Speaker 1: Now one you're putting. I got a string going on here.
Speaker 1: Something just killing my dog. Something killed your dog, my dog.
Speaker 1: We're flying through the or over the tree. I don't
Speaker 1: know how it did it, Okay, damn, and I'm really confused.
Speaker 1: All I saw was my dog coming over the fence,
Speaker 1: and he was dead once you hit the ground. Like.
Speaker 1: I didn't see any cars. All I saw was my
Speaker 1: dog coming over the fence. Say, what are you putting?
Speaker 1: We got some wonder or something crawling around out here?
Speaker 1: Did you see what it was?
Speaker 2: It was?
Speaker 1: It was seeing enough. I'm out here looking through the
Speaker 1: window now and I don't see anything. I don't want
Speaker 1: to go outside. Jesus quiet, you better Hello, get the
Speaker 1: Boddy out here, quin, I'm out there. I thought of
Speaker 1: a mention about Tech forty nine. I don't know. Easy
Speaker 1: ann out there. Yeah, I'm walking right heady.
Speaker 3: Hey everybody today, I've got a bonus episode for you.
Speaker 3: But before we get into the story, I want to
Speaker 3: take just a minute and talk about something that I've
Speaker 3: honestly just been taking for granted. So I've got another show.
Speaker 3: It's called Backwoods Bigfoot Stories. Now. I know I've mentioned
Speaker 3: it here before, and I just kind of assumed that
Speaker 3: all of you knew about it, But over the last
Speaker 3: few weeks, I've had several of you reach out to
Speaker 3: me through email and messages on social media saying that
Speaker 3: you just found Backwoods Bigfoot Stories and that you absolutely
Speaker 3: love it. And every time I get one of those messages,
Speaker 3: I think to myself, Man, how many other folks in
Speaker 3: this audience don't even know it exists. So that's why
Speaker 3: I decided to put this bonus episode together. What you're
Speaker 3: about to hear is a story that I'll also be
Speaker 3: sharing over on Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, and it's a really
Speaker 3: good examp sample of the kind of content you're going
Speaker 3: to find over there. These aren't the same stories I
Speaker 3: share here on Sasquatch Odyssey. Now, I have shared some
Speaker 3: of the Bigfoot Country episodes in both places, but the
Speaker 3: vast majority of what's on Backwoods Bigfoot Stories can't be
Speaker 3: heard anywhere else. We're talking over one hundred and eighty
Speaker 3: episodes that are exclusive to that show. That's a lot
Speaker 3: of stories you're missing out on if you haven't checked
Speaker 3: it out yet.
Speaker 2: So here's what I want you to do.
Speaker 3: Click the link right here in the show notes, or
Speaker 3: just go to wherever you're listening to me right now
Speaker 3: and search Backwoods Bigfoot stories. When you find it, hit
Speaker 3: that follow or subscribe button, turn on your auto downloads,
Speaker 3: and just let all those amazing stories start rolling in.
Speaker 3: I promise you you're not going to be disappointed. All right, now,
Speaker 3: let's get into this one, Dear Brian. I've gone back
Speaker 3: and forth about writing this for a long time.
Speaker 2: Years.
Speaker 3: Actually, I've started this email more times than I can count,
Speaker 3: got a paragraph or two in, and then deleted the
Speaker 3: whole thing every single time, because how do you tell
Speaker 3: someone a story like this without sounding like you've completely
Speaker 3: lost your mind? But I heard your podcast Sasquatch Odyssey,
Speaker 3: and something about the way you talk about these creatures
Speaker 3: told me you'd understand. You wouldn't laugh, you wouldn't try
Speaker 3: to explain it away, You just listen.
Speaker 1: So here it is.
Speaker 3: My name is Thomas. I'm fifty three years old. I
Speaker 3: live on one hundred and sixty acres in the Appalachian
Speaker 3: Foothills of eastern Tennessee, not far from the Smoky Mountains,
Speaker 3: and I've spent the better part of my life sharing
Speaker 3: this land with a family of sasquatch, not just seeing them,
Speaker 3: not just hearing them howl in the distance on some
Speaker 3: cold November night, living alongside them, watching them grow, watching
Speaker 3: them raise their young, and being watched right back. I
Speaker 3: want to be real with you, Brian. I'm not some
Speaker 3: guy who caught a glimpse of something dark moving through
Speaker 3: the trees and let his imagination run wild for the
Speaker 3: next four decades. This isn't a story about a shadow.
Speaker 3: It's not about a strange sound, or a blurry photograph
Speaker 3: or a line of big footprints that could have been anything.
Speaker 3: This is a story that spans over forty years of
Speaker 3: my life. It involves three generations of my family, and
Speaker 3: it started with my grandfather, a bear trap and an
Speaker 3: act of simple human kindness that changed everything. I don't
Speaker 3: expect you to just take my word for it. I
Speaker 3: know how this sounds, Believe me, I know, but I'm
Speaker 3: asking you to hear me out all the way to
Speaker 3: the end, and then you can decide for yourself what
Speaker 3: you think. My grandfather's name was Walter, but everybody called
Speaker 3: him Walt. He was a quiet man, not the dramatic,
Speaker 3: mysterious kind of quiet that you see in movies, just
Speaker 3: a man who didn't see much point in talking when
Speaker 3: there wasn't anything useful to say. He ran cattle and
Speaker 3: grew tobacco on that farm from nineteen fifty two until
Speaker 3: the day he died. Worked the land every single day,
Speaker 3: Sundays included. He knew every hollow, every ridge, every creek
Speaker 3: bed on that property like he knew the creases on
Speaker 3: his own hands. My grandmother was named June, and she
Speaker 3: was Walt's opposite in almost every way. She talked enough
Speaker 3: for both of them, and Walt seemed perfectly content with
Speaker 3: that arrangement. She was warm, funny, sharp as attack well
Speaker 3: into her eighties, and she made the best biscuits and
Speaker 3: gravy you've ever tasted in your life. I'm not exaggerating.
Speaker 3: People drove from two counties over for those biscuits. I
Speaker 3: spent every summer on that farm from the time I
Speaker 3: was five years old. My parents lived about forty five
Speaker 3: minutes away in Knoxville. Every June, they'd load me up
Speaker 3: in the car, drive me out to Grandpa Walt's place,
Speaker 3: and I wouldn't come home until the last week of August,
Speaker 3: sometimes not even then. Those summers were everything to me,
Speaker 3: And I'm not just saying that because of what I'm
Speaker 3: about to tell you. That farm was magic all on
Speaker 3: its own, one hundred and sixty acres of rolling pasture
Speaker 3: backed up against thousands of acres of national forest, dense hardwood, timber,
Speaker 3: steep terrain, rhododendron thickets so tangled you couldn't push through
Speaker 3: them with a machete, the kind of wild country where
Speaker 3: a man could walk for three days and never cross
Speaker 3: a paved road. And as a kid, I had the
Speaker 3: run of it. I'd eat breakfast with Grandma June, lace
Speaker 3: up my boots, and disappear into those hills until supper time.
Speaker 3: Nobody worried, nobody called different time, different world entirely. But
Speaker 3: I need to take you back before my time, back
Speaker 3: to the spring of nineteen sixty. I wasn't born yet.
Speaker 3: This part of the story comes directly from my grandfather,
Speaker 3: and later separately from my grandmother. They both told it
Speaker 3: to me independently over the years, and they never once
Speaker 3: contradicted each other on a single detail, not one. It
Speaker 3: was early April, cool mornings, warm afternoons. The dogwoods were
Speaker 3: just starting to pop white along the ridge lines. Trample
Speaker 3: Walt was walking the fence line along the northern boundary
Speaker 3: of the property. That stretch runs right up against the
Speaker 3: National Forest. It's remote, no neighbors for miles in that direction,
Speaker 3: nothing but timber and mountains and silence. He heard it
Speaker 3: before he saw anything. A sound, he told me. He
Speaker 3: couldn't place it. And my grandfather could identify every animal
Speaker 3: in those mountains by its call, every bird, every frog.
Speaker 3: He knew the difference between a bobcat's scream and a
Speaker 3: fox bark at a quarter mile. But this sound didn't
Speaker 3: fit anything in his experience. It was somewhere between a
Speaker 3: moan and a cry, low and guttural, but with a
Speaker 3: pitch to it that carried through the timber. He said
Speaker 3: it had a quality that he could only describe as anguish, raw,
Speaker 3: unfiltered anguish, and it made the hair stand straight up
Speaker 3: on his forearms. Now, my grandfather was not a man
Speaker 3: who spooked. He served two years in Korea. He'd faced
Speaker 3: down charging bulls, he'd killed rattlesnakes with a hoe while
Speaker 3: barely raising his pulse. But he told me that sound
Speaker 3: made him stop in his tracks, made him seriously consider
Speaker 3: turning around and walking back to the house. He didn't, though,
Speaker 3: that wasn't who he was if something was hurt on
Speaker 3: or near his land, he was going to find out
Speaker 3: what it was. He followed the sound about two hundred
Speaker 3: yards past the fence line, into the thick timber on
Speaker 3: the federal side, down into a little ravine where a
Speaker 3: seasonal creek ran through a tangle of dead fall and laurel,
Speaker 3: and that's where he found it. There was a bear trap,
Speaker 3: an old one, a big steel leg holed trap with
Speaker 3: jaws that could snap a two inch saple and clean
Speaker 3: in half. These traps were already illegal by then, but
Speaker 3: they still turned up in the woods from time to time.
Speaker 3: Poachers set them, left them for weeks, sometimes forgot about
Speaker 3: them entirely. My grandfather despised those traps. He'd pulled them
Speaker 3: out of the ground and destroy them whenever he found one.
Speaker 3: Had a whole collection of rusted ones hanging on nails
Speaker 3: in the back of his bond. But this trap wasn't empty.
Speaker 3: Something was caught in it. When my grandfather described this
Speaker 3: moment to me, and he described it many times over
Speaker 3: the years, he would always get very still. His eyes
Speaker 3: would drift somewhere far away, like he was standing back
Speaker 3: in that ravine all over again. His voice would drop
Speaker 3: to just above a whisper like the memory still demanded
Speaker 3: that kind of reverence even after all those decades. It
Speaker 3: was a young one, that is what he always called it,
Speaker 3: the young one for the rest of his life. That
Speaker 3: is how he referred to it, never anything else.
