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.
Speaker 1: We're pulling off the road tonight, no state line to
Speaker 1: cross and no local legend to chase down. We're parked
Speaker 1: at the end of a dirt road with the engine ticking,
Speaker 1: and I'm digging into the mail bag. That inbox has
Speaker 1: been filling up for months now, email after email from
Speaker 1: people who never planned on telling anybody what happened to them.
Speaker 1: When I finally sat down and started sorting through them,
Speaker 1: I noticed that I had quite a few stories from hunters,
Speaker 1: and honestly, that makes sense when you think about it.
Speaker 1: Hunters are out there before dawn and after dark, sitting
Speaker 1: still for hours and places most people never go. They
Speaker 1: know what a deer sounds like walking through leaves, and
Speaker 1: what a squirrel sounds like, and what a man sounds like.
Speaker 1: So when something moves through the timber that doesn't match
Speaker 1: any of those, a hunter notices whether he wants to
Speaker 1: or not. Tonight, I've got six of those stories for you,
Speaker 1: from six different men in six different states, and the
Speaker 1: oldest one goes back to the fifties, while the newest
Speaker 1: come from two thousand and eight. Our first encounter comes
Speaker 1: from a man named Jack. Jack was hunting elk in
Speaker 1: western Montana in November of nineteen sixty eight, and he
Speaker 1: tells it like this. We packed in on a Friday,
Speaker 1: me and my buddy Dell, seven miles up a drainage
Speaker 1: off the Blackfoot, following the trail the outfitters had used
Speaker 1: before the war, and nobody had maintained since Del's dad
Speaker 1: had hunted that basin back in the forties and swore
Speaker 1: by it big bulls and no people, and that was
Speaker 1: the whole pitch. It snowed on us the first night,
Speaker 1: maybe four inches, wet and heavy, the kind of snow
Speaker 1: that bends the lodge pole over the trail, so you're
Speaker 1: ducking branches all morning and soaked through by noon. We
Speaker 1: set a wall tent and a stand of spruce near
Speaker 1: a little creek and strung a tarp for the meat pole.
Speaker 1: Deal carried a thirty aught six his dad had given him,
Speaker 1: and I carried a Winchester Model seventy that I'd saved
Speaker 1: two summers of wages to buy. The first two days
Speaker 1: were ordinary and better than ordinary. Really. We cut the
Speaker 1: elk tracks everywhere we went, fresh ones, and on Saturday
Speaker 1: evening Dell passed on a Raghorn bull because we were
Speaker 1: greedy and it was still early in the hunt. That
Speaker 1: night we ate beans and elk jerky from the year
Speaker 1: before and played cribbage on a little board Dell kept
Speaker 1: folded up in his coat pocket. I remember every bit
Speaker 1: of that, the jerky and the cribbage, and the way
Speaker 1: the lantern hissed. And I've often wondered why the ordinary
Speaker 1: part stuck so hard. I think it's because of what
Speaker 1: came after. Once something splits your life into a before
Speaker 1: and an after. You hang on to the before. Sunday night,
Speaker 1: we turned the lantern down and I was drifting somewhere
Speaker 1: between awake and asleep when something walked past the tent.
Speaker 1: And when I say past the tent, I mean close,
Speaker 1: close enough that there was no mistaking it for anything
Speaker 1: moving farther off in the timber. Now you have to
Speaker 1: understand what fresh snow does to sound out there. Four
Speaker 1: inches of wet snow turns every footstep into a distinct
Speaker 1: crunch with real weight behind it. A deer makes a
Speaker 1: light ticking crunch in four quick beats, and an elk
Speaker 1: is heavier, but it still four beats. And a bear
Speaker 1: in November is mostly in bed for the winter, and
Speaker 1: a bear shuffles anyway. What walked past our tent that
Speaker 1: night walked in two beats, slow ones, with long spaces
Speaker 1: between them, and every single step sounded like a sack
Speaker 1: of cement being dropped flat on the ground. I heard
Speaker 1: del sit up in the dark, heard his cock creak
Speaker 1: under him, and neither one of us said a word
Speaker 1: while those steps carried up the creek maybe forty yards,
Speaker 1: and then stopped. And after they stopped, there was nothing
Speaker 1: at all, no sound of anything walking away, and no
Speaker 1: sound of anything walking back. The steps just ended. After
Speaker 1: a long while, Dell whispered that it was a moose,
Speaker 1: and I said, yeah, a moose, And neither one of
Speaker 1: us believed it for a second, because a moose doesn't
Speaker 1: walk in two beats, and we both knew that perfectly well.
Speaker 1: But moose was the best word either of us had,
Speaker 1: so we used it. And we lay there in the
Speaker 1: dark until morning. Morning came and I got up first,
Speaker 1: built the fire and got the coffee going, and then
Speaker 1: I walked up the creek with my rifle because I
Speaker 1: wanted to see moose tracks, and I wanted to see
Speaker 1: them badly. The tracks were right there where we'd heard them,
Speaker 1: but they weren't moose. They were flat, long and wide,
Speaker 1: and when I set my size eleven boot down inside
Speaker 1: one of those prints, there was at least five inches
Speaker 1: of room to spare. There were five toes pressed into
Speaker 1: that snow, splayed wide at the front and driven in deep,
Speaker 1: and the stride between one print and the next was
Speaker 1: longer than I could stretch. I tried it. I stood
Speaker 1: in one print and lunged for the next one, and
Speaker 1: came up short and fell over sideways into the snow.
Speaker 1: And I lay there for a second, looking up at
Speaker 1: the spruce tops, and I remember thinking, very calmly that
Speaker 1: we should go home. I didn't say that to Dell, though.
Speaker 1: Dell came up the creek carrying his coffee and stood
Speaker 1: looking at that line of prints for a long time,
Speaker 1: and then he walked the whole line out to where
Speaker 1: it crossed the creek on the far bank. Those prints
Speaker 1: went straight up a slope that I would have needed
Speaker 1: my hands to climb, and they went up it in strides.
Speaker 1: Dell came back and poured his coffee out into the snow,
Speaker 1: which was a thing I had never once seen him do,
Speaker 1: because coffee was sacred to Dell. And all he said was, well,
Speaker 1: we come seven miles. That was the entire discussion. We'd
Speaker 1: come seven miles, so we were staying. Young men make
Speaker 1: decisions like that all the time, and some of them
Speaker 1: don't get to be old men because of it. And
Speaker 1: we got lucky. We hunted Monday, and the whole day
Speaker 1: was wrong. And I can't put it any better than that.
Speaker 1: Even now, the basin had gone quiet on us. Two
Speaker 1: days earlier, we'd had squirrels chattering, and ravens working the ridges,
Speaker 1: and elk signed so fresh it was steaming, and now
Speaker 1: there was nothing but old tracks and silence. Somewhere around midday,
Speaker 1: I sat down on a log to eat, and I
Speaker 1: got that feeling on the back of my neck that
Speaker 1: everybody talks about and nobody can prove. And I turned
Speaker 1: around fast, and of course there was nothing behind me
Speaker 1: but dark timber, going back and back and back. Any
Speaker 1: one of a hundred shadows in there could have been
Speaker 1: a stump, or could have been something standing very still,
Speaker 1: and there was no way on earth to tell the difference.
Speaker 1: Late that afternoon I found out where all the elk
Speaker 1: had gone. Their tracks funneled out of the basin through
Speaker 1: a saddle on the east ridge, dozens of animals moving together.
Speaker 1: And the weird part was they had gone through in
Speaker 1: the night, in the snow at a trot. You can
Speaker 1: read gate and tracks as plain as print on a
Speaker 1: page if you know what to look for. Elk don't
Speaker 1: trot seven miles away from good feed in the middle
Speaker 1: of the night because of weather, and they don't do
Speaker 1: it for wolves that aren't there. So the only conclusion
Speaker 1: the snow would let me draw was that something had
Speaker 1: emptied that basin the way a man empties a room,
Speaker 1: and that me and Dell were the only things left
Speaker 1: in it, too dumb to leave. On my way back
Speaker 1: to camp, I cut one more piece of sign. It
Speaker 1: was a single, just one pressed into the snow on
Speaker 1: top of a flat boulder beside the trail, and that
Speaker 1: boulder came up to my chest. It looked for all
Speaker 1: the world like something had stepped up onto that rock
Speaker 1: with one foot to get a better look down the
Speaker 1: back trail, and then stepped off again. I stood there
Speaker 1: a while trying to figure out how anything could get
Speaker 1: one foot up there without leaving a single mark around
Speaker 1: the base, and I couldn't do it. So I quit
Speaker 1: trying and walked that last half mile back to camp,
Speaker 1: a good deal faster than I'd walked all day. I
Speaker 1: told Dell about the elk leaving, but I never told
Speaker 1: him about the boulder. To this day, I couldn't tell
Speaker 1: you why, except that saying it out loud would have
Speaker 1: made it real, and I didn't want it any more
Speaker 1: real than it already was. Monday night, it came back,
Speaker 1: and this time it wasn't walking quiet. A little after
Speaker 1: ten o'clock. Something hit the meat pole tarp. We had
Speaker 1: no meat hanging yet, just the tarp and the rope,
Speaker 1: and whatever hit it slapped that canvas hard enough to
Speaker 1: crack it like a flag in a windstorm. Up out
Speaker 1: of his cot with the lantern, and I came up
Speaker 1: with the two seventy, and we stood shoulder to shoulder
Speaker 1: in the tent door, throwing that weak yellow light out
Speaker 1: into the spruce, and all it showed us was falling
Speaker 1: snow and tree trunks and our own breath. Then the
Speaker 1: smell rolled in on us. I grew up on a ranch,
Speaker 1: and I've smelled everything that can die and rot on
Speaker 1: a ranch. I've smelled boarhogs, and bears and a bull
Speaker 1: elk in the full of the rut. And this was
Speaker 1: none of those things, and it was worse than all
Speaker 1: of them together. It was like a wet dog that
Speaker 1: had been dead a week, with something sharper underneath it,
Speaker 1: something like ammonia. And it came into that tent so
Speaker 1: thick you could almost feel it. Dell gagged on it,
Speaker 1: and I'm not embarrassed to tell you my hands were
Speaker 1: shaking on that rifle. Then it screamed at us. I
Speaker 1: have spent fifty years trying to describe that sound to people,
Speaker 1: and the best I've ever managed is this. You take
Speaker 1: a woman screaming the worst scream you've ever heard in
Speaker 1: your life, tearror and pain all wound together, and you
Speaker 1: give that sam the chest of a bull and lungs
Speaker 1: the size of feedsacks. You make it go on for
Speaker 1: eight or ten seconds without a single breath, and you
Speaker 1: put it sixty yards away from you, in the dark,
Speaker 1: with four inches of snow on the ground, so you
Speaker 1: know beyond any doubt that whatever is making that sound
Speaker 1: has weight to it. That scream ran all the way
Speaker 1: down the drainage, and the echo came back off the
Speaker 1: far ridge, and then the basin went silent, and I
Speaker 1: promise you the silence was worse. We didn't sleep that night.
