Speaker 1: For decades, people have disappeared in the woods without a trace.
Speaker 1: Some blame wild animals, others whisper of creatures the world
Speaker 1: refuses to believe in. But those who have survived they
Speaker 1: know the truth. Welcome to Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, where we
Speaker 1: share real encounters with the things lurking in the darkness Bigfoot,
Speaker 1: dog man, UFOs, and creatures that defy explanation. Some make
Speaker 1: it out, others aren't so lucky. Are you ready, because
Speaker 1: once you hear these stories, you'll never walk in the
Speaker 1: woods alone again. So grab your flashlight, stay close, and
Speaker 1: remember some things in the woods don't want to be found.
Speaker 1: Hit that follow or subscribe button, turn on auto downloads,
Speaker 1: and let's head off into the woods if you dare. Hey, Brian,
Speaker 1: I don't know how you sort through what lands in
Speaker 1: your inbox, and I won't pretend my stories the strangest
Speaker 1: one you've ever been sent. I've listened to enough of
Speaker 1: your shows to know you handle people's stories with care,
Speaker 1: and that's the only reason I'm sitting down to write this.
Speaker 1: My daughter played me one of your Encounter episode's last
Speaker 1: Christmas in her kitchen. I sat there with her earbud
Speaker 1: in my ear for forty straight minutes and didn't say
Speaker 1: a word. When it was over. She asked me what
Speaker 1: I thought of it, and I told her i'd let
Speaker 1: her know that was almost a year ago. Here, I
Speaker 1: am two things up front before any of it. Every
Speaker 1: name in here is a first name only, and none
Speaker 1: of them's real. The man who hired me back then
Speaker 1: has been gone for some years now, but his family's
Speaker 1: still around and they don't deserve to have his last
Speaker 1: name dragged into something he never spoke about while he
Speaker 1: was alive. The young man who came with us as
Speaker 1: his assistant is doing fine from what I hear, and
Speaker 1: I've left him alone for thirty years and intend to
Speaker 1: keep doing that. So in this email, i'll call him Conrad.
Speaker 1: The kid I'll call Drew, and you can call me
Speaker 1: Tim if you read any of this on the air.
Speaker 1: That isn't the name on my driver's license, but it's
Speaker 1: close enough to what folks used to call me when
Speaker 1: I worked. The second thing is that I don't want
Speaker 1: a dime for this, and I don't want anybody coming
Speaker 1: up here to look for the place. The country where
Speaker 1: it happened is still out there, and the line that
Speaker 1: got crossed is still a line. So if you decide
Speaker 1: to tell this, tell it as a story, don't tell
Speaker 1: it as a map. All right, that's the housekeeping here
Speaker 1: we go. I started guiding hunters in northern Idaho in
Speaker 1: the late eighties. I'd come back from four years in
Speaker 1: the Marine Corps with nothing in my pocket and a
Speaker 1: back that wasn't going to like office work, and a
Speaker 1: man my dad knew offered to teach me what he
Speaker 1: knew about elk and mule deer in exchange for help
Speaker 1: around his place. By the time I hit my early thirties,
Speaker 1: I was running my own outfit out of a single
Speaker 1: wide trailer and a battered bronco, and I had a
Speaker 1: reputation for being the kind of guide who'd put you
Speaker 1: on an animal when nobody else could. That sounds prouder
Speaker 1: than it ought to. The truth was I needed the work.
Speaker 1: My wife at the time and I had a baby boy,
Speaker 1: and the medical bills from his first eight months had
Speaker 1: hit us in a way that took years to climb
Speaker 1: out from under. By the fall of nineteen ninety five,
Speaker 1: I was guiding anything that walked through the door with
Speaker 1: cash in its hand. Black Bear Mountain goat elk late
Speaker 1: season cow tags. I once took a dentist out for
Speaker 1: ruffed grouse because he'd offered me four hundred dollars for
Speaker 1: a half day walk and we needed the propane. I
Speaker 1: tell you that because I wanted on record. I wasn't
Speaker 1: a brave man. I was a tired man with a
Speaker 1: young family, and tired men with young families say yes
Speaker 1: to things they probably shouldn't. Conrad came to me in
Speaker 1: the second week of September, though he didn't drive up himself,
Speaker 1: a man i'd guided two years before. A real estate
Speaker 1: fellow out of Spokane had given Conrad my number, and
Speaker 1: Conrad called me from a hotel in Kurdalen and said
Speaker 1: he had a project he wanted to discuss in person.
Speaker 1: He used that word project, not a hunt, not a trip,
Speaker 1: a project. I should have heard something in that, but
Speaker 1: I didn't. He showed up the next morning in a
Speaker 1: least suburban with the longest Matt Black case in the
Speaker 1: back seat I'd ever seen riding to a hunt. He
Speaker 1: was maybe forty five, lean, gray at the temples, with
Speaker 1: the kind of soft hands that have never gripped a
Speaker 1: wrench but have signed a great mini checks he had
Speaker 1: on the brand new version of every piece of gear
Speaker 1: the catalogs were pushing that year new boots, new jacket,
Speaker 1: a wristwatch that probably cost more than my truck. He
Speaker 1: had a young man with him, maybe twenty three or
Speaker 1: twenty four, whose job, as far as I could tell,
Speaker 1: was to carry whatever Conrad sat down. That was drew.
Speaker 1: We sat at my kitchen table and Conrad opened up
Speaker 1: a folder. Inside were aerial photographs, top g graphic maps
Speaker 1: with grease pencil circles on them, and three printed articles
Speaker 1: that looked like they'd come off the early days of
Speaker 1: the Internet, which still felt new and shaky back then.
Speaker 1: I didn't have a computer myself, so I read the
Speaker 1: headlines upside down across the table. The articles were about Sasquatch.
Speaker 1: I didn't say anything at first. I just looked up
Speaker 1: at him and waited. He smiled, the way a man
Speaker 1: smiles when he thinks he has the upper hand of
Speaker 1: every room he walks into. He said he wanted to
Speaker 1: take a Sasquatch. I'll be honest about my reaction. I
Speaker 1: didn't laugh or tell him to leave. I sat at
Speaker 1: the table with my coffee in my hand, and I
Speaker 1: thought about the truck payment, and the propane bill, and
Speaker 1: the new pair of boots my boy needed for school.
Speaker 1: And I asked Conrad what he meant exactly when he
Speaker 1: said the word take. He laid it out for me.
Speaker 1: He'd heard through a friend of a friend that there
Speaker 1: was a part of the country up here where the
Speaker 1: locals didn't go after dark. He'd paid somebody to dig
Speaker 1: up old newspaper articles and a few hunter reports from
Speaker 1: the setes. He'd spoken to a fish and game biologist
Speaker 1: who'd asked not to be quoted. He decided this was
Speaker 1: the place he didn't expect to walk out of the
Speaker 1: woods with a body. And he told me that plainly
Speaker 1: what he wanted was footage, thermal footage, audio, something he
Speaker 1: could take to a private buyer he'd already been in
Speaker 1: touch with. Failing that, he'd settle for a clean trophy shot.
Speaker 1: He said the word trophy the way other people say
Speaker 1: the word groceries. I asked him about Drew. He waved
Speaker 1: his hand and said Drew would handle the cameras and
Speaker 1: carry batteries and wouldn't be in his way. Drew, sitting
Speaker 1: in the corner with a notebook, looked at me like
Speaker 1: he was hoping I'd say something his boss couldn't argue with.
Speaker 1: Then Conrad slid a piece of paper across the table.
Speaker 1: On it, he'd written a number. The number was twelve
Speaker 1: thousand dollars. He told me, in the same voice he
Speaker 1: might have used to order a sandwich, that I'd receive
Speaker 1: half upfront in cash and the other half in cash
Speaker 1: on our return. I told him I needed to think
Speaker 1: about it overnight, and he nodded as though he'd never
Speaker 1: heard a no in his life and probably never would,
Speaker 1: and he said he'd be at the hotel until ten
Speaker 1: the next morning. After he left, I drove out to
Speaker 1: a ridge above my place and sat in the bed
Speaker 1: of my pickup and watched the dark come in over
Speaker 1: the cell Kirks. Twelve thousand dollars in nineteen ninety five
Speaker 1: was almost half a year's income for me. It was
Speaker 1: my boy's medical, the rest of the truck, and breathing
Speaker 1: room I hadn't had since the previous winter. I called
Speaker 1: him at nine the next morning and said, yes, I
Speaker 1: want that on record. I made the choice with my
Speaker 1: eyes open. Whatever happened later wasn't something Conrad did to me.
Speaker 1: It was something I walked into knowing better. I'd grown
Speaker 1: up listening to old men in this country. The old
Speaker 1: men I came up around were a mix of timber families,
Speaker 1: a couple of Salish elders who came down to a
Speaker 1: diner on the highway every Wednesday, and a handful of
Speaker 1: trappers who'd been working those drainages since before I was born.
