Speaker 1: I was born on the family farm in Virginia, and
I worked there all my life. The events I'm about
to tell you happened on this farm. Repairing fences is
a typical job on our place. They keep livestock on
our property as well as keep our neighbors animals out
of our fields. Two weeks prior to this event, I
had worked for a week to restring an old fence
that needed repair, and it's not the most difficult work,
but it's not the easiest. While working on a piece
of equipment in the shed, one of my hands drove
up and skidded to a stop and frantically ran over
to me, saying he had knocked a deer down a
few minutes ago. Well, that wasn't odd news, not so
that he would be sweating and speaking so fast that
I hardly understood half of what he was saying. I
asked him to slow down and catch his breast that
I could follow, and he took a few minutes and
appeared to lower his heart rate and get control of
his breathing. All right, there was a nice group of
those that walked out of the trees in the south
field where I've been hunting. This year. The season's almost
over and we need some meat, so I killed her,
he said. He looked at his feet for several seconds,
and I thought he was done, And then his breathing
began coming in shallow heaves again. Come over here and
sit down and relax, I said, pointing to an old
log stool next to the barn door. Now catch a breath,
and let's start over. He sat down and took several
deep breaths, and he continued, I didn't hit that dough
right little above her heart. I think she jumped straight
up in the air and ran back to the tree line,
and when she tried to jump the fence, her rear
legs caught on the top wire and she went down. Well,
I sat there until she was dead, and I climbed
out of the shooting house. And when I turned away
from the lighter to go get her, there was a
huge bear standing over her. Now I don't know where
it came from. I haven't seen a bear all year,
but there it was, honkered over her. Now yelled at
it to run it off my deer, and it stood
up on its rear legs and it looked right at me.
But it wasn't a bear. It was a giant, hairy monster.
I think. I took a step forward, and as soon
as I moved, it bent down and threw that dough
over its shoulder, and he walked up into the trees.
I stood there for several minutes until I couldn't see
it anymore. That thing took the whole fence with it
when it stepped over. I guess it got its leg
hung up in the barbs, and it took a few
posts with it and then started snapping staples out of
the post. Well, he was way up in the woods
when I saw the fence go slack. Now I think
he either broke the wire or got himself untangled. There
was a long silence that I broke. Well, how far
was the deer from the shooting house? I asked, maybe
forty yards. He said, let's go look at the fence.
I said, I'm not going back down there. He said,
you can go, but not me. I drove on down there,
and sure enough he was telling the truth about the fence.
I don't know what dragged that fence up into those trees.
I couldn't have done it without a tractor. No human
or even a bear could have done that. Much damage.
He said it was an animal. Well, it must have
been a big one. A few months later, I was
supposed to meet one of my hands in a field
to repair another fence. I got to the site and
I gathered my tools and material and I walked through
a ravine to the area that we were to work.
He should have been there waiting on me. I was
ten minutes late. I waited another thirty minutes and here
he came running down the slope straight at me. What's
your rush, I asked, Why? Part next to your truck?
He said, And I got out and I shut the door,
and I looked over the bed of the truck about
to get my tools out, and out walks this giant,
hairy monster from the trees. He walked across that ditch
right there and straight through the field and down into
the swampy area on the low end of the field.
I didn't know what that thing was, so I laid
down on the grass behind my truck so he couldn't
see me, and I watched him walk right down into
that slough from under my truck. All right, show me
where he was, I said. The guy was not afraid
as the other one who wouldn't go back to the
spot where he killed the deer. And we walked to
the trucks and down to the edge of the mud
where the wetlands started. You see that big limb laying
there in the water, He said, yeah, what about it?
I asked. He bumped his head on that limb when
he walked under that tree, and he acted like the
limb pissed him off. And he reached up and yanked
that limb off with one hand and through it where
it's laying now. Man, that limb must weigh two hundred pounds.
I said. It was a big limb that I would
have had to cut up to even move it. You
say he threw that thing. Damn right, he did. That's
why I said it was a monster. Let's get out
of here. I'm getting the creeps, he said. Truthfully, I
was getting the wheelies too, So I agreed and we
went back to work. My father once told me that
he and some teenage friends were raccoon hunting on a cold,
moonlit night in the nineteen twenties. In those days, their
equipment was made up of a miner's lamp, a twenty
two single shot rifle, and a pack of raccoon dogs.
The dogs had treed a raccoon, or so they thought.