Speaker 1: We sat back to back on the cots with the
Speaker 1: lantern burning wasting fuel that neither of us said a
Speaker 1: word about, and Dell talked about his dad's old hunts
Speaker 1: in that basin. Every story he knew one after another
Speaker 1: all night long, just so there'd be a human voice
Speaker 1: in that tent. Somewhere around four in the morning, he
Speaker 1: ran out of stories, and we sat there listening to
Speaker 1: the creek, because the creek was the only thing left
Speaker 1: in the whole world that still sounded normal. At first light,
Speaker 1: we made a decision without ever actually discussing it, which
Speaker 1: was that we were packing out, but Deal still wanted
Speaker 1: his elk, and I understood that because we told everybody
Speaker 1: back home we'd be bringing meat, and Deal was the
Speaker 1: kind of man who'd rather be scared half to death
Speaker 1: than embarrassed. So we agreed on one last still hunt
Speaker 1: together down through the meadows at the bottom of the basin,
Speaker 1: and after that we'd break camp and be walking out
Speaker 1: by noon. We never fired a shot that morning, but
Speaker 1: in the second meadow I saw it. That meadow ran
Speaker 1: maybe two hundred yards across, snowed over and ringed in timber,
Speaker 1: with the creek cutting along the far side. We came
Speaker 1: up to the edge of it, slow glassing as we went,
Speaker 1: and Deal had the binoculars up when his hand closed
Speaker 1: on my sleeve. He didn't say a word, He just
Speaker 1: grabbed and squeezed, and I followed the line of those
Speaker 1: glasses out across the snow. It was crossing the far
Speaker 1: edge of the meadow, right along the timberline, moving left
Speaker 1: to right, and it was upright, walking on two legs
Speaker 1: the entire way. I want to be as clear I
Speaker 1: know how to be about that, because people always ask
Speaker 1: me whether it may be dropped down at some point,
Speaker 1: whether it might have been a bear that stood up
Speaker 1: for a second. The answer is that it walked upright
Speaker 1: across two hundred yards of my vision, and it never
Speaker 1: once looked like anything but a man, except it was
Speaker 1: far too big to be a man. It was dark
Speaker 1: brown going on black, and the snow out there stood
Speaker 1: higher than where its ankle should have been. And it
Speaker 1: moved through that snow the way I moved through mode grass,
Speaker 1: arms swinging long and low, the head set forward on
Speaker 1: the shoulders, with no neck that I could see. It
Speaker 1: never looked at us, not once, and I thanked God
Speaker 1: for that small mercy. For fifty years. It took maybe
Speaker 1: thirty seconds to cross that whole meadow, and then it
Speaker 1: walked into the timber on the north side, and the
Speaker 1: timber closed around it, and the meadow was just a
Speaker 1: meadow again, white and empty and quiet, with the creek
Speaker 1: talking away on the far side like nothing had happened.
Speaker 1: Dell lowered the binocular and his face had gone gray.
Speaker 1: He held the glasses out to me and I told
Speaker 1: him I didn't need them. I'd seen it plain, and
Speaker 1: he said no, look at the snow. I looked, and
Speaker 1: even without the glasses, I could see the trail the
Speaker 1: thing had left behind it, a line of dark holes
Speaker 1: running across all that white, steady and even as a seam.
Speaker 1: We broke camp in under an hour and did seven
Speaker 1: miles out with full packs before dark, and I don't
Speaker 1: remember being tired even once. At the truck. Dale finally
Speaker 1: spoke about it. What he said was, we don't tell
Speaker 1: my dad. I said okay. Then he said we don't
Speaker 1: tell anybody, and I said okay to that too. Dale
Speaker 1: kept that deal until the day he died in nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety four, and I kept it a good while longer.
Speaker 1: My wife knew, because you can't stay married to somebody
Speaker 1: for forty years and hide a thing that sits on
Speaker 1: you the way that thing sat on me. But she's
Speaker 1: gone now too. And here's what finally got me to
Speaker 1: write all this down. I got to thinking that the
Speaker 1: meadow is still up there, and the drainage is still
Speaker 1: up there, and I'm the only living soul left who
Speaker 1: knows what walked across that snow in nineteen sixty eight
Speaker 1: that started to seem wrong to me. A thing like
Speaker 1: that shouldn't have to die with me. So there it is.
Speaker 1: I never went back to that basin, and DLL never
Speaker 1: went back either. And it was his father's basin, his birthright,
Speaker 1: seven miles of the best elk country in Montana, and
Speaker 1: he never set foot in it again for the rest
Speaker 1: of his life. People can make of that whatever they want.
Speaker 1: That was Jack and what gets me about his story
Speaker 1: is the fifty years of silence. One email sent for
Speaker 1: no other reason than that the last other witness was
Speaker 1: gone and the story needed somewhere to live before he
Speaker 1: was gone too. I think about that meadow more than
Speaker 1: I probably should. But let's keep digging because our next
Speaker 1: encounter comes from a man named Curtis, and it takes
Speaker 1: us south down into the Washita Mountains of Arkansas in
Speaker 1: the fall of nineteen seis seventy seven. Stay tuned for
Speaker 1: more backwoods bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages.
Speaker 1: In nineteen seventy seven, Curtis was hunting whitetail deer on
Speaker 1: his uncle's lease in the Washataus west of hot springs,
Speaker 1: and he tells it like this. My uncle Ray had
Speaker 1: eight hundred acres leased up with three other men. It
Speaker 1: was big timber country, pine ridges and hardwood bottoms, cut
Speaker 1: through with creeks that ran clear over gravel. And I
Speaker 1: had hunted that ground since I was a boy. I
Speaker 1: knew that least the way you know your own house
Speaker 1: in the dark. It was the second week of gun season,
Speaker 1: and I was hunting a ladder stand that Ray and
Speaker 1: I had built together in a white oak flat above
Speaker 1: Cedar Creek. That spot had never once in my life
Speaker 1: failed to show me deer. The acorns were thick that year,
Speaker 1: and you could sit that stand of an evening and
Speaker 1: count six or eight or ten deer feeding through before
Speaker 1: dark every set without fail. That particular evening I counted zero.
Speaker 1: I don't mean the deer were slow coming in. I
Speaker 1: mean there was not one deer and not one squirrel,
Speaker 1: And a white oak flat in the middle of acorn
Speaker 1: season should have had squirrels raining out of the trees.
Speaker 1: I sat there from two in the afternoon until shooting
Speaker 1: light was nearly gone, and the wood stayed empty and
Speaker 1: shut up like a church on a Monday. Honestly, I
Speaker 1: was more annoyed than anything, because I figured somebody had
Speaker 1: walked through and stunked the place up. Figured one of
Speaker 1: Ray's lease partners had gone and ruined my evening. Then
Speaker 1: right at dark, from the ridge across the creek, something
Speaker 1: knocked wood against wood, one loud, sharp knock, like a
Speaker 1: man swinging a baseball bat full force against a tree trunk,
Speaker 1: and the sound rolled across that bottom in a way
Speaker 1: I felt in my chest as much as heard. Then
Speaker 1: from way off to the east, maybe half a mile out,
Speaker 1: another knock answered it. Now, I'd love to tell you
Speaker 1: I understood something significant was happening, but I didn't. This
Speaker 1: was nineteen seventy seven, and I was a kid from
Speaker 1: Guard County who had never heard the words would knock
Speaker 1: strung together in his life. What I thought was somebody's
Speaker 1: building something at dark in the middle of eight hundred
Speaker 1: least acres. And I settled on that in about two
Speaker 1: seconds flat, because the truth is, I did not want
Speaker 1: to think about it any harder than that. I climbed
Speaker 1: down and walked out to the truck and drove back
Speaker 1: to Rai's camp. And I never mentioned it to a soul.
Speaker 1: You'll notice that every man in this story keeps not
Speaker 1: mentioning things. There's a reason for that, and we'll get
Speaker 1: to it. The next day, I didn't hunt at all
Speaker 1: because it rained, and we sat around camp, and something
Speaker 1: happened that afternoon that I didn't connect to anything until
Speaker 1: much later. Ray kept a couple of beagles at camp,
Speaker 1: good Stout, little woods dogs that lived to run rabbits
Speaker 1: between deer sets along. About four o'clock, both of those
Speaker 1: dogs came out from under the porch at the same
Speaker 1: time and stood facing east toward the ridges, and growled
Speaker 1: low and steady, hackles up both of them at once.
Speaker 1: Ray got up and looked east and there was nothing
Speaker 1: out there but rain and pine. He hushed them and
Speaker 1: they would not hush, and he finally put them both
Speaker 1: in the cab of his truck, and those dogs stood
Speaker 1: up on the seat with their noses pressed against the glass,
Speaker 1: still facing east until it got dark. Ray said it
Speaker 1: was probably a cat moving through, and I said probably.
Speaker 1: I've thought a lot over the years about how much
Speaker 1: work that word does for men who don't want to
Speaker 1: talk about something. Two evenings later I was back in
Speaker 1: that stand, and this time the deer were back two
Speaker 1: a dough and two yearlings came through around four o'clock,
Speaker 1: feeding easy, with their tails loose, everything looking normal again.
Speaker 1: I let them walk because Ray had us holding out
Speaker 1: for bucks, and I settled in for the Golden Hour,
Speaker 1: feeling like the woods had gotten over whatever had been
Speaker 1: bothering them. At about five point fifteen, that same dough
Speaker 1: came back through, only this time she was running flat
Speaker 1: out with her ears pinned back and the yearlings scrambling
Speaker 1: to stay behind her. They blew past my stain, close
Speaker 1: enough that I could have hit them with a rock,
Speaker 1: and they were not running the way deer run when
Speaker 1: they've smelled a hunter, because deer that smell you bounce
Speaker 1: and blow and stop to look back over their shoulders.
Speaker 1: These deer ran like the ground behind them had caught fire,
Speaker 1: straight down into the creek bottom, splashing through the water
Speaker 1: and gone. I got the rifle up and pointed it
Speaker 1: back the way they'd come, because my first thought was dogs.
Speaker 1: We'd had trouble with dog packs running deer on that
Speaker 1: least before, so I sat there waiting on dogs, and
Speaker 1: what came instead was a smell. The wind was in
Speaker 1: my face, coming down off the ridge, and it carried
Speaker 1: something rotten and rank and musky all at once, like
Speaker 1: a skunk had died in a septic tank. It arrived
Speaker 1: slow and kept getting stronger, which meant whatever was making
Speaker 1: it was getting closer. And I still had that rifle
Speaker 1: pointed at the ridge, and my heart had started going hard.
Speaker 1: And I had not yet seen one single thing. That's
Speaker 1: the part I I always tell people who weren't there.
Speaker 1: I hadn't seen anything at all, and I was already
Speaker 1: more scared than I had ever been in my life.
Speaker 1: Off nothing but a smell and two knocks and some
Speaker 1: running deer. Your body knows things ahead of your eyes.
