Dear Creepypasta [#Wattys2016]

The hunter's Boots

I need to tell you about something that happened to me – and it's something that I don't remember.
How is that possible, you ask?
Well, I can't be precisely certain what happened, but by putting a lot of broken pieces together, I think I've formed a decent enough picture of the events that unfolded.
As I tell my story, you'll come to understand why I don't remember any of it. And why it's important that I tell you anyway.
Let's begin with me, an avid trail-runner, navigating some of the more challenging terrain I've had the pleasure of running through.
Don't get me wrong; it was absolutely beautiful. I had wanted to run the wilds of New Zealand's Stewart Island for several years, but it took me a long while to get together the time and the money to even get to such a remote corner of the world. As I ran along the forgotten, root-tangled tracks on my first day, it became clear that nobody had run these particular trails for a very, very long time, and that I was a bit lost. Fortunately, the island is only thirty four miles across at its widest point, and barely seven at its narrowest, so being 'lost' really only meant finding somewhere the GPS would work on my phone, and then pointing myself back towards Oban, the tiny main settlement.
The last thing I truly remember is thinking that I should cut a trail back down to the coast, to get my bearings again.
What happened from there is down to speculation, and pieced together from the footage on my phone.
It probably took me around half an hour to push through the dense bush before I spotted something unusual in amongst the native trees. Getting closer, I likely confirmed every trail runner's fear - that I'd found a dead body. At that point it seems I took my phone out of my arm strap and started filming.
The body was really a skeleton, not a body at all.
In most instances where folks like me stumble over a corpse, it's either early in decomposition, or it's so ripe that half a billion flies have started a colony in it.
This one was old – so old that the bones had become fusted with the green of the local mosses, and the ribcage had collapsed in on itself. I walked around the lolling skull, which had become entwined with questing fern roots, then stopped as I saw the legs.
A pair of shabby, knee-high leather boots encased the shin and foot bones of the deceased, even though no other item of clothing remained.
In the video from my phone, I see my hand reach out to touch the ancient leather, then the camera is placed face up on the loamy soil, filming only the canopy of the trees overhead.
But I know what happened here; after I touched the boots, I took them off the skeletal legs, likely shook them out to get rid of forest debris and loose metatarsals, and then I took off my own shoes and put on the boots.
The video on the phone shows a final brief flash of the old bones, and then I step away from the ancient corpse.
For a full second the world in that footage turns a leaden, unhealthy grey.
Then it shows me standing back at Oban, outside the backpacker's hostel where I was staying.
That's where my memory returns. I realised my phone was still recording, and that I was holding my running shoes in the other hand.

Now, just as you are probably wondering right now, when I saw that video, the first thing I wanted to know was what the hell had possessed me to take the boots off a skeleton, then put them on my own two feet.
Unlike many of the other mysteries to come, that's an easy question to answer.
While the boots looked like shabby, mildewed old leather, the instant you touch them, they transform.
They are, quite frankly, exquisite.
What kind of leather it is, I have no idea, but it has a rich inner glow, like burnished bronze mixed with the flesh of ripe chestnuts. The buckles are talmi gold, worked into the shape of running hares with garnets for their mad eyes. The leather itself has carefully tooled hunt scenes worked into it, princes on magnificent palfreys blowing hunting horns and chasing deer.
I remember the feeling standing there outside the hostel, that just looking down at them made my heart sing with the desire to possess them, even though they were already on my own feet.
I was still concerned that I'd found a skeleton, and knew that I should report my discovery to the local police. A quick check of my running app showed that the GPS had kicked in and picked up the precise coordinates of where I'd stopped, so I shouldn't have a problem locating it. But what really caught my eye as I looked at the tracking was how I'd crossed roughly three miles in the blink of an eye.
I replayed the video on my phone, showing me stepping out onto the animal trail, then the wall of grey, and then the sudden shaky footage of the backpacker's lodge.
Had I really travelled over three miles in a single second? In a single step? Or was I just worn out and jet-lagged, and giving too much weight to a GPS glitch? I know that's the logical explanation, but even then, it just felt far too real.
Taking the boots off, lest something weird happen again, I slung them over one arm and stepped inside the lodge, looking for a phonebook to call the police.