One late summer afternoon around 1979 the local deputy pulled up into my yard, got out of his pickup, and began to question me about who might have been involved in an incident he was investigating.

Somebody had demolished an almost new and very nice cabin less than a half mile from Ted’s home place.

The deputy, whom I knew well, mentioned a couple of possible suspects. Then he brought up Ted Kaczynski's name.

"I don’t know who would have done this, but I know it wouldn't be Ted," was my immediate response.

At that time I really believed that statement. I hadn't yet seen the side of Ted that was capable of such a crime.

We discussed other possibilities. Then I asked him, "Why would Ted be considered a suspect anyway?"

The cabin owner said he and his kids had ridden their snowmobiles up around Ted’s cabin and it had made him extremely upset, the deputy replied. I explained the family had done the same thing to me and I was upset at the time. I caught them and told them to leave. I argued that if I had the same motive and didn't do it, that fact alone wasn't enough to pin it on Ted. The deputy agreed.

We then talked about the cabin and the destruction. I was shocked. The person responsible had devastated the cabin and machines parked there and most everything was beyond salvaging. An ax had been used to hack a hole in the cabin to gain access. After entering, he then had chopped up the kitchen cabinets and emptied the contents of the refrigerator and thrown them across the floor. Mustard, glue, bleach, and other substances were squirted and poured all over the carpet, furnishings, and bedding. Even the phones were smashed and phone lines were pulled out of the walls.

Virtually no spot inside the cabin was left unscathed. All this anger was then directed outside where, after growing tired of unscrewing fasteners around the window of the small mobile home used as a camper, he finally smashed the glass to get inside, and ravaged the camper.

The snowmobiles and motorcycles were next. After chopping and slashing the machines, he pounded and broke their engines with an ax. Some things, like a chain saw, just disappeared without a trace.

It was a scene of destruction. Whoever was responsible was a very angry and vengeful person. At the time, I heard the damage was estimated to be from $20,000 to $25,000.

I couldn't believe it. Who could have committed this terrible act? I had successfully helped get Ted off the hook, and even if there was a question of his guilt or innocence at the time, nothing could be proven. Whoever was responsible would get away with the crime for the time being.

Every area around my home was hit. It seemed as though nobody was safe.

During the late summer of 1980, a family moved onto some property that had just been logged. They set up a camp and had a couple of motorcycles for mountain transportation. The family left for several days. When they returned they found the motorcycles a sorry sight. All the tires were slashed, the bikes were smashed up and sugar had been poured into the gas tanks. The motorcycles were nearly destroyed.

Earlier that same summer a potentially deadly episode occurred in my gulch. I had just moved a 16-by-26-foot cabin to a spot near the trailer where I was living.

I had started a low-scale logging operation, selectively removing some large Douglas-firs that were beginning to die or fall over undercut banks heavily eroded by a recent spring flood. I skidded the logs down to a landing near the Stemple Road where I decked and prepared them for hauling to the Champion International peeler mill west at Bonner, Montana.

I left for the weekend on a welding job near Toston, some ninety miles to the southeast. I had hooked up power to the new cabin since I planned to fix it up and build an addition at some point. I accidentally left a light on when I left, and I never locked the doors since the building was tucked away in brush and trees, and was barely visible from the main road.

When I returned I was alarmed to find a bullet hole through the wall just below a window near the light that had been left on. The bullet had ripped through the wall at an angle about chest high and then hit a protruding corner next to a mirror. If it had pierced the corner it would have shattered the mirror.

I followed the path of the bullet by line of sight and determined this was no accident. The trajectory led to a cluster of trees and brush on the hill behind the cabin far from the road where someone could have discharged a gun.

Ted was the last one I ever would have suspected. Looking back I now realize how easy it would have been for him to think it was a person other than me in the new cabin. I never had explained to anyone what I was doing. Logs piled along the road, a new cabin moved in, the circumstances could be interpreted as signs that some loggers had moved into the gulch and were beginning operations. Ted knew the cabin and tractor I later found out he vandalized a couple of years earlier didn't belong to me so it would be easy for him to think this situation was similar.

What topped everything else about the shooting was that whoever fired the gun then entered the cabin to see if he'd hit anyone. When he found the building empty he dug the slug out of the wall, removing any possibility of identifying it. Later I explained to Ted about the logging activity and that I was trying to save the timber before it toppled into the stream, and told him about my new cabin. He looked surprised and concerned. Although I said I was finished logging here and never wanted to take more trees out of McClellan Gulch other than ones I was losing, I never mentioned anything to him about the bullet hole in the wall.

-from the fifth chapter, "The Lincoln Mysteries"