Speaker 1: It always has. Then I heard it walking coming down
Speaker 1: off the ridge through the leaves. And here's the thing
Speaker 1: you have to understand about hardwood leaves in November, which
Speaker 1: is that they tell on everything that touches them. I
Speaker 1: have heard one hundred men walk through November leaves, and
Speaker 1: every one of those men made a racket, boots, dragging,
Speaker 1: sticks popping, no rhythm to any of it. This was
Speaker 1: nothing like that. This was slow, even two legged steps, heavy,
Speaker 1: but somehow careful at the same time. Something coming down
Speaker 1: that slope, one deliberate foot at a time, placing each
Speaker 1: foot the way I would walk if I were trying
Speaker 1: my best to be quiet, but weigh too much for
Speaker 1: quiet to ever really work. It stopped inside the cedar
Speaker 1: thicket at the base of the ridge, maybe sixty yards
Speaker 1: from my stand, and then it just stood there. The
Speaker 1: light was going fast. By then I had maybe fifteen
Speaker 1: minutes left where the scope would gather anything at all.
Speaker 1: And I sat in that ladder stand with the rifle
Speaker 1: laid across the rail, staring at a solid wall of cedar,
Speaker 1: and somewhere inside that cedar something stood without moving a muscle.
Speaker 1: I could smell it, and I knew exactly where it
Speaker 1: was standing, and I could not see so much as
Speaker 1: one hair of it. Then the creek spoke up behind me.
Speaker 1: That's the only way I know how to put it,
Speaker 1: because from cedar creek at my back there came a splashing,
Speaker 1: deliberate and rhythmic, the sound of something waiting, and the
Speaker 1: understanding arrived all at once that there were two of them,
Speaker 1: one holding still in the cedars in front of me,
Speaker 1: and another one crossing the creek behind me. The moment
Speaker 1: that landed, the fear I'd been feeling turned into something
Speaker 1: older and more animal, the feeling of an animal that
Speaker 1: has just realized the door is closing on it. I
Speaker 1: don't remember to to lead, and I don't remember one
Speaker 1: single rung of that twelve foot ladder. The next thing
Speaker 1: I knew, I was standing on the ground at the
Speaker 1: base of my own stand, with the rifle at low ready,
Speaker 1: and the splashing had stopped, and the smell was still
Speaker 1: hanging in the air, and I heard myself say out loud,
Speaker 1: in a voice I didn't recognize as mine, I'm leaving now.
Speaker 1: I could not tell you why I said it. It
Speaker 1: just came up out of me, and from inside that
Speaker 1: cedar thicket sixty yards away in the near dark, something
Speaker 1: answered me. It wasn't a scream, and it wasn't a growl.
Speaker 1: It was something low and short, like a big drum
Speaker 1: being struck one time, a whoop with the top cut
Speaker 1: off of it, just the one sound and nothing after it.
Speaker 1: And then the whole face of that cedar thicket moved
Speaker 1: high up, higher than the top of my head, branches
Speaker 1: swaying and shifting like a truck was backing through them,
Speaker 1: and all of that movement was going away from me,
Speaker 1: up the ridge. It let me go that's how I've
Speaker 1: understood it for near fifty years now, Now that the
Speaker 1: sound was it letting me go. I walked out of
Speaker 1: that bottom in the full dark, with my thumb riding
Speaker 1: the safety the whole way, stopping every fifty yards to
Speaker 1: stand and listen, and the woods gave me nothing else.
Speaker 1: When I got to the truck, I sat behind the
Speaker 1: wheel a long while before my hand would go steady
Speaker 1: enough to fit the key in the ignition. Ray was
Speaker 1: at camp frying potatoes when I came in, and he
Speaker 1: took one look at my face and turned the burner off.
Speaker 1: He sat me down at the table, this man who
Speaker 1: had hunted that country his entire life. And I told
Speaker 1: him every bit of it, the knocks from two nights
Speaker 1: before the deer, the smell, the thing standing in the cedars,
Speaker 1: the second thing crossing the creek at my back. And
Speaker 1: I want to tell you exactly what Ray did when
Speaker 1: I finished talking, because it's the part of this whole
Speaker 1: story that has stayed with me the longest. He didn't
Speaker 1: laugh at me. He got up from the table, walked
Speaker 1: out to his truck, and came back in with a
Speaker 1: road map of the state of Arkansas. He spread that
Speaker 1: map out over the table and put his finger down
Speaker 1: on a spot in Miller County, way down in the
Speaker 1: southwest corner, and he said, in nineteen and seventy one,
Speaker 1: some folks down here in got tore up over things
Speaker 1: just like what you're telling me, and every soul in
Speaker 1: this state laughed at them for it. Then he slid
Speaker 1: his finger up the map to our lease, and he said,
Speaker 1: I have hunted this ground for thirty years, and I've
Speaker 1: heard them knocks four times, and I heard that whoop
Speaker 1: of yours exactly once, back in fifty nine. And I
Speaker 1: never told one living person about it, because I watched
Speaker 1: what happened to them foul people when they told. Then
Speaker 1: he folded the map back up along its creases and said,
Speaker 1: your stands coming down tomorrow, and we'll hunt you on
Speaker 1: the west end the rest of the season. And that
Speaker 1: was the end of the conversation. We took the stand
Speaker 1: down the next morning, the two of us together, because
Speaker 1: neither one of us was willing to let the other
Speaker 1: go in there alone. While we were unbolting it from
Speaker 1: that white oak, I found a place where the bark
Speaker 1: had been rubbed clean off the truck unk of a
Speaker 1: pine across the flat at the height of my shoulder,
Speaker 1: while I stood flat on the ground, pressed into the mud.
Speaker 1: At the base of that pine was half of a footprint,
Speaker 1: just the front half, the toes and the ball of
Speaker 1: the foot, and it was wider than both of my
Speaker 1: boots set side by side. Ray stood looking down at
Speaker 1: it for a long while, and then he set his
Speaker 1: boot on top of it and twisted his heel and
Speaker 1: wiped it out of the mud entirely. When I asked
Speaker 1: him why in the world he'd done that, he said,
Speaker 1: because you'll want to bring people up here, and this
Speaker 1: ain't a thing you want people knowing you've seen. I
Speaker 1: hunted that lease for eleven more years after that season,
Speaker 1: and I never once sat the white Oak flat again.
Speaker 1: I noticed as the years went by that none of
Speaker 1: the other men on the lease ever hunted it either,
Speaker 1: and nobody ever said why, and nobody ever asked why.
Speaker 1: So there sat eight hundred acres of deer lease with
Speaker 1: a forty acre hole right in the middle of it,
Speaker 1: that every man on the place quietly hunted around the
Speaker 1: way water goes around a stone. And here's one more
Speaker 1: thing about that country before I let it go. Those
Speaker 1: beagles of Rays. The same two dogs that had stood
Speaker 1: growling at the east ridges in the rain would not
Speaker 1: hunt the Cedar Creek side of the lease after that season.
Speaker 1: He'd cast them off the road down toward that bottom,
Speaker 1: and they would run one short loop and come straight
Speaker 1: back to the truck and sit down and look at him.
Speaker 1: These were good rabbit dogs, dogs that would run a
Speaker 1: track through a briar patch until their ears bled and
Speaker 1: they flat refused forty acres of the best rabbit ground
Speaker 1: on the whole lease. Ray never once made them go.
Speaker 1: He'd load them back up without a word and drive
Speaker 1: around to the west end, and neither of us ever
Speaker 1: said a thing about it. Ray passed away in nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety six, and at the funeral, one of the old
Speaker 1: lease partners came up to me, a man named Hollis.
Speaker 1: He shook my hand and held on to it a
Speaker 1: second longer than a handshake needs, and he said, Ray
Speaker 1: told me you've seen it too. That was the first
Speaker 1: and only time in nineteen years that anybody ever said
Speaker 1: it out loud. You asked me what I make of
Speaker 1: it all now, this many years down the road, and
Speaker 1: here's what I make of it. There was something living
Speaker 1: in those cedar bottoms. That was not a bear and
Speaker 1: was not a man, and the old timers knew it
Speaker 1: was there, and their way of handling that knowledge was
Speaker 1: to hunt around it and keep their mouths shut. Maybe
Speaker 1: that was wisdom and maybe that was fear. But from
Speaker 1: where I stood that evening, at the bottom of my
Speaker 1: own ladder in the dark, I couldn't have told you
Speaker 1: the difference that was Curtis out of the Washataus, and
Speaker 1: the image I can't shake from his story is old
Speaker 1: Ray with that road map, dragging his finger from falc
Speaker 1: up to their lease. Because that man had been carrying
Speaker 1: a sound around in his head since nineteen fifty nine
Speaker 1: and had never once set it down in front of
Speaker 1: another human being. We're going further back now because our
Speaker 1: next encounter comes from a man named Frank, and it's
Speaker 1: the oldest story in the bag. Tonight out of Washington State,
Speaker 1: up in the Cascades in nineteen fifty four. Frank is
Speaker 1: gone now, and his family emailed me this account written
Speaker 1: down over the years, exactly the way he told it
Speaker 1: at his own kitchen table. In the fall of nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty four, Frank was working a logging show on the
Speaker 1: west slope of the Cascades and hunting black bear on
Speaker 1: his days off. This is his account, the way he
Speaker 1: always told it. You have to understand what the woods
Speaker 1: were like out there in fifty four, because there were
Speaker 1: no roads where we worked except the ones we were
Speaker 1: building ourselves. The company punched a grade up a river valley,
Speaker 1: and we followed it in cutting. As we went. Behind
Speaker 1: us lay the mill and the town and everything a
Speaker 1: man understood, And ahead of us stood timber that no
Speaker 1: white man had ever walked underneath. And I mean that
Speaker 1: as a plain statement of fact. It was old growth
Speaker 1: Douglas first, so big around that four of us couldn't
Speaker 1: link hands and reach around one. When you walked back
Speaker 1: into that standing timber away from the cut, the light
Speaker 1: went green and the sound went dead, and you were
Speaker 1: in a different world than the one your mother raised
Speaker 1: you in. Every man on that show felt it, and
Speaker 1: not one of us ever said it. I hunted bear
Speaker 1: because bear was worth money and the meat was good.
Speaker 1: The company had an unofficial bounty going because the bears
Speaker 1: tore up equipment and got into the cookshack, and a
Speaker 1: good hide brought cash in town. On top of that,
Speaker 1: most Sundays I'd take my Winchester and climb up above
Speaker 1: the cut, following the creeks, looking for the berry slopes
Speaker 1: where the bears fed in the fall. But before I
Speaker 1: can get to my particular Sunday, I have to tell
Speaker 1: you what the woods had already been doing all that season,
Speaker 1: because my Sunday didn't come out of nowhere. All through September,
Speaker 1: things had been going missing off the landing. It wasn't
Speaker 1: tools going missing, it was food, a lunch pail here
Speaker 1: and a sack of apples there. The men blamed each
Speaker 1: other for a while, and then they blamed the bears.
Speaker 1: But no bear that ever lived opens a latched lunch pail,
Speaker 1: eats what's inside, and leaves the pail sitting closed and
Speaker 1: on a stump forty feet away from where it was taken.
Speaker 1: Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back
Speaker 1: after these messages that happened. I saw the pail on
Speaker 1: the stump with my own eyes, latch shut and licked
Speaker 1: clean inside. And I remember Old einar our Cook, a
Speaker 1: Swede who had been logging since before the First War,
Speaker 1: standing there looking at that pail for a long long time.