Speaker 1: They didn't all agree on much, and they didn't even
Speaker 1: all agree on what to call the thing we were
Speaker 1: going up there to find. But they agreed on one
Speaker 1: piece of country, and they agreed on one piece of advice,
Speaker 1: And the advice had been the same for as long
Speaker 1: as anybody had been giving it. There was a creek
Speaker 1: up in the high country that the old maps didn't
Speaker 1: bother to name. The white loggers and the trappers had
Speaker 1: a few names for it, none of them official. The
Speaker 1: Salish men I knew called it something I won't right here,
Speaker 1: because it isn't mine to write. The simplest thing the
Speaker 1: old men used to tell me when I was a
Speaker 1: boy and asking too many questions, was that you didn't
Speaker 1: cross that creek to hunt. You could cross it for water.
Speaker 1: You could cross it for a lost dog. If you
Speaker 1: had to, you didn't cross it to take. I asked
Speaker 1: an old trapper once when I was maybe fifteen, what
Speaker 1: would happen if you did. He had a face like
Speaker 1: a piece of driftwood, and he didn't answer me right away.
Speaker 1: He chewed on his lip for a minute, and then
Speaker 1: he said, you'd find out who lives there. I thought
Speaker 1: about that conversation more than once on the drive in.
Speaker 1: I didn't share any of it with Conrad, not at first.
Speaker 1: We met up at a turn off above a forest
Speaker 1: service road on the second of October, and I drove
Speaker 1: the lead truck while Conrad and Drew followed in the suburban.
Speaker 1: We had close to four hours of road to cover.
Speaker 1: The first three were on county and forest roads that
Speaker 1: any pickup could handle, but the last hour was on
Speaker 1: a track that I had to get out twice to clear.
Speaker 1: I'd put a chainsaw in the bed for that purpose.
Speaker 1: Conrad watched me work without offering to help, and Drew
Speaker 1: tried twice to pitch in and was waved off by
Speaker 1: his boss. Let me give you a sense of Conrad
Speaker 1: before I go any further, because he matters. He wasn't stupid,
Speaker 1: and he wasn't cruel in the regular sense of the word.
Speaker 1: He was something I think people from his world become
Speaker 1: without meaning to. He'd spent thirty years being the most
Speaker 1: important person in any room he walked into, and he'd
Speaker 1: stop noticing there were rooms. He thought of the woods
Speaker 1: the way he thought of his own driveway. He believed
Speaker 1: on a level he didn't, even though he believed it,
Speaker 1: that the country we were driving into belonged to whoever
Speaker 1: could afford to be in it. He told me, while
Speaker 1: I was sawing through a windfall pine that he'd taken
Speaker 1: a leopard in Zambia in nineteen ninety one. I don't
Speaker 1: doubt he had. He told me he'd taken a brown
Speaker 1: bear in Kumchotka, and he said the word Kamchatka the
Speaker 1: way some men say the name of a woman they
Speaker 1: used to know. He said he'd had his eye on
Speaker 1: this for a long time. This he didn't say what
Speaker 1: this was. The Sasquatch wasn't a creature to him. It
Speaker 1: was an entry on a list. Drew was a different animal.
Speaker 1: He was a film school kid who'd taken this gig
Speaker 1: because it paid him in a month what he made
Speaker 1: in a year of waiting tables in Seattle. He had
Speaker 1: every piece of camera equipment Conrad had bought him laid
Speaker 1: out in foam in three pelican cases, and he treated
Speaker 1: those cases like they were full of glass eggs. He
Speaker 1: apologized to me twice for things that weren't his fault,
Speaker 1: and he offered me half his sandwich at lunch. He
Speaker 1: was scared of his boss in a way that made
Speaker 1: me feel sorry for him, and a little protective in
Speaker 1: a way I tried not to let show. We made
Speaker 1: the trailhead in the late afternoon. By trailhead, I mean
Speaker 1: a wide spot in the road where the track ran
Speaker 1: out and a faint footpath continued up through Alder. There
Speaker 1: was no sign, no register box, nothing on any map
Speaker 1: I owned that said this place existed by name. I parked,
Speaker 1: stepped out, and stood at the edge of the road,
Speaker 1: watching the country for a long time. You should know
Speaker 1: that I'd been into this drainage before. I'd hunted it
Speaker 1: as a young man with a friend of mine whose
Speaker 1: dad had brought him up there, and we'd stayed on
Speaker 1: the lower side. We'd taken a five y five bull
Speaker 1: in a meadow about three miles up. The country was steep,
Speaker 1: mostly old growth cedar. At the bottom then mixed conifer,
Speaker 1: then high country with little hidden parks and rock out
Speaker 1: crops up around six and seven thousand feet. There was
Speaker 1: elkin there, and bear and the usual ruffed grouse and
Speaker 1: the occasional moose moved through. There was also, depending on
Speaker 1: who you asked, something else. I'd never seen it. I'd
Speaker 1: heard things the way you hear things in the woods,
Speaker 1: and I'd come across a couple of pieces of sign
Speaker 1: in my career that I couldn't account for. I hadn't
Speaker 1: in my own mind made a decision about whether the
Speaker 1: something else was real. What I decided was that the
Speaker 1: old men I trusted believed it was, and that the
Speaker 1: old men were rarely wrong about country. The creek I'd
Speaker 1: been told never to cross was about four miles in
Speaker 1: from where we parked. I planned to camp short of
Speaker 1: it that first night. That was the plan. We hiked
Speaker 1: in for the rest of the daylight. Conrad set a
Speaker 1: fast pace for a man who'd been sitting in a
Speaker 1: leather seat for four hours, and his gear was light
Speaker 1: because Drew was carrying half of it. I had my
Speaker 1: own pack and the chainsaw. We made it about two
Speaker 1: and a half miles before the light went and I
Speaker 1: called a halt at a flat spot beside a smaller
Speaker 1: feed or creek that I'd used as a camp before.
Speaker 1: The first night was eventful, and that matters. It was
Speaker 1: completely ordinary. We had a small fire. Conrad drank two
Speaker 1: fingers of bourbon out of a steel cup and told
Speaker 1: a story about a koodoo in Namibia that I didn't
Speaker 1: entirely follow. Drew worked on his cameras by headlamp. We
Speaker 1: could hear an owl somewhere up the slope, and a
Speaker 1: bull elk bugled twice over toward the north ridge, and
Speaker 1: Conrad got quiet and listened to it like he was
Speaker 1: hearing music in a language he understood. I lay in
Speaker 1: my tent that night and listened to the country, and
Speaker 1: the country sounded the way the country was supposed to sound,
Speaker 1: wind in the cedars, the creek down below us, the
Speaker 1: small noise of mice in the duff. I went to
Speaker 1: sleep and slept hard. I'm telling you about that ordinary
Speaker 1: night because of what happened on the second day. We
Speaker 1: broke camp at first light. Conrad wanted to push hard.
Speaker 1: I told him we had a long climb to where
Speaker 1: I'd planned to set up base camp, and we'd want
Speaker 1: to be on the ground there with light to spare
Speaker 1: so we could glass the basin in the evening. He
Speaker 1: said fine. We moved around mid morning. We came on
Speaker 1: the first thing. It was a young pine, maybe four
Speaker 1: inches at the base, that had been twisted and laid
Speaker 1: across the trail at about chest height. I've seen damage
Speaker 1: from the wind snow load, and bear damage, and I've
Speaker 1: seen what porcupines and moose can do to a young tree.
Speaker 1: This wasn't any of those. The pine was rooted on
Speaker 1: the uphill side of the trail, it had been bent
Speaker 1: across the path, and the top had been driven into
Speaker 1: the ground on the downhill side, and it was holding.
Speaker 1: The trunk was twisted, not snapped. The bark had pulled
Speaker 1: and split along a spiral. I stopped and looked at
Speaker 1: it for a long minute. Conrad came up behind me
Speaker 1: and asked what the hold up was. I told him
Speaker 1: I wasn't sure. He pushed past me, ducked under the trunk,
Speaker 1: and kept going up the trail. Drew looked at me,
Speaker 1: and I looked at Drew. I gave the trunk a
Speaker 1: tap with my hand, and the whole thing held like
Speaker 1: it had been planted. We went on. Stay tuned for
Speaker 1: more backwoods big stories. We'll be back after these messages.
Speaker 1: About forty minutes later we came on the second thing.
Speaker 1: There was an old cedar stump beside the trail, the
Speaker 1: kind of stump that had probably been cut by a
Speaker 1: hand crew sometime around World War One. It was mossed
Speaker 1: over and weathered down, and on top of it sat
Speaker 1: a stone. The stone was the size of a small watermelon.
Speaker 1: It was wet, the way riverstones are wet, with that
Speaker 1: dark sheen on it. The nearest running water was the
Speaker 1: feeder creek we'd left more than a mile below. The
Speaker 1: stone had been balanced on the stump in a way
Speaker 1: I couldn't have replicated if you'd given me an hour
Speaker 1: and a level. Conrad stopped this time. He looked at
Speaker 1: the stone for a long moment, and I could see
Speaker 1: him working out what it was. Then he reached out
Speaker 1: and pushed it. It rocked but didn't fall. He pushed harder,
Speaker 1: and it tipped off the stump and thudded into the dove.
Speaker 1: He looked at me and smiled, and his smile was
Speaker 1: the smile of a man who has just decided that
Speaker 1: something as a prank. He said, somebody's been up here
Speaker 1: messing around, probably the same locals you said were spooked.
