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Jake begins his investigation in his usual fashion, keyword searches on the internet, and within a few tries, he finds a couple of references to the incident in question.
"According to a local truck driver, he drove down Coe Road late one day around 2:00 in the afternoon. He pulled his truck over and stopped along the road to eat his lunch. When he finished eating, he got out of the truck to stretch his legs, when this beast appeared out of the corn and stood just five feet away. He described this creature as 'unexplainable, manlike but dark and dirty."
Using manually typed keywords, Jake finds this single report repeated on numerous websites with a few slight variations. He could have searched for the same information by using voice recognition on his phone to consult an AI chatbot, but refused to do this. He would use AI results only as a last resort because his job and livelihood were being threatened by the creative capabilities of the AI revolution. Even with Jake's typed word searches, AI interjects its opinion on the subject on most occasions, making his efforts merely symbolic at most. Knowing this, he offers as little as possible to the AI bots, hoping they won't learn from an actual "conversation" he might have with them.
He finds enough information to indicate the incident occurred on Coe Road west of Winn Road. To Jake's astonishment, this area is a mere ten miles east of the family cabin. The date, more than twenty years ago, has Jake consider what his next move will be in his investigation. Jake decides to take a trip to Winn and ask around town about the incident. There are several places in a small town where he might find some story leads, like the town library, historical society, local church, community center, or the one place Jake found most of his leads, the local tavern. He felt certain a day trip to Winn to a few civic buildings, and then an evening at the local watering hole would produce some leads to follow up on, if not some new information that hadn't been published that might help his assignment. He thought that if he could dig up anything while in Winn, he could use it to pad existing information and fill out a story to submit. It didn't take long for Jake to determine that this first assignment was "in the bag" and that he should go there on Friday before his contract begins the following week.
As he works, Jake has to stop and feed the fire in the fireplace and wood stove, eventually having to restock the wood in the house by venturing outside to the woodshed. It is a short walk out the back door, and it would have taken only a few minutes to retrieve the firewood, except the snow had drifted against the shed door. He gets the snow shovel and begins to clear the snow when he hears a loud noise in the distance that sounds like a wooden baseball bat hitting a baseball out of the park. He pauses as he ponders what he just heard. It's well after sunset, and the temperature outside is cold with a deep freeze in the teens Fahrenheit, an environment much different from the milder weather of warmer seasons. Jake remembers a news report stating that when the temperature is low enough, trees can freeze and split with a popping sound. "That is what I'm hearing", Jake thinks until he hears the same sound again, but repeated twice in succession with a more distant third report after a short pause.
Jake feels a chill, not from the frigid temperatures but because he realizes what he heard sounded like a pattern, not a natural occurrence. Jake doesn't give it much more thought as he is cold and needs to get in the cabin with the wood before he gets frostbite. Although he tries to rationalize away his paranoid feeling that the sound wasn't due to the frigid temperature, he still can't shake it off, even after warming himself by the fireplace. After more online research, he feels he can't do much more until he investigates Winn later in the week. He goes to bed after a long and eventful day, even as the sun is only a few hours from rising on a new one.