Speaker 2: He said.
Speaker 3: It was maybe four and a half feet tall, covered
Speaker 3: head to foot in dark reddish brown hair, not fur.
Speaker 3: He was very specific about that distinction, hair like the
Speaker 3: hair on a man's arm, only thicker, longer, and covering
Speaker 3: the entire body. The build was lean but muscular, even
Speaker 3: on what was clearly a juvenile. The arms hung longer
Speaker 3: than they should have, the shoulders were abroad, the chest
Speaker 3: was deep, and it was sitting on the ground with
Speaker 3: its right foot clamped in a steel leg holed trap,
Speaker 3: looking up at my grandfather with an expression he said,
Speaker 3: was absolutely unmistakable. It was terrified, but it understood. It
Speaker 3: understood that the man standing ten feet away was either
Speaker 3: going to help it or hurt it, and there was
Speaker 3: nothing it could do about either outcome. Here's the part
Speaker 3: that always gets me. The young creature didn't lunge, It
Speaker 3: didn't scream, bare its teeth or try to drag itself away.
Speaker 2: Through the brush.
Speaker 3: It just sat there, breathing hard, trembling, Its dark eyes
Speaker 3: locked onto my grandfather's face with an intensity he said
Speaker 3: he had never experienced from any animal in his entire life,
Speaker 3: because it was not looking at him the way an
Speaker 3: animal looks at a person. It was looking at him
Speaker 3: the way a person looks at another person. My grandfather
Speaker 3: stood there for what he estimated.
Speaker 2: Was a full minute.
Speaker 3: Neither of them moved, neither of them made a sound.
Speaker 3: He said he could hear his own heartbeat in his ears,
Speaker 3: the creek trickling through the rocks behind him, a woodpecker
Speaker 3: working a dead oak somewhere up the ridge. The whole
Speaker 3: forest seemed to be holding its breath right along with them. Then,
Speaker 3: very slowly, he set down the fence pliers he had
Speaker 3: been carrying. He held both hands up, palms out open, empty,
Speaker 3: and he said, out loud, in a calm and steady voice, Easy, now,
Speaker 3: I ain't gonna hurt you.
Speaker 2: Let me help.
Speaker 3: He told me later that he felt foolish talking to
Speaker 3: it like that, like talking to a dog or a horse,
Speaker 3: But something in those eyes made him feel like the
Speaker 3: words might actually mean something, like they might actually land.
Speaker 3: He approached one step at a time. The creature tensed
Speaker 3: but didn't move. It's breathing quickened its hands, and my
Speaker 3: grandfather always emphasized the hands because they were large but
Speaker 3: unmistakably hand shaped fingers, and all those hands were pressed
Speaker 3: flat against the ground on either side of its body,
Speaker 3: ready to push off, ready to bolt, But it didn't.
Speaker 2: It waited.
Speaker 3: My grandfather knelt beside the trap. The jaws had clamped
Speaker 3: just above the ankle, cutting through hair and into skin.
Speaker 3: There was blood, not a lot, but enough to tell
Speaker 3: him the trap had been holding for a while, hours
Speaker 3: at least, maybe longer. He knew how these traps worked.
Speaker 3: You had to press both spring levers down simultaneously to
Speaker 3: open the jaws. It took strength, and it took nohow
Speaker 3: and even then, getting a panicked animal free without making
Speaker 3: the injury worse was tricky business. But Grandpa Walt had
Speaker 3: done it before, for dogs, for a young deer once,
Speaker 3: even for a neighbor's calf that had gotten tangled in
Speaker 3: a stretch of old barbed wire rigged to a spring mechanism.
Speaker 3: He put one boot on one spring lever, the other
Speaker 3: boot on the opposite side. He pressed down with his
Speaker 3: full weight, and the jaws opened. The creature yanked its
Speaker 3: foot free, and then it did something my grandfather carried
Speaker 3: with him for the rest of his life. It didn't run,
Speaker 3: not right away. It pulled its injured foot close to
Speaker 3: its body and cradled it with both hands. Then it
Speaker 3: looked up at my grandfather one more time, held his
Speaker 3: gaze for three maybe four seconds, and it made a sound, soft,
Speaker 3: almost like a hum, low and brief, like a single
Speaker 3: note played on a cello. Then it turned and it
Speaker 3: was gone up the slope and into the laurel thicket
Speaker 3: so fast that my grandfather said if he'd blinked, he
Speaker 3: would have missed it entirely for something that had been
Speaker 3: trapped and injured. It moved through that brush like smoke
Speaker 3: through a screen door. He stood there alone in the ravine,
Speaker 3: the empty trap at his feet, blood on the leaves,
Speaker 3: his heart about to beat out.
Speaker 2: Of his chest.
Speaker 3: And Walter Pritchard, the quietest man in Severe County, walked
Speaker 3: back to his farmhouse and told his wife everything. Grandma
Speaker 3: June didn't believe him, not at first, and I don't
Speaker 3: hold that against her one bit. If my husband came
Speaker 3: in from the fence line and told me he'd just
Speaker 3: freed a juvenile bigfoot from a bear trap. I'd probably
Speaker 3: check him for a fever two. But Walt wasn't the
Speaker 3: kind of man who made things up. He wasn't a storyteller.
Speaker 3: He wasn't a practical joker. In thirty years of marriage,
Speaker 3: June told me she could count on one hand the
Speaker 3: number of times he'd exaggerated anything. So while she didn't
Speaker 3: know what to make of his account, she didn't dismiss
Speaker 3: it entirely either. She filed it away wait and see.
Speaker 3: She didn't have to wait long. About three weeks after
Speaker 3: the trap incident, Grandpa Walt was sitting on the back
Speaker 3: porch after supper. This was his nightly ritel every evening,
Speaker 3: once the dishes were done and the farm was settled.
Speaker 3: He'd sit out there in his old wooden rocker with
Speaker 3: a cup of coffee and watch the light fade off
Speaker 3: the mountains. Sometimes June would join him. Most nights he
Speaker 3: was alone and stay tuned for more sasquatch ot to
Speaker 3: see back after these messages. The back porch faced north,
Speaker 3: looking out across about sixty yards of mode grass to
Speaker 3: a split rail fence, then an open hayfield that sloped
Speaker 3: gently uphill for maybe two hundred yards before hitting the
Speaker 3: tree line. That tree line was the edge of everything
Speaker 3: beyond it. The forest climbed up into the smokies and
Speaker 3: didn't stop for a very long time. That evening, right
Speaker 3: at dusk, Grampa Walt noticed something standing at the edge
Speaker 3: of those trees, just a shape at first, a dark
Speaker 3: upright shape partially obscured by the trunk of a big
Speaker 3: tulip poplar. Could have been a stump, could have been
Speaker 3: a shadow, but stumps don't move, and shadows don't shift
Speaker 3: their weight from one foot to the other. He sat
Speaker 3: perfectly still and watched the shape stepped out from behind
Speaker 3: the tree, just one step enough to clear the trunk,
Speaker 3: and even at two hundred yards in fading light, my
Speaker 3: grandfather knew exactly what he was lying looking at the
Speaker 3: young one, same height, same reddish brown coloring, standing there
Speaker 3: at the edge of his property, looking down the slope
Speaker 3: toward the farmhouse, looking at him. They watched each other
Speaker 3: for maybe five minutes.
Speaker 2: Neither moved.
Speaker 3: The light continued to fade, and then, just as the
Speaker 3: last glow of sunset slipped behind the western ridge, the
Speaker 3: creature turned sideways and melted back into the timber, gone,
Speaker 3: like it had never been there at all. My grandfather
Speaker 3: didn't say anything to June that night. He wanted to
Speaker 3: be sure, He wanted to know it wasn't a one
Speaker 3: time thing, that the creature hadn't just wandered past on
Speaker 3: its way somewhere else. So the next evening he was
Speaker 3: back on that porch, same chair, same cup of coffee,
Speaker 3: same quiet patience, and right at dusk there it was again,
Speaker 3: same spot, same tree, same careful posture, half hidden, half visible.
Speaker 2: Watching.
Speaker 3: This went on for six straight evenings. Every single night,
Speaker 3: right at the edge of dark, the creature appeared at
Speaker 3: the tree line, never closer, never farther, always within maybe
Speaker 3: thirty yards of that big tulip poplar, always watching. On
Speaker 3: the seventh night, my grandfather did something that I believe
Speaker 3: changed the entire trajectory of this story. Something so simple
Speaker 3: it almost seems too small to matter, But it mattered.
Speaker 3: It mattered enormously. He left food out. He took a
Speaker 3: tin pie plate from the kitchen, loaded it with leftover
Speaker 3: corn bread, some apple slices, and a few pieces of
Speaker 3: cooked pork from supper. He walked it out to the
Speaker 3: split rail fence, set it on a post, and walked
Speaker 3: back to the porch. Then he sat down and waited.
Speaker 3: The creature appeared at the tree line right on schedule.
Speaker 3: It stood there longer than usual that night, fifteen minutes,
Speaker 3: maybe twenty. My grandfather could tell it was studying the
Speaker 3: plate on the fence post. He could see the subtle
Speaker 3: movement of its head back and forth. Plate Man, Plate Man.
Speaker 2: It didn't come down.
Speaker 3: When full dark settled in, it slipped away the same
Speaker 3: as always. But in the morning, when Grandpa walked out
Speaker 3: to check, the plate was empty, licked clean, and sitting
Speaker 3: on the ground, not on the fence post where he'd
Speaker 3: left it. It had been moved carefully, not knocked off
Speaker 3: by a raccoon or a possum. Picked up, emptied, and
Speaker 3: sat down in the grass. That was the beginning. From
Speaker 3: that night on, my grandfather left food out every evening.
Speaker 3: He varied what he put on the plate, corn bread, biscuits, fruit,
Speaker 3: leftover meat, beans, sweet potatoes. He was testing, he told me,
Speaker 3: trying to figure out what it preferred. Turns out it
Speaker 3: liked everything, but it especially liked fruit. Apples, pears, and
Speaker 3: peaches would disappear first every single time. After about two
Speaker 3: weeks of this routine, the creature started coming closer, not
Speaker 3: all the way to the fence, but down the hayfield,
Speaker 3: maybe halfway. It had emerged from the tree line, walked
Speaker 3: down the slope with a cautious loping gait, and stop,
Speaker 3: squat down on its haunches. Wait, watch the porch, Watch
Speaker 3: my grandfather. And eventually, once it seemed satisfied that no
Speaker 3: threat was coming, it had continued down to the fence,
Speaker 3: take the food, and retreat back up the hill. Grandpa
Speaker 3: Walt told June about the return visits after that first week.