Speaker 1: Then he said something in Swedish and walked away, and
Speaker 1: he would not translate it for anybody who asked. And
Speaker 1: then there were the nights we slept in bunk cars
Speaker 1: at the camp, and two or three times that fall
Speaker 1: the men in the in car heard something big, walked
Speaker 1: the full length of the camp in the dark, heard
Speaker 1: the gravel giving way under its step after step. One
Speaker 1: night in October, somebody or something picked up a choker cable,
Speaker 1: which is a length of steel cable heavy enough that
Speaker 1: it takes two grown men to drag it anywhere, and
Speaker 1: carried it off the landing and up the bank, and
Speaker 1: it draped over a stump like a scarf over the
Speaker 1: back of a chair. The side rod blamed pranksters, and
Speaker 1: the men all looked at one another, and every one
Speaker 1: of us was thinking the same thought, which was that
Speaker 1: no man alive drags a choker uphill in the dark
Speaker 1: for a joke and manages to leave no bootprints doing it.
Speaker 1: There was one more night that I always tell separately,
Speaker 1: because that one I was awake for. It was early October,
Speaker 1: a Thursday, and I had gone out of the bunk
Speaker 1: car to the outhouse around midnight. It was a clear,
Speaker 1: cold night with a big moon, and I was walking
Speaker 1: back across the gravel when a whistle came down from
Speaker 1: up the valley, from way past the end of the grade.
Speaker 1: It was long and clean, two notes high and then low,
Speaker 1: loud enough to carry a mile with no trouble. I
Speaker 1: stopped where I stood because it sounded exactly like a
Speaker 1: man whistling for his dog, and there was no man
Speaker 1: up there. The grade ended, and past the grade there
Speaker 1: was nothing but standing timber all the way to the path,
Speaker 1: and then from the ridge on the far side of
Speaker 1: the valley, another whistle answered the first one, the same
Speaker 1: two notes, turned around backward, low and then high. The
Speaker 1: two of them went back and forth like that four times,
Speaker 1: one voice up the valley and one voice on the ridge,
Speaker 1: calling and answering across all of that dark timber, while
Speaker 1: I stood on the gravel in the moonlight in my
Speaker 1: long johns and listened. I'm not ashamed to tell you
Speaker 1: the hair stood up on me from my heels to
Speaker 1: my scalp. But it wasn't frightening the way a scream
Speaker 1: is frightening. And this is the part I've never fully
Speaker 1: gotten across to anybody in all the years since it
Speaker 1: was worse than frightening, because it was orderly. Two of
Speaker 1: something were talking to each other over the top of
Speaker 1: our sleeping camp calm as two farmers visiting across a
Speaker 1: fence line, and whatever they were saying to each other,
Speaker 1: we were down there in the middle of it, asleep
Speaker 1: in our little ten cars, believing we owned that valley
Speaker 1: because we had parked a bulldozer in it. I went
Speaker 1: back to my bunk and I told nobah, So that
Speaker 1: was the season I was living inside of. When my
Speaker 1: Sunday finally came, it was the last week of October,
Speaker 1: cold and clear, with the alders gone yellow all along
Speaker 1: the creeks. I went up early before light above the
Speaker 1: cut and into the standing timber, headed for an old
Speaker 1: burn from years back, where the huckleberries grew thick on
Speaker 1: a south facing slope. It was a two hour walk,
Speaker 1: and I'd made it three or four times already that fall,
Speaker 1: and taking one bear off that slope. I got to
Speaker 1: the edge of the burn just as the sun was
Speaker 1: coming over the ridge, and I sat myself down against
Speaker 1: a snag on the downhill edge, the way I always did,
Speaker 1: to look the slope over before I moved. I didn't
Speaker 1: own field glasses in those days, so all I had
Speaker 1: were my eyes. But my eyes were young then, and
Speaker 1: they worked fine. And what my eyes found on that slope,
Speaker 1: about one hundred and fifty yards above me, feeding in
Speaker 1: the huckleberry exactly the way a bear feeds, was not
Speaker 1: a bear. It was sitting on its haunches. And that's
Speaker 1: the first thing, because it sat the way a man
Speaker 1: sits on the ground. It was stripping berries off the
Speaker 1: bushes with its hands and eating them out of its palm.
Speaker 1: And I mean hands, because I watched the arm reach
Speaker 1: out and the fingers close around a branch, and the
Speaker 1: branch bend in and come back, and the hand travel
Speaker 1: up to the mouth, over and over, easy and unhurried,
Speaker 1: like a man eating peanuts at a ball game. It
Speaker 1: was covered in hair, a reddish brown that went lighter
Speaker 1: across the shoulders where the morning sun was hitting it.
Speaker 1: And it was big. I had nothing on that slope
Speaker 1: to measure it against except the berry bushes, which stood
Speaker 1: about waist high on a man and sitting down flat
Speaker 1: on the ground. That things head and shoulders rode above
Speaker 1: those bushes the way a standing man rides above a
Speaker 1: field of wheat. My mind tried everything it had in stock,
Speaker 1: a bear, a man in a coat, a burned stump,
Speaker 1: an elk bedded down, and the thing on the slope
Speaker 1: beat every one of those explanations just by reaching out
Speaker 1: its arm and picking another handful of berries. People always
Speaker 1: ask me, first thing, why I didn't shoot it, since
Speaker 1: I was sitting there with a thirty thirty across my knees.
Speaker 1: And I've given different answers over the years, but the
Speaker 1: true answer is that shooting it never crossed my mind,
Speaker 1: not once, not for one second, because you don't think
Speaker 1: about shooting a thing like that any more than you'd
Speaker 1: think about shooting your neighbor over the back fence. Everything
Speaker 1: about it said person. It was the wrong person, an
Speaker 1: impossible person, but a person all the same. And the
Speaker 1: rifle lay across my knees the whole time, and I
Speaker 1: never once felt it there. I watched it feed for
Speaker 1: what I judge was ten minutes, which were the longest
Speaker 1: and the shortest ten minutes of my life at the
Speaker 1: same time. And then the wind, which had been pouring
Speaker 1: gently down the slope into my face all morning, swirled
Speaker 1: on me, and I felt it turn against the back
Speaker 1: of my neck out on that slope. The thing stopped
Speaker 1: with its hand halfway up to its mouth, and it
Speaker 1: turned its head and it looked at me in fifty
Speaker 1: yards between us, and I felt that look land on
Speaker 1: my chest like a hand. It didn't startle, and it
Speaker 1: didn't crash away into the timber the way a bear
Speaker 1: would have. It looked at me for two or maybe
Speaker 1: three seconds, and then it stood up. And I've carried
Speaker 1: the side of it standing up for the whole rest
Speaker 1: of my life. I'll tell you plainly, it's the single
Speaker 1: most frightening thing I've ever seen. And I say that
Speaker 1: as a man who later watched a widow maker kill
Speaker 1: a fellow not sixty feet away from me. It rose
Speaker 1: up off that ground in one single motion, no hands pushing,
Speaker 1: no gathering itself, just up the way a young and
Speaker 1: angry man comes up out of a chair. And when
Speaker 1: it reached its full height, the entire slope changed scale
Speaker 1: around it, because those berry bushes I'd been measuring it
Speaker 1: against suddenly looked like nothing at all. It stood eight
Speaker 1: feet if it stood an inch, and I know exactly
Speaker 1: how that number sounds, and I knew how it sounded
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty four to two, which is a large
Speaker 1: part of why I kept my mouth shut for so
Speaker 1: many years. Afterward, it stood there facing me, with its
Speaker 1: arms hanging loose at its sides, and it swayed side
Speaker 1: to side, slow twice and maybe three times, like a
Speaker 1: man shifting his weight while he makes up his mind
Speaker 1: about something. Then it turned and walked up the burn,
Speaker 1: quartering away from me, and every stride it took ate
Speaker 1: up ground in a way I still don't have words for.
Speaker 1: It crested the top of that slope in less time
Speaker 1: than it has taken me to tell you about it.
Speaker 1: And at the very crest, standing against the morning sky,
Speaker 1: it stopped, and it turned its head, and it looked
Speaker 1: back down at me one more time, and then it
Speaker 1: was over the top and gone. I sat against that
Speaker 1: snag until my legs would answer me again, and then
Speaker 1: I walked the two hours back down to camp, and
Speaker 1: I do not remember one step of that walk. What
Speaker 1: I remember is coming onto the landing and finding iinar
Speaker 1: there splitting wood for the cook stove. Stopped midswing and
Speaker 1: looked at me, and whatever was written on my face,
Speaker 1: that old man read it at a glance. He set
Speaker 1: the axe head down on the block and he said,
Speaker 1: and I never in my life forgot the words you've seen,
Speaker 1: the big fellow. It wasn't a question, he said it
Speaker 1: the way you'd say you got caught in the rain.
Speaker 1: I told him I'd seen something up at the Old Burn,
Speaker 1: and I started in trying to describe it, and Einar
Speaker 1: held one hand up and stopped me cold, and he
Speaker 1: told me, don't tell it around camp. He said the
Speaker 1: Indians on that side of the mountains had always known
Speaker 1: about them, had known since before anybody's grandfather, and had
Speaker 1: names for them, and that not one of those names
Speaker 1: meant monster. He said that in all his years in
Speaker 1: the woods, he had seen one exactly once himself up
Speaker 1: in Canada before the First War, and had heard them
Speaker 1: more times than that. And then he told me the
Speaker 1: thing I've repeated to people ever since, because it remains
Speaker 1: the best advice on this subject any man has ever
Speaker 1: given me. He said, they was here first, and you're
Speaker 1: the one visiting, so act like it. I logged four
Speaker 1: more years on that side of the mountains after my Sunday,
Speaker 1: and some nights I heard things far off up the valleys,
Speaker 1: sounds that the older men said were cougar, But I
Speaker 1: never saw it again. Two years after my Sunday in
Speaker 1: fifty six, the company pushed the road up past that burn,
Speaker 1: and the same fall they cut that slope, the food
Speaker 1: stopped disappearing from the landing, and the walking in the
Speaker 1: night stopped, and the camp went quiet, and it stayed quiet,
Speaker 1: and it was the kind of quiet that should have
Speaker 1: felt like a relief, and somehow never did. Einar retired
Speaker 1: that winter, and the last thing he ever said to me,
Speaker 1: standing at the cookshack door with his bag packed, was
Speaker 1: we cut his front porch, so he's moved back further up.
Speaker 1: He nodded at the mountains when he said it, like
Speaker 1: there would always be a further up. But there isn't.
Speaker 1: And that's the thing I find myself thinking about now
Speaker 1: that I'm old. There isn't a further up anymore, because
Speaker 1: as we cut the further up all of it, and
Speaker 1: I helped. I have a grandson who hunts that same
Speaker 1: country today on roads I built with my own hands,
Speaker 1: and it's all second growth and locked gates now, and
Speaker 1: he thinks his grandpa's story is a good story. It
Speaker 1: isn't a story to me. Though it was a Sunday
Speaker 1: morning on a berry slope, and I was there, that
Speaker 1: was Frank. And think about where that account sits in
Speaker 1: time for a minute, because nineteen fifty four is four
Speaker 1: years before a bulldozer operator named Jerry Crewe walked into
Speaker 1: a California newspaper office carrying a plaster cast and accidentally
Speaker 1: handed America the word bigfoot. Frank didn't have the word yet.