Speaker 1: I told him I didn't think so. He told me
Speaker 1: very pleasantly that what I thought wasn't what he was
Speaker 1: paying me for. That was the moment, if I'm being
Speaker 1: absolutely truthful with you, that was the first moment I
Speaker 1: should have turned us around. We hadn't yet crossed any line.
Speaker 1: We were still on the right side of where I
Speaker 1: knew we ought to be, and I had a way
Speaker 1: to get him back to his vehicle by nightfall if
Speaker 1: I leaned on it, and I sat there in the
Speaker 1: trail and heard my own voice in my own head
Speaker 1: saying the truck payment and the boots and the propane,
Speaker 1: and I let him win. We went on. We came
Speaker 1: up on the creek a little after one in the afternoon.
Speaker 1: It was, I have to tell you, a perfectly ordinary creek,
Speaker 1: maybe twelve feet across at that crossing, knee deep in
Speaker 1: the deepest channel, running clean over a bed of dark
Speaker 1: stones with a little white foam where it broke around
Speaker 1: two larger rocks in the middle. There were old logs
Speaker 1: lying along the banks, and the woods came down close
Speaker 1: on both sides. If I'd been showing it to a
Speaker 1: fly fisherman, I'd have told him it looked like a
Speaker 1: good cutthroat stretch. The trail dropped down to a flat
Speaker 1: where you could pick your way across on stones, and
Speaker 1: a faint track continued up the bank on the far side.
Speaker 1: I stopped on our side and dropped my pack. Conrad
Speaker 1: asked me what I was doing. I told him we
Speaker 1: needed to talk. I sat him down on a piece
Speaker 1: of log. Drew sat down beside him, with his camera
Speaker 1: bag on his lap. I squatted on my heels, the
Speaker 1: way old men in this country squat when they want
Speaker 1: to say something serious without standing over you. I told
Speaker 1: him about the line, not every word of it, and
Speaker 1: I didn't quote any of the old men. I told
Speaker 1: him that locally this creek was treated as a boundary,
Speaker 1: and that I'd been into the country on the far
Speaker 1: side a few times in my life, but only for water,
Speaker 1: and never to take I told him that what we
Speaker 1: were here for, regardless of what either of us believed in,
Speaker 1: it was the kind of thing the people who lived
Speaker 1: in this country didn't do across this creek. I asked
Speaker 1: him to consider hunting from this side. I told him
Speaker 1: I'd extend the trip by two days at no charge,
Speaker 1: and that if we glassed the basin from the ridges
Speaker 1: on this side, we'd have the same shot at seeing
Speaker 1: whatever there was to see. He listened to me. I'll
Speaker 1: give him that. He didn't interrupt when I was finished.
Speaker 1: He was quiet for a moment, and then he asked
Speaker 1: me a question. He asked me, do you believe what
Speaker 1: you're telling me? I told him the truth. I told
Speaker 1: him I didn't know what I believed, but that I
Speaker 1: knew what I'd been told, and I knew the men
Speaker 1: who told me, and I trusted them more than I
Speaker 1: trusted my own opinions about country I didn't live in
Speaker 1: full time. He nodded, He took a sip of water
Speaker 1: from a stainless bottle and looked at the creek for
Speaker 1: a long minute. Then he stood up, picked up his pack,
Speaker 1: and said, all right, I respect that, but I didn't
Speaker 1: come fifteen hundred miles to glass from a ridge. He
Speaker 1: stepped down to the and he walked across the creek
Speaker 1: without taking his boots off. Drew stood there beside me,
Speaker 1: and I could see he was scared. He was a kid.
Speaker 1: He looked at me with his mouth a little open,
Speaker 1: and he said, very quietly, what do we do? I'll
Speaker 1: tell you what I was thinking at that moment, because
Speaker 1: I've thought about it almost every week since. I was
Speaker 1: thinking that I could let Conrad go on alone. He
Speaker 1: was on his own now, by his own decision. I
Speaker 1: could sit on this side with Drew and we could wait,
Speaker 1: or we could walk back out and I could mail
Speaker 1: him his half of the deposit. That was a real option,
Speaker 1: and I had it in my hand. I didn't take it.
Speaker 1: I told Drew to follow me across, and I picked
Speaker 1: up my pack and I went. The water was cold
Speaker 1: in a way I remember specifically, not the cold of
Speaker 1: a normal creek in October, but the cold that comes
Speaker 1: off glacial melt, A hurting cold. I was through it
Speaker 1: in maybe ten seconds, and my feet ached for an
Speaker 1: hour after up the far bank. That was when the
Speaker 1: country went quiet. Let me try to describe this, and
Speaker 1: I'm not sure i'll do it justice. The sound of
Speaker 1: the woods doesn't stop all at once. It steps down
Speaker 1: the way a stage light steps down at the end
Speaker 1: of a play. There's a moment when you realize you
Speaker 1: haven't heard a chickadee in a while, and then you
Speaker 1: realize you haven't heard a creek bird in a while.
Speaker 1: And then a wind comes through the cedars overhead, and
Speaker 1: it sounds, for the first time in your life, like
Speaker 1: it's the only thing making any noise on the entire mountain.
Speaker 1: By the time I got to the top of the bank,
Speaker 1: I could hear my own heart beat in my ears.
Speaker 1: I wasn't afraid yet, I could hear it because there
Speaker 1: was nothing else to listen to. The squirrels had stopped chittering,
Speaker 1: and the jays were gone, And although the wind in
Speaker 1: the trees was loud, underneath that wind sat the deepest
Speaker 1: silence I've ever stood inside of. Conrad was already thirty
Speaker 1: yards up the trail and didn't seem to notice. Drew
Speaker 1: came up behind me and stopped beside me. He said,
Speaker 1: very quietly, where are all the birdsards? I told him
Speaker 1: I didn't know. We caught up to Conrad, who'd stopped
Speaker 1: beside a cedar that had to be eight feet through
Speaker 1: at the base. He was looking up at it. The
Speaker 1: bark on the uphill side had been rubbed off in
Speaker 1: a vertical strip about as wide as a man's torso,
Speaker 1: and the strip ran from the duff all the way
Speaker 1: up to a height i'd put at eleven or twelve
Speaker 1: feet off the ground, higher than any elk could rub,
Speaker 1: higher than any bear could reach. Conrad ran his hand
Speaker 1: over the bear wood and smiled. He said, that's our boy.
Speaker 1: There was no fear in him. There was excitement, and
Speaker 1: there was a kind of possession. He'd already decided that
Speaker 1: whatever was making this sign was his, It belonged to him.
Speaker 1: He'd walk through this country and accumulate evidence of it
Speaker 1: the way a man walks through a buffet line and
Speaker 1: accumulates plates. We pushed on for another two hours, climbing steadily,
Speaker 1: and we came on three more rub trees, four more
Speaker 1: twisted saplings, and one more stump with a stone on it.
Speaker 1: The stone on this one was bigger than the first.
Speaker 1: It was wet, and I don't know where the water
Speaker 1: on it came from. The nearest running water was the
Speaker 1: creek we'd crossed. Around five in the afternoon, we came
Speaker 1: up onto a flat bench above a rock outcrop, with
Speaker 1: a clear sight line down a long basin to the south.
Speaker 1: It was a good camp. There was a small spring
Speaker 1: running off the rock and a fire ring I'd left
Speaker 1: there myself, maybe seven years before. It was the place
Speaker 1: I'd told Conrad we would set up. I'd planned that
Speaker 1: camp before I knew we were going to cross the creek.
Speaker 1: It was sitting, by my best estimate, about a mile
Speaker 1: and a quarter on the wrong side of the line
Speaker 1: we made camp. Drew set up his cameras on tripods
Speaker 1: at the edge of the bench, looking down into the basin.
Speaker 1: Conrad got out his thermal optic, which was a unit
Speaker 1: I hadn't seen before. I'd seen night vision in the Marines,
Speaker 1: and I'd seen the early commercial thermals that were just
Speaker 1: starting to come into the hunting market in the late nineties,
Speaker 1: and this thing was a generation ahead of both. He
Speaker 1: told me, with a great deal of pride, that he'd
Speaker 1: bought it through a contact who worked in defense procurement.
Speaker 1: He set it on a tripod beside Drew's cameras and
Speaker 1: tested it on a coyote that crossed the basin a
Speaker 1: quarter mile down. I cooked, Drew helped me. Conrad sat
Speaker 1: in a chair he'd had Drew carry up for him
Speaker 1: and watched the basin. The sun went down behind the
Speaker 1: ridges to the west, and the country stayed quiet. Not
Speaker 1: silent now, exactly the way it had been right after
Speaker 1: the creek, but quiet underneath the wind in the spring.
Speaker 1: There was no animal sound. No coyote yipped, no owl called,
Speaker 1: and the bull elk that had bugled the night before
Speaker 1: on the far side of the line was nowhere up here.
Speaker 1: About an hour after dark, the first thing happened. Conrad
Speaker 1: sat up sharply in his chair and made a small
Speaker 1: grunt of attention. I came over to him. He was
Speaker 1: looking through his thermal. He pointed, without taking his eye
Speaker 1: off the optic, and he said, west ridge two thirds up.
Speaker 1: Looked with my naked eyes, I could see nothing at all.