Speaker 3: This time she didn't question them because by then she'd
Speaker 3: seen something herself. She'd been hanging laundry on the line
Speaker 3: one afternoon. The clothes line ran along the east side
Speaker 3: of the house, facing a different section of tree line
Speaker 3: than what Walt watched from the porch. She had a
Speaker 3: wet bed sheet in her hands, and she looked up
Speaker 3: and there was something standing in the shadows about one
Speaker 3: hundred yards out, taller than the young one, much taller,
Speaker 3: she estimated six and a half maybe seven feet, and darker,
Speaker 3: almost black, brought across the shoulders like a barrel.
Speaker 2: It was watching her.
Speaker 3: She said, she froze with that wet sheet in her
Speaker 3: hands and just stared. The thing stared back, and then
Speaker 3: it simply turned and walked into the forest with a
Speaker 3: stride so long and so quiet that she said it
Speaker 3: covered thirty feet in about four steps and made less
Speaker 3: noise than a cat crossing a carpet. June told Walt
Speaker 3: that evening, and his response was immediate, that ain't the
Speaker 3: young one. That's a different one entirely. That's when they
Speaker 3: both understood there wasn't just one creature on their land.
Speaker 3: There were at least two, probably more, moving through the
Speaker 3: forests around the property, using the Pritchard Farm as part
Speaker 3: of a larger territory, a safe harbor, a place where
Speaker 3: food appeared on fence posts and the humans kept their distance,
Speaker 3: And somehow, because of what Walt had done with that
Speaker 3: bear trap, they decided this place could be trusted. The
Speaker 3: year was nineteen eighty six. I was five years old,
Speaker 3: and it was my first real summer on the farm.
Speaker 3: I'd visited before quick weekend trips holidays, but that was
Speaker 3: the first year my parents dropped me off for the
Speaker 3: full stretch late June to late August. An eternity when
Speaker 3: you're five, a whole universe of time. I remember the
Speaker 3: drive out the highway giving way to two lane blacktop,
Speaker 3: the blacktop giving way to gravel, the gravel winding up
Speaker 3: through the hollow to the farmhouse, which sat on a
Speaker 3: gentle rise with the barn behind it, and the mountains
Speaker 3: stacked up like blue gray waves in every direction. Grandma
Speaker 3: June met me on the porch with a glass of
Speaker 3: sweet tea and a hug that smelled like flour and lavender.
Speaker 3: Grandpa Walt was in the barn, and when he came
Speaker 3: in for dinner, he put his big rough hand on
Speaker 3: top of my head and said, boys, getting tall. That
Speaker 3: was Walt's version of a welcome speech. I didn't know
Speaker 3: about the creatures yet, not that first week, maybe not
Speaker 3: even the second. I was too busy being five years
Speaker 3: old on a farm. There were barn cats to chase, cows,
Speaker 3: to stare at a creek, to splash through a tire
Speaker 3: swing hanging from an oak tree that I could ride
Speaker 3: for hours without getting bored. But I noticed things. I
Speaker 3: noticed that every evening Grandpa Walt would fix a plate
Speaker 3: of food and carry it out past the fence line.
Speaker 3: I asked Grandma June about it once, and she hesitated
Speaker 3: just for a second, then smiled and said, your grandpa
Speaker 3: likes to feed the wildlife, honey. I noticed that some
Speaker 3: mornings there were big indentations in the soft ground near
Speaker 3: the barn, like footprints, but bigger than any boot I'd
Speaker 3: ever seen. I pointed them out to Grandpa Walt, and
Speaker 3: he just nodded. Lot of big critters in these woods,
Speaker 3: and I noticed the smell. If you've ever been near
Speaker 3: one of these things, Brian, you know exactly what I'm
Speaker 3: talking about. It's unmistakable, nothing like any animal you've ever encountered,
Speaker 3: musky and thick, and sort of sweet and rotten at
Speaker 3: the same time, like wet earth and overripe fruit, and
Speaker 3: something else underneath that you can't quite name. I didn't
Speaker 3: know what it was at five years old. I just
Speaker 3: knew that sometimes, when the wind came down off the
Speaker 3: mountain in the evening, the air would carry this strange,
Speaker 3: heavy scent, and Grandpa Walt would go very still and
Speaker 3: look toward the tree line. The first time I actually
Speaker 3: saw one was in mid July of that summer. I
Speaker 3: couldn't sleep. It was hot, the kind of sticky, breathless
Speaker 3: Appalachian heat that doesn't let up even after midnight. My
Speaker 3: bedroom was upstairs, and the window faced the back of
Speaker 3: the property, the hayfield, the tree line, the mountains beyond.
Speaker 3: I got out of bed and went to the window,
Speaker 3: just to feel the air, just to see the moonlight
Speaker 3: on the field. And there was something standing in the yard,
Speaker 3: not at the tree line, not in the hayfield, in
Speaker 3: the yard, maybe forty feet from the house. It was
Speaker 3: the big one, the dark one, the one Grandma June
Speaker 3: had seen from the clothesline. Though I didn't know that yet.
Speaker 3: I just knew that something enormous was standing in the moonlight,
Speaker 3: upright still as a statue, its head slightly tilted, and
Speaker 3: it appeared to be looking at the upstairs windows, looking
Speaker 3: at my window. I was five years old. I should
Speaker 3: have screamed. I should have run to my grandparents' room
Speaker 3: and dove under their covers and cried until the sun
Speaker 3: came up.
Speaker 2: But I didn't.
Speaker 3: And Brian, I've thought about this a thousand times over
Speaker 3: the years. Why didn't I scream? Why didn't I feel afraid?
Speaker 3: I was a little kid staring at a seven foot
Speaker 3: creature standing in the moonlight, and my overwhelming emotion wasn't fear.
Speaker 3: It was curiosity, pure, uncomplicated curiosity, like finding a new
Speaker 3: kind of bug on a rock, like discovering a room
Speaker 3: in the house you didn't know existed. I pressed my
Speaker 3: face against the window screen and whispered, hey. The creature's
Speaker 3: head moved just slightly, a tilt and a justment. Then
Speaker 3: it turned and walked away, slow, unhurried, across the yard
Speaker 3: and into the shadows beyond the barn. I watched until
Speaker 3: I couldn't see it anymore, and then I went back
Speaker 3: to bed and fell asleep like nothing had happened. I
Speaker 3: told Grandma June at breakfast the next morning, told her
Speaker 3: there was a big animal in the yard. She set
Speaker 3: her coffee cup down and looked at Grandpa Walt. He
Speaker 3: looked back at her, one of those long married couple
Speaker 3: looks that communicates an entire conversation without a single word.
Speaker 3: That was the morning they decided to tell me. Grandpa
Speaker 3: Walt pushed his plate aside, folded his hands on the table,
Speaker 3: and in that steady, measured voice of his, he told
Speaker 3: me about the bear trap, about the young one, about
Speaker 3: the food on the fence posts, about the different creatures
Speaker 3: June had seen about the seven years they'd been quietly
Speaker 3: coexisting with something most people didn't even believe existed. I
Speaker 3: don't remember being shocked. I don't remember being scared. What
Speaker 3: I remember is feeling like I'd been let in on
Speaker 3: the most important secret in the world, Like my grandparents
Speaker 3: had been guarding this incredible, impossible thing, and now I
Speaker 3: was part of it too. Then Grandpa walk got very serious.
Speaker 3: He leaned forward and looked me right in the eyes.
Speaker 3: And this is something I remember with absolute clarity even now.
Speaker 3: He said, Thomas, these creatures live on this land because
Speaker 3: they trust us. If you tell people about them, men
Speaker 3: will come here with guns and cameras and dogs, and
Speaker 3: they'll either kill them or drive them away. Do you understand,
Speaker 3: I nodded, Even at five, I understood. There are neighbors,
Speaker 3: he said, and we look after our neighbors. That's what
Speaker 3: Prichard's do. That simple statement became the foundation of everything
Speaker 3: that followed. They are are neighbors. We look after our neighbors.
Speaker 3: That was the code, the unspoken contract between my family
Speaker 3: and these creatures that held for over four decades heads
Speaker 3: until now until this email. But I'm getting ahead of
Speaker 3: myself that first summer after I knew, everything changed, not
Speaker 3: on the farm. The farm was the same as it
Speaker 3: had always been. What changed was me, my awareness, my attention.
Speaker 3: Suddenly I was tuned into a frequency i'd been missing
Speaker 3: my whole short life. Every snap twig mattered, every odd
Speaker 3: shadow deserved a second look. Every strange sound that drifted
Speaker 3: down from the ridge line was a signal, a clue,
Speaker 3: a piece of the puzzle. And the creatures that turned
Speaker 3: out were everywhere, not everywhere all the time, but their
Speaker 3: presence was woven into the landscape of that property in
Speaker 3: ways i'd been completely blind to. Grandpa Walt started teaching
Speaker 3: me how to read the signs footprints in the mud
Speaker 3: along the creek, not always clear, not always complete, but
Speaker 3: unmistakable once you knew what to look for, the wide
Speaker 3: splay of the toes, the depth of the impression, the
Speaker 3: sheer size of them. Stick structures. Now, Brian, I know
Speaker 3: you talk about these on your show. I've heard you
Speaker 3: describe them, and I can tell you from decades of
Speaker 3: first hand experience, you're right on the money. They build
Speaker 3: them on purpose along game trails, at the edges of clearings.
