SCULLY: What am I looking at?

MULDER: Thirty loggers working a clear-cutting contract in Washington State. Rugged, manly men in the full bloom of their manhood.

SCULLY: Right, but what am I looking for?

MULDER: Anything strange, unexplainable, unlikely... boyfriend?

SCULLY: I don't know, I... I give up, Mulder.

MULDER: You give up? Funny, that's apparently what the Federal Forest Service has done as well.

SCULLY: Why, what happened to them?

MULDER: In a word, they vanished. Or so it would appear.

MULDER: This is Doug Spinney and Steven Teague. They call themselves "monkey wrenchers." The guys who drive spikes into trees, sabotage logging equipment and otherwise make life miserable for lumberjacks and lumbermills.

SCULLY: Ecoterrorists or militant environmentalists.

MULDER: They've asked the F.B.I. to investigate. I had to pull a few strings to make sure we got the case.

SCULLY: For an ecoterrorism case? Do I dare ask why?

MULDER: In 1934, long before anyone even knew what an ecoterrorist was, a W.P.A. crew vanished from that same area without a trace. Not one of those men was ever found or heard from again.

SCULLY: And you suspect what? Bigfoot?

MULDER: Not likely. That's a lot of flannel to be choking down even for Bigfoot.

MOORE: Let me get this out of the way. I have no quarrel with these ecoterrorists in principle. And I'm as concerned for this forest and the environment as anybody. It's their methods I can't condone.

SCULLY: Do you think they'd go so far as to kill a man?

MOORE: Well, there's thirty men up there unaccounted for, each with survival experience. Something happened to them.

SCULLY: Why do these men work so far up in the wilderness?

HUMPHREYS: That's where the trees are.

SCULLY: You're kidding, right?

HUMPHREYS: No, environmentalists have pretty much made sure that all the land you see here is untouchable. We're forced to take our timber where we can get it. Even then, we plant saplings for every tree we take.

MULDER: So why do the ecoterrorists target you?

HUMPHREYS: See, these tree-huggers comes from the same kind of boys that went up to Canada during the Vietnam war. They're cowardly and so are their tactics.

HUMPHREYS: All the vehicles have all been monkey wrenched, power generator's busted.

SCULLY: Somebody really turned this place upside-down.

HUMPHREYS: Whoever did it didn't want the fact broadcast, either.

MOORE: Radiators are all full of rice. Looks like sugar or sand in the crankcases. They really did a number here.

SCULLY: Well, you were right about one thing.

MULDER: What's that?

SCULLY: It definitely wasn't Bigfoot.

SCULLY: Oh God... It feels, uh... it feels dessicated and hard and dry, almost... preserved.

MOORE: Like it's been enbalmed.

SCULLY: No, more like all the fluids have been bled from this body. Almost like it's been cured. I think... it's a male.

MULDER: Barely.

MOORE: I'd say it's, uh, some kind of spider's nest or insect cocoon.

SCULLY: What kind of an insect could have gotten a man all the way up into that tree?

MULDER: Itsy-bitsy spider.

HUMPHREYS: What happened to my men?

SPINNEY: What men?

HUMPHREYS: The men who were working this camp.

SPINNEY: I don't know what happened to them. Probably the same thing that'll happen to us when the sun goes down... If we stand around here talking, there'll be nothing left to say. I'd start thinking about how to get that generator started. Darkness is our enemy.

MULDER: Why did you say that darkness was our enemy?

SPINNEY: That's when they come.

SCULLY: When who comes?

SPINNEY: I don't know what it is. They come from the sky, take a man right off his feet and devour him alive. I saw it happen.

SPINNEY: We camped two valleys over, four of us. Three now. Our truck has a dead battery so we drew straws to see who would make the hike over here to steal one from the loggers.

MULDER: Why not just hike out?

SPINNEY: More than a day's hike. No way we'd want to be caught out in the forest after dark.

SPINNEY: You don't want to go out in the night. Take my word on that. It's out there.

HUMPHREYS: What? If I go out that door, something's going to attack me, eat me alive and spin me in it's web?

SPINNEY: Yes.

HUMPHREYS: What, it's too polite to come in here and get me?

SPINNEY: For some reason, it's, uh, afraid of the light.

HUMPHREYS: It's afraid of the light.

SCULLY: What do you think?

MULDER: I think I'm going to suggest that we sleep with the lights on.

MOORE: This is odd. This yellow ring's got something living in it, some kind of… tiny bug. It doesn't make sense.

SCULLY: Why not?

MOORE: Well, parasites attack a tree in a variety of ways, but they always attack the living parts. The leaves, the roots, the new growth rings. Even if they're borers of something, they wouldn't be working so deep in the tree.

MULDER: What do you know about insects, Scully?

SCULLY: Uh, just what I learned in my biology courses. That they're the foundation of our ecosystem. That there's lots of them, something like 200 million per person on this planet.

MULDER: And they've been around a long time, right?

SCULLY: Yeah, something like 600 million years, even before the dinosaurs. Why?

MULDER: And this tree is what, 5, 6, 700 years old?

MOORE: Yeah.

MULDER: And these rings represent a history of climatic changes, which means that in this year or season in the life of the tree, there was some kind of strange event that produced an abnormal ring.

SCULLY: Well, like what, exactly?

MULDER: A volcanic eruption. This whole chain of mountains running from Washington to Oregon is still extremely active. Remember Mt. St. Helens?

SCULLY: Yeah, but how does that explain the bugs?

MULDER: When Mt. St. Helens erupted, there was a large amount of radiation that was released from inside the earth. Strange things started to grow. There's actually this lake where they've discovered a kind of amoeba that can literally suck a man's brains out.

SCULLY: Oh, a brain-sucking amoeba.

SPINNEY: No, it's true. Spirit Lake. And there's documented cases of swimmers being infected.

SCULLY: But an amoeba is a single-celled organism. It can be mutated. An insect is a complex animal. It would take years and years to evolve.

MULDER: Well, then maybe what we're dealing with isn't a mutation at all. What if it's some kind of... extinct insect larvae in that ring, deposited during a period of volcanic activity, brought up through the tree's root system. Ancient insect eggs. Thousands, maybe millions of years old lying dormant until...

SPINNEY: Until those loggers cut down that tree. That would be rather poetic justice, don't you think? Unleashing the very thing that would end up killing them and your friend Humphreys?

SCULLY: What about the gas in the trucks?

MULDER: There is no more gas, the other tanks have all been ruptured or filled with sugar.

SCULLY: Well, then we've got to get back on the radio, we've got to send out a mayday.

MOORE: Every drop of fuel we waste is fuel that's gonna keep this gennie powered tonight. I mean, I don't want to be waiting around hoping somebody heard that transmission when this thing quits running about two o'clock in the morning. Do you?

SCULLY: What are you going to do?

MULDER: Button this place up. If we're gonna spend the night in here, we've got to do everything we can to make sure the bugs stay out there.

MOORE: I'd be careful with that. It's the only bulb that works.

MULDER: Scully? How is she doing?

MAN: She's still not out of the woods, so to speak. She lost a lot of fluids. Two or three more hours of exposure, she might not have made it.

MULDER: I told her it was going to be a nice trip to the forest. How you going to contain it to the forest? What if the swarm migrates?

MAN: The government has initiated eradication procedures. They're quite certain that by using a combination of controlled burns and pesticides, they will be successful.

MULDER: And if they're not?

MAN: That is not an option, Mr. Mulder.