Speaker 1: You're listening to Bigfoot's Wilderness, Part four, The Missing Hunter,
Speaker 1: the story people chose to keep. The truth didn't disappear
Speaker 1: after Wade Harlan's bones were buried. It didn't sink into
Speaker 1: the ground with him, or washed downstream with the flood
Speaker 1: water that had uncovered what the woods had kept hidden
Speaker 1: for so long. Truth almost never vanishes completely. What it
Speaker 1: does what it did here is thin, out spread itself
Speaker 1: so wide that no single person feels responsible for holding
Speaker 1: on to it. And in that thinner something else takes
Speaker 1: its place. A story, not a lie exactly, not at first,
Speaker 1: more like a convenient arrangement of facts, omissions, and assumptions
Speaker 1: that fit together neatly enough to stop people from digging further.
Speaker 1: A story that allowed everyone to return to their routines
Speaker 1: without feeling like they'd failed. A man who vanished within
Speaker 1: shouting distance of their lives. That story began forming the
Speaker 1: moment the sheriff chose his words carefully, no definitive cause
Speaker 1: of death. Those four words did more work than any
Speaker 1: investigation ever could. They left room, They left doubt, They
Speaker 1: left silence where questions should have lived. In a county
Speaker 1: like this one, where people knew one another's trucks and habits,
Speaker 1: where grudges and favors stretched back decades. Silence had value.
Speaker 1: Silence kept peace. Silence kept neighbors from looking sideways at
Speaker 1: one another in the grocery store aisle, and silence had
Speaker 1: always lived comfortably alongside stories about the woods. Within weeks
Speaker 1: of the burial, Slate Ridge became something people talked about again,
Speaker 1: instead of something they avoided without comment. The shift was subtle.
Speaker 1: It showed up in the way men leaned back in
Speaker 1: their chairs at the diner and lowered their voices, in
Speaker 1: the way parents told children not to wander too far
Speaker 1: up there. In the way, hunters began to speak of
Speaker 1: the ridge with a kind of resigned respect. That's where
Speaker 1: Wade went missing. That's where they found those bones. That's
Speaker 1: where that thing lives. The word thing did a lot
Speaker 1: of heavy lifting. Bigfoot had always existed here in the margins,
Speaker 1: long before Wade had vanished. There were stories, old ones,
Speaker 1: inherited ones. A grandfather who saw something cross a logging
Speaker 1: road in the nineteen fifties, a scream heard during a
Speaker 1: winter hunt that didn't sound like any animal anyone recognized,
Speaker 1: footprints found after snowstorms that were quietly ignored. Those stories
Speaker 1: had never been urgent. Now they were useful. The local
Speaker 1: paper ran a follow up piece two weeks after the burial.
Speaker 1: It wasn't sensational. It didn't use the word sasquatch in
Speaker 1: the headline, but it didn't avoid it either. Local lore
Speaker 1: surrounds ridge where Hunter disappeared. The article quoted an unnamed
Speaker 1: resident who spoke of old stories that were passed down
Speaker 1: through generations. It mentioned unusual tracks found during the original search.
Speaker 1: It referenced reports of strange sounds. It did not mention
Speaker 1: the cuts on the bones. It did not mention the
Speaker 1: placement of the remains. It did not mention how the
Speaker 1: tracks faced away from the ravine. No one called the
Speaker 1: editor to complain that silence mattered. Over the past year,
Speaker 1: Slate Ridge changed without physically changing at all. No fence
Speaker 1: went up, no signs were posted, but fewer people went there.
Speaker 1: Camps shifted to other drainages, hunters chose easier ground. Those
Speaker 1: who did venture near the ridge came back with stories.
Speaker 1: A man said he'd felt watched the entire time he
Speaker 1: sat in his stand, as if his thoughts weren't private anymore.
