Big Game Hunter Shoots Bigfoot!

woods alone again. So grab your flashlight, stay close, and remember some things in the woods don't want to be found. Hit that follow or subscribe button, turn on auto downloads, and let's head off into the woods if you dare. Hey, Brian, I don't know how you sort through what lands in your inbox, and I won't pretend my stories the strangest

one you've ever been sent. I've listened to enough of your shows to know you handle people's stories with care, and that's the only reason I'm sitting down to write this. My daughter played me one of your Encounter episode's last Christmas in her kitchen. I sat there with her earbud in my ear for forty straight minutes and didn't say a word. When it was over. She asked me what I thought of it, and I told her i'd let her know that was almost a year ago. Here, I

am two things up front before any of it. Every name in here is a first name only, and none of them's real. The man who hired me back then has been gone for some years now, but his family's still around and they don't deserve to have his last name dragged into something he never spoke about while he was alive. The young man who came with us as his assistant is doing fine from what I hear, and I've left him alone for thirty years and intend to

keep doing that. So in this email, i'll call him Conrad. The kid I'll call Drew, and you can call me Tim if you read any of this on the air. That isn't the name on my driver's license, but it's close enough to what folks used to call me when I worked. The second thing is that I don't want a dime for this, and I don't want anybody coming up here to look for the place. The country where it happened is still out there, and the line that

got crossed is still a line. So if you decide to tell this, tell it as a story, don't tell it as a map. All right, that's the housekeeping here we go. I started guiding hunters in northern Idaho in the late eighties. I'd come back from four years in the Marine Corps with nothing in my pocket and a back that wasn't going to like office work, and a man my dad knew offered to teach me what he knew about elk and mule deer in exchange for help

around his place. By the time I hit my early thirties, I was running my own outfit out of a single wide trailer and a battered bronco, and I had a reputation for being the kind of guide who'd put you on an animal when nobody else could. That sounds prouder than it ought to. The truth was I needed the work. My wife at the time and I had a baby boy, and the medical bills from his first eight months had hit us in a way that took years to climb

out from under. By the fall of nineteen ninety five, I was guiding anything that walked through the door with cash in its hand. Black Bear Mountain goat elk late season cow tags. I once took a dentist out for ruffed grouse because he'd offered me four hundred dollars for a half day walk and we needed the propane. I tell you that because I wanted on record. I wasn't a brave man. I was a tired man with a young family, and tired men with young families say yes

to things they probably shouldn't. Conrad came to me in the second week of September, though he didn't drive up himself, a man i'd guided two years before. A real estate fellow out of Spokane had given Conrad my number, and Conrad called me from a hotel in Kurdalen and said he had a project he wanted to discuss in person. He used that word project, not a hunt, not a trip, a project. I should have heard something in that, but

I didn't. He showed up the next morning in a least suburban with the longest Matt Black case in the back seat I'd ever seen riding to a hunt. He was maybe forty five, lean, gray at the temples, with the kind of soft hands that have never gripped a wrench but have signed a great mini checks he had on the brand new version of every piece of gear the catalogs were pushing that year new boots, new jacket,

a wristwatch that probably cost more than my truck. He had a young man with him, maybe twenty three or twenty four, whose job, as far as I could tell, was to carry whatever Conrad sat down. That was drew. We sat at my kitchen table and Conrad opened up a folder. Inside were aerial photographs, top g graphic maps with grease pencil circles on them, and three printed articles that looked like they'd come off the early days of the Internet, which still felt new and shaky back then.

I didn't have a computer myself, so I read the headlines upside down across the table. The articles were about Sasquatch. I didn't say anything at first. I just looked up at him and waited. He smiled, the way a man smiles when he thinks he has the upper hand of every room he walks into. He said he wanted to take a Sasquatch. I'll be honest about my reaction. I

didn't laugh or tell him to leave. I sat at the table with my coffee in my hand, and I thought about the truck payment, and the propane bill, and the new pair of boots my boy needed for school. And I asked Conrad what he meant exactly when he said the word take. He laid it out for me. He'd heard through a friend of a friend that there was a part of the country up here where the locals didn't go after dark. He'd paid somebody to dig up old newspaper articles and a few hunter reports from

the setes. He'd spoken to a fish and game biologist who'd asked not to be quoted. He decided this was the place he didn't expect to walk out of the woods with a body. And he told me that plainly what he wanted was footage, thermal footage, audio, something he could take to a private buyer he'd already been in touch with. Failing that, he'd settle for a clean trophy shot. He said the word trophy the way other people say

the word groceries. I asked him about Drew. He waved his hand and said Drew would handle the cameras and carry batteries and wouldn't be in his way. Drew, sitting in the corner with a notebook, looked at me like he was hoping I'd say something his boss couldn't argue with. Then Conrad slid a piece of paper across the table. On it, he'd written a number. The number was twelve

thousand dollars. He told me, in the same voice he might have used to order a sandwich, that I'd receive half upfront in cash and the other half in cash on our return. I told him I needed to think about it overnight, and he nodded as though he'd never heard a no in his life and probably never would, and he said he'd be at the hotel until ten the next morning. After he left, I drove out to a ridge above my place and sat in the bed of my pickup and watched the dark come in over