Speaker 3: Sometimes it's a simple x made from two heavy limbs
Speaker 3: that no wind could have arranged that way. Sometimes it's
Speaker 3: more elaborate arches, lean tos. Once I found a structure
Speaker 3: that looked for all the world like a small doorway
Speaker 3: frame made from interlocked branches about three feet high. I've
Speaker 3: got no idea what its purpose was, but it was
Speaker 3: built deliberately with intention. Tree knocks. Grandpa Walt taught me
Speaker 3: to listen for them, a sharp crack like a heavy
Speaker 3: branch striking a trunk, then a pause, then another crack
Speaker 3: from a different direction. He said they communicated that way,
Speaker 3: signaling each other over distances, sending locations, warnings, maybe things
Speaker 3: we couldn't even begin to interpret. And the vocalizations. Lord,
Speaker 3: the vocalizations, the whoops, the long mournful howls that rolled
Speaker 3: across the valleys at three in the morning. The chatter, yes,
Speaker 3: I said, chatter. I swear to you, Brian, I've heard
Speaker 3: these creatures making rapid, complex vocalizations back and forth to
Speaker 3: each other that sounded for all the world like conversation,
Speaker 3: not words I could understand, but structured patterned, not random
Speaker 3: noise communication. By mid July of that first aware summer,
Speaker 3: I was seeing the young one regularly, not up close,
Speaker 3: not yet, but I'd spot him in the tree line
Speaker 3: when I was out exploring. He'd be standing in the shadows,
Speaker 3: watching me with those dark, intelligent eyes, and I'd stop
Speaker 3: and I'd wave, just a little kid waving at a
Speaker 3: sasquatch in the woods, and sometimes sometimes his head like
Speaker 3: he was trying to figure out what that gesture meant.
Speaker 3: And stay tuned for more sasquatch ot to see.
Speaker 2: We'll be right back. After these messages, I started.
Speaker 3: Bringing food with me on my explorations, apples, mostly biscuits,
Speaker 3: whatever I could pocket from the kitchen without Grandma June noticing,
Speaker 3: which wasn't much because that woman noticed everything. I'd leave
Speaker 3: the food on rocks and stumps along the trails I walked,
Speaker 3: and the next day it had be gone. One afternoon
Speaker 3: in late July, I was sitting on a fallen log
Speaker 3: near the creek, eating an apple and throwing rocks into
Speaker 3: the water. Middle of the day, bright sunshine, cicadas screaming
Speaker 3: in the trees, the kind of lazy, hot afternoon where
Speaker 3: everything seems to slow down and.
Speaker 2: The whole world feels drowsy. I heard a twig.
Speaker 3: Snap behind me, close, maybe twenty feet. I turned around
Speaker 3: and there he was, the young one, at the edge
Speaker 3: of a laurel thicket, not hiding, not retreating, just standing
Speaker 3: there in the open, looking at me. This was the
Speaker 3: closest I'd been to him, and Brian, I need you
Speaker 3: to understand something. I was five years old, I was small.
Speaker 3: He was close to my height, maybe a little taller,
Speaker 3: and at that distance, in broad daylight, I could see
Speaker 3: details that would have been impossible from two hundred yards
Speaker 3: at dusk. His face was broad, with a wide, flat
Speaker 3: nose and a heavy brow ridge jutting out over deep
Speaker 3: set eyes. The skin on his face was dark, almost leathery,
Speaker 3: like someone who'd spent an entire life in the sun
Speaker 3: and wind. The mouth was wide, the lips were thin,
Speaker 3: the jaw was massive and strong. But the eyes, the
Speaker 3: eyes are what I remember most, dark brown, almost black,
Speaker 3: and they were looking at me with an expression I
Speaker 3: can only describe as recognition, not like a deer recognizing
Speaker 3: a threat, not like a doll recognizing its owner, something
Speaker 3: in between, something I'd never seen before and haven't quite
Speaker 3: seen since in any other animal on this earth. He
Speaker 3: recognized me, me, specifically, the small human who'd been waving
Speaker 3: at him from the trails, the one who left apples
Speaker 3: on rocks. I held out the apple I'd been eating,
Speaker 3: just extended my arm with the half eaten fruit in
Speaker 3: my hand, a five year old's universal peace offering. He
Speaker 3: didn't take it, not that day. He stood there for
Speaker 3: maybe thirty seconds, watching me. Then he turned and slipped
Speaker 3: back into the laurel, quiet as a whisper. But he
Speaker 3: came back the next day, and the day after that,
Speaker 3: and the day after that, each time a little closer,
Speaker 3: each time, a little longer, each time, the gap between
Speaker 3: us narrowing by inches and seconds. It was like watching
Speaker 3: a wild animal learn to trust. Except it wasn't quite
Speaker 3: that simple. It was more mutual than that. He was
Speaker 3: studying me just as much as I was studying him.
Speaker 3: We were both learning, both figuring out the rules of
Speaker 3: this strange new relationship that had no name and no precedent.
Speaker 3: It was August ninth, nineteen eighty six. I remember the
Speaker 3: date because it was the day after my grandparents' wedding anniversary,
Speaker 3: and there was left over cake in the kitchen. I'd
Speaker 3: brought a piece with me, chocolate cake with white icing.
Speaker 3: I set it on the log where I always sat.
Speaker 3: He came out of the tree line, walked right up
Speaker 3: to the log and picked up that piece of cake
Speaker 3: with his hand, his hand five fingers, a thumb longer
Speaker 3: than a human hand and wider across the palm, but
Speaker 3: shaped the same way. He picked up that cake and
Speaker 3: brought it to his face and smelled it first. Then
Speaker 3: he ate it carefully, not like an animal tearing into food, carefully,
Speaker 3: like he was tasting it, savoring it. Then he looked
Speaker 3: at me, and I swear on everything I hold sacred
Speaker 3: in this world. The corner of his mouth moved, not
Speaker 3: a smile, not exactly, but something close enough that even
Speaker 3: a five year old could read it, something that said
Speaker 3: that was good. I was six feet away from a sasquatch,
Speaker 3: six feet from a creature that most of the world
Speaker 3: insists doesn't exist. And what I felt in that moment
Speaker 3: wasn't awe or terror or disbelief. What I felt was friendship,
Speaker 3: simple as that, as simple and uncomplicated as making a
Speaker 3: new friend on the playground at recess. Here's a kid
Speaker 3: I like, here's a kid who seems to like me back.
Speaker 3: We share food, we share space. That makes us friends.
Speaker 3: Now that's how it started. A five year old boy
Speaker 3: and a juvenile sasquatch and a piece of leftover chocolate
Speaker 3: cake on an August afternoon in the Smoky Mountains. By
Speaker 3: the end of that first summer, I'd seen the young one,
Speaker 3: my friend, more than two dozen times. Our meetings had
Speaker 3: settled into a comfortable pattern. I'd go to the creek,
Speaker 3: I'd bring food, I'd sit on the log, and sooner
Speaker 3: or later, sometimes within minutes, sometimes after an hour of
Speaker 3: patient waiting, he'd appear. We'd sit near each other, not touching,
Speaker 3: not close enough to touch, but close enough to share
Speaker 3: a space, comfortably close enough that I could hear him breathing,
Speaker 3: close enough that I could smell that strange, musky scent,
Speaker 3: which I'd already come to associate with comfort and familiarity
Speaker 3: rather than something alien and threatening. I talked to him constantly,
Speaker 3: the way kids talked to pets and stuffed animals and
Speaker 3: imaginary friends. I told him about my parents, about school,
Speaker 3: about the cartoons I liked, and the dream i'd had
Speaker 3: the night before. I told him about the fish I
Speaker 3: caught in the creek, and the snake I found under
Speaker 3: the barn, and the way Grandma June's fried chicken tasted
Speaker 3: on a Sunday afternoon. He listened, had tilted eyes steady.
Speaker 3: Did he understand the actual words? Honestly, I don't know,
Speaker 3: probably not, but I believe, and I believed this for
Speaker 3: almost fifty years, that he understood the intent behind them,
Speaker 3: the tone, the meaning underneath the sounds. He understood that
Speaker 3: this small human was offering something connection, companionship.
Speaker 2: Trust.
Speaker 3: Now, the Young One wasn't the only creature on or
Speaker 3: near that property, not by a long shot, And as
Speaker 3: my awareness grew over the years, so did my understanding
Speaker 3: of just how many of them were moving through those mountains.
Speaker 3: Grandpa Walt had been keeping informal tracks since seventy nine.
Speaker 3: Not in a journal, not with photographs. Walt would never
Speaker 3: have created physical evidence that someone could stumble across. He
Speaker 3: kept it all in his head, and over the years,
Speaker 3: based on size, coloring, behavior, and location, he'd identified at
Speaker 3: least four distinct individuals. The Young One my friend, reddish,
Speaker 3: brown hair, lean build, originally about four and a half
Speaker 3: feet tall when Walt found him in the trap, but
Speaker 3: growing noticeably every year. By the time I met him
Speaker 3: in eighty six, he was pushing five feet Still clearly juvenile.
Speaker 3: The big dark one, the one I'd seen in the
Speaker 3: yard my first night, the one Grandma June had spotted
Speaker 3: from the clothes line, close to seven feet tall, dark brown,
Speaker 3: almost black, massive across the shoulders. Grandpa Walk believed this
Speaker 3: was an adult male. He appeared less frequently than the
Speaker 3: young one, but was seen consistently over the years, usually
Speaker 3: at greater distances. He was cautious, wary. He'd observed from
Speaker 3: the deep tree line, but rarely came into the open.
Speaker 3: A third individual, smaller than the big male but larger
Speaker 3: than the young one, lighter in color, almost a sandy brown.
Speaker 3: Walk first spotted this one in eighty one, and he
Speaker 3: believed it was female. She moved differently than the male, smoother,
Speaker 3: more fluid. She was often seen in the same general
Speaker 3: area as the young one, within a few hundred yards.
Speaker 3: Grandpa Walt's theory, and I think he was absolutely right,
Speaker 3: was that this was the young one's mother. And there
Speaker 3: was a fourth seen only twice in the early eighties,
Speaker 3: larger even than the big dark male, gray streaked hair,
Speaker 3: slower movements. Grandpa Walt thought it might be very old.
Speaker 3: He never saw it again after eighty three and suspected
Speaker 3: it had either died or moved on to a different range.
Speaker 3: So there was a family, or at least a group,
Speaker 3: moving through the forests around our property, using the Pritchard
Speaker 3: Farm as some kind of waypoint, a safe harbor in
Speaker 3: a world that had no other safe harbors for creatures
Speaker 3: like them. By my second summer on the farm eighty seven,
Speaker 3: I had a name for the young one. I called
Speaker 3: him Huck, after Huckleberry Finn, because he was wild and
Speaker 3: free and lived outside the rules of the regular world.
Speaker 3: And those were the books Grandma June was reading to
Speaker 3: me every night before bed.
Speaker 2: Huck.