Speaker 1: All Frank had was a burn slope, a swede with
Speaker 1: an axe, and a Sunday morning he carried for the
Speaker 1: rest of his life. Our next encounter jumps us ahead
Speaker 1: thirty five years up into the big timber of Michigan's
Speaker 1: Upper Peninsula, and it comes from a man named Dale,
Speaker 1: who was a bear hunter. In September of nineteen eighty nine,
Speaker 1: Dale was running a bear bait in the western Upper Peninsula,
Speaker 1: south of the Porcupine Mountains. Baiting bear is a routine,
Speaker 1: and honestly, the routine is the whole art of it.
Speaker 1: You pick a spot, and you establish a bait, and
Speaker 1: you freshen it on a schedule, and what you're really
Speaker 1: doing is teaching a bear that groceries show up in
Speaker 1: the same place at the same time, so the bear
Speaker 1: builds a habit and then you go sit on the habit.
Speaker 1: People who don't hunt like to say it's unsporting, and
Speaker 1: people who actually do it know that a mature bore
Speaker 1: in big timber is about the wariest animal walking around
Speaker 1: North America, and that mostly what the bait teaches you
Speaker 1: is exactly how smart he is while he eats your
Speaker 1: donuts and never once shows himself in daylight. I had
Speaker 1: run baits in that country for nine straight seasons, and
Speaker 1: I had a system worked out. A fifty five gallon
Speaker 1: drum chained to a maple with holes cut in the sides,
Speaker 1: filled up with bakery waste and restaurant grease and whatever
Speaker 1: else I could scrounge, covered over with logs, so the
Speaker 1: bear had to work for it, and I could read
Speaker 1: the sign he left working. I checked it every third
Speaker 1: day like clockwork, and I knew every bear on that
Speaker 1: bait by his sign long before I ever laid eyes
Speaker 1: on it. That particular season, I had a big boar
Speaker 1: working it who left a front pad print wide as
Speaker 1: a coffee can lid, and I had him patterned coming
Speaker 1: in during the last half hour of light. Everything about
Speaker 1: that September was normal, nine seasons worth of normal, right,
Speaker 1: up until the third week of the month. I came
Speaker 1: in on a Tuesday to freshen the bait, and the
Speaker 1: logs were off the drum, and they had it been
Speaker 1: pulled off the way a bear pulls them off. They
Speaker 1: had been thrown. One of them, a green maple log,
Speaker 1: heavier than anything I'd want to carry any distance, was
Speaker 1: lying fifteen yards away up against a stump. The drum itself,
Speaker 1: which was chained to that maple with a logging chain,
Speaker 1: had been dragged out to the very end of the
Speaker 1: chain and stood straight up on end. And it was empty,
Speaker 1: cleaned out, reached into through the top, and emptied, not
Speaker 1: worked through the side holes the way a bear does it,
Speaker 1: because a bear has no choice but to work the holes.
Speaker 1: My first thought was people, some clown messing with my bait,
Speaker 1: Except the ground told me no. The ground around a
Speaker 1: bait station gets soft and torn up and it takes
Speaker 1: tracks beautifully, And there was not one boot print anywhere
Speaker 1: on it. What there was instead, pressed in deep right
Speaker 1: beside the drum and soil packed down like something very
Speaker 1: heavy had stood in that one spot while it worked
Speaker 1: was a barefoot track seventeen and a half inches long.
Speaker 1: I measured it twice with my tape because I didn't
Speaker 1: believe my own tape the first time. Seventeen and a
Speaker 1: half inches long and seven inches across the ball, five toes,
Speaker 1: no claw marks anywhere. I knelt over that track for
Speaker 1: a good twenty minutes, trying every way. I knew to
Speaker 1: turn it into a bear, because a bear's hind foot
Speaker 1: can fool you if you want badly enough to be fooled,
Speaker 1: and Buddy, I wanted to be fooled. But a bear's
Speaker 1: hind foot narrows down hard at the heel, and this
Speaker 1: heel was wide and round and pressed in deepest of everything.
Speaker 1: And a bear shows claws out ahead of the toes,
Speaker 1: and there were no claws, and those toes were splayed
Speaker 1: out like fingers gripping the dirt. A full stride ahead
Speaker 1: of it. There was a second track a left, and
Speaker 1: my own stride stretching runs about three feet. This one
Speaker 1: went four and a half. Now here's what I did next,
Speaker 1: and it'll tell you exactly where my head was at,
Speaker 1: because I went home and got more bait, and I
Speaker 1: came back out and refilled that drum. I hung a
Speaker 1: trail timer on it instead of a camera, because in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty nine a camera setup was money I didn't have,
Speaker 1: and a timer would at least record the hour that
Speaker 1: something tripped the string. Then I rehung the logs and
Speaker 1: raked the ground smooth in a big, clean apron all
Speaker 1: the way around the way you'd set a track trap.
Speaker 1: Because I decided I was going to figure this out.
Speaker 1: I wasn't scared yet. I was interested, and interested is
Speaker 1: a thing you get to be in the daylight in
Speaker 1: September with your truck parked a quarter mile away. Scared
Speaker 1: came later, and when it finally came, it came all
Speaker 1: at once and made up for lost time. Stay tuned
Speaker 1: for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages.
Speaker 1: Three days later, I checked it, and the logs were
Speaker 1: thrown again, and the drum was cleaned out again, and
Speaker 1: the timer had tripped at two eleven in the morning,
Speaker 1: and my nice raked apron of dirt had tracks pressed
Speaker 1: all through it. And it wasn't one set of tracks.
Speaker 1: It was two sizes. There was the seventeen and a
Speaker 1: half I already knew, and there was a smaller one
Speaker 1: thirteen inches pressed lighter, hanging back toward the outside edge
Speaker 1: of the apron, like it had stood off and waited
Speaker 1: while the big one worked the drum, a big one
Speaker 1: and a small one. I'll tell you that did something
Speaker 1: to me standing out there alone looking down at it,
Speaker 1: because a bear on your bait is a bear. But
Speaker 1: two sets of barefoot tracks and two sizes, one working
Speaker 1: and one waiting, means you're not dealing with an animal
Speaker 1: proper anymore. You're dealing with a family. And I did
Speaker 1: not want to be dealing with a family. And there
Speaker 1: was something else in that raked dirt, or rather something
Speaker 1: missing from it, because my bore was gone nine seasons
Speaker 1: of reading bait sites, and I knew that big bear's
Speaker 1: pad print the way I know my own signature, and
Speaker 1: it was nowhere on that apron, and there was no
Speaker 1: bear sign at all. None. A drum full of bakery
Speaker 1: waste had sat open in the woods for three days
Speaker 1: in some of the best bear country in the state
Speaker 1: of Michigan, and not one single bear had come near it,
Speaker 1: and the coyotes hadn't come either, And coyotes will work
Speaker 1: a bait the minute a bear's back is turned. Everything
Speaker 1: in those woods that walked on four legs had written
Speaker 1: that spot off completely, and the only customers still coming
Speaker 1: were walking on two and one more small thing. And
Speaker 1: I almost never tell this part because it sounds like nothing.
Speaker 1: That timer of mine hung from a branch on a
Speaker 1: cord at about chest height, and when I had left it,
Speaker 1: the face point pointed at the drum. When I came back,
Speaker 1: the face pointed away from the drum, turned a neat
Speaker 1: half turn on its cord, like something had picked it
Speaker 1: up in its fingers, looked it over, and set it
Speaker 1: back down, facing the wrong way. A raccoon spins things
Speaker 1: and drops things and chews on things, but nothing choose
Speaker 1: a trail timer and then hangs it back exactly where
Speaker 1: it was just turned around. I stood there, holding that
Speaker 1: little box and feeling watched by it, which makes no
Speaker 1: sense at all, and I put it in my coat
Speaker 1: pocket instead of rehanging it. And I couldn't have told
Speaker 1: you why to save my life. I sat that bait
Speaker 1: on a Saturday evening and I told my wife I
Speaker 1: was going after my bore, which was half true. My
Speaker 1: stand was a wooden platform sixteen feet up a hemlock
Speaker 1: down wind, thirty yards off the drum, and I was
Speaker 1: settled in by three o'clock with a thirty ought to
Speaker 1: six across my lap. The afternoon went by as ordinary
Speaker 1: as any afternoon in the woods. Red squirrels working the duff,
Speaker 1: a piliated woodpecker hammering away at a snag off to
Speaker 1: the north. And then around six o'clock even that shut off,
Speaker 1: and the woods did the thing I had heard about
Speaker 1: for years and privately filed away under campfire talk. The
Speaker 1: switch flipped. The woods dropped into a total silence, and
Speaker 1: it was a silence with pressure inside it, like the
Speaker 1: air out ahead of a thunderstorm. At six point forty
Speaker 1: something started circling me, and I never heard of footfall
Speaker 1: the whole time. What I heard was position a stick
Speaker 1: popped off to the east of me, And then four
Speaker 1: or five minutes went by, and there was a soft
Speaker 1: brush of branches to the south, and then southwest and
Speaker 1: then west, and I understood that something was walking a slow,
Speaker 1: patient circle around my stand, about one hundred yards out,
Speaker 1: staying quiet, betrayed only every few minutes by a piece
Speaker 1: of ground that wouldn't cooperate with it. A bear doesn't
Speaker 1: do that. A bear works sent straight up and down
Speaker 1: the wind. But this thing walked the entire compass around me,
Speaker 1: like a farmer walking a fence line. And it finished.
Speaker 1: It circled directly behind me, to the northwest, down wind,
Speaker 1: inside a blowdown thicket that I could not twist far
Speaker 1: enough around to see into, and from inside that thicket
Speaker 1: it watched me. I couldn't see it and I couldn't
Speaker 1: hear it. And I've never in my life been more
Speaker 1: certain of any fact than I was certain of that one,
Speaker 1: because every hair on the back of my neck stood
Speaker 1: on end. In nine seasons of sitting stands, I had
Speaker 1: never felt anything like it, and I have never felt
Speaker 1: it since, and I hoped to die without feeling it again.
Speaker 1: We stayed like that, me and that thicket for the
Speaker 1: better part of an hour while the light drained out
Speaker 1: of the woods, and somewhere in there I made a
Speaker 1: decision that I still stand behind today, which was that
Speaker 1: I was not going to be sixteen feet up a
Speaker 1: tree in that spot when full dark came. Whatever the
Speaker 1: rules of this situation were, nobody had given me a copy,
Speaker 1: and a tree stand in the dark with a slung
Speaker 1: rifle was a bad hand no matter what the rules
Speaker 1: turned out to be. So I did the boldest thing
Speaker 1: I have ever done, which was also the most cowardly
Speaker 1: thing I've ever done, and thirty five years later, I
Speaker 1: still can't tell you which one it was more of.