Speaker 1: Another claimed he'd smelled something foul near the creek, and
Speaker 1: left without finishing his hunt. A pair of teenagers camping
Speaker 1: illegally reported hearing heavy footsteps circle their tent all night,
Speaker 1: stopping whenever they spoke. Each story fed the next Bigfoot
Speaker 1: wasn't just a possibility now he was an explanation, and explanations,
Speaker 1: once accepted, have a way of defending themselves. Cal Morrison
Speaker 1: stopped correcting people. That surprised some folks. Cal had never
Speaker 1: been shy about dismissing nonsense. He'd argued men into silence
Speaker 1: over bare behavior, weather patterns, even the best way to
Speaker 1: read sign in mud. But when the bigfoot talk grew louder,
Speaker 1: Col simply listened. One evening, a younger hunter asked him, outright,
Speaker 1: you believe that thing killed Wade. Cal stared into his
Speaker 1: coffee for a long time before answering no, He said.
Speaker 1: The hunter waited, but I believe it saw what did? Cal?
Speaker 1: Had it? The hunter laughed nervously, unsure how to respond.
Speaker 1: Cal didn't elaborate he understood something most of them didn't yet.
Speaker 1: The story had already chosen its path. Pushing against it
Speaker 1: would only draw attention to the wrong questions, and attention
Speaker 1: once misdirected, rarely circles back on its own. The sheriff
Speaker 1: understood this too. He wasn't a coward, he wasn't corrupt.
Speaker 1: He was tired. He'd worn the badge long enough to
Speaker 1: know what happened when you tugged at certain threads in
Speaker 1: a small community. He knew which men hunted together, which
Speaker 1: family lees intermarried, which grudges lay just under the surface,
Speaker 1: dormant but not gone. And he knew what he didn't
Speaker 1: have no witness willing to go on record, no clear timeline,
Speaker 1: no weapon, no confession. What he did have was a
Speaker 1: story that satisfied the public and kept the peace. So
Speaker 1: when people came to him with new reports tracks near
Speaker 1: the ridge, knocks heard after dark, a silhouette scene against
Speaker 1: the evening sky, he listened, nodded, and filed them under unsubstantiated.
Speaker 1: He let the legend grow, because legends don't point fingers,
Speaker 1: They point outward into the trees. Years passed. The cemetery
Speaker 1: marker for Wade Harlan was eventually replaced with a simple headstone,
Speaker 1: no epitaph, just a name and dates that didn't quite
Speaker 1: make sense. People visited less often as time wore on,
Speaker 1: grief dulled into memory, Memory softened into story, and the
Speaker 1: story took on a life of its own. Local kids
Speaker 1: dared one another to hike the lower spur At dusk,
Speaker 1: Couples parked near the trailhead to drink beer and scare themselves.
Speaker 1: Someone carved a crude wooden figure and nailed it to
Speaker 1: a fence post before it was quietly removed. Slate Ridge
Speaker 1: became a place where fear was safe, contained external inhuman.
Speaker 1: That was the point. What people didn't talk about any
Speaker 1: more were the men who'd been there the season Wade vanished,
Speaker 1: the arguments that had flared and died, the quiet rivalries
Speaker 1: over hunting grounds, the way certain people avoided one another afterward.
Speaker 1: Those details faded, not because they weren't important, but because
Speaker 1: they were inconvenient. Once a story becomes useful, inconvenient facts
Speaker 1: tend to disappear on their own. Cow watched this happen
Speaker 1: with a growing sense of dread. Every new Bigfoot story
Speaker 1: reinforced the same idea that whatever happened to Wade was
Speaker 1: beyond human control, an act of nature, an act of
Speaker 1: the wild. That idea settled into the community like sediment.
Speaker 1: Col knew better, not because he had proof, not because
Speaker 1: he'd seen the act itself, but because he'd seen the witness,
Speaker 1: and he understood, in that quiet moment on the ridge
Speaker 1: that the thing standing there hadn't been confused, It hadn't
Speaker 1: been enraged, it hadn't been predatory. It had been attentive,
Speaker 1: which meant it knew the difference. Once a year, usually
Speaker 1: around the anniversary of Wade's disappearance, some one would push back.