Speaker 3: That was my friend's name, and he's carried that name
Speaker 3: in my mind for over forty years. I saw the
Speaker 3: big dark male up close once during that second summer,
Speaker 3: and it scared me, I'll be honest about that. I
Speaker 3: was out farther than usual past the creek, up on
Speaker 3: a ridge that marked the western edge of our property,
Speaker 3: climbing on some rock outcroppings being a kid, I came
Speaker 3: around a big boulder and he was just there, standing
Speaker 3: in a gap between two trees, maybe thirty feet away,
Speaker 3: looking right at me. Seven feet of muscle and hair
Speaker 3: and those deep, dark calculating eyes. He wasn't threatening, he
Speaker 3: didn't charge, he didn't vocalize. He just stood there and
Speaker 3: looked at me, and everything about his posture communicated one
Speaker 3: single thing, You're too far from the house, little one.
Speaker 3: I felt it like a physical sensation, a wave of
Speaker 3: something that pressed against my chest and made me want
Speaker 3: to step backward.
Speaker 2: Not malice, not.
Speaker 3: Aggression, authority, presence, the absolute, unshakable presence of a creature
Speaker 3: that owned these woods in a way that no deed
Speaker 3: or survey or fence post could ever match. I backed up, slowly, carefully,
Speaker 3: and I went home. I didn't go past the creek
Speaker 3: again for the rest of that summer. When I told
Speaker 3: Grandpa Walt about it, he nodded like I just confirmed
Speaker 3: something he already suspected. That Big One watches the boundaries.
Speaker 3: He said, he knows where our land ends and the
Speaker 3: wild starts, and he doesn't want you in the wild,
Speaker 3: not by yourself. That's what Grandpa Walt believed. The big
Speaker 3: male was protecting me the same way he'd protect one
Speaker 3: of his own young keeping me inside the safe zone,
Speaker 3: keeping me close to home and away from whatever dangers
Speaker 3: lurked deeper.
Speaker 2: In those mountains.
Speaker 3: And honestly, Brian, looking back on it now, with over
Speaker 3: fifty years of life behind me, I think my grandfather
Speaker 3: was absolutely right. I kept coming back every summer, every
Speaker 3: single year, without exception.
Speaker 2: By eight, those.
Speaker 3: Months on the farm were more home to me than
Speaker 3: my parents' house in Knoxville. By ten, I was lobbying
Speaker 3: hard to live there permanently, go to the county school,
Speaker 3: stay year round. My parents wouldn't allow it, But those
Speaker 3: summer stretched out like lifetimes, and every one of them
Speaker 3: deepened my relationship with Huck and my understanding of the
Speaker 3: creatures who shared our land.
Speaker 2: Huck grew fast sasquatch must have a growth rate that accelerates.
Speaker 3: During the juvenile years, because between my first summer and
Speaker 3: my fourth he went from about five feet tall to
Speaker 3: close to seven. His frame filled out dramatically. The lean,
Speaker 3: almost gangly quality of his youth gave way to a thick,
Speaker 3: powerful build. His hair darkened slightly, from reddish brown to
Speaker 3: a deeper chestnut. His face matured, the features heavier, more defined,
Speaker 3: the brow ridge more prominent. He was becoming an adult,
Speaker 3: but his behavior toward me didn't change, not the fundamentals.
Speaker 3: He still came to the creek when I was there.
Speaker 3: He still accepted food from my hand, which was something
Speaker 3: that had started during my second summer and continued without interruption.
Speaker 3: We still sat together in that quiet, companionable way that
Speaker 3: had defined our friendship from the very beginning. What did
Speaker 3: change was the complexity. As I got older and more observant,
Speaker 3: I started picking up on subtleties I'd missed before, responses
Speaker 3: that went far beyond simple animal habituation. If I came
Speaker 3: to the creek upset, and I was a kid, so
Speaker 3: I was upset more often than I'd like to admit.
Speaker 2: He seemed to know. He'd sit closer, stay longer.
Speaker 3: Once, when I was crying about a fight i'd had
Speaker 3: with my mom on the phone the night before, he
Speaker 3: reached out and placed his hand, that enormous, long fingered
Speaker 3: hand flat on the ground between us, palmed down, fingers
Speaker 3: spread wide, and he held it there until I stopped crying.
Speaker 3: I thought about that gesture for decades. What was it comfort, empathy,
Speaker 3: some instinctive mammalian response to a no creatures distress. I
Speaker 3: don't know the scientific answer, but I know what it
Speaker 3: felt like. It felt like exactly what it looked like.
Speaker 3: A friend saying I'm right here, I'm not going anywhere.
Speaker 3: By twelve, I'd begun documenting everything, not officially, not in
Speaker 3: any way that would satisfy a peer reviewer. But I
Speaker 3: kept a spiral bound composition book that I hid in
Speaker 3: a hollow log near the creek. I drew sketches, wrote
Speaker 3: down dates and times and behaviors, noted what food Huck preferred,
Speaker 3: what time of day he appeared, what direction he came
Speaker 3: from and left in, what vocalizations I heard around the property,
Speaker 3: what the weather was like. I was a kid playing scientist,
Speaker 3: but I was also building a record that I've maintained
Speaker 3: off and on for over forty years. Let me give
Speaker 3: you some highlights from those growing up years, the moments
Speaker 3: that burned themselves so deep into my memory that I
Speaker 3: can close my eyes right now, sitting at this desk,
Speaker 3: and see them like they happened yesyesterday. Summer of eighty nine,
Speaker 3: I was eight. I was at the creek, sitting on
Speaker 3: my log, and Huck came out of the trees carrying something.
Speaker 3: He walked right up to where I was sitting, which
Speaker 3: by this point he'd do routinely, and set down a
Speaker 3: riverstone perfectly round about the size of a baseball, smooth gray.
Speaker 3: He placed it on the log between us, and then
Speaker 3: sat down.
Speaker 2: A gift.
Speaker 3: The creature had brought me a gift. I picked it up,
Speaker 3: turned it over in my hands, felt the cool weight
Speaker 3: of it.
Speaker 2: Looked at him.
Speaker 3: He was watching me with that steady, patient gaze. I said,
Speaker 3: thank you, Huck, and I swear to you, Brian, I
Speaker 3: swear on my grandparents graves. He nodded a small, deliberate
Speaker 3: dip of his head, the same gesture you or I
Speaker 3: would make if someone thanked us for something.
Speaker 2: I still have that rock.
Speaker 3: It's sitting on my desk right now, six inches from
Speaker 3: my right hand as I write this email. Stay tuned
Speaker 3: for more sasquatch ot to see. We'll be right back
Speaker 3: after these messages. Summer of ninety one, I was ten.
Speaker 3: Grandpa Walt and I were walking the property together, checking
Speaker 3: the cattle in the far pasture. We came over a
Speaker 3: rise and both stopped dead. The big dark male, the
Speaker 3: sandy colored female, and hook all three standing in the pasture,
Speaker 3: just standing there among the cattle, about eighty yards away.
Speaker 3: And the cows didn't care one bit. They were grazing
Speaker 3: around those three massive creatures like it was the most
Speaker 3: normal thing in the world. Three sasquatchs standing in a
Speaker 3: field of cows in broad daylight. My grandfather and I
Speaker 3: watched for maybe ten minutes. Nobody moved, nobody panicked, The
Speaker 3: cattle grazed, the creature stood. It was the most surreal
Speaker 3: and simultaneously peaceful scene I've ever witnessed before or since.
Speaker 3: The big male turned his head toward us, held the
Speaker 3: look for a long moment, and the three of them
Speaker 3: walked away, single file, up the hill and into the timber.
Speaker 3: The cattle never even raised their heads. Summer of ninety three,
Speaker 3: I was twelve. I was at the creek at dusk,
Speaker 3: which was later than I usually stayed out. The light
Speaker 3: was going fast, and I heard something crashing through the
Speaker 3: woods upstream. Heavy footsteps moving fast, getting closer. My heart
Speaker 3: rate spiked. I stood up from the log, and two
Speaker 3: shapes came bursting through the undergrowth about fifty yards upstream.
Speaker 3: They were chasing each other playing Huck, now nearly six
Speaker 3: feet tall and built like a young linebacker, was being
Speaker 3: pursued by another juvenile I'd never seen before, smaller than Huck,
Speaker 3: lighter colored. They were running and dodging through the trees,
Speaker 3: making these sharp, barking sounds that I can only describe
Speaker 3: as laughter, pure, joyful, unmistakable. After they tore through the
Speaker 3: creek bed water sprang everywhere, crashed through the laurel on
Speaker 3: the other side, and vanished into the darkening woods. The
Speaker 3: whole thing lasted maybe fifteen seconds. Then silence. A new juvenile,
Speaker 3: a younger one, which meant the group was reproducing, growing.
Speaker 3: There was a new generation coming up in those mountains.
Speaker 3: Summer of ninety five, I was fourteen, and something happened
Speaker 3: that summer. I've never told another living soul until right now.
Speaker 3: You're the first. I was at the creek late afternoon.
Speaker 3: Huck came and sat with me the way he always did,
Speaker 3: but he was different that day. Agitated, He kept looking
Speaker 3: over his shoulder toward the deep woods to the north,
Speaker 3: making soft, rapid vocalizations under his breath, nervous, restless. Something
Speaker 3: had him wound tight. And then I heard why, from
Speaker 3: deep in the forest, maybe a quarter mile away, maybe more,
Speaker 3: a sound I'd never heard before. A scream, but not
Speaker 3: an animal scream, not a human scream either, something that
Speaker 3: occupied a terrible space in between long sustained, rising in
Speaker 3: pitch until it made your teeth ache, then falling away.
Speaker 3: And it was answered by another from a completely different
Speaker 3: direction than a third, from somewhere to the south. Three
Speaker 3: voices screaming into the mountains, and they were getting closer.
Speaker 2: Huck stood up.
Speaker 3: He was fully upright over seven feet tall by then,
Speaker 3: and his whole body was rigid with tension. The hair
Speaker 3: on his shoulders and upper back was standing straight up.
Speaker 3: He looked down at me and Brian. The expression in
Speaker 3: those eyes was one I'd never seen on him before. Urgency,
Speaker 3: pure desperate urgency, the kind that doesn't need language to communicate.
Speaker 3: Get out of here right now. He made a sharp,
Speaker 3: guttural bark, and he pushed my shoulder, not hard enough
Speaker 3: to hurt, but hard enough to leave absolutely no room
Speaker 3: for misinterpretation.