Speaker 1: The ridge was a black shape against a slightly less
Speaker 1: black sky. Drew swung one of his cameras around. Conrad
Speaker 1: slid out of his chair very quietly, and reached for
Speaker 1: his rifle. This is where I want to stop and
Speaker 1: tell you what he was carrying. He had a custom
Speaker 1: Mauser M ninety eight chambered in three seventy five H
Speaker 1: and H magnum. It was a beautiful gun. The wood
Speaker 1: was figured walnut, the metal work was case hardened, and
Speaker 1: it had a Schmidt and Bender scope on top of
Speaker 1: it in a different context, I'd have admired it with
Speaker 1: both hands. He was carrying it that night with a
Speaker 1: thermal clip on attachment that made it to his daytime scope.
Speaker 1: The whole setup had cost more than my truck, including
Speaker 1: the trailer hitch. He stood up, shouldered the rifle and
Speaker 1: looked through the thermal. I have to be straight with
Speaker 1: you here, I didn't see the shape on the ridge.
Speaker 1: I have only what Conrad described, and what he described
Speaker 1: changed in the telling even that night. The first time
Speaker 1: he said it, he said it was a man shape standing.
Speaker 1: The second time he said it, he said it was leaning.
Speaker 1: Drew for his part, swore on the next day that
Speaker 1: he'd had something on the camera, and we'll come back
Speaker 1: to that. What I know is what happened next. Conrad
Speaker 1: fired the report, came off the rock face behind us,
Speaker 1: and slammed back across the basin in a way I
Speaker 1: felt in my chest and the muzzle flash strobe the
Speaker 1: bench like lightning. I had my hands over my ears,
Speaker 1: and I still felt it. There was a beat of
Speaker 1: silence after the shot, a long beat. Then Conrad lowered
Speaker 1: the rifle and turned toward me with his face lit up.
Speaker 1: He said, I hit it. I hit it dead solid.
Speaker 1: It went down. I asked him, are you sure? He said,
Speaker 1: I watched it fall. I asked him where exactly? He pointed.
Speaker 1: I marked the spot on the ridge as best I could.
Speaker 1: We couldn't get there in the dark. The country between
Speaker 1: us and that point was steep, broken loose rock, and
Speaker 1: going over there in headlamps would have been begging for
Speaker 1: a turned ankle or worse. I told him we'd find
Speaker 1: it at first light. He nodded, but his hands were shaking,
Speaker 1: not with fear, with excitement. He clapped drew on the
Speaker 1: shoulder and laughed. We went to bed about two hours later,
Speaker 1: after Conrad had calmed down enough to drink some water
Speaker 1: and eat. I checked the perimeter of camp before I
Speaker 1: turned in the way I always do. I walked the bench,
Speaker 1: walked the spring, walked the edge of the rock. I
Speaker 1: came back to my tent, climbed in, and lay there
Speaker 1: in my bag for a long time with my eyes open.
Speaker 1: I didn't sleep that night, not really. I dozed maybe
Speaker 1: an hour total, in stretches. The thing that kept me
Speaker 1: awake wasn't what Conrad had done. What kept me awake
Speaker 1: was that the country hadn't made a single sound in
Speaker 1: response to that shot. We got up at first light.
Speaker 1: Conrad was up before me, which surprised me. He was
Speaker 1: already dressed and standing at the edge of the bench,
Speaker 1: glassing the ridge with his daytime optic. He turned to
Speaker 1: me when I came out of my tent, and he
Speaker 1: was wearing the same look I'd seen on him the
Speaker 1: previous night, only sharpened. He looked the way a man
Speaker 1: looks who's been waiting for Christmas morning his whole life,
Speaker 1: and woken up to find it was finally here. I
Speaker 1: made coffee. We ate quickly. Drew packed a daypack with
Speaker 1: two of his cameras. Conrad slung his rifle in a
Speaker 1: smaller pack. I took a coil of rope, a first
Speaker 1: aid kit, and a plastic tarp to wrap whatever we found.
Speaker 1: It took us almost two hours to work our way
Speaker 1: over to the spot. We had to drop down off
Speaker 1: the bench, cross a saddle, climb the west ridge from
Speaker 1: the south side, and traverse a face of broken rock.
Speaker 1: I had to go ahead twice to find a root.
Speaker 1: By the time we got to the place Conrad had marked,
Speaker 1: my legs were burning and Drew was sweating through his shirt.
Speaker 1: We searched. We searched for an hour, then two. We
Speaker 1: worked concentric circles, then downhill where any wounded ants animal
Speaker 1: would have run, then uphill in case it had gone
Speaker 1: the other way. We checked along ledges and under blowdowns.
Speaker 1: We found, in total four things. The first was a
Speaker 1: smear of something on a flat piece of rock, about
Speaker 1: thirty feet downhill of where Conrad said the shape had
Speaker 1: been standing. The smear was about eighteen inches long, dark
Speaker 1: and sticky, and the morning sun hadn't dried it. I
Speaker 1: knelt beside it and didn't touch it. It was the wrong
Speaker 1: color for blood, the wrong color for any blood I'd
Speaker 1: ever seen, and I have in my career seen a
Speaker 1: great deal of blood. It was blacker than venus blood, thicker,
Speaker 1: with a faint sheen on top of it, the way
Speaker 1: an oil slick has a sheen. Drew filmed it. I
Speaker 1: wouldn't be surprised if his footage of that smear is
Speaker 1: still on a hard drive somewhere. The second was a
Speaker 1: single hair caught on a piece of bitter brush about
Speaker 1: ten feet from the smear. It was reddish brown end
Speaker 1: to end, close to seven inches long. It was coarse.
Speaker 1: I bagged it in a sandwich bag I had in
Speaker 1: my coat pocket and slipped the bag into my coat.
Speaker 1: I'm sure I lost that bag somewhere in the months
Speaker 1: that followed. I never had it tested, and I never
Speaker 1: wanted it tested. The third was a track, just one.
Speaker 1: The ground was mostly broken rock, and there was only
Speaker 1: one place in the whole search area where there was
Speaker 1: enough soft duff for any kind of impression to register.
Speaker 1: The print was in that duff. It was conservatively sixteen
Speaker 1: inches long, with five toes, and the toes were the
Speaker 1: wrong shape, not human and not any animal toe. I
Speaker 1: knew there was a clear ball of the foot, and
Speaker 1: the impression was deepest at the heel and at the ball,
Speaker 1: the way a footprint is deepest when something heavy is walking,
Speaker 1: not running. Drew film the print. Conrad stood over it
Speaker 1: for a long time, not saying anything. The fourth was
Speaker 1: the absence of a body. There was no body anywhere,
Speaker 1: no trail, no drag mark, no further blood beyond the smell.
Speaker 1: Stay tuned for more Backwoods bigfoot stories. We'll be back
Speaker 1: after these messages. Whatever had been on that rock had
Speaker 1: gotten up and walked off, and it had walked off
Speaker 1: in a way that left no trace beyond the single track.
Speaker 1: After three hours, Conrad called the search. He was furious
Speaker 1: in a quiet way. He wasn't yelling. He was walking
Speaker 1: with his jaw set, kicking at rocks, shaking his head.
Speaker 1: He told me, as we worked our way back toward camp,
Speaker 1: that the shot had been good and the animal had
Speaker 1: been hit. I told him I believed him. I did
Speaker 1: believe him. I just believed something else, too, and I
Speaker 1: didn't say it out loud. What I believed was that
Speaker 1: we'd wounded something that shouldn't have been wounded, and that
Speaker 1: we were now in country that knew it. We got
Speaker 1: back to camp in the early afternoon. Conrad ate a
Speaker 1: freeze dried meal, drank from a flask, sat in his
Speaker 1: chair and watched the basin. He was waiting, I think,
Speaker 1: for whatever he'd hit to come back into view. Drew
Speaker 1: puttered around with his cameras. I cleaned up the camp,
Speaker 1: refilled water from the spring, and split some wood for
Speaker 1: the night's fire. The sun went down, the country was
Speaker 1: quiet again. We ate. Conrad went to bed early. He
Speaker 1: told me he wanted to be up well before light
Speaker 1: to glass the ridges at dawn. Drew went to bed
Speaker 1: shortly after. I sat by the fire for another hour,
Speaker 1: then banked the coals and turned in. I slept that night.
Speaker 1: I don't know why. Maybe my body had decided that
Speaker 1: it had to. I went out hard, and I dreamed
Speaker 1: something I can't remember the details of, only that in
Speaker 1: the dream, I was walking through a stand of cedars,
Speaker 1: and there was someone walking parallel to me through the trees,
Speaker 1: just out of sight, matching my pace. I woke up
Speaker 1: an hour before dawn because Drew was outside my tent
Speaker 1: saying my name. He was saying it the way you
Speaker 1: say a name when you don't want to wake anybody
Speaker 1: else up. He was crouched beside the door of my tent,
Speaker 1: and his face, when I unzipped, was as white as
Speaker 1: a bone. He didn't say anything else, He just made
Speaker 1: a small motion with his head toward the edge of
Speaker 1: the camp. I pulled on my boots and went with him.
