assessing our situation, and screaming--rather, in one fluid moment we wake to screams, and later realized that we were the ones screaming.

the confusion at our tent appearing to collapse on us, while simultaneously being skewed off the ground and shaken violently, completely disorients us.

after the tiny moment in which this all happened, we huddled in the center of the tent, trying to understand what had happened and searching for our flashlight.

we could not find the flashlight.

we were mortally terrified.

we had no idea what was outside the tent, and whether it was still there or had left.

one of our friends in a tent nearby called out and asked if we were ok.

we got out of the tent, joined by several other people who we had woken with our screams, and examined the tent.

there was a hole big enough to stick your foot through in the lower left hand side of the tent.

the pole had been pulled apart.

two tent stakes had been pulled completely up.

an elastic bungee cord that secured the rain cover on the tent had been ripped completely off.

we speculated that a deer had run into our tent.

we gathered our things and abandoned our tent.

we left abruptly in the mizzling rain, driving through the tree shadowed roads home.

later that day, we retrieved our tent from some friends who had brought it home with them.

they told us that several other people in the campground had had things stolen from their cars, one of which was parked near our tent outside the parking lot on the grass.

we now believe that a person who had been stealing from the car either slipped on the wet grass or tripped on our tent pole and fell on our tent.

this does nothing to relieve the terror we felt upon waking up screaming.