Rangers Recovered This Footage 88 Days Later — The Owner Was Never Identified

When a Bitterroot National Forest ranger pulls the SD cards from a cluster of trail cameras left behind deep in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, he expects nothing more than routine fall patrol work. What he finds is a carefully built monitoring camp, broken down and abandoned eighty-eight days earlier, with no name attached to any of it and no missing person anywhere on record. Kevin Howard has worked this country for sixteen years, and at first the footage shows only an ordinary Montana summer drainage doing exactly what it should. Then the patterns begin to change, in the animals and in the camp itself, and the field notes the owner left behind start to read less like research and more like the record of something drawing closer. This is the account of what more than four thousand images captured in a place eleven miles from the nearest road, and of a question the ranger has not been able to set down in the months since.