the cell Kirks. Twelve thousand dollars in nineteen ninety five was almost half a year's income for me. It was my boy's medical, the rest of the truck, and breathing room I hadn't had since the previous winter. I called him at nine the next morning and said, yes, I want that on record. I made the choice with my eyes open. Whatever happened later wasn't something Conrad did to me. It was something I walked into knowing better. I'd grown

up listening to old men in this country. The old men I came up around were a mix of timber families, a couple of Salish elders who came down to a diner on the highway every Wednesday, and a handful of trappers who'd been working those drainages since before I was born. They didn't all agree on much, and they didn't even all agree on what to call the thing we were

going up there to find. But they agreed on one piece of country, and they agreed on one piece of advice, And the advice had been the same for as long as anybody had been giving it. There was a creek up in the high country that the old maps didn't bother to name. The white loggers and the trappers had a few names for it, none of them official. The Salish men I knew called it something I won't right here,

because it isn't mine to write. The simplest thing the old men used to tell me when I was a boy and asking too many questions, was that you didn't cross that creek to hunt. You could cross it for water. You could cross it for a lost dog. If you had to, you didn't cross it to take. I asked an old trapper once when I was maybe fifteen, what would happen if you did. He had a face like a piece of driftwood, and he didn't answer me right away. He chewed on his lip for a minute, and then

he said, you'd find out who lives there. I thought about that conversation more than once on the drive in. I didn't share any of it with Conrad, not at first. We met up at a turn off above a forest service road on the second of October, and I drove the lead truck while Conrad and Drew followed in the suburban. We had close to four hours of road to cover.

The first three were on county and forest roads that any pickup could handle, but the last hour was on a track that I had to get out twice to clear. I'd put a chainsaw in the bed for that purpose. Conrad watched me work without offering to help, and Drew tried twice to pitch in and was waved off by his boss. Let me give you a sense of Conrad before I go any further, because he matters. He wasn't stupid, and he wasn't cruel in the regular sense of the word.

He was something I think people from his world become without meaning to. He'd spent thirty years being the most important person in any room he walked into, and he'd stop noticing there were rooms. He thought of the woods the way he thought of his own driveway. He believed on a level he didn't, even though he believed it, that the country we were driving into belonged to whoever could afford to be in it. He told me, while I was sawing through a windfall pine that he'd taken

a leopard in Zambia in nineteen ninety one. I don't doubt he had. He told me he'd taken a brown bear in Kumchotka, and he said the word Kamchatka the way some men say the name of a woman they used to know. He said he'd had his eye on this for a long time. This he didn't say what this was. The Sasquatch wasn't a creature to him. It was an entry on a list. Drew was a different animal. He was a film school kid who'd taken this gig because it paid him in a month what he made

in a year of waiting tables in Seattle. He had every piece of camera equipment Conrad had bought him laid out in foam in three pelican cases, and he treated those cases like they were full of glass eggs. He apologized to me twice for things that weren't his fault, and he offered me half his sandwich at lunch. He was scared of his boss in a way that made me feel sorry for him, and a little protective in a way I tried not to let show. We made

the trailhead in the late afternoon. By trailhead, I mean a wide spot in the road where the track ran out and a faint footpath continued up through Alder. There was no sign, no register box, nothing on any map I owned that said this place existed by name. I parked, stepped out, and stood at the edge of the road, watching the country for a long time. You should know

that I'd been into this drainage before. I'd hunted it as a young man with a friend of mine whose dad had brought him up there, and we'd stayed on the lower side. We'd taken a five y five bull in a meadow about three miles up. The country was steep, mostly old growth cedar. At the bottom then mixed conifer, then high country with little hidden parks and rock out crops up around six and seven thousand feet. There was elkin there, and bear and the usual ruffed grouse and

the occasional moose moved through. There was also, depending on who you asked, something else. I'd never seen it. I'd heard things the way you hear things in the woods, and I'd come across a couple of pieces of sign in my career that I couldn't account for. I hadn't in my own mind made a decision about whether the something else was real. What I decided was that the old men I trusted believed it was, and that the

old men were rarely wrong about country. The creek I'd been told never to cross was about four miles in from where we parked. I planned to camp short of it that first night. That was the plan. We hiked in for the rest of the daylight. Conrad set a fast pace for a man who'd been sitting in a leather seat for four hours, and his gear was light because Drew was carrying half of it. I had my

own pack and the chainsaw. We made it about two and a half miles before the light went and I called a halt at a flat spot beside a smaller feed or creek that I'd used as a camp before. The first night was eventful, and that matters. It was completely ordinary. We had a small fire. Conrad drank two fingers of bourbon out of a steel cup and told a story about a koodoo in Namibia that I didn't

entirely follow. Drew worked on his cameras by headlamp. We could hear an owl somewhere up the slope, and a bull elk bugled twice over toward the north ridge, and Conrad got quiet and listened to it like he was hearing music in a language he understood. I lay in my tent that night and listened to the country, and the country sounded the way the country was supposed to sound, wind in the cedars, the creek down below us, the small noise of mice in the duff. I went to

sleep and slept hard. I'm telling you about that ordinary night because of what happened on the second day. We broke camp at first light. Conrad wanted to push hard. I told him we had a long climb to where I'd planned to set up base camp, and we'd want to