Speaker 1: I stood up on that platform and I faced the blowdown,
Speaker 1: and I spoke to it. I said, I'm coming down now,
Speaker 1: and I'm going to my truck, and I'm done here.
Speaker 1: And my voice came out small in all that silence,
Speaker 1: like a kid answering a question in a big, empty classroom,
Speaker 1: and the thicket answered me back. It did the very
Speaker 1: last thing on this earth I expected, because it knocked
Speaker 1: wood on wood one time from inside that blowdown, not
Speaker 1: fifty yards away from me, and it wasn't loud. It
Speaker 1: was almost gentle, like a knuckle rapping once on a doorframe.
Speaker 1: I don't know what that knock meant, and I've turned
Speaker 1: it over in my head for thirty five years without
Speaker 1: wearing it out, but standing in that hemlock in the
Speaker 1: last of the light, my body took it as permission.
Speaker 1: I unloaded my rifle with my hand shaking, and I
Speaker 1: climbed down and I walked out to my truck at
Speaker 1: a normal walking pace, with every cell in my body
Speaker 1: screaming at me to run. It took eleven minutes. I
Speaker 1: know that because I counted them off my watch afterward,
Speaker 1: and my watch said eleven minutes. And it felt like
Speaker 1: four days. Nothing followed me out, or at least nothing
Speaker 1: I could hear, And when I got to the truck,
Speaker 1: I did something I had never once done in nine seasons,
Speaker 1: which was locked the doors of a pickup parked on
Speaker 1: a two track eleven miles from the nearest pavement. I
Speaker 1: sat there with the engine running and the heater going,
Speaker 1: even though I wasn't cold, watching the dark line of
Speaker 1: the trail in my mirror while I ate my sandwich,
Speaker 1: and the trail stayed empty. And I drove home with
Speaker 1: the radio turned up loud enough to feel it in
Speaker 1: the seat. I pulled that bait for good. I went
Speaker 1: back in the next morning with my brother in law
Speaker 1: in daylight, with two rifles between us, and we hauled
Speaker 1: out the drum and the chain and the timer, and
Speaker 1: I forfeited the whole season. And I told the guys
Speaker 1: at work my spot had gotten poached. And on the
Speaker 1: way out on the two track, about a quarter mile
Speaker 1: from the bait side, we found the logs. The logs
Speaker 1: off my drum four green maple logs that I had
Speaker 1: wrestled onto that barrel, one at a time, sweating through
Speaker 1: my shirt, were laid across the two track, side by side,
Speaker 1: neat and tight together, like a little section of corduroy bridge,
Speaker 1: set perpendicular to the road, and directly across the line
Speaker 1: my truck had to take to get out. My brother
Speaker 1: in law stopped the truck and neither one of us
Speaker 1: got out for a minute, and then he said, bears,
Speaker 1: don't do that. I said no. He said, so who
Speaker 1: put your logs on the road. And I didn't have
Speaker 1: an answer for him. And we got out together and
Speaker 1: moved them together. And I can tell you for a
Speaker 1: fact that those logs took the two of us, one
Speaker 1: log at a time, grunting. Something had carried four of
Speaker 1: those a quarter mile and stacked them neat. I won't
Speaker 1: tell you it was a message, because I don't know
Speaker 1: what it was, but I'd left one door cracked open
Speaker 1: in my mind through all of it. The door marked
Speaker 1: some other explanation, and those four logs on that roadde
Speaker 1: closed it for good. I still hunt bear to this
Speaker 1: day in different country, a long way east of there,
Speaker 1: and every season the first time I walk into a
Speaker 1: brand new bait site, I stand there for a minute
Speaker 1: before I unload the truck, and I just stand and listen.
Speaker 1: My brother in law asked me one time what I
Speaker 1: was listening for, and I told him, I'm not listening,
Speaker 1: I'm asking. And there's a difference that was dale out
Speaker 1: of the western Upper Peninsula and out of everything in
Speaker 1: the bag tonight. It's those four logs stacked neat across
Speaker 1: a two track that followed me down the hallway at night.
Speaker 1: Because whatever you decide they were, somebody carried them a
Speaker 1: quarter mile to put them there. We've got two more
Speaker 1: to go, and our next encounter comes from a man
Speaker 1: named Tommy. It takes us back down south into the
Speaker 1: river bottoms of Middle Georgia in the summer of nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety six, when Tommy and his cousin went out after
Speaker 1: hogs in the dark and found out that something else
Speaker 1: was hunting the same bottom. Here's what happened. The hogs
Speaker 1: were eating us alive that summer. My grandmother had two
Speaker 1: hundred acres on the river, row crop up top and
Speaker 1: hardwood bottom running down along the water, and those hogs
Speaker 1: would come up out of that bottom at night and
Speaker 1: root through her corn like a plow gone drunk. The
Speaker 1: county didn't care, and the state said have at it,
Speaker 1: So me and my cousin Ree had ourselves a standing arrangement.
Speaker 1: Friday and Saturday nights we hunted hogs. Mostly that meant
Speaker 1: shooting them off the field edges with a spotlight and
Speaker 1: a couple of rifles. But some nights we'd ease down
Speaker 1: into the bottom itself and still hunt the trails by moonlight,
Speaker 1: which sounds crazy and absolutely was. But we were young,
Speaker 1: and it was our dirt, and we had been running
Speaker 1: that bottom since before either one of us could see
Speaker 1: over the corn. And you have to know what that
Speaker 1: bottom was like. It was a quarter mile of hardwoods
Speaker 1: between the fields and the river, cut through with slews
Speaker 1: and cane thickets, hot as the inside of a greenhouse
Speaker 1: in June, and loud all night long. A southern river
Speaker 1: bottom in the summertime, roars with sound, frogs and bugs
Speaker 1: and Chuckwill's widows and barred owls hollering back and forth
Speaker 1: at each other up and down the river, a solid
Speaker 1: wall of sound from dark to daylight, and you learn
Speaker 1: to hunt inside of that sound. The first strange thing
Speaker 1: that June wasn't a sound at all, though. The first
Speaker 1: strange thing was the hogs, And what the hogs did
Speaker 1: was quit the bottom entirely. And you have to understand,
Speaker 1: hogs don't quit. You can pressure hogs, you can shoot
Speaker 1: at them every night of the week and they'll shift
Speaker 1: around on you and go nocturnal and get cagy, but
Speaker 1: they do not walk away from two hundred acres of
Speaker 1: shade and mud and white oak with a cornfield right
Speaker 1: next door. Yet in the middle of June, our tracks
Speaker 1: and our sign just dried up to nothing. Renoiced it first,
Speaker 1: and he came off the field one Friday night saying
Speaker 1: they'd all done, moved over to the neighbor's place, and
Speaker 1: we laughed about the neighbor's luck. But the thing kept
Speaker 1: itching at me because the neighbor's land was the same bottom,
Speaker 1: one fence over, and hogs don't read fences. Something had
Speaker 1: moved those hogs, and it wasn't us, because we hadn't
Speaker 1: fired a shot in two weeks. The second strange thing
Speaker 1: was the smell. Third weekend of June, we eased down
Speaker 1: into the bottom around eleven at night to check a
Speaker 1: slow crossing where the hogs used to water. There was
Speaker 1: a half moon up and decent light once your eyes
Speaker 1: settled into it. And we got within about one hundred
Speaker 1: yards of that slew and walked straight into a stink
Speaker 1: like a wall. Re stopped so short I ran into
Speaker 1: his back. It was dead, flesh rank, but underneath the
Speaker 1: dead part there was something alive in it, musky and sour,
Speaker 1: like a billy goat had rolled in a gut pile.
Speaker 1: And it just sat there in that thick, humid air
Speaker 1: without moving. We stood inside of it and re whispered
Speaker 1: that it was a dead hog, and I whispered back
Speaker 1: that it wasn't all dead. And neither one of us moved,
Speaker 1: and the bottom roared on all around us, the way
Speaker 1: it always did, except that right around us it didn't.
Speaker 1: That wall of frog and bug sound had a hole
Speaker 1: in it. The roar kept going fifty or sixty yards
Speaker 1: out in every direction, but the piece of bottom we
Speaker 1: were standing in, and a piece beyond us running toward
Speaker 1: the slough, had gone dead quiet. We were standing inside
Speaker 1: a bubble of silence, and every frog and cricket inside
Speaker 1: that bubble had shut its mouth for the same reason.
Speaker 1: Reput his hand on my arm and pressed down, which
Speaker 1: was our old sign from dove hunting that meant hold still.
Speaker 1: And then out ahead of us at the slough, the
Speaker 1: water moved, and it wasn't a splash. It was a weighed, deliberate,
Speaker 1: evenly spaced sucking steps through knee deep water and river
Speaker 1: bottom mud, the kind of mud that grabs hold of
Speaker 1: your boot and turns loose of it with a pop.
Speaker 1: And something was crossing that slew one heavy leg at
Speaker 1: a time. And here's what my mind did with that sound,
Speaker 1: which is the same thing everybody's mind does. My mind said,
Speaker 1: that's a man. That's a poacher, that's somebody dumping something
Speaker 1: they shouldn't, and a man waiting a slow at eleven
Speaker 1: o'clock at night is trouble, sure, but it's man trouble.
Speaker 1: And man trouble was a thing I understood, and I
Speaker 1: actually felt my shoulders come down an inch when I
Speaker 1: settled on it. Then it came up out of the
Speaker 1: slough onto the near bank into the hard woods, and
Speaker 1: it started walking, and my shoulders learned better real quick.
Speaker 1: You can hear weight. I don't care what anybody wants
Speaker 1: to tell you about the woods playing tricks on people.
Speaker 1: Because one hundred and eighty pound man walking through summer
Speaker 1: bottom land makes a certain amount of ground noise, and
Speaker 1: I had been hearing that exact noise my whole life.
Speaker 1: What came up out of that water made ground noise
Speaker 1: like a horse walking on its hind legs, the kind
Speaker 1: you feel come up through your boots. And it moved
Speaker 1: in a dead straight line through cane that I would
Speaker 1: have had to bust through arms first, and the cane
Speaker 1: didn't slow it down even a little. It was quartering
Speaker 1: across in front of us, right to left, maybe seventy
Speaker 1: yards out, and it did not know we were there
Speaker 1: because the wind was coming off the river into our faces.
Speaker 1: It didn't know we were there, and God helped the
Speaker 1: both of us. We followed it. That part was Ree,
Speaker 1: because I would have stood rooted in that one spot
Speaker 1: until sunrise. But retugged my sleeve and started easing left,
Speaker 1: paralleling the thing, and I fell in behind him, because
Speaker 1: following Ree through the woods was a habit older than
Speaker 1: my judgment. We ghosted along a hog trail with that
Speaker 1: thing seventy yards off our right shoulder, tracking it by
Speaker 1: sound alone, and that bubble of silence moved right along
Speaker 1: with it through the roar of the bottom, a hole
Speaker 1: in the noise, sliding through the dark ahead of us,
Speaker 1: and the two of us chased it. It stopped at
Speaker 1: the big blowdown oak by the property fence, and then
Speaker 1: we heard wet crunching bone and cartilage giving way, tearing, smacking.