It took them a while to get to the dogs,
but when they got there and shine their light into
the tree, there wasn't a coon. The dogs weren't jumping
up in the tree like normal. They kind of hung
back and they just kept barking. My father lowered his
leg to ground level, and standing there behind the tree
was a creature, he said, looked like a giant wolf
on two legs. The creature lunged at the dogs and
they took off back to the truck, with my father
and his friends right behind him. My father said he
didn't know if that thing was chasing him, but they
sure ran like it was. They never hunted that area again,
but then he saw it again two weeks later on
a cold night, running across the field, not too far
from where the dogs had it cornered over. Twenty years later,
while driving Old Leesburg Pike or Route seven in northern Virginia,
he and my mother were driving across the bridge over
Goose Creek. In the middle of the bridge, he thought
he could see a man standing there. When he was
closer and the lights illuminated the man better, he saw
that it wasn't a man. It was a tall, lanky,
apparently covered in hair creature. His mind went back to
those nights in the nineteen twenties when he was a teenager.
My father made the decision not to back out of
that bridge and instead to speed past this thing. As
the car approached, the creature left onto the railing to
avoid being hit, and as they passed, it swiped at
the car. I don't remember my mother ever talking about
this night, maybe she wanted to forget it. In nineteen
fifty nine, the year I was born, my father saw
it again, crossing a field at night on our family farm.
I don't know what this creature is. Maybe there are
more than one, but my family and friends have seen
it many times through the last years. Whatever it is,
it must have a long lifespan or we're seeing its
offspring over time. They appear to stay well hidden and
away from humans, and I assume it is by chance
or that the odds are good that some humans will
catch a rare sight of them while they move around
at night. Last year, on June the second, I was
writing into one of our base camps that we use
for elk hunting. My younger brother and myself operate a
guide service that we inherited from our father and his
father before that. We lease out hundreds of thousands of
acres in several states and don't have any need to
advertise or ask for clients because we're now booked out
for five years in advance. We have professional athletes, billionaires, actors,
and politicians as clients. Any one of these clients will
pay sixy digits for a record book bull ELK Now,
I really don't want to give my name because it
could be devastating to my business if it was discovered
what I'm about to tell you. The only other person
I've told was my brother, who I had to confide in.
Arrived in the early afternoon after a pleasant two day
ride on horseback. There are two ways into our camps,
and that is horseback or helicopter, which we've had a
couple of our clients opt to do. I crossed the
bridge that my father and grandfather built over the fast
moving narrow river that was still flowing quick from the
snow melt from the higher altitudes. I rode right into
the makeshift corral with Dusty and the two pack mules
that only offered an illusion of containment, because we wanted
to give the horses a chance to run if a
bear or cougar visited while we weren't around. We didn't
worry much about the horses or mules running off because
they were like big dogs rather than horses, and they
would come back when we called them, and they wouldn't
travel far away even if there was danger present. I
quickly took inventory of the camp and raised the coolers
off the ground, as they had two weeks worth of
food in them and I didn't want the local bear
population getting to feel comfortable visiting the camp, and I
cooked up dinner and I turned in for the night.
For the next two days, I began to scout the
area for elk sign, but I didn't find so much
as a hoof print, even in the watering holes that
the bulls loved to dig up. Arriving back at the camp,
I discovered my camp torn to bits and the coolers
had been pulled down and emptied, only leaving a single
pack of bacon in some bottles of frozen water. The
mules didn't appear to be concerned whatsoever about the visitors,
and in fact looked like someone had tried to braid
their manes and tails. Well. To me, this trip was
over and I was going to head back to the
truck the next day, but I decided that I would
give this bear or people something to think about before
I left. In the morning, I was up before sun
up and ready to investigate the crime of stealing my food,
and I snuck off into the woods. I was able
to track something for a distance and even found some
of the wrappers from the meat that I had brought,
But by noon the trail had gone cold, and I
knew I had to get on the trail if I
was going to make it back to the truck sometime tomorrow.
I was being quiet as I approached the camp, and
I could tell that something was amiss. At the edge,
I could see something big and hairy in the corral
with a horse, but they weren't excited like they were
in danger. They were just standing there. This animal still
had a winter coat on it, and it was brown
and it was four to six inches long. And I
reached down to my side and grabbed my lever Action
twelve gage and loaded a staggered buckshot deer slug combination
for protection from bears or cougars. The first shot would
be buckshot and it would tear up and knock it backwards,
and then the slug would kill it, and I would
repeat it over two times. I had it in my
grip now, and I flipped off the set with the
most subtle click. But I was heard, and this animal
began to raise up on its feet. It was in
that moment that I realized that this creature was standing
over eight foot tall, and it wasn't a bear. It
was a sy squatch. Well, I was in shot as
this thing turned toward me and it smiled at me.