Speaker 1: The fire was down to coals and there was just
Speaker 1: enough gray in the eastern sky to see by without
Speaker 1: the headlamp. Drew walked me out past the edge of
Speaker 1: the bench to the little flat on the south side
Speaker 1: of the camp where the spring ran out before it
Speaker 1: dropped over the rock. There were six animals laid out
Speaker 1: on the flat in a circle. Picture this. The circle
Speaker 1: was maybe eighteen feet across. The animals were laid with
Speaker 1: their heads pointed inward toward the center, and they'd been arranged,
Speaker 1: every one of them with care. The ground around them
Speaker 1: was undisturbed. There was no blood on the ground, no
Speaker 1: spray of any kind. The first animal closest to me
Speaker 1: was a coyote with its neck broken. The body was
Speaker 1: otherwise intact, the eyes open, the mouth closed. The second
Speaker 1: was a young raccoon with both four legs broken cleanly
Speaker 1: at the same point on each leg. Its neck had
Speaker 1: also been broken. Its tail was laid out behind it
Speaker 1: in a straight line, and its ringed pattern was perfect.
Speaker 1: The third was a fissure. I've only seen a wild
Speaker 1: fissure three or four times in my life. It's a
Speaker 1: hard animal to see. This One's spine had been broken
Speaker 1: in the lower back and its head had been turned
Speaker 1: around backward. The fourth was a porcupine with every quill
Speaker 1: still in it. I don't know how anything broke a
Speaker 1: porcupine without losing fingers. Its skull had been crushed. The
Speaker 1: fifth was a marmot, which made no sense at all
Speaker 1: because we were below Marmot Country. The sixth was a
Speaker 1: young mule deer, a dough maybe a year and a
Speaker 1: half old. Her neck had been broken, her front legs
Speaker 1: had been broken, and her hindquarters were intact. Her eyes
Speaker 1: were still open and they hadn't yet glazed. None of
Speaker 1: the six had been eaten. Not one bite had been
Speaker 1: taken from any of them. There was no scavenging, no flies,
Speaker 1: no smell yet of decay. They were fresh, laid down
Speaker 1: within the last hour maybe two. The circle was perfect,
Speaker 1: The spacing between the animals was even. The heads all
Speaker 1: pointed in the first thing that hit me about that
Speaker 1: scene wasn't fear. The fear came later. The first thing
Speaker 1: I felt was something I have only felt one other
Speaker 1: time in my life, and that was when I was
Speaker 1: a young man at a military funeral and I watched
Speaker 1: the honor guard fold a flag for a friend's mother.
Speaker 1: The first thing I felt was that I was looking
Speaker 1: at something ceremonial. Somebody had taken the time to do this.
Speaker 1: Somebody had taken the time to pick up six animals
Speaker 1: from across the country. We were standing in, one of
Speaker 1: them from above us, and one of them from a
Speaker 1: habitat we were below, and lay them out in the
Speaker 1: dark around our camp with their heads pointed in toward us.
Speaker 1: It wasn't a threat. Let me say that clearly, because
Speaker 1: it would have been easier. If it had been a
Speaker 1: threat I would have understood, and a threat I could
Speaker 1: have answered. But this seemed more like an indicet Drew
Speaker 1: came out of his tent ten minutes later. He stood
Speaker 1: at the edge of the circle for a long time
Speaker 1: and didn't say anything. He had his camera out and
Speaker 1: was filming, but his hands were shaking and the footage
Speaker 1: probably wasn't usable. I watched Conrad's face the whole time
Speaker 1: he stood there. On that face for the first time,
Speaker 1: I saw a flicker of something that I hadn't seen before.
Speaker 1: Not fear exactly, something closer to insult. He looked like
Speaker 1: a man who'd just been told something he wasn't allowed
Speaker 1: to refuse. Then he did the worst thing he could
Speaker 1: have done. He turned to me and asked me whether
Speaker 1: I had any plastic large enough to wrap the deer.
Speaker 1: He wanted to take it out as evidence. I told
Speaker 1: him no, and I told him the deer was going
Speaker 1: to stay where it had been put, and that we
Speaker 1: were going to leave the circle alone. I told him
Speaker 1: we were going to break camp right now this morning
Speaker 1: and walk out, and I wouldn't charge him for the
Speaker 1: second half of the trip. He looked at me. He
Speaker 1: didn't raise his voice. He told me, very calmly, that
Speaker 1: he was paying me to be his guide and that
Speaker 1: I would do as he asked. I told him no
Speaker 1: a second time. I told him I'd been hired to
Speaker 1: bring him into this country and to bring him out alive,
Speaker 1: and that I was now telling him, as the man
Speaker 1: responsible for his life and the kid's life, that we
Speaker 1: were leaving. He reached into his bag. He pulled out
Speaker 1: a bundle of one hundred dollars bills and laid them
Speaker 1: on a flat rock beside the fire and set a
Speaker 1: stone on top of them. He said, this extra five
Speaker 1: thousand dollars is your bonus on top of what we
Speaker 1: already agreed. The deer is going out with us. Drew
Speaker 1: was looking at me, I was looking at Conrad. The
Speaker 1: country was looking at all of us. I could feel it.
Speaker 1: I picked up the bills, put them back in his hand,
Speaker 1: walked back to my tent and started packing. He didn't
Speaker 1: follow me. He stood at the edge of the circle
Speaker 1: with the gray dawn coming up behind him, and he
Speaker 1: stared down at the dough. I got my pack about
Speaker 1: two thirds packed, and I was rolling my sleeping bag
Speaker 1: when I heard Conrad's voice from the other side of camp.
Speaker 1: It said, Hey, Tim, can you come help me with this?
Speaker 1: It was Conrad's voice, the pitch, the cadence, the way
Speaker 1: he hit the consonants. He had a slight rasp on
Speaker 1: his vowels from years of cigars, and the rasp was there.
Speaker 1: I recognized the voice the way I recognized my own
Speaker 1: brother's voice on the phone. I stuck my head out
Speaker 1: of my tent. Conrad was still standing at the edge
Speaker 1: of the circle. He hadn't moved, he hadn't spoken. The
Speaker 1: voice had come from the tree line on the north
Speaker 1: side of camp. I felt something happen in my chest.
Speaker 1: I don't have a word for a cold went all
Speaker 1: the way through my arms, and the hair on the
Speaker 1: back of my neck came up the way the hair
Speaker 1: on a dog comes up. I crawled the rest of
Speaker 1: the way out of the tent, stood up and looked
Speaker 1: at Conrad. He was looking back at me. His eyes
Speaker 1: were wide. He'd heard it too. Drew came out of
Speaker 1: his tent at that moment and asked us if we'd
Speaker 1: called him. The voice came again from the trees, a
Speaker 1: little farther up the slope. This time it said, Drew,
Speaker 1: bring me the camera. Drew hadn't moved. Drew was right
Speaker 1: there in front of us. The voice was, I swear
Speaker 1: to you Conrad's voice. Drew sat down on the ground.
Speaker 1: He just sat down, very suddenly, as if his legs
Speaker 1: had stopped working. He looked at his boss, then at me.
Speaker 1: His face was wet. I hadn't seen him start crying.
Speaker 1: I walked over to Conrad. I picked up his rifle
Speaker 1: from where he'd leaned it against a stump, walked it
Speaker 1: back to my tent, and put it down beside my pack.
Speaker 1: I didn't say anything. I don't entirely know why I
Speaker 1: did it. I didn't in that moment, trust anybody in
Speaker 1: our camp to be holding a firearm, including myself. The
Speaker 1: voice didn't call again. That morning we finished breaking camp.
Speaker 1: None of us spoke. Conrad didn't protest when I picked
Speaker 1: up his rifle, and he didn't ask for it back.
Speaker 1: He walked behind me and Drew with empty hands. We
Speaker 1: left the city animals where they were. It was about
Speaker 1: half past eight in the morning when we shouldered our
Speaker 1: packs and started down the trail. We didn't get far.
Speaker 1: The trail down off the bench winds through a section
Speaker 1: of old growth cedar where the trees are big enough
Speaker 1: that two men can hide behind one trunk and not
Speaker 1: see each other. We were about ten minutes into that section,
Speaker 1: single file, with me and the lead and Conrad in
Speaker 1: the middle, and Drew bringing up the rear. When I
Speaker 1: came around a bend and stopped, the trail in front
Speaker 1: of me was a mess. I don't know how else
Speaker 1: to describe it. Trees had come down. Two big cedars,
Speaker 1: maybe four feet through at the base, had been laid
Speaker 1: across the trail. They hadn't fallen because there was no
Speaker 1: root ball. They'd been pushed over and laid down Around
Speaker 1: the cedars. Smaller trees had been twisted and woven. There
Speaker 1: were branches stacked into a kind of barricade, and there
Speaker 1: were stones, big stones set on top of the branches
Speaker 1: at intervals. It had been done in the time we'd
Speaker 1: been packing. It had been done silently. We hadn't heard
Speaker 1: a single tree go down, and we hadn't heard a
Speaker 1: stone strike a stone. None of it had made any
Speaker 1: noise that any of us had heard. I just stood there.
Speaker 1: I think I stood there for a full minute. Conrad
Speaker 1: came up behind me and stopped. Drew came up behind him.