Speaker 1: A man would have too much to drink and say
Speaker 1: something reckless. A woman would ask why no one ever
Speaker 1: followed up on certain details. A newcomer would wonder aloud
Speaker 1: why a missing person case with human remains was allowed
Speaker 1: to die so easily. Those conversations never lasted long. Some
Speaker 1: one would mention the tracks, some one else would mention
Speaker 1: the knox, some one would say, you know how those
Speaker 1: woods are, and the push would end. Even Deputy Finch,
Speaker 1: long gone from the county, felt the weight of the
Speaker 1: story settling in behind him. When he returned years later
Speaker 1: for a visit, he stopped by the diner. Out of habit,
Speaker 1: Wade's name came up. Shame Finch said, carefully, never got closure.
Speaker 1: A man at the counter snorted, oh, we got closure,
Speaker 1: he said, just not the kind you write reports about.
Speaker 1: Finch didn't argue. He finished his coffee and left. The
Speaker 1: woods continued to do what they had always done. Sometimes
Speaker 1: they offered a glimpse, a shadow on the ridge at dusk,
Speaker 1: too tall to be a man, too upright to be
Speaker 1: an animal. Sometimes they offered sound, knocks that echoed across drainages,
Speaker 1: always measured, never frantic. Sometimes they offered smell, drifting on
Speaker 1: cold air, like a reminder. And sometimes they offered nothing
Speaker 1: at all. That was the worst part, because silence in
Speaker 1: the end is the most persuasive story there is. By
Speaker 1: the late nineteen eighties, Slate Ridge had become something people
Speaker 1: referenced with familiarity instead of fear. The legend had softened.
Speaker 1: Bigfoot was no longer a lurking threat. He was a presence,
Speaker 1: an explanation, a boundary marker. Don't go there, don't push it,
Speaker 1: don't ask. The story had done its job. But stories
Speaker 1: have a flaw. They rely on everyone agreeing to keep
Speaker 1: telling them the same way, and every so often, rarely quietly,
Speaker 1: something happened that threatened to bend them out of shape.
Speaker 1: In the fall of nineteen eighty nine, a man walking
Speaker 1: alone near the ridge, returned pale and shaken. He told
Speaker 1: his wife he'd seen something standing where the ravine opened out,
Speaker 1: something watching the trail as if waiting. What What did
Speaker 1: it do? She asked nothing, He said, that's what scared me.
Speaker 1: He never went back, col heard about it a week later.
Speaker 1: He sat on his porch that evening, watching the tree
Speaker 1: line darken, and felt the old weight settle in his chest.
Speaker 1: The story had been chosen, but the witness was still there,
Speaker 1: and witnesses, no matter how patient, don't watch forever without reason.
Speaker 1: Slate Ridge is quieter now, not because its story is finished,
Speaker 1: but because it is still unfolding. The woods remain, the
Speaker 1: creek still bends through the ravine, and some truths stay buried,
Speaker 1: not to be hidden, but to be revealed in their
Speaker 1: own time. What was found there was only part of
Speaker 1: the story. The rest is still waiting. Thank you for
Speaker 1: listening to Bigfoot's Wilderness. If you've been following the story
Speaker 1: with us, listening closely, letting the silence speak as much
Speaker 1: as the words, we truly appreciate you being here. If
Speaker 1: you'd like to support this show, there's a supporter's club
Speaker 1: where you can join for about two bucks a month,
Speaker 1: absolutely no pressure. It just helps keep the podcast going
Speaker 1: and the stories coming. And if you're not ready for that,
Speaker 1: your time and attention mean just as much. Stay tuned
Speaker 1: for Part five, where what was witnessed, what was allowed,
Speaker 1: and what was left behind finally comes into focus. Have
Speaker 1: a great night, and remember some things don't hunt, some
Speaker 1: things don't save, some things only watch.