A park ranger wakes up in Brujas Canyon after sharing the same dream as his roommate, both of whom are chased by a black bull that local lore says is a witch. Another ranger’s friend steps from her tent along a desert river and meets a “woman” whose attack ends with cougar tracks and a warning whispered by tradition: some predators wear borrowed skins. Far away beneath redwoods, a hiker meets a toddler who speaks an unfamiliar word, then loses eleven minutes he can’t account for, along with any trace of the boy or the man he thought was his father. What threads tie a witch-bull, skinwalkers, and missing time together in America’s most protected wildlands?

Night in the Smokies turns the forest mute, no wind, no insects, until a crouched, black form with burning red eyes appears on a boulder, and a heat-shimmer “something” paces hikers down t ...