Speaker 1: We all three stood and looked at the barricade, and
Speaker 1: nobody said anything. The trail was the only safe way
Speaker 1: down off that bench. The country to either side was
Speaker 1: steep and broken and laced with blowdown, and going around
Speaker 1: the barricade would have meant a long detour to the south,
Speaker 1: dropping down maybe a thousand feet of bad ground in
Speaker 1: the hope of intersecting the trail again. Below the barricade
Speaker 1: was a message. The message was, you don't leave by
Speaker 1: the way you came. I told Conrad and Drew to
Speaker 1: back up, and we retreated about fifty yards. I told
Speaker 1: them to stay there. I went forward, and I looked
Speaker 1: at the barricade more carefully, trying to find a way through.
Speaker 1: I looked for the gap. There wasn't one. The whole
Speaker 1: thing had been put together with care, the way a
Speaker 1: man who knows fence will splice fence, and the gaps
Speaker 1: that were there were too low to crawl under without
Speaker 1: going on your belly. I went back to Conrad and Drew.
Speaker 1: I told them we were going to have to take
Speaker 1: the south route, that it would put us in steep country,
Speaker 1: and that we wouldn't make it out today. Conrad looked
Speaker 1: at me for a long time. He'd been quiet since
Speaker 1: the voice, and he wasn't the same man who'd crossed
Speaker 1: the creek. There was something in his face that hadn't
Speaker 1: been there before. I'll tell you what it looked like.
Speaker 2: To me.
Speaker 1: It looked like the face of a man who had
Speaker 1: finally been told a thing he couldn't buy his way past.
Speaker 1: He nodded, picked up his pack, and fell in behind
Speaker 1: me without a word. We went south. The country south
Speaker 1: of the bench was the worst country I'd ever moved
Speaker 1: through with paying clients. There was a steep talus slope
Speaker 1: that we had to side hill across for nearly half
Speaker 1: a mile, and a section of blowdown that we had
Speaker 1: to climb over and through, and at one point I
Speaker 1: had to cut a branch with my saw to free
Speaker 1: Drew's pack. There was a spring seep that turned one
Speaker 1: hundred yards of trail into wet clay. Conrad slipped twice.
Speaker 1: The second time he slipped, he went down hard on
Speaker 1: his right knee, tore his pants and came up bleeding
Speaker 1: and silent. We made about a mile and a half
Speaker 1: and three hours. That was when Conrad's pack came open.
Speaker 1: He was in the middle of our line, between me
Speaker 1: and Drew, on a flat stretch where the going was easy.
Speaker 1: I heard him say, very quietly, what the hell? I
Speaker 1: turned around. He had his pack off and on the ground.
Speaker 1: The top was open. He was rummaging through it. He
Speaker 1: looked up at me, his face had gone gray. He said,
Speaker 1: my ammunition is gone. He'd been carrying a box of
Speaker 1: twenty rounds of three seventy five H and H. They'd
Speaker 1: been in his pack since we'd left the upper camp.
Speaker 1: The box had been in a side pocket with a
Speaker 1: buckled flap over it. The flap was still buckled. The
Speaker 1: box was gone. I looked at his rifle that I'd
Speaker 1: given back to him about two hours into our hike out.
Speaker 1: He still had it slung over his shoulder. There was
Speaker 1: a single round in the chamber and four in the
Speaker 1: magazine from the previous morning. That was it. Drew checked
Speaker 1: his own pack. His batteries were missing, all of them.
Speaker 1: The ones in the cameras were still there, but every
Speaker 1: spare he'd carried was gone. The pack was zipped, the
Speaker 1: pockets were closed, and he hadn't taken his pack off
Speaker 1: in three hours. I checked my own pack. Mine was untouched.
Speaker 1: That wasn't lost on any of us. My pack was untouched.
Speaker 1: Conrad's pack had been opened and emptied of ammunition while
Speaker 1: it was on his back, and Drew's pack had been
Speaker 1: opened and emptied of batteries while it was on his back.
Speaker 1: Mine hadn't been touched. Conrad sat down on a log.
Speaker 1: He sat down the way Drew had sat down that morning.
Speaker 1: His legs simply gave out. He didn't say anything. He
Speaker 1: stared at the open top of his pack. I made
Speaker 1: a decision. I told him we needed to get to
Speaker 1: a place I could defend, and we needed to wait
Speaker 1: for daylight to make a plan. I knew of a
Speaker 1: small overhang about a mile farther on a place where
Speaker 1: the cliff cut back into a kind of shelter with
Speaker 1: a flat front. I'd used it in a storm one time.
Speaker 1: We could put our backs to the rock and have
Speaker 1: a sight line out front. We pushed for the overhang
Speaker 1: and made it just before dark. I built a fire
Speaker 1: bigger than i'd normally have built one. I had a
Speaker 1: feeling about light that night, and I wanted as much
Speaker 1: of it as I could make. Drew didn't eat conrad
Speaker 1: ate a little. He sat with his back to the rock,
Speaker 1: held his rifle across his knees, and stared out into
Speaker 1: the trees. His knee was swollen up under his pants,
Speaker 1: and he had a streak of dried blood down his shin.
Speaker 1: Let me tell you what we heard that night, because
Speaker 1: we heard a great deal. The first thing we heard
Speaker 1: was a sound I think was meant to be an elk.
Speaker 1: It was a bugle. It came from the trees about
Speaker 1: one hundred and fifty yards out from our overhang. It
Speaker 1: was the right pitch and the right shape. It went
Speaker 1: up the scale and broke at the top the way
Speaker 1: a real bugle breaks. It was a fine It was
Speaker 1: almost perfect, almost perfect, but not quite. Stay tuned for
Speaker 1: more Backwoods bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages.
Speaker 1: Because a real bull elk pushing a bugle isn't breathing
Speaker 1: the way a man is breathing. The breath behind that
Speaker 1: bugle was a man's breath or something man shaped. The
Speaker 1: lungs were the wrong size. The bugle was being made
Speaker 1: by something that had heard bugles and was trying to
Speaker 1: make one, and it was good at it, and it
Speaker 1: wasn't good enough. Conrad jerked his rifle up at the
Speaker 1: first note and kept it up while the bugle ran
Speaker 1: its course. When the bugle stopped, he didn't lower the
Speaker 1: rifle for a long minute. Then he lowered it slowly,
Speaker 1: turned to me, and his eyes in the firelight looked
Speaker 1: like the eyes of a man who's just been told
Speaker 1: he has a disease. The second thing we heard was
Speaker 1: my own voice. The voice came from the trees on
Speaker 1: the south side of the overhang, and it said, in
Speaker 1: my own voice, Hey, Drew, can you come help me
Speaker 1: with this? It said it the way I'd have said
Speaker 1: it if it had been me. It even had the
Speaker 1: little hitch I have on the word help, which I've
Speaker 1: had since I broke a tooth as a kid. I've
Speaker 1: heard myself on tape. I know what I sound like.
Speaker 1: That voice was my voice. Drew didn't move. He looked
Speaker 1: at me, and I looked at him, and I shook
Speaker 1: my head very slowly. Drew nodded. The voice came again
Speaker 1: from a different direction. The trees on the west side.
Speaker 1: It said, Drew, I need you to come over here.
Speaker 1: A minute Drew started crying again. He wasn't making any noise.
Speaker 1: There were just tears running down his face. He looked
Speaker 1: at me and mouthed the word please. Here's what I
Speaker 1: think now, looking back, I think the voice was trying
Speaker 1: to separate us. It had picked up that Drew was
Speaker 1: the youngest, and the most frightened, and the most likely
Speaker 1: to break. It had picked up my voice and Conrad's
Speaker 1: voice during the day, and it had sat in the
Speaker 1: trees and listened to us, and it had practiced. I
Speaker 1: don't think it was trying to lure Drew to his death.
Speaker 1: I don't believe that. I think it was trying to
Speaker 1: Drew from us the way a wolf separates a calf
Speaker 1: from a herd, so that it could deal with us
Speaker 1: one at a time. Conrad and Drew didn't go anywhere
Speaker 1: that night. None of us slept. We sat with our
Speaker 1: backs to the rock and the fire in front of us,
Speaker 1: and we listened to the woods and the woods. Sometime
Speaker 1: after midnight went quiet again. The quiet was almost worse
Speaker 1: than the voices. Around three in the morning, I heard
Speaker 1: a sound on my side of the overhang, and I
Speaker 1: looked over. There was a handprint on the canvas of
Speaker 1: the shelter half i'd stretched across the rock as a
Speaker 1: wind break. The handprint was wet. It was made of
Speaker 1: mud or something close to mud. It was on the
Speaker 1: inside of the canvas. Whatever had made it had been
Speaker 1: on the inside of the canvas behind me while I
Speaker 1: was sitting there with my back to it, and I
Speaker 1: hadn't heard it. The handprint had five fingers. The fingers
Speaker 1: were almost twice the length of mine. The palm was
Speaker 1: the size of a dinner plate. The thumb was set
Speaker 1: lower than a human thumb is set. The hand wasn't
Speaker 1: the wrong shape exactly. It was a hand, It was
Speaker 1: just bigger and longer, and the thumb was placed differently.
Speaker 1: It had been pressed into the canvas the way a
Speaker 1: man might press his hand against the inside of a
Speaker 1: door to lean and listen. I'll be honest about what
Speaker 1: I felt. I was afraid. I won't pretend I wasn't.