Speaker 2: Go move now. I ran all the way back to the.
Speaker 3: Farmhouse without stopping once, burst through the back door so
Speaker 3: hard it banged against the wall, and Grandma June nearly
Speaker 3: dropped a casserole dish. I was white as a sheet
Speaker 3: and shaking. I told her something had scared Huck, something
Speaker 3: in the deep woods, something that had all of them upset.
Speaker 3: Grandpa walked went out on the porch and listened. He
Speaker 3: stood there for a full fifteen minutes without moving, and
Speaker 3: I watched his face change because those screams were still
Speaker 3: going fainter, now moving north, but still echoing off the ridges,
Speaker 3: like something out of a nightmare. Something's passing through. He said, quietly,
Speaker 3: something they don't want here.
Speaker 2: What was it?
Speaker 3: I don't know, other Sasquatch, a rival group encroaching on territory,
Speaker 3: some threat that exists in their world that I can't
Speaker 3: even begin to conceptualize. I never found out. The screams
Speaker 3: faded into the distance and then into silence.
Speaker 2: The night went quiet.
Speaker 3: By the next afternoon, Huck was back at the creek
Speaker 3: like nothing had happened. But he'd pushed me, he'd physically
Speaker 3: intervened to move me to safety. And that moment, right
Speaker 3: there is the one I always come back to when
Speaker 3: someone asks me whether these creatures are just animals, because
Speaker 3: just animals don't do that. Just animals don't assess a
Speaker 3: developing situation, identify a vulnerable companion, and take deliberate physical
Speaker 3: action to protect them from a threat they haven't even
Speaker 3: encountered yet. Huck protected me that day the same way
Speaker 3: my grandfather had protected him with that bear trap sixteen
Speaker 3: years before the debt had come full circle. Time does
Speaker 3: what time always does. It moves, It doesn't slow down.
Speaker 3: It doesn't care what you want or what you're not
Speaker 3: ready for. By seventeen, I was spending less time at
Speaker 3: the creek. Not because I'd lost interest, God, no, but
Speaker 3: because I was seventeen. I had a girlfriend back in Knoxville,
Speaker 3: a driver's license, sat scores, and college applications, and a
Speaker 3: whole life outside that farm pulling at me in directions
Speaker 3: I couldn't resist forever. Huck was fully grown by then,
Speaker 3: or very close to it, over seven and a half
Speaker 3: feet tall, and built like nothing I can easily compare
Speaker 3: to a human being. Broad didn't do him justice. His
Speaker 3: chest was like a rain barrel, his arms hung thick
Speaker 3: as fence posts, nearly to his knees. His hair had
Speaker 3: darkened to a deep brown, almost matching the big male
Speaker 3: I assumed was his father, or at least a senior
Speaker 3: member of the group. There was a gravity to him now,
Speaker 3: a seriousness, a weight that went beyond physical mass. He
Speaker 3: wasn't a juvenile anymore. He was becoming something powerful and
Speaker 3: patient and wise in a way I don't have adequate
Speaker 3: vocabulary for. But he still came to the creek when
Speaker 3: I was there, still sat on the log, And even
Speaker 3: though I was a teenager full of hormones and anxiety
Speaker 3: and self consciousness about every little thing, when I sat
Speaker 3: there next to him, in the quiet shade of those
Speaker 3: old hemlocks, all of that noise just fell away. I
Speaker 3: was just Thomas, he was just Huck, and the world
Speaker 3: made perfect sense. My last summer before college was ninety nine.
Speaker 3: I was eighteen. I'd been accepted to the University of Tennessee,
Speaker 3: and I knew, in a way that sat heavy in
Speaker 3: my chest like a stone, that things were about to
Speaker 3: change in ways I couldn't undo. I wasn't going to
Speaker 3: be that kid on the farm anymore. I wasn't going
Speaker 3: to walk down to the creek every day and sit
Speaker 3: with my oldest friend and let the hours unspool around
Speaker 3: us like they'd never run out. The last time I
Speaker 3: saw Huck before I left for school was August twenty third,
Speaker 3: nineteen ninety nine. I remember the exact date because I
Speaker 3: wrote it in my notebook. I went to the creek
Speaker 3: early that morning, brought apples, his favorite, always his favorite.
Speaker 3: He came out of the trees and sat down next
Speaker 3: to me, close closer than usual. Our shoulders were almost touching.
Speaker 3: He smelled like the forest, like earth and moss and
Speaker 3: wild things and the creek itself. We sat there for
Speaker 3: a very long time, neither of us moved. The water
Speaker 3: talked its endless liquid conversation over the rocks. A red
Speaker 3: tailed hawk circled overhead, riding the thermals above the eastern ridge.
Speaker 3: I talked to him the way I always had. I
Speaker 3: told him I was leaving, that I had to go
Speaker 3: away to school, that it was far and I wouldn't
Speaker 3: be back for a while. I told him I was sorry.
Speaker 3: I told him i'd miss him. I told him he
Speaker 3: was my best friend in the whole world, and always
Speaker 3: had been. Ridiculous right an eighteen year old man sitting
Speaker 3: on a log pouring his heart out to a sasquatch
Speaker 3: about going to college. But Huck listened the way he
Speaker 3: always listened, that familiar tilt of the head, those deep, dark,
Speaker 3: bottomless eyes. When I stood up to leave, he stood
Speaker 3: up too, and he did something he'd never done before
Speaker 3: in all the years I'd known him. He reached out
Speaker 3: and placed his hand flat on my chest, palmed down,
Speaker 3: fingers spread wide.
Speaker 2: Right over my heart.
Speaker 3: He held it there for maybe five seconds. The weight
Speaker 3: of that hand, the warmth of it through my shirt,
Speaker 3: the sheer size of it spanning nearly the entire width
Speaker 3: of my chest, and those eyes looking into mine with
Speaker 3: something I'll go to my grave believing was understanding. He knew,
Speaker 3: he knew I was leaving, and this was his goodbye.
Speaker 3: Then he dropped his hand, turned and walked back into
Speaker 3: the trees without looking back. I stood there by that
Speaker 3: creak and cried like a child eighteen years old, six
Speaker 3: feet tall, ready to go off into the world and
Speaker 3: become a man. And I wept openly and without shame,
Speaker 3: because I was saying goodbye to my best friend, and
Speaker 3: I didn't have the words to tell him what he
Speaker 3: meant to me, what he'd always meant to me, that
Speaker 3: every moment I'd spend in his company across thirteen summers
Speaker 3: had been a gift I didn't deserve and could never repay.
Speaker 3: I drove to Knoxville two days later, started classes a
Speaker 3: week after that, and the world moved on. College was fine.
Speaker 3: I studied forestry. What else was a kid like me
Speaker 3: going to study. I wanted to understand the ecosystem that
Speaker 3: sustained these creatures, the food sources, the habitat requirements, the
Speaker 3: migration patterns that might explain their movements through the mountains.
Speaker 3: And maybe, in the back of my mind I harbored
Speaker 3: a quiet little fantasy that someday I'd find a way
Speaker 3: to prove their existence in a manner that would protect
Speaker 3: them rather than put them at risk. That fantasy didn't
Speaker 3: survive long. The academic world had zero room for sasquatch.
Speaker 3: My professors were good people, smart, dedicated scientists, but the
Speaker 3: subject was absolutely radioactive. You didn't bring it up in
Speaker 3: a forestry department unless you wanted to torpedo your credibility
Speaker 3: before it ever got off the ground. So I kept
Speaker 3: my mouth shut, studied my trees and my soil chemistry
Speaker 3: and my wildlife management protocols, wrote my papers, got my degree.
Speaker 3: I came back to the farm during breaks whenever I
Speaker 3: could manage it, Thanksgiving, Christmas, a few weeks in summer.
Speaker 3: Though those visits got shorter every year as jobs and
Speaker 3: relationships and the endless churn of adult life stacked up
Speaker 3: more and more demands. But every single time I came back.
Speaker 3: I went down to the creek, brought apples, sat on
Speaker 3: the log, and every single time Huck appeared, not always immediately,
Speaker 3: sometimes I sat for an hour, sometimes longer, but he
Speaker 3: always showed up, always as if something in the rhythm
Speaker 3: of that land had signaled to him that his old
Speaker 3: friend was back. He was enormous by then, full adult,
Speaker 3: close to eight feet, heavier than I could reasonably estimate,
Speaker 3: and he looked different in the ways that age changed
Speaker 3: any living creature. The hair around his face had grown longer,
Speaker 3: his movements were slower, more deliberate, more measured. He carried
Speaker 3: himself with the bearing of a creature that knew its
Speaker 3: place at the very top of its world and had
Speaker 3: nothing left to prove. But when he sat down next
Speaker 3: to me on that log, he was still Huck, still
Speaker 3: my friend, Still that curious, patient, gentle presence that had
Speaker 3: shaped my childhood and weighs no human being ever had
Speaker 3: My grandparents aged the way mountain people tend to age,
Speaker 3: slowly at first, and then all at once. Grandpa Walt
Speaker 3: was tough as a boot heel well into his seventies,
Speaker 3: still working the cattle every morning, still walking the fence lines,
Speaker 3: still leaving food out at dusk, although by then it
Speaker 3: was more ritual than research. He knew they were there,
Speaker 3: they knew he was there. The arrangement was decades deep
Speaker 3: and solid as the bedrock under those hills. Grandma June
Speaker 3: started slipping, first, her memory, her balance, little things that
Speaker 3: added up to bigger things, faster than any of us
Speaker 3: wanted to face. By two thousand and eight, she needed
Speaker 3: help with daily tasks. By twenty ten, Grandpa Walt was
Speaker 3: her full time caretaker and the farm work was suffering
Speaker 3: for it. Fences sagged, fields went unmowed, the cattle herd
Speaker 3: shrank because he couldn't manage them alone anymore. I drove
Speaker 3: out every weekend I could helped with whatever needed doing.
Speaker 3: Fixed fences, mowed the fields, moved cattle, did the heavy
Speaker 3: lifting that Walt's body couldn't handle anymore. And every visit
Speaker 3: I noticed him getting thinner, getting slower. The weight of
Speaker 3: caring for June was grinding him down in a way
Speaker 3: that sixty years of hard farming never had. June passed
Speaker 3: in December of twenty twelve pneumonia. It took her fast,
Speaker 3: which was a mercy. She was here one week and
Speaker 3: gone the next. Grandpa Walt held her hand in the
Speaker 3: hospital room and then came home to an empty house.
