Like most people, I never believed bigfoot existed outside of stories. Always figured
if they did exist, there'd be some kind of proof, like bones or
excrement, hair or nests. And like most believers, I've had some experience
that have changed my stance on the topic. In twenty thirteen, we had
been in charge of taking care of nuisance hogs at a pecan farm for over
a year. The farm also included a few fields of cotton, but the
hogs tended to leave those fields alone. The pecans ended at the tree line,
and that led to thousands of acres of untouched Georgia forests, and the
creek ran through the forest as well, along with a whole lot of deer.
I was partnered with two guys from my office. One was my best
friend, Jim, who has influenced me into becoming a Southern speaking Red Mexican
Red a Southern speaking Red Mexican I am today, okay. The other was
Gregg, he runs a hunting guide business on the side by the way.
The man's name who wrote this. He has a Spanish sounding name, so
I'm guessing he may be or his family may be from south of the southern
United States border. We were having a great success baiting the hogs at the
treeline using automatic feeders, but the population was so dense we were barely making
a dent. It was probably the heavy concentration of game that drew in a
family group. One night, we were spread out and using the last picond
trees as natural blinds from the tree line that was about thirty yards away.
I was sitting at the base of the tree to hide my outline. There
was a farmhouse near the entrance to the field where a light was just brought
enough to backlight us. Well. I didn't expect to see anything anyway,
and the wind was behind us, blowing our scent straight into the tree line.
Surprisingly, I started hearing movement and twigs snap, so I readied my
rifle. It was a clear night with plenty of moonlight to see the tree
line. I didn't see any shadows moving around yet, but I was patient.
Thump, something hit the ground right in front of me, scaring the
crap out of me. I thought a branch had come off the pecan tree.
They're always losing branches. Well, I jumped to my feet and turned
on my weapon light, and lying just a few feet in front of me,
was a two foot piece of oak branch, dug into the ground like
it had been thrown. It was three inches across and it did not come
from the tree above. I jumped behind the tree and swept my light across
the tree line, and then I called my buddies to come over, and
as soon as I told them what happened, Gregg started shouting that they were
trespassing on private property. We were the only ones with access to hunt there,
and we pressed up to the tree line and shouted for them to come
out and show themselves well. After a few minutes of shouting with no response,
we figured our hunting was ruined for the night, and so we packed
up. The next day, Jem and I went back to try to find
tracks or signs of who was messing with us the night before. We were
hoping to find what direction they'd come from, but the underbrush was too thick,
and while we searched, we talked about what kind of arm the person
must have had to throw that log. Thirty yards is a pretty good throw
for a stick that size. For a while, that's how things went for
us. We'd be hunting, and then sticks and rocks or cotton seeds would
be thrown at us, and we'd yell like we did the first night,
and it became a hunting as usual routine. We figured someone was set on
roots our hunts, but we weren't going to be run off by someone that
didn't like us hunting there. It did make us extra careful about what we
were firing at. We made triple sure that we weren't firing on the harasser
or harassers, and as annoying as it was, we decided that none of
us was ever to hunt alone on that property anymore. And we continued bagging
our fair share of hogs, but we never found any tracks. We made
up our minds that it was someone poaching the land and they were good at
hiding their movement. We had several game cameras set up throughout the property,
but we never got any pictures of anything other than normal wildlife. We did
sometimes catch a whiff of something that didn't smell like any animal that I know
of. It was an ungodly mix of wet dog and hot garbage with just
a hint a sulfur or ammonia. Then things began to happen that convinced us
that we were dealing with something more than the human harassers. My father,
he's my best friend, and my brother came in from out of state to
do some hog hunting with us, and we began our hunt at the edge
of the pecan field as usual, but we never saw anything. Our visitors
were only there for the night and the moon was full, so we decided
to go down to the farm's dirt service road that was cut into the trees
leading to the creek. We figured we might get a chance to run up
on a hog near that water. We've killed a few of them down that
road when they were wallowing in the mud to cool off. We moved near
the water until we could hear some movement coming from the creek, and as
it got closer, we took a knee to wait for it to expose itself
near the road. Whatever it was, it stopped just shy of the road
beyond our site. After a couple of minutes that felt more like hours,
something hit me in the chest. It didn't hurt, it's just surprised the
heck out of me. And I looked down and I saw a cotton seed
at my feet. Well, that freaked me out because we were a long
way from the nearest cotton field, and I jumped up and was about to
turn my weapon light on when Jim told me to wait. There was some
more movement closer to the road, and then he heard a loud grunt right
before it ran away through the shallow creek. The grunt was not a hog
or a deer. The sound of it running through the water told us it
was by a peedle. It was making a loud splash, like a person
running ankle deep in water, but the splashes were too far apart. Whatever
made that sound, it had a huge stride. We pulled out of the
woods and returned to our cars, and our visitors drove separately. In our
car, Jim and Gregg and I were in a tense conversation about what could
have made those noises. We figured it didn't expect so many of us to
be on the trail, so when it got eyes on us, it turned
and ran. We were beginning to lean toward the possibility of the stories about
sasquatch being true, but with the jobs we have, never making assumptions and
seeking solid evidence before confirming suspicions is ingrained in us, so we continued on,
but with extra caution and large caliber weapons. One night, Greg brought
in a couple of friends for a dog hunt. These guys had two catch
dogs and one bay dog. They were no slouches. The catch dogs were
pitt mixes and they were well equipped with GPS, trackers and night vision and
a lot of success in previous hunts. It was a hot summer night and
we were excited to get our first dog hunt in. The handlers sent the
dogs into the tree line to start the hunt, and it wasn't long before
the dogs had their cat and the bay dog began barking to let us know.