Speaker 1: But the fear wasn't on top. The thing on top
Speaker 1: was something else, the same feeling I'd had standing over
Speaker 1: the circle of animals. It was the feeling of being
Speaker 1: looked at by something that had decided after watching me
Speaker 1: that I wasn't the problem. The handprint was on my
Speaker 1: side of the canvas. Neither Conrad's side nor drew side
Speaker 1: had one, just the single print where I'd been sitting
Speaker 1: all night. It had been left for me to see,
Speaker 1: the way you might leave a note on the door
Speaker 1: of a friend you'd stop by to check on while
Speaker 1: you were on your way to do something else. I
Speaker 1: didn't tell Conrad Drew about it that night. I rolled
Speaker 1: the canvas up before dawn so that the print was
Speaker 1: on the inside of the roll, and I put the
Speaker 1: canvas in the bottom of my pack. I don't know
Speaker 1: why I did this. It felt important at the time,
Speaker 1: and it feels important now. I think the print was
Speaker 1: a courtesy. I think it was a thing being said,
Speaker 1: and the thing being said was I see you. You're
Speaker 1: not why I'm here. Dawn came slow. The fire was
Speaker 1: down to a few coals, so I built it up.
Speaker 1: I made coffee, and I made it strong because I
Speaker 1: wanted the smell. Conrad had finally fallen asleep around four
Speaker 1: in the morning, sitting up against the rock with his
Speaker 1: rifle across his knees. Drew was lying on his side
Speaker 1: with his eyes open. He wasn't asleep. He was looking
Speaker 1: at the fire. I told Drew very quietly that I
Speaker 1: was going to step away from the overhang for a
Speaker 1: minute to relieve myself. I told him to stay where
Speaker 1: he was, not to wake Conrad, and that i'd be
Speaker 1: back in five minutes. I walked maybe thirty yards south
Speaker 1: down on slope into the trees. I did what I
Speaker 1: needed to do. I started back. When I came around
Speaker 1: the last of the trees, the overhang was empty. Conrad
Speaker 1: was gone. The rifle was on the ground where he'd
Speaker 1: been sitting. Drew was sitting up exactly where he'd been,
Speaker 1: looking at the place where Conrad had been. He wasn't
Speaker 1: crying anymore. His face was empty. I asked him what happened.
Speaker 1: He said, in a voice I could barely hear. He
Speaker 1: was looking at something in the trees, and then he
Speaker 1: stood up and he walked into them. I asked him
Speaker 1: if he'd said anything. Drew shook his head. I asked
Speaker 1: him how long ago. Drew said maybe a minute, maybe two.
Speaker 1: I picked up Conrad's rifle and checked the chamber. The
Speaker 1: single round was still in it, and there were still
Speaker 1: four rounds in the magazine. I shouldered the rifle. I
Speaker 1: told Drew to stay at the overhang, to keep the
Speaker 1: fire up, and not to call out, no matter what
Speaker 1: he heard. I went after Conrad. The trail was easy
Speaker 1: to follow it. First, he'd gone west into a stand
Speaker 1: of fur and hemlock, and he hadn't been trying to
Speaker 1: hide his passage. He'd gone in a straight line. There
Speaker 1: were boot prints and patches of douff, and a place
Speaker 1: where he'd brushed past a low branch and broken it.
Speaker 1: About one hundred yards in the trail changed. This is
Speaker 1: the part I've spent the longest time thinking about, so
Speaker 1: let me try to describe it carefully. The boot prints
Speaker 1: kept going, but they began to wander. They went left,
Speaker 1: then right, then left again. They went around trees that
Speaker 1: he could have walked past straight. They went over a
Speaker 1: dead fall that he could have gone around. They were
Speaker 1: the prints of a man who wasn't picking his own line.
Speaker 1: About fifty yards farther on, I came on a place
Speaker 1: where the Prince stopped at the foot of a fir tree.
Speaker 1: There was a scuff in the duff where Conrad had stopped,
Speaker 1: and from the scuff, his prince turned ninety degrees and
Speaker 1: continued north. To his left, on the bark of the
Speaker 1: fir tree, there was a fresh gouge. The bark had
Speaker 1: been struck hard by something that had thrown a stone
Speaker 1: or hit the trunk with a hand. The gouge was
Speaker 1: at chest height and there was no stone on the ground.
Speaker 1: It was a redirect. The thing had stopped him at
Speaker 1: the tree, hit the tree to his left, and Conrad
Speaker 1: had turned right. I followed the new track. About thirty
Speaker 1: yards on. There was another scuff and another gouge, this
Speaker 1: time on a small alder, and the track turned again.
Speaker 1: Conrad was being driven the way I had driven elk
Speaker 1: in my career, the way Conrad himself had probably driven
Speaker 1: a kudu in Namibia or a leopard in Zambia. He
Speaker 1: was being driven with sound and movement through country he
Speaker 1: didn't choose. I followed the drives for about a quarter mile.
Speaker 1: He'd been turned six times that I could count. Each
Speaker 1: turn took him farther from the overhang and deeper into
Speaker 1: the country we'd crossed into. The thing driving him knew
Speaker 1: the country it was using, the country It was steering
Speaker 1: him towards something. I came up onto a small ridge
Speaker 1: and from the top of the ridge I looked down
Speaker 1: into a clearing. The clearing was maybe forty feet across.
Speaker 1: There was a flat in the middle of it, with
Speaker 1: a downed log along one side. The morning light was
Speaker 1: just coming over the ridge behind me, and it was
Speaker 1: lighting the clearing the way a stage light lights a stage.
Speaker 1: Conrad was on his knees in the middle of the clearing.
Speaker 1: He wasn't bound, there was nothing holding him. He was
Speaker 1: on his knees in the duff, with his hands on
Speaker 1: his thighs, rocking back and forth very slightly, and he
Speaker 1: was making a sound that wasn't crying and wasn't a word.
Speaker 1: It was the sound to hurt animal makes a low, steady,
Speaker 1: broken sound. At the edge of the clearing, opposite him,
Speaker 1: in the shadow of a big fur, there was something
Speaker 1: sitting on the downed log. I'll tell you what I saw,
Speaker 1: and you can do with it what you want. It
Speaker 1: was sitting with its knees drawn up and its arms
Speaker 1: resting on them, sitting like that. It was as tall
Speaker 1: as a tall man standing on its feet. I'd have
Speaker 1: said it was eight and a half feet eat maybe
Speaker 1: a little more. Its hair was a dark reddish brown,
Speaker 1: the same color as the hair I'd bagged off the
Speaker 1: bitter brush. Its face was in the shadow of its brow,
Speaker 1: and I couldn't then or later tell you what its
Speaker 1: face looked like in any detail. There was a face,
Speaker 1: and there were eyes, and the eyes were watching Conrad.
Speaker 1: It wasn't making any move to touch him. It was
Speaker 1: watching him. It had brought him here, and now it
Speaker 1: was watching him. Understand. I stood at the top of
Speaker 1: the ridge with Conrad's rifle on my shoulder. I had
Speaker 1: a clear shot from where I was standing With the
Speaker 1: gun I was holding, I couldn't have missed. I didn't shoot.
Speaker 1: Let me tell you why. I'd been hunting in those
Speaker 1: mountains for twenty years. I'd killed many animals. I'd killed
Speaker 1: an animal that morning, two trips before, for camp meat.
Speaker 1: I knew what killing was, and I knew the difference
Speaker 1: between killing a thing for food and killing a thing
Speaker 1: for any other reason. The thing on the log wasn't
Speaker 1: something I needed to kill. It wasn't threatening me, and
Speaker 1: it wasn't threatening Drew. It had already twice gone out
Speaker 1: of its way to communicate to me that I wasn't
Speaker 1: the problem, the handprint on the canvas, the untouched pack,
Speaker 1: the fact that I'd walked thirty yards into the woods
Speaker 1: to relieve myself a half hour before, and I was
Speaker 1: still standing here breathing. There was also this. The thing
Speaker 1: on the log was watching Conrad the way a judge
Speaker 1: watches a defendant. There was no rage in it, and
Speaker 1: there was no haste. It was waiting for something. I
Speaker 1: think now looking back, that it was waiting for Conrad
Speaker 1: to understand. Conrad had come up here believing that the
Speaker 1: country and everything in it belonged to whoever could afford
Speaker 1: to be in it, and the thing on the log
Speaker 1: had spent two days and two nights and one morning
Speaker 1: teaching him otherwise, it wasn't finished teaching him. I lowered
Speaker 1: the rifle. I cleared my throat. I didn't say anything.
Speaker 1: I just made the small sound a man makes when
Speaker 1: he's trying to be respectful in a doorway. The thing
Speaker 1: on the log lifted its head and looked up at
Speaker 1: the ridge. It looked at me. I don't actually know
Speaker 1: how long it was. Time in that moment didn't work
Speaker 1: the way it usually works. I raised my hands. I
Speaker 1: held the rifle by the stock with my left hand
Speaker 1: away from my body, and I held my right hand open,
Speaker 1: palm out. The thing on the log looked at me,
Speaker 1: then back down at Conrad, then at me again, and
Speaker 1: then slowly it stood up standing. It was every bit
Speaker 1: of what I'd guessed sitting maybe more. It was tall
Speaker 1: enough that the lowest fur branch over the log brushed
Speaker 1: across its shoulder. It didn't duck, it just shifted and
Speaker 1: the branch slid past it. It looked at Conrad one
Speaker 1: more time, then turned around and walked into the trees.