Speaker 3: I don't think he ever truly recovered from that silence.
Speaker 3: Some people are built to exist as one half of
Speaker 3: a pair. When the other half disappears, the machinery just
Speaker 3: starts to wind down. Gear's skip springs loosen, the whole
Speaker 3: mechanism slows. Walt died fourteen months later, February of twenty fourteen,
Speaker 3: heart attack, in the barn, doing the morning chores the
Speaker 3: same way he'd done them every single day for sixty
Speaker 3: two years. I found him that afternoon. I'd driven out
Speaker 3: after work because he hadn't answered his phone, which never happened.
Speaker 3: He was lying on the barn floor next to a
Speaker 3: wheelbarrow with a bale of hay half loaded on it.
Speaker 3: His face was peaceful, his hands were dirty from the work.
Speaker 3: There was hay in his hair. I sat on the
Speaker 3: floor of that barn, next to my grandfather's body and
Speaker 3: wept until I had nothing left. And from somewhere far
Speaker 3: up in the mountains, faint but unmistakable carried on the
Speaker 3: cold February wind, I heard a long, low howl that
Speaker 3: rose and fell and rose again. And then faded away
Speaker 3: into nothing and stay tuned for more sasquatch ot to see.
Speaker 3: We'll be right back after these messages? Was that coincidence?
Speaker 3: Did the creatures know what was gone? Can a howl
Speaker 3: be mourning? I don't have answers to those questions. I'm
Speaker 3: not sure anyone does. But I know what it felt
Speaker 3: like sitting on that barn floor with tears freezing on
Speaker 3: my face and that sound rolling down out of the timber.
Speaker 3: It felt like goodbye. Walt left me the farm. The
Speaker 3: will was simple, one page, everything to Thomas, the land,
Speaker 3: the house, the barn, the cattle, one hundred and sixty
Speaker 3: acres of pasture and timber, and creek and ridge that
Speaker 3: had been pritchered land since before I was born. I
Speaker 3: didn't hesitate, not for a single second. I quit my
Speaker 3: job with the State Forestry Service the following Monday, sold
Speaker 3: my apartment in Knoxville, packed everything I owned to the
Speaker 3: bed of my truck, and drove out to the farm
Speaker 3: on a gray, damp March morning that smelled like thawing
Speaker 3: earth and old leaves.
Speaker 2: I moved in. I started working.
Speaker 3: I picked up exactly where my grandfather had left off,
Speaker 3: and the very first thing I did, that very first evening,
Speaker 3: before I even finished unpacking my clothes, was fixed a
Speaker 3: plate of food and carry it out to the fence
Speaker 3: post apples, pears, leftover biscuits from the batch I'd made
Speaker 3: that afternoon using Grandma June's recipe, the same offering my
Speaker 3: grandfather had started making thirty five years before. I sat
Speaker 3: on the porch in Walt's old rocking chair. The wood
Speaker 3: was worn satin smooth from decades of his weight and movement.
Speaker 3: The runners creaked on the floorboards. The mountains went from
Speaker 3: blue to purple to black. As the last light drained
Speaker 3: out of the sky, and right at dusk, a shape
Speaker 3: appeared at the tree line. Huck taller than i'd remembered, broader.
Speaker 3: There was gray in the hair around his face and
Speaker 3: along his shit olders now silver threads woven through the
Speaker 3: dark chestnut. He moved with a heaviness that hadn't been
Speaker 3: there before, a deliberateness. He was aging, just like me,
Speaker 3: just like everything on God's green Earth. But he came
Speaker 3: down the hill all the way to the fence, took
Speaker 3: the food from the plate, and then he stood there
Speaker 3: looking at the house, looking at the porch, looking at
Speaker 3: me sitting in Walt's chair. He knew, I'm absolutely certain
Speaker 3: of it. He knew the old man was gone and
Speaker 3: that I'd taken his place. He understood the change, He
Speaker 3: recognized the continuity. He could see that the cycle had
Speaker 3: turned and a new chapter had begun, but the story
Speaker 3: was the same one it had always been. He looked
Speaker 3: at me for a long long time. Then he turned
Speaker 3: and walked back up the hill and into the darkening timber.
Speaker 3: I sat in that rocking chair and listened to the
Speaker 3: frogs and the crickets and the distant murmur of the creek,
Speaker 3: and I felt, for the first time since my grandfather died,
Speaker 3: like I was exactly where I was supposed to be,
Speaker 3: Like I was home. Now here's where this story takes
Speaker 3: its most remarkable turn, the part I've been building toward
Speaker 3: this whole time, the part that keeps me awake at
Speaker 3: night with a sense of wonder so profound it borders
Speaker 3: on disbelief. Even after everything I've seen and lived through
Speaker 3: on this land, Huck kept coming back the way he
Speaker 3: always had. But one evening he didn't come back alone.
Speaker 3: It was June of twenty fifteen, about a year after
Speaker 3: I'd moved on to the farm full time, I'd re
Speaker 3: established all the old routines. Food on the fence, post,
Speaker 3: evenings on the porch, weekends down at the creek, sitting
Speaker 3: on the same log where a five year old boy
Speaker 3: had once offered a half eaten apple to a creature
Speaker 3: the world says doesn't exist. Huck appeared regularly every few days,
Speaker 3: sometimes more often. He'd emerged from the tree line at dusk,
Speaker 3: take the food and watch me from the hillside. Occasionally,
Speaker 3: when I went down to the creekin me there, and
Speaker 3: we'd sit together the way we always had, two old friends,
Speaker 3: gray creeping into our hair. The years between us measured
Speaker 3: in silence and shared space, and the kind of understanding
Speaker 3: that doesn't require a single spoken word. But one evening
Speaker 3: in June I looked up from the porch and there
Speaker 3: wasn't one shape at the tree line.
Speaker 2: There were two.
Speaker 3: Huck was there in his usual spot near the big
Speaker 3: tulip poplar, and standing beside him, slightly behind, was another creature,
Speaker 3: shorter than Huck by about six inches, narrower in the shoulders,
Speaker 3: a lighter shade of brown, almost tawny in the evening light,
Speaker 3: standing close to him, very close the way to being
Speaker 3: stand when they belonged.
Speaker 2: To each other. A mate.
Speaker 3: Huck had a mate. I set the plate on the
Speaker 3: fence post as usual, walked back to the porch, sat down,
Speaker 3: and I watched as they came down the hill together,
Speaker 3: moving in tandem, Huck slightly in front, his body position
Speaker 3: between his mate and the farmhouse. Protective, alert but not afraid.
Speaker 3: She was beautiful. I know how that sounds a grown
Speaker 3: man saying that about a sasquatch, but she was. There
Speaker 3: was an elegance to her movement that was different from
Speaker 3: Huck's heavy, deliberate stride. Fluid, graceful. She picked her way
Speaker 3: down that slope with a sureness that told me she'd
Speaker 3: been here before many times, probably watching from the shadows,
Speaker 3: assessing this place and this human from a safe distance
Speaker 3: before she was willing to show herself. They took the
Speaker 3: food together, and for the first time, the mate turned
Speaker 3: and looked directly at me on the porch, held my
Speaker 3: gaze for maybe two seconds, then turned away and followed
Speaker 3: Huck back up the hill. Two seconds, that's all it was.
Speaker 3: But in those two seconds, something passed between us that
Speaker 3: I can only describe as acknowledgment, not trust, not friendship,
Speaker 3: not yet, just recognition. I see you, I know what
Speaker 3: you are to the one I'm with. I know what
Speaker 3: this place means. Over the following week, she started appearing
Speaker 3: more regularly, always with Huck, always positioning herself slightly behind him,
Speaker 3: always cautious. But the distance was shrinking, the same way
Speaker 3: it had shrunk between Huck and me all those decades ago,
Speaker 3: inches at a time, trust built in tiny increments, millimeters
Speaker 3: of faith. And then in September of twenty fifteen, I
Speaker 3: saw the three of them together for the first time, Huck,
Speaker 3: his mate, and a small one Brian. I need you
Speaker 3: to really sit with what I'm about to describe. I
Speaker 3: need you to understand what I felt in this moment.
Speaker 3: I was sitting on that porch in the cool September dusk.
Speaker 3: The air had that first hint of autumn in it,
Speaker 3: that sharpness, that clarity. The hayfield was golden in the
Speaker 3: low angle light, and the tree line was starting to
Speaker 3: show the faintest.
Speaker 2: Blush of color at the edges.
Speaker 3: I looked up at the woodline and there was Huck,
Speaker 3: standing tall and still the way he always stood, his
Speaker 3: mate beside him, close and between them, half hidden behind
Speaker 3: its mother's leg, a juvenile, small, maybe two and a
Speaker 3: half feet tall, dark reddish brown hair, moving with that unsteady,
Speaker 3: curious wabble that all young creatures have, whether their human
Speaker 3: children or fawns, or bear cubs or apparently baby sasquatch.
Speaker 3: Huck had a child, the creature I'd befriended as a boy,
Speaker 3: the creature my grandfather had freed from a steel trap
Speaker 3: in a ravine nearly forty years before. That creature had
Speaker 3: grown up, found a mate and started a family, and
Speaker 3: he'd brought them here to this farm, to this safe
Speaker 3: place that Walt Pritchard's single act of mercy had established
Speaker 3: as a sanctuary across the span of decades. My grandfather
Speaker 3: freed a scared, hurt juvenile from a bear trap in
Speaker 3: nineteen seventy nine. That juvenile learned to trust a human family.
Speaker 3: That trust was maintained through years of patience and consistency
Speaker 3: and mutual respect, and now over thirty five years later,
Speaker 3: that trust was being passed to the next generation. I
Speaker 3: sat on that porch and I couldn't see through my tears.
Speaker 3: I'm not ashamed to tell you that, Brian, I'm fifty
Speaker 3: three years old, and I've seen things in my life
Speaker 3: that most people couldn't begin to imagine, And that moment
Speaker 3: on the porch, watching Huck stand at the tree line
Speaker 3: with his family in the September light is the single
Speaker 3: most profound experience of my entire existence, more meaningful than
Speaker 3: any degree I've earned, any job I've held, any human
Speaker 3: accomplishment I could point to on a resume, because it
Speaker 3: was proof, living, breathing, three foot tall, proof that these
Speaker 3: creatures have families that they love, that they remember, that
Speaker 3: they carry knowledge forward and pass it down to their young.
