I had heard of the coyote farm, but I let Ezra elaborate.
“This old trail used to be the only way through this little strip of Colorado to get onto Utah in the Winter when the snow was high, but I wouldn’t even think about trying this thing past the first week of November, would give you about a 50/50 shot at making it. But those old folks back in the day didn’t think twice about it. About half would freeze or starve to death. Take your pick. But the real story is, it wasn’t that simple. That was just a good alibi.
“The real story is this Mueller family, old German bastards, lived just down the hill and they knew a lot of people would die up here, so they would come up all the time and steal the leftover bodies for their food. Then, once they got a taste for it, they started straight up stealing people off these trails. They would take them over to their farm. The people still on the trail would say they would hear what they first thought were coyotes howling in the night, but it was really the folks plucked off the trail by the Muellers screaming into the night in pain as they got treated like breakfast pigs on their farm. You might hear the howls tonight. Probably actually coyotes now, but that still don’t make it feel at least a little bit troublesome.”
I didn’t even respond to Ezra’s story, I had actually heard a somewhat similar variation to it once at a park in Wyoming at a summer internship, I figured every region had their own version of it.
Ezra finally stopped for the first time in hours. He turned to me with a drooling smile and wide eyes.
“If you aren’t too afraid, I was thinking we could set up camp pretty soon before the sun starts to set. Not too far from the farm?”