Speaker 1: It didn't crash through anything or crack a single stick.
Speaker 1: A thing that size moving through that country should have
Speaker 1: made noise like a freight train, and it made no
Speaker 1: noise at all. I waited until it had been gone
Speaker 1: for account of sixty Then I went down off the
Speaker 1: ridge into the clearing. Conrad didn't look up when I
Speaker 1: came toward him. He was still rocking, still making the sound.
Speaker 1: I knelt in front of him and put my hand
Speaker 1: on his shoulder. He flinched as if he hadn't known
Speaker 1: I was there, and he looked up at me, and
Speaker 1: his eyes weren't the eyes of the man who'd crossed
Speaker 1: the creek. I'll tell you what I saw in those eyes.
Speaker 1: I saw a man who had finally understood all the
Speaker 1: way down that there were things he wasn't going to
Speaker 1: win against. I'd seen that look on men in the
Speaker 1: Marines who'd been through their first real bad day, and
Speaker 1: I'd seen it on a man in a hospital after
Speaker 1: a heart attack. I'd never seen it on a man
Speaker 1: in the woods. I asked him if he was hurt.
Speaker 1: He shook his head. He couldn't at that moment speak.
Speaker 1: I helped him to his feet. His knee from the
Speaker 1: day before was very swollen and he couldn't put full
Speaker 1: weight on it, but he could stand. I put his
Speaker 1: arm over my shoulder, held the rifle in my off hand,
Speaker 1: and walked him out of the clar It took us
Speaker 1: almost two hours to get back to the overhang. Drew
Speaker 1: was sitting where I'd left him. He stood up when
Speaker 1: he saw us. He didn't ask any questions. He just
Speaker 1: shouldered his pack and Conrad's pack, and we started south again.
Speaker 1: I won't draw out the walk out because the walkout
Speaker 1: was the longest two days of my life, and there's
Speaker 1: nothing in it for the listener. We came down off
Speaker 1: the bad country in the late afternoon of that second day,
Speaker 1: and we hit the trail we'd come in on below
Speaker 1: the barricade. The barricade was no longer there. The trees
Speaker 1: that had been across it were gone, along with the
Speaker 1: branches and the stones. There was no sign on the
Speaker 1: trail that any of it had ever been. We crossed
Speaker 1: the creek. The water was the same dead cold it
Speaker 1: had been three days earlier. On the other side, the
Speaker 1: country made noise again. A jay yelled at us from
Speaker 1: a stand of cedar. Within thirty seconds of our setting
Speaker 1: foot on the bank, A squirrel chittered at Drew's head.
Speaker 1: A grouse drummed somewhere up the slope. Conrad down on
Speaker 1: a log on the friendly side of the creek and
Speaker 1: put his face in his hands. He didn't cry. He
Speaker 1: just sat that way for a long time. Drew sat
Speaker 1: down beside him and didn't speak. I built a small
Speaker 1: fire and made hot water, and we drank instant coffee
Speaker 1: out of metal cups, and the three of us sat
Speaker 1: there until the light went and we slept hard that
Speaker 1: night for the first time in three days. We made
Speaker 1: the trucks the next afternoon. Conrad paid me in cash
Speaker 1: in full. He paid me the second six thousand he'd
Speaker 1: agreed on, and he paid me the bonus five thousand
Speaker 1: he'd tried to give me at the camp. I tried
Speaker 1: to refuse the bonus, but he wouldn't let me. He
Speaker 1: pushed the bills into my coat pocket with a hand
Speaker 1: that was still shaking, and he said, very quietly, take it.
Speaker 1: He never spoke to me again about what happened. I
Speaker 1: got two letters from him in the years that followed.
Speaker 1: The first one was a Christmas card the December after,
Speaker 1: with a short note that said only thank you for
Speaker 1: getting us out. He signed it with his first name.
Speaker 1: The second one came about two years later. It was
Speaker 1: a typed letter. It thanked me again. At the bottom
Speaker 1: it said I have not been back into mountains. I
Speaker 1: have not hunted since. I hope you are well. He
Speaker 1: died in two thousand and nine of a heart attack
Speaker 1: at home. I read it in the paper. I didn't
Speaker 1: go to the service. Drew, as far as I know,
Speaker 1: is doing fine. He left the film business and works
Speaker 1: in a job that has nothing to do with cameras.
Speaker 1: We exchanged Christmas cards for about ten years and then
Speaker 1: drifted apart the way men do I don't think either
Speaker 1: of us wanted to keep the connection alive, and I
Speaker 1: don't blame him the hair I bagged off the bitter brush,
Speaker 1: I lost the handprint on the canvas I kept. I
Speaker 1: still have it rolled up in the back of a closet.
Speaker 1: I've never had it tested. I've never shown it to anybody.
Speaker 1: I don't know what I'm keeping it for. Probably I'm
Speaker 1: keeping it because throwing it out would feel like a
Speaker 1: thing I'm not allowed to do. I never guided again
Speaker 1: for outsiders after that fall. I finished out the season
Speaker 1: i'd committed to, which was three more elk hunts and
Speaker 1: a goat hunt for an old client of mine I trusted.
Speaker 1: After that, I stopped advertising. I did some work for
Speaker 1: fishing game over the years, and packed for an outfitter
Speaker 1: friend a few times. I never took another stranger into
Speaker 1: the high country. The country is still there, the creek
Speaker 1: is still there, the line is still there. The thing
Speaker 1: that lives on the other side, if it's still alive,
Speaker 1: is still there too. I don't know how long they live.
Speaker 1: I don't know if it's one of them, or a
Speaker 1: family of them, or the descendants of the one that
Speaker 1: watched Conrad in that clearing. I don't believe it's a
Speaker 1: single being any more than I believe my whole town
Speaker 1: is one man. I do believe, after thirty years, that
Speaker 1: what we ran into up there wasn't an animal. It
Speaker 1: was an animal in the same way that I'm an animal,
Speaker 1: breathing and walking and warm blooded, a creature on this earth.
Speaker 1: But it was something else too. It was a thing
Speaker 1: that knew a circle when it built one, and knew
Speaker 1: a voice when it heard one. It knew the difference
Speaker 1: between a man who'd crossed a line and a man
Speaker 1: who'd been hired to walk along behind him. It made
Speaker 1: that distinction deliberately, and it acted on the distinction. I'm
Speaker 1: alive because of that distinction. A few years after all
Speaker 1: of this, I was up in the same general country,
Speaker 1: on the friendly side of the creek, packing for that
Speaker 1: outfit or friend I mentioned. We had a client who'd
Speaker 1: taken a nice bull, and we were boning him out
Speaker 1: near dark. I walked off about thirty yards to relieve myself.
Speaker 1: The way i'd walked off from drew at the overhang,
Speaker 1: and while I was standing there, I had the unmistakable
Speaker 1: feeling that I was being watched. I looked up across
Speaker 1: the drainage. The light was almost gone. There was a
Speaker 1: ridge over there, maybe four hundred yards out, on the
Speaker 1: far side of where I knew the line ran. There
Speaker 1: was a shape on the ridge. I'll be honest with you,
Speaker 1: I don't know if what I saw was real. The
Speaker 1: light was bad, and I was tired, and i'd been
Speaker 1: thinking about the previous trip all day because the bull
Speaker 1: we were boning had come down out of the same
Speaker 1: basin where Conrad had sat in his chair with his
Speaker 1: thermal optic. What I saw, or what I thought I saw,
Speaker 1: was a tall figure standing at the edge of the ridge.
Speaker 1: It wasn't moving, as best as I could tell. It
Speaker 1: was looking down across the drainage at me. I stood
Speaker 1: there for a long minute. Then I went back to
Speaker 1: the bull and helped finish dressing it. I didn't tell
Speaker 1: my friend what i'd seen. I didn't tell my wife
Speaker 1: when I got home. I haven't told anybody until tonight,
Speaker 1: sitting at my kitchen table writing this email, with my
Speaker 1: coffee gone cold and my dog asleep on the rug
Speaker 1: behind my chair. That's the story. I trust you with it.
Speaker 1: Tell it however you want to tell it. Change what
Speaker 1: you need to change. Cut what you need to cut.
Speaker 1: I want you to know I appreciate your work. The
Speaker 1: reason I trusted you with this is the way you
Speaker 1: share other people's I don't want to sound sappy, but
Speaker 1: that matters to the people that share their experiences. Of that,
Speaker 1: you can be sure. I have grandchildren, now, two of them,
Speaker 1: and one of them is a girl who's asking me
Speaker 1: about the woods every time I see her. I'll take
Speaker 1: her into the woods. I'll take her up the friendly
Speaker 1: side of the friendly creeks. I'll teach her what my
Speaker 1: father taught me and what the old men taught me.
Speaker 1: And one of the things I'll teach her is the
Speaker 1: thing I learned the hard way that fall. The country
Speaker 1: doesn't belong to us. We're guests in it. Some of
Speaker 1: us are good guests and some of us are bad
Speaker 1: guess the country can tell the difference, and so can
Speaker 1: the things that live in it. Take care of yourself
Speaker 1: out there.
Speaker 2: Tim did the game to
Speaker 1: P