We tracked the dogs using the GPS and we got within two hundred feet
of them. When the dogs moved away from us, and as we pushed
further in, we got a whiff of that same scent we'd smelled in previous
hunts. For the next hour, the dogs would stop and we'd move toward
them, and then they'd move off before we could see them through the underbrush.
The handlers thought the dogs might have gotten into a hog too big for
them to pin down completely. We decided to pull back to our park vehicles
while the handlers tried to recall their dogs. Only one of the catch dogs
returned. He wasn't injured, but he had some blood on his muzzle.
They put him in his kennel and the bay dog continued to holler when they
tried to recall him. On the GPS, the dogs were showing as being
a bit less than a quarter of a mile away, and we decided to
try to get closer to the dogs in case they couldn't hear us, or
the collars were malfunctioning or something. We pushed into the woods, and again
when we got close, the dogs moved away. The handlers were getting worried
and started yelling as loud as they could to get the dogs to return,
and when the dogs moved away yet again, we started running to try to
get close enough to see what was happening. After running a hard mile through
the woods and thorny vines and thick underbrush, we finally caught up to the
dogs near the creek. The catch dog was laying on his side with a
circular stab wound in his left temple. He was dead. The bay dog
was standing over him, barking toward the brush. We thought a hog's tusk
had finally gotten him, but when we inspected him rigor mortis was beginning to
set in. If he just recently stopped moving, that wasn't possible. His
fur was wet, but there was no blood or other injuries anywhere on him,
and it was as if he had been carried and put down where we
had found him. If a hog had dragged him, he'd have been dirty
and beat up. And again that smell permeated the area. The handlers collected
their dogs and we all walked out to the cars. The handlers loaded up
their dogs and left without saying a word. They were definitely spooked and refused
all invitations to ever hunt with us again. Despite all of this, we
never did officially call it a sasquatch encounter. We had several more similar encounters,
but we never did lay eyes on one. The South Georgia brush is
so thick that you can hardly see a few feet in front of you.
We spent the rest of the summer trying to find hard evidence. To provide
proof, we set up game cameras, but all that did was convince me
that they can see infrared illuminators and smart enough to avoid them. Jim had
read about tree knocking, so we finally decided to give it a try to
challenge them into coming out. We parked about two hundred yards from the tree
line and we walked up to one hundred and fifty yards from the tree line
and the pecan field. We borrowed a PVS fourteen monocular to get an advantage
with good night vision, and after being there for about an hour with Jim
knocking on a pecan tree with a dial rod, we finally saw them.
Jim unclipped and handed me the monocular, saying scan the tree line to our
left. Near the first row of pecan trees outside the tree line, there
were three of them, with two more further back in the tree line itself.
It was a clear night and plenty of starlight to feed the night vision.
They were absolutely massive, and the tallest of the three was a good
eight and a half to nine feet tall. The two of the tree line
were, though with a perspective and the trees shading them from the light,
it was hard to tell if they were significantly smaller. The night vision didn't
let us see the color, and we were too far away to see a
good detail on their faces, but they were muscular with thick shoulders and short
necks. Their hair was matted and it reflected some light in the night vision,
as if they had been in a creek water and they were standing there
watching us with no idea that we could see them with our passive night vision.
We were never fans of shooting one to use the corpse as evidence.
They're just animals doing their thing. We're not sport hunters. We eat or
donate the meat from our kills. But we didn't like our chances against five
of them if they decided to attack, so we decided to bug out.
I handed Jim the monocular and we walked backwards to Jim's truck slowly with rifles.
Out said that they were not advancing on us, but they were keeping
pace with us. When we got to the truck, I jumped into the
bed and covered Jim while he got into the driver's seat and got us out
of there. We started referring to them as our friends whenever anyone might be
around to overhear us talking. We never did get them to come out into
the open again. They still throw stuff at us to remind us that they're
still out there. We decided as long as they made no overtly aggressive actions
toward us, that we would not shoot at them. The sticks and rocks
and seeds smarted on occasion, but we did not see it as enough to
respond with deadly forced We did, however, start wearing our armor while we
were out there. The next year, the farmer who on the land leased
a property out from under us to a friend for deer hunting. We found
out later from his son that the guy only hunted once and he never came
back. The farmer has since passed away and we have not been able to
get permission from his estate to continue our hunts. We're still working on it.
We have better technology now to obtain proof that they're still out there.
And one last thing. Once, when I was working the night shift,
I got a call from a coworker who had gone out with Jim and Greg,
and as soon as I answered, he started to cuss me out.
Well, as an ex marine, he had a lot of inventive ways to
swear, and after his verbal assault calmed down, he asked me why I
never told him about our friends on the hunting property. Well, I ask
him if he'd ever believed me, and he said probably not, and he
hung up on me. We never talked about it again. That short chat
proved to me that we were not crazy or seeing things. I believe the
behaviors we witnessed from these creatures were threat displays to protect their hunting grounds.
They could just as easily be very dangerous if they wanted to.