Cloze: Devil's Footsteps

___________________________(1) winter morning in 1855, people of the English county ___________________________(2) Devon woke up to a weird and wonderful sight. There were tracks of an unknown creature ___________________________(3) disturbed the untouched blanket of snow. These tracks were no ordinary hoof, paw or foot prints – they went on and on for miles, walking over, as ___________________________(4) to around obstacles that came in their ___________________________(5) . To this day not a single person has been ___________________________(6) to interpret, understand or explain who or what was responsible for this rather peculiar occurrence. At the time of this phenomenon, people were so stunned and impressed by what they saw ___________________________(7) their emotional state may have influenced the witness ___________________________(8) they gave to the press. Also, a long time has ___________________________(9) since this, and details may have changed as no proper record ___________________________(10) made at the time.

The fateful night was the 8th of February. It had snowed a lot that night, and the whole land was completely covered. ___________________________(11) what witnesses said, it stopped snowing at around twelve o’clock at night. Devon is a major farming county and people ___________________________(12) to get up fairly early to work at their farms, so the ___________________________(13) birds left their houses at about six in the morning and became the first ones to behold the strange prints on the snow. These people were always the first to wake up, so there should not have ___________________________(14) any marks made before them. Word went from village to village and the whole county was ___________________________(15) to discover that the prints spanned over more than 100 miles.