Speaker 1: It was feeding, and the smell rolled back over us again.
Speaker 1: RE eased himself up against a sweet gum and raised
Speaker 1: his rifle and looked through his scope, and I heard
Speaker 1: my cousin's breathing change. Stay tuned for more Backwoods bigfoot stories.
Speaker 1: We'll be back after these messages. I got my own
Speaker 1: rifle up and through my scope over the trunk of
Speaker 1: that downed oak, I could see the top of its back,
Speaker 1: and its shoulders and its head where it was hunched over,
Speaker 1: working at something on the ground. Then the head came up,
Speaker 1: still chewing. I could see the jaw working side to side,
Speaker 1: a silhouette blacker than the dark behind it, a head
Speaker 1: like a bucket, set down onto shoulders like a chest freezer,
Speaker 1: no neck anywhere. Then it turned its face our way
Speaker 1: and it quit chewing, and two dim disks caught the
Speaker 1: moonlight set far apart wider apart than my eyes, and
Speaker 1: both of them fixed on the exact piece of darkness
Speaker 1: where two fools stood down wind holding rifles that neither
Speaker 1: one of them had any intention of firing. Nobody moved.
Speaker 1: The bottom kept roaring away out beyond our bubble, and
Speaker 1: my scope was on it, and my finger was nowhere
Speaker 1: near the trigger, and Reeese wasn't either. He told me
Speaker 1: later his thinking had run the same track as mine,
Speaker 1: which was that shooting that thing would be the worst
Speaker 1: mistake of our lives, even if we killed it, and
Speaker 1: something considerably worse than a mistake if we didn't. Then
Speaker 1: it stood up, and I heard resay a word under
Speaker 1: his breath that our grandmother would have slapped him for.
Speaker 1: And I lost the entire animal out of the top
Speaker 1: of my scope four power seventy yards, and it stood
Speaker 1: up clean out of my field of view. I came
Speaker 1: off the glass and saw the whole of it with
Speaker 1: my bare eyes, upright against the pale trunk of a
Speaker 1: dead sycamore. And it was built like the front door
Speaker 1: of a barn. It huffed at us one time, a
Speaker 1: blast of air out of that big chest, like a horse,
Speaker 1: but three size is bigger. Then it turned and it
Speaker 1: walked three strides over to the fence, four strands of
Speaker 1: barbed wire, the way you or I would step over
Speaker 1: a garden hose, one leg over and done, and never
Speaker 1: breaking stride. The roar of the bottom swallowed the sound
Speaker 1: of it going, and after a minute or so, the
Speaker 1: frogs came back on in the bubble where we stood,
Speaker 1: first one and then all of them together like a
Speaker 1: switch being thrown, and me and Rie were just two
Speaker 1: men standing in the dark. We walked out to the
Speaker 1: truck without one word passing between us. And I want
Speaker 1: to say something about that walk, because it was a
Speaker 1: quarter mile of hardwood bottom in the dark that I
Speaker 1: had walked a thousand times in my life, and that
Speaker 1: night it was a different walk Entirely. Every trail I
Speaker 1: had known since I was a kid had turned foreign
Speaker 1: on me. We went single file with Ree in front,
Speaker 1: and neither one of us reached for the flashlight, and
Speaker 1: I couldn't tell you now whether that was strategy or
Speaker 1: whether neither of us wanted to be the one standing
Speaker 1: there holding the light. Twice re stopped dead and we
Speaker 1: stood listening, and twice the bottom gave us back nothing
Speaker 1: but its ordinary roar and When we finally came up
Speaker 1: out of the trees, that cornfield looked like the shore
Speaker 1: of home. We sat on the tailgate for a while
Speaker 1: and re lit a cigarette and his hand made the
Speaker 1: flame jump all over the place, and he offered me one,
Speaker 1: and I don't smoke, and I took it anyway. That
Speaker 1: was the first cigarette of my life, smoked in a
Speaker 1: cornfield at one in the morning, And the first thing
Speaker 1: either of us managed to say a good ten minutes
Speaker 1: in was re saying, we ain't telling Granny because she
Speaker 1: will sell this place. The next morning, we went back
Speaker 1: down in the daylight and walked straight to the blowdown oak,
Speaker 1: and on the ground behind it was a sow hog,
Speaker 1: or what was left of one. I've cleaned more hogs
Speaker 1: in my life than I can count, and I never
Speaker 1: saw one opened up like that. She was pulled apart,
Speaker 1: a whole hind quarter gone, and the ribs spread open
Speaker 1: and down in the mud. We found the tracks going
Speaker 1: in with water still seeping into the deepest of them,
Speaker 1: and reset his boot down inside one of those tracks,
Speaker 1: and there was a hand's width of print showing all
Speaker 1: the way around his size twelve. We didn't cast it,
Speaker 1: and we didn't photograph it, because this was nineteen ninety
Speaker 1: six and we were two country born, and it genuinely
Speaker 1: did not occur to either one of us that anybody
Speaker 1: on earth would want to see it, seeing as how
Speaker 1: we had no intention of telling anybody on earth. We
Speaker 1: looked at it awhile and Ree said well, and I
Speaker 1: said yep, And we walked up out of that bottom
Speaker 1: and we hunted the field edges only for the rest
Speaker 1: of that summer from the truck with the doors close
Speaker 1: to hand. The hogs came back in September, and the
Speaker 1: way I figure it, whatever had been working that bottom
Speaker 1: moved on along the river, the way those things must move,
Speaker 1: following the food. Granny died in two thousand and three
Speaker 1: without ever knowing a word of it, and the land
Speaker 1: came down to my mother, and it's still ours, and
Speaker 1: I still hunted, and I have never seen that thing again,
Speaker 1: and I've never smelled it again. But I'll tell you
Speaker 1: what I do now, and you can laugh if you
Speaker 1: want to. When I kill hogs down in that bottom,
Speaker 1: I leave one. I drag it over to what's left
Speaker 1: of the blowdown oak, and I leave it lying there.
Speaker 1: It was Ree who started that not me, more than
Speaker 1: twenty years of it now, and one time I finally
Speaker 1: asked him why he does it, and he shrugged at
Speaker 1: me and said, it's polite. That's the entire reason it's polite.
Speaker 1: And I'll tell you something else, which is that nothing
Speaker 1: has ever once bothered us down in that bottom since.
Speaker 1: And you can make of that whatever you want. That
Speaker 1: was Tommy from the river bottoms of Middle Georgia. And
Speaker 1: the detail that stays with me from his story is
Speaker 1: that hole in the frog sound, a moving bubble of
Speaker 1: silence sliding through a wall of noise, and two young
Speaker 1: men deciding to chase it, and then a hog left
Speaker 1: it the blowdown oak every season for twenty years in
Speaker 1: County because it's polite. We've got one story left in
Speaker 1: the bag tonight, and it's the newest one. It comes
Speaker 1: from a man named Wade, an archery elk hunter, who
Speaker 1: was alone in the Colorado High Country in September of
Speaker 1: two thousand and eight, in the middle of the rut,
Speaker 1: calling to something he thought was a bull. Here's his story.
Speaker 1: I want to start with who I was when I
Speaker 1: walked in there, because it matters to everything that follows.
Speaker 1: I was the skeptic in every elk camp I ever
Speaker 1: sat in. I had been hearing bigfoot stories around fires
Speaker 1: for years, and I filed every last one of them
Speaker 1: in the same drawer, right between the lake monsters and
Speaker 1: the lights in the sky. I had a biology degree
Speaker 1: I wasn't using, and a good job I didn't like.
Speaker 1: And September was the one thing in my year that
Speaker 1: felt real. Nine days alone at eleven thousand feet with
Speaker 1: a bow, and I had made that trip solo four
Speaker 1: years running. I wasn't a man who spooked either. I'd
Speaker 1: had a black bear walk through my camp. I'd been
Speaker 1: bluff charged by a cow moose, and I had sat
Speaker 1: out lightning storms above tree line, hunkered down on my pack.
Speaker 1: I knew that country, and I knew myself in it.
Speaker 1: I'm telling you all of that so you'll understand what
Speaker 1: it took to change my mind, because in the end,
Speaker 1: it took one night and one morning. I packed in
Speaker 1: five miles on a Saturday and set my camp in
Speaker 1: the usual spot, a bench of spruce at the edge
Speaker 1: of a big meadow system, with dark timber rising up
Speaker 1: behind it toward the divide. The rut was going strong
Speaker 1: because I heard bugles that first evening from two different bulls,
Speaker 1: one across the meadow and one way up high, and
Speaker 1: I fell asleep in my bag doing what every elk
Speaker 1: hunter does, which is building the next morning in my
Speaker 1: head before it comes. And the next three days turned
Speaker 1: out to be the best hunting of my entire life,
Speaker 1: because there were elk everywhere answering my calls. And on
Speaker 1: day two I had one hundred inches of screaming bull
Speaker 1: inside forty yards with no shot, and I didn't even care,
Speaker 1: because that's how good it was. So whatever came later
Speaker 1: that week, it didn't come because the mountain was empty.
Speaker 1: The mountain was as full as I had ever seen it.
Speaker 1: On the evening of day four, I heard the other bugle.
Speaker 1: I was glassing from the edge of my bench in
Speaker 1: the last hour of light, and a bull had been
Speaker 1: sounding off up in the dark timber. A real bull,
Speaker 1: I want to be clear, by a completely normal bugle,
Speaker 1: with the growl and the climb and the scream and
Speaker 1: the chuckle all where they belonged. He would go, and
Speaker 1: then about a minute later, from a finger of timber,
Speaker 1: maybe half a mile north of him, something would answer him.
Speaker 1: And the answer was wrong. The shape of it was
Speaker 1: a bugle, and it went up where a bugle is
Speaker 1: supposed to go up, but the pipes underneath it were wrong,
Speaker 1: because there was no whistle in it anywhere. An elk
Speaker 1: bugle rides on this reedy, fluty overtone, and this thing
Speaker 1: had none of that at all. It was all chest
Speaker 1: like somebody had taken a bugle and played it back
Speaker 1: through a tuba. Too much air and too much low end,
Speaker 1: and it went on far too long. A big bull
Speaker 1: runs out of breath, and this thing held its scream
Speaker 1: flat and steady past the point where any bull I
Speaker 1: had ever heard would have quit, held it like it
Speaker 1: had a spare set of lungs in reserve. And then
Speaker 1: it just stopped. No chuckle and no grunt on the
Speaker 1: end of it, just off like a switch being thrown,
Speaker 1: and the real bull went. That was the tale I
Speaker 1: failed to read correctly, because a rutting bull in the
Speaker 1: middle of September is the single horniest, angriest animal on
Speaker 1: the mountain. And that bull heard the wrong answer come
Speaker 1: back at him twice, and he shut his mouth for
Speaker 1: the rest of the night. I remember thinking, humh. The
Speaker 1: herd bull must have come in and pushed him around,
Speaker 1: because that's what a mind does. It hands you a
Speaker 1: story that fits what you already know. And it did
Speaker 1: exactly that for me, and I went to bed satisfied
Speaker 1: with it. At two o'clock in the morning, something screamed
Speaker 1: close above my camp and there was no story anywhere
Speaker 1: that fit that. I came up out of sleep like
Speaker 1: I'd been dropped into a lake. It was maybe two
Speaker 1: hundred yards up the slope behind my tent, and it
Speaker 1: started out as that same tuba bugle, and then it
Speaker 1: broke apart into something that had syllables inside it. I
Speaker 1: don't know any other way to say it except yelling
Speaker 1: ape yelling, the kind you hear in a gorilla documentary,
Speaker 1: but pitched up at the end, almost like a question,
Speaker 1: and huge chest, huge, rolling off the divide and coming back.
