He was startled by a sudden splash at his side. A limb must have fallen from a tree. He looked up. There were no trees overhead; the gravel bar extended far into the bend of the creek, thirty feet away from the forested bank. Frightened, he looked again at the object in the shallow water. It was too straight to be a tree limb, and it had stuck into the stream bed like a javelin. The angle told him someone had thrown it at him from behind.

He jumped and spun around. He could see only a few feet into the dull green mist of the forest. Nothing moved. The only sounds were the gurgle of the creek over the stones and the steady, light patter of the rain. With his heart pounding, Hartman ran for the tent, where his knife lay next to the stove.

He didn’t get there. Just as he scrambled from the slippery stones of the bar to the earthen bank, something reared up horrifyingly out of the brush directly in front of him. Hartman stared unbelievingly into a pair of fierce, mad eyes. He tried to stop and turn, but he skidded on the wet stones and fell on his side at the figure’s feet. He looked up to see a black silhouette edged with awful clarity against the sky’s dying light, its right hand raised high, holding what could only be, incredibly, a heavy, rough stone hammer, a caveman’s stone club. Hartman flung his left arm across his face as the hammer came crashing down.

Excerpt from the Peninusla Daily News, April 2, 1976:

SEARCH FOR HIKERS ENDS

QUINAULT, WA-Olympic National Park authorities to day announced abandonment of the search for two hikers believed lost last month in the park’s Quinault area. Clyde Hartman, thirty-eight, of Portland, Oregon, and Norris Eckert, twenty-nine, of Seattle, disappeared within a few days of each other in early March, apparently in the dense rain forest northwest of Lake Quinault. Senior investigator Claude Gerson said that the search had been "the most exhaustive one ever made" in the Olympic National Park, and there was "simply no trace of them."