But when I smiled back at it, I guess I
must have done something wrong, because it leaned forward and
it roared at me. Now, I have been roared at
by grizzly bears and cougars quite often, but none that
could match the volume or the duration of the roar,
even in the slightest I snapped the gun up and
was about to squeeze off the first shot when I
was struck by another beast that was hiding just a
couple of feet to my left. The force of the
impact knocked me ass over ears, through the air and
into the river. Suddenly I was being swept downstream in
this cold water faster than you could dream. But I
was glad to see how fast I was moving because
I saw the two creatures running along the bank trying
to catch up to me. I knew that I had
been in the water over twenty minutes, and I knew
that I needed to get out soon or I would
freeze to death in this sixty degree water. I had
not seen the creatures for some time now, but I
decided to make my way to the other bank just
to be safe. As I got to the bank, I
realized that I was having trouble breathing and my left
arm was stiff. I decided to head back to the truck,
which would take me four to five days on foot,
and I was going to have to be really careful
because I lost my phone in shotgun and I only
had the forty caliber ruger on my hip. In fifteen rounds,
I had walked two hours and stopped to build a
fire to drive the rest of the way before dark
sat in and the temperatures drop, and I had managed
to doze off when I heard that roar again off
in the distance, and it was answered other roars from
different locations. There was no time to rest. Now I
had to go. But I was hurting, and I mean
I was hurting. But I sucked it up and I
started trotting off to the east. Anyone else would have
been lost and running around in the darkness until sunrise
when the sun popped over the horizon. But I've been
hunting this area for the past forty years, and I
knew it better than the ranchers that owned it. I
continued to hear the roars that night, and something breaking
limbs against tree up until the sky began to lighten up.
But I never stopped, and I kept moving, and I
only stopped a couple of times at some small lakes
to take a drink of water. And I traveled well
into the afternoon, and I stopped against a tree and
I was asleep in seconds. I was jarred awake by
thunder in the distance, and I wondered if those creatures
were still following me, and I forced myself to my
feet and I started making tracks again after midnight, when
the storm had passed and everything finally quieted down, which
was when I heard another roar, and it was about
half the distance away that I was the evening before well.
This gave me motivation to push harder, and I picked
up the past, forcing myself to the extreme, knowing that
if I didn't get out, they would be on me
by morning. That night was the scariest twelve hours on
the planet for me. The roarers became more frequent and closer,
and just a couple of hours before the sun popped
up in the east, I started to get hit with
rocks and sticks with amazing accuracy. I had no idea
where they were being thrown from or how far away,
so I kept going afraid to stop, thinking I would
be dinner or I'd be torn apart. But I refrained
from reaching for my pistol because I believed that that
was the trigger that set the attack off the other day,
and I was hoping that they were just trying to
push me out of their home range. I was relieved
to see the sun crest the horizon that morning, and
I knew it was about another twelve hours away from
my truck. The good news was soon turned bitter, though,
as I began to cough up blood and I realized
now that I had a broken rib that must have
punctured my lung and I was bleeding internally, and doubt
swept in. I began to think of my two boys
at home and my lovely wife, and I was wondering
if they would ever find me out here before the
wolves or bears discovered my body. And then I became
concerned about my brother because he would surely come looking
for me, and I wondered what was going to happen
to him if the creature saw another human in their area.
All this gave me more strength than I thought was
possible for one human to have, and I was nearing
the top of a ridge about four hours from the
truck when I heard it. It was the sound of
a truck nearby, and to my delight, I recognized it
as one of the ranch trucks, but it was starting
to pull away, and my heart sink into my stomach.
I grabbed my ruger forty cow and I started popping
off rounds as fast as I could, and then everything
went black. I woke up in the hospital in Denver,
where I had been flown in by a helicopter after
the ranch hands came to my rescue and call the medics.
It was very expensive, but it was covered by a
couple of our clients with deep pockets, which I'm extremely
grateful to. My family was all there and they were
excited to see me wake up. I had just been
through an eight hour surgery on top of everything else,
to remove part of my lung and one of my kidneys.
Everyone had assumed that I had been thrown from my
horse and hurt myself during the fall, but I knew
better than to correct them and tell them what had
really happened. I asked my brother to stay back as
everyone left to get rest, and I told him the
story about what really happened. I don't think he can
completely believed me, but he promised me that he would
not go back to that site without several of our
friends with him. Two weeks later, my brother came back
from recovering the mules in Dusty and to tell me
about what he had found. He said that the camp
was completely destroyed, along with the corral and the bridge.
He found Dusty and the mules a short distance away,
which came running when he called to them, and he
also found huge footprints in the mud around the camp,
and then the rocks started being thrown at them and
they fled the area, riding all night long to get
back to the trucks and the trailer. Now he believes
me I wasn't physically able to guide last year. Now
I wonder if I'll be able to guide mentally now.
I decided to take on an apprentice to help me
scout out other leases that we have, but I don't
think we'll ever return to the bridge camp. Here is
what I'm confused about. Why didn't they mess with the
horses and the mules, and what did I do wrong
to warrant the aggressive roar. I do understand that my
reaction to that roar, by pointing my shotgun at the creature,
was perceived as a threat, and that is probably what
caused a second animal attack on me. I also believed
that they could have caught me at any time that
they would have desired, so I think they were just
motivating me to leave as quickly as possible. And I
also wonder if they had driven out all the local wildlife,
because I never found any tracks of anything on that trip.