Speaker 3: That kindness, real kindness, the kind that expects nothing in return,
Speaker 3: is something they recognize and honor across generations. Huck had
Speaker 3: taught his mate that the Pritchard farm was safe, and
Speaker 3: now together they were teaching their child the same lesson.
Speaker 3: It's been about ten years since that September evening, and
Speaker 3: if you're sitting there wondering whether this story has some
Speaker 3: tragic ending, some awful final chapter where everything falls apart,
Speaker 3: I'm genuinely happy to tell you it doesn't. They're still here,
Speaker 3: all three of them. Huck comes and goes on a
Speaker 3: seasonal pattern around more in the warmer months, less in winter,
Speaker 3: though he never disappears entirely, even in deep January, when
Speaker 3: the snow's a foot thick and the wind cuts through
Speaker 3: the hollows like a blade, I'll find his tracks near
Speaker 3: the barn, big, deep impressions that no amount of rational
Speaker 3: skepticism could explain away as anything other than what they are.
Speaker 3: His mate, I call her Birch because of her lighter coloring,
Speaker 3: is more elusive than Huck's ever been. She keeps her distance,
Speaker 3: watches from the tree line, accepts food from the fence post,
Speaker 3: but only after I've gone back inside. She's never approached
Speaker 3: me directly the way Huck does, and I respect that completely.
Speaker 3: She doesn't owe me anything. She's already given me something
Speaker 3: far more valuable than close contact. She's allowed her child
Speaker 3: to grow up knowing that this patch of human land
Speaker 3: and this particular human aren't threats to be feared. The
Speaker 3: young one Huck's child, I call him Oak. That young
Speaker 3: one's the mere image of what Huck looked like when
Speaker 3: my grandfather found him in that bear trap in seventy nine.
Speaker 3: Same reddish brown hair, same curious tilt of the head,
Speaker 3: same way of standing at the edge of the trees
Speaker 3: and watching with those big, dark eyes that seem to
Speaker 3: absorb everything and reveal nothing. Oaks bolder than his mother,
Speaker 3: much bolder. He comes to the creek now, not to
Speaker 3: sit with me, not yet enough that I can see
Speaker 3: the details of his young face, the shape of his
Speaker 3: developing hands, the way his hair whirls at the crown
Speaker 3: of his head in the same pattern as Hucks. He
Speaker 3: watches me from maybe thirty yards with an intensity that
Speaker 3: I recognize immediately because it's the same intensity Huck watched
Speaker 3: me with when I was five years old, sitting on
Speaker 3: that log holding out an apple. And sometimes, when Oak's
Speaker 3: near the creek and Hook emerges from the trees to
Speaker 3: join him, I can see something pass between father and son,
Speaker 3: a look, a gesture, a subtle shift in posture that
Speaker 3: communicates something I can feel, even if I can't translate it.
Speaker 3: This one is safe, This one has always been safe.
Speaker 3: You can trust this place the way I do. The
Speaker 3: cycle's turning again, and I'm blessed beyond any reasonable measure
Speaker 3: to be alive to witness it. I'm fifty three years old,
Speaker 3: I don't have a wife, never married, no children of
Speaker 3: my own, and yes, I'm fully aware of the irony
Speaker 3: the man who spent his entire life building bonds with
Speaker 3: a family of sasquatch never quite managed to build a
Speaker 3: permanent family with his own species. That's a fair observation,
Speaker 3: and I won't pretend it doesn't sting sometimes late at
Speaker 3: night in the quiet. But this farm and these creatures
Speaker 3: are my life's work, my purpose, my calling. If you
Speaker 3: want to get spiritual about it, I wouldn't trade a
Speaker 3: single moment of it for anything the regular world has
Speaker 3: to offer. There's something else that weighs on me, though,
Speaker 3: something I think about in the small hours, when the
Speaker 3: house is dark and the mountains are black against the
Speaker 3: stars and the only sounds are the wind in the
Speaker 3: hemlocks and the occasional distant hoot of a barred owl.
Speaker 3: I'm not going to live forever. Nobody does. When I'm gone,
Speaker 3: this farm will pass to someone, a distant cousin. Maybe
Speaker 3: I haven't decided yet, but whoever inherits this land needs
Speaker 3: to understand what's here, What's been built over nearly half
Speaker 3: a century of patience and decency and quiet, stubborn commitment
Speaker 3: to a promise made by a man in a wooden
Speaker 3: rocking chair. That's why I'm writing to you, Brian. Not
Speaker 3: because I want attention. Lord knows I don't want that.
Speaker 3: Not because I want researchers tramping through my property with
Speaker 3: thermal cameras and parabolic microphones.
Speaker 2: Not because I want to.
Speaker 3: Prove anything to the skeptics or the scientists or the
Speaker 3: armchair experts who've already made up their minds about what's
Speaker 3: real and what isn't. I'm writing because this story deserves
Speaker 3: to exist somewhere outside my own head. It deserves to
Speaker 3: be heard by someone who won't dismiss it, someone who'll
Speaker 3: receive it with the seriousness and respect it's earned, someone
Speaker 3: who understands at a gut level what it means when
Speaker 3: a creature the whole world says is impossible, stands in
Speaker 3: a field at sunset with its mate and its child,
Speaker 3: and looks at a man on a porch and raises
Speaker 3: its hand. My grandfather freed a scared young creature from
Speaker 3: a bear trap in the spring of nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 3: He didn't do it for fame. He didn't do it
Speaker 3: for evidence. He didn't run back to the house and
Speaker 3: grab a camera. He did it because something was hurt
Speaker 3: and he could help.
Speaker 2: That's all. That's the whole origin story.
Speaker 3: No drama, no agenda, no grand theory about relic hominids
Speaker 3: or missing links or the Patterson Gimlin film. Just a
Speaker 3: quiet old farmer in eastern Tennessee and a simple act
Speaker 3: of mercy on an April morning. And from that one
Speaker 3: act everything else grew. The food on the fence posts,
Speaker 3: the evening vigils on the back porch, the years of careful, patient,
Speaker 3: almost impossibly gentle coexistence. A friendship between a little boy
Speaker 3: and a young sasquatch that's endured across decades and defied
Speaker 3: every assumption about what's possible between our species and theirs.
Speaker 3: A family of creatures who learned generation by generation that
Speaker 3: this one small piece of human territory was different from
Speaker 3: all the others, that the people here could be trusted.
Speaker 3: I think about my grandfather every single day. I sit
Speaker 3: in a chair, I walk his fence lines. I leave
Speaker 3: food on the same post he chose all those years ago.
Speaker 3: And when Huck comes down that hill at dusk, moving slower,
Speaker 3: now gray in his hair, a lifetime of silent friendship.
Speaker 3: In every deliberate step, I see Walt in the whole arrangement,
Speaker 3: his patience, his decency, his absolute iron willed refusal to
Speaker 3: exploit or expose something that had placed its trust in him.
Speaker 3: There are neighbors, and we look after our neighbors. That's
Speaker 3: what Pritchard's do. I don't know what you'll do with
Speaker 3: this email. Maybe you'll read it on your show, maybe
Speaker 3: you'll file it away as one more account from one
Speaker 3: more guy who claims he's seen something in the woods.
Speaker 3: I'll leave that decision to you. I trust your judgment,
Speaker 3: but I want to leave you with one last image,
Speaker 3: one final scene from this long, strange.
Speaker 2: Beautiful story.
Speaker 3: Last Tuesday evening, just a few days before I sat
Speaker 3: down to write this, I was on the porch, coffee
Speaker 3: in my hand, the sun going down behind the western Ridge,
Speaker 3: throwing that golden orange light across the hayfield that makes
Speaker 3: everything look like an oil painting, the kind of light
Speaker 3: that stops you in your tracks and makes you grateful
Speaker 3: to have eyes. Huck came out of the tree line,
Speaker 3: moving slow. There's a stiffness in his gait now that
Speaker 3: I recognize because I feel the exact same thing in
Speaker 3: my own knees and hips every morning when I get
Speaker 3: out of bed. He's getting old. We both are two
Speaker 3: old timers, watching the years stack.
Speaker 2: Up like cordwood.
Speaker 3: He came about halfway down the hill and stopped. Then
Speaker 3: Birch emerged from the timber behind him, and then Oak,
Speaker 3: not so small anymore, maybe four and a half feet now,
Speaker 3: gangly strong, full of that same restless, curious energy that
Speaker 3: Huck carried in his body when he was young and
Speaker 3: the world was new, and a boy with an apple
Speaker 3: was the most interesting thing he'd ever encountered. The three
Speaker 3: of them stood there in that golden, impossible light on
Speaker 3: my hill, on our hill, father, mother, child, a family,
Speaker 3: on the land that my grandfather's kindness had made safe
Speaker 3: for them before I was even born. And Huck turned
Speaker 3: and looked at me on the porch. I swear to you, Brian,
Speaker 3: on everything I am, and everything I've ever been, and
Speaker 3: everything that matters in this strange life. That old creature
Speaker 3: raised his hand, not a wave, not exactly, but a lift,
Speaker 3: an open palm, a gesture that carried across forty years
Speaker 3: and two hundred yards of evening air, and said what
Speaker 3: it's always said between us ever since. A scared young
Speaker 3: creature looked up from a bear trap, and saw a
Speaker 3: man who chose to help.
Speaker 2: I see you, I know you.
Speaker 3: We're still here, both of us, after all this time.
Speaker 3: I raised my coffee cup in return. And then they
Speaker 3: turned all three of them, single file, father, mother child,
Speaker 3: into the long blue shadows of the mountains, into the
Speaker 3: wild place that no roads ever reached and no maps
Speaker 3: ever named, into whatever world is theirs beyond the tree line.
Speaker 3: They'll be back, they always come back, and I'll be
Speaker 3: here in Walt's chair, on Walt's porch, honoring the promise
Speaker 3: that started with a bear trap and a grandfather's steady
Speaker 3: hands and a belief as old as the mountains themselves
Speaker 3: that kindness is never wasted, not even on the impossible,
Speaker 3: especially not on the impossible. With deep respect and gratitude,
Speaker 3: Thomas Severe, County, Tennessee, di in bo