Screaming or howling in Douglas County, Oregon

While growing up, my grandparents would take my brother and I up to Lookingglass, Oregon for about 2 weeks to visit with my Uncle and cousins. Over the years there are several incidents that stand out in my mind, but the one(s) that prompted me to write you occured during my stay in the summer of 1989. Two of my cousins and I were up very late watching some movies. When the movies were over, we decided to go outside and goof around. As we were running out the door, a strange sound stopped us in our tracks. It was coming from the creek bottom and made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. It began to sound as if a cow was beying, a very deep gutteral sound advancing into a howl that lasted about 5-10 seconds. At first I was dismissing it as one of the neighbors cows, but my cousin said she had never heard it before and the end of the vocalization sounded more like a wolf than a cow. I yelled for my younger cousin to come back inside, she had frozen in place when the sound started, and we locked the door - something that they never do because the location is so rural. I had never been so frightened by a noise in my life. What ever it was sounded very large and I was in doubt that the locked door would stop it if it decided to investigate it's surroundings. It sounded very close, but we were located in a valley, and because of the echo it was hard for me to figure out exactly how close it really was. Two nights later I heard it again, this time I was alone on the dirt road that connects the "highway" to the properties on the Mountain. I was walking to the bridge that covers a creek that seperates the properties when I heard it again, starting low and growing to a high-pitched howl. I froze and waited, it sounded again a few minutes later, closer than before. I listened to the vocalizations on the web site, and it sounded like the Ohio sound in its pitch and duration.