Speaker 1: It did that three separate times, spaced out over a
Speaker 1: few minutes, and it was walking while it did it,
Speaker 1: because I could track it moving across the slope above
Speaker 1: me left to right by sound alone. I sat up
Speaker 1: in my bag with my release clipped onto my bowstring,
Speaker 1: which tells you everything about how well I was thinking
Speaker 1: at that point. A man holding a bow inside a
Speaker 1: tent in the dark, and I lay there and did
Speaker 1: the math that a skeptic does. It wasn't elk, and
Speaker 1: it wasn't moose, and it wasn't a mountain lion, because
Speaker 1: cats sound like women screaming, and this was nothing like
Speaker 1: a woman. And that left Bear. And I leaned on
Speaker 1: Bear as hard as a man can lean on anything,
Speaker 1: because black bears can get strange vocally, but no bear
Speaker 1: in the recorded history of bears has ever delivered a
Speaker 1: sustained scream with syllables in it. Three times at eleven
Speaker 1: thousand feet while walking a contour line. I had a
Speaker 1: satellite along for emergencies and a regular phone for pictures,
Speaker 1: and I got the regular one out to record, and
Speaker 1: this was two thousand and eight. So what I actually
Speaker 1: captured when it screamed the third time was mostly wind
Speaker 1: and static, with something buried way down in it. I
Speaker 1: still have that file today, and it proves absolutely nothing
Speaker 1: to anybody who wasn't inside that sleeping bag, and it
Speaker 1: proves everything to me because whenever I play it, my
Speaker 1: hands remember then it was over, and the night went
Speaker 1: back to being an ordinary, enormous, silent mountain night, and
Speaker 1: I didn't sleep so much as practice lying still until
Speaker 1: the tent walls went gray. Morning came on day five
Speaker 1: and I decided to go look. Sunrise had made me
Speaker 1: brave again, and I told myself, you have a biology degree,
Speaker 1: so go up there and read the sign, and it'll
Speaker 1: be a bear and you'll feel silly, and you'll hunt
Speaker 1: the afternoon and laugh about the whole thing at the
Speaker 1: trailhead in four days. So I took my bow and
Speaker 1: went up the slope behind camp side, heeling along the
Speaker 1: tour where I had tracked the sound in the night.
Speaker 1: The ground up there was spruce duff over rock, which
Speaker 1: is terrible ground for tracks, And for two hundred yards
Speaker 1: I found nothing at all, and my heart rate came
Speaker 1: down a little with every empty step. Then I hit
Speaker 1: the elk wallow. There's a seep up on that bench,
Speaker 1: a muddy wallow the bulls use, and I had hunted
Speaker 1: over it in years past, and the mud in it
Speaker 1: was churned up with elk sign the way it always was.
Speaker 1: And walking straight through the middle of all that elk
Speaker 1: sign through mud that holds detail like a plaster mold,
Speaker 1: was a line of barefoot tracks. And that was the
Speaker 1: morning I quit being a skeptic. Those tracks ran sixteen inches,
Speaker 1: give or take, and I know because I laid my
Speaker 1: arrow down alongside one and marked the length with my
Speaker 1: thumb and checked it against my tape back at camp,
Speaker 1: and it went just past sixteen. They were deep, too
Speaker 1: deeper than my own bootprints pressed in right beside them,
Speaker 1: and I was carrying a sixty pound pack's worth of
Speaker 1: body on those boots. There were toes gripping and pushing off,
Speaker 1: with mud squeezed up between them left and right, and
Speaker 1: left walking, not running, on a stride that made me
Speaker 1: skip step to try to match it. And the whole
Speaker 1: line of them crossed that wallow and headed away in
Speaker 1: exactly the direction I had tracked the screaming and laid
Speaker 1: across the game trail. On the far side of the wallow,
Speaker 1: wedged in between two spruce trunks, at just about the
Speaker 1: height of my chest, was a green aspen limb as
Speaker 1: thick as my forearm. It was fresh, with the leaves
Speaker 1: still soft on it, and the nearest aspen stand was
Speaker 1: three hundred yards downhill from where it hung. The break
Speaker 1: at the base of that limb hadn't been cut, and
Speaker 1: it hadn't been chewed. It had been twisted wrung around
Speaker 1: like a dish rag with the fibers spiraled the whole
Speaker 1: way up. A fresh limb across the trail at chest height,
Speaker 1: wedged in tight between two trees. You can read that
Speaker 1: however you like. But I stood in front of it
Speaker 1: that morning, and I read it exactly one way, which
Speaker 1: was that the trail was closed and I wasn't welcome
Speaker 1: past it. And here's what I did about it. And
Speaker 1: I'm not proud of it, and I'm not ashamed of
Speaker 1: it either. I didn't go past that limb. I'd love
Speaker 1: to tell you the biology degree kicked in and I
Speaker 1: documented everything and pushed on up the mountain in the
Speaker 1: name of human knowledge. But what actually happened is that
Speaker 1: the woods above that wallow were silent in a way
Speaker 1: that the woods below it were not. I could hear
Speaker 1: birds working downhill and absolutely nothing uphill, and every instinct
Speaker 1: I owned, the same instincts I trusted to keep me
Speaker 1: alive up there every September, all pointed the same direction.
Speaker 1: And that direction was not up. So I took eleven
Speaker 1: pictures on that terrible little phone, and I backed away
Speaker 1: from the wallow the way you back away from a
Speaker 1: growling dog. And I went down to camp and sat
Speaker 1: on a log and ate a breakfast. I have no
Speaker 1: memory of eating. And I had a conversation with myself
Speaker 1: that came down in the end to this. You have
Speaker 1: four days left on your tag, the best elk hunting
Speaker 1: of your life below camp, and something above camp that
Speaker 1: closed the trail, so stay below the wallow or pack out.
Speaker 1: I stayed. People are always surprised by that. But I stayed,
Speaker 1: and I hunted hard for four more days, and on
Speaker 1: day seven I killed a five point bull a mile
Speaker 1: below camp. And now I want to tell you about
Speaker 1: the packout, because the packout is the real end of
Speaker 1: this story. A bull elk alone is four trips the
Speaker 1: quarters first and then the rest, four trips of better
Speaker 1: than a mile each way with meat on your back,
Speaker 1: through Lyon country and bear country. And I had done
Speaker 1: it before and it had never much bothered me. But
Speaker 1: this time, on the second trip, coming back for the
Speaker 1: third load, right at dusk, with the pack frame empty,
Speaker 1: something started walking with me. It paralleled me upslope forty
Speaker 1: or fifty yards inside the timber, matching my pace, and
Speaker 1: when I stopped, it stopped one step late every single time,
Speaker 1: and I ran a little experiment on that walk, because
Speaker 1: apparently the biology degree picks the worst possible moments to
Speaker 1: wake up. I changed my pace. I sped up for
Speaker 1: fifty yards and then slowed way down, and then stopped
Speaker 1: dead in the middle of a stride with one foot
Speaker 1: still in the air, like a kid playing freeze tag.
Speaker 1: And it tracked me through every bit of it. It
Speaker 1: sped up when I sped up, always a beat behind,
Speaker 1: slowed when I slowed, stopped when I stopped. There's no
Speaker 1: dead fall settling, no squirrel, no trick of mountain acoustics
Speaker 1: anywhere that plays followed the leader with a man for
Speaker 1: half a mile, and that's what it did. It walked
Speaker 1: with me for the better part of half a mile,
Speaker 1: and then at some point it simply wasn't there anymore.
Speaker 1: And it never came near my meat. That's the piece
Speaker 1: of this I still chew on because a quartered elk
Speaker 1: hanging in game bags is the biggest free lunch on
Speaker 1: the mountain. And whatever was up there let that meat
Speaker 1: hang for two nights and never touched it. Chose instead
Speaker 1: to walk a ridgeline through the timber beside me at dusk,
Speaker 1: like all it wanted was to see what I was
Speaker 1: going to do. I packed the last load out in
Speaker 1: the dark on purpose, almost like I was proving something
Speaker 1: to myself, headlamp swinging, and I talked out loud the
Speaker 1: entire way, telling the timber exactly what I was doing,
Speaker 1: just getting my elk almost done. Last trip. Nothing answered me,
Speaker 1: and nothing followed me, and I drove out that same
Speaker 1: night instead of sleeping at the trailhead the way I
Speaker 1: always had before. I've been back to that unit six
Speaker 1: times since, and I've killed elk there, and I've never
Speaker 1: once camped on that bench again. And I've never heard
Speaker 1: that wrong bugle again. And most years I halfway hoped to,
Speaker 1: and every year I'm fully glad I don't. And there's
Speaker 1: one last thing. Two years ago, I finally played my
Speaker 1: recording for an old outfitter down in that country, a
Speaker 1: man who has been running stock into that wilderness for
Speaker 1: forty years. I didn't set it up for him at all,
Speaker 1: didn't say one word about bigfoot. I just said I
Speaker 1: heard this behind my camp back in eight What do
Speaker 1: you make of it? He listened to it twice and
Speaker 1: handed the phone back to me, and he said, you
Speaker 1: camped on the bench by the big wallow, didn't you?
Speaker 1: And I had never told that man where I camped.
Speaker 1: He wouldn't say another word about it after that, no
Speaker 1: matter how I came at him, except that as I
Speaker 1: was leaving, he told me something close to what an
Speaker 1: old Swedish cook told a young logger in another mountain range,
Speaker 1: fifty years before either one of us was born, though
Speaker 1: of course neither of us could have known that. He said,
Speaker 1: that's their mountain in September two. So camp lower. That
Speaker 1: was Wade, the skeptic with the biology degree, sixteen inches
Speaker 1: of mud that held detail like plaster, and an old
Speaker 1: outfitter who knew exactly which bench he'd camped on without
Speaker 1: ever being told. And that empties the bag for tonight.
Speaker 1: Six men across six decades, from nineteen fifty four to
Speaker 1: two thousand and eight, from Washington to Georgia, Montana to Michigan,
Speaker 1: Arkansas to Colorado. Different country and different game and different generations,
Speaker 1: and underneath all of it, the same story told in
Speaker 1: tracks and knocks and smells and silence by men who
Speaker 1: mostly never told anybody at all. The road's waiting, and
Speaker 1: there's a whole lot of country left out there. Keep
Speaker 1: your eyes on the tree line and I'll see you
Speaker 1: down the road. Did never