Knocking in Alexander County, Illinois

October 10th, 2011, it was a Tuesday morning I believe, no it wouldn’t be a Tuesday morning because I was out here in the afternoon. I was walking down that trail on the next ridge over. I was just coming back from the other campsite over there that somebody had made. I had been doing tree knocks and whoops to no avail, no sound, no return calls or anything and when I came back off the ridge to the main fire access trail I noticed a large pile of feces. No, first I saw the footprint. It measured nineteen inches long, seven and a quarter inches wide at the ball of the foot where the toes connect and it was five and a half inches wide at the heel. I saw that and I said “XXXX!” And then I looked down and started measuring it and everything and I walked a little and that is exactly what I found was a pile of feces. The makeup of it was vegetable matter, mostly vegetable matter, crayfish, shells from the skull part not the tails. I guess they can’t digest the hard shell of it. And there was also mollusks, fresh water mollusks shell mixed up in the feces, and I took a picture of that and accidentally mishandled that photo and accidentally got deleted when I tried to transfer it to my memory card and to my computer. And I took maybe two or three steps after that and I looked up and saw… he was seven to seven and a half feet tall, I’m guessing, he was probably bigger, I was terrified at the time. He was maybe three hundred, three hundred-fifty lbs. And he was about eighty feet away, seventy to eighty feet and he closed half that distance in three steps before he veered off the hill at a forty-five degree angle, ran down the ridge which is about an eight per cent grade for about maybe about 150 feet and then hits the valley of the two ridges and went up the next ridge which is about as steep and tall. So fast you couldn’t match it on a horse, motorcycle, three-wheeler even if it was paved. It was digging up a ground hornet’s nest and later I discovered by looking on line that hornets make what is known as hornet honey which is a concentrated nectar mixed with insect protein that they store with the larva. Now it’s not in large doses from my understanding but if you was to dig up an entire hornet’s nest (as the picture of the hornet’s nest you have that he dug up) you could get quite a nice little bit of nutrition from that much. If he made any sound it was no louder than say a squirrel moving through the leaves which for something so large moving and so fast is amazing. The bulk of its chest was just unbelievably broad, thick and dense. You could see the muscles moving. As it was running through, it was partly cloudy and there were still some leaves on the trees, and as it was running it ran through a bit of light coming through the canopy I could see that’s fur was dark brownish with a really bright red tint to it when the sun hit it directly. And he was gone up this other ridge and I collected my stuff and started running back to my car.