Ansel Teague is a land surveyor in Stokes County, North Carolina. On a clear night in October 1994, his instrument locked onto something eighteen hundred feet down an open line and pulled it in to thirty-nine feet in eleven seconds. He stood up off the eyepiece and looked. Something tall and dark was standing in his line, holding something at the level of its face, taking a reading of him. He wrote down the numbers and said nothing for twenty-three years. Then an old man in a Greensboro diner hands him a list of forty-one names — witnesses, eleven states, most of them past eighty. "I did the paper," he says. "I could never do the doors." So Ansel drives. A school bus driver in Ohio watched four small figures cross a township road on legs that bent in the wrong place, their black eyes wrapping around the sides of their heads. A woman on a porch in Kentucky spent a night in 1955 firing a shotgun at things three feet tall with claws and huge yellow eyes that flipped over backward when hit, got up, and came back. A shipyard retiree in Mississippi describes what came across the riverbank: grey hide like an elephant, no neck, no eyes at all, pincer hands, and legs it never used. A woman in a nursing home who cannot remember the year says the same four sentences six times without changing a word — about the thing that came up out of the creek, stood in the shallow, and looked at her. There is a hill in West Virginia. A road in Alabama. A field in Missouri. A screen door in Tennessee that does not open. Thirteen people, and everything they describe is drawn from the real record of what witnesses have reported for the last hundred and thirty years. Field Book 41 is a novel about testimony — and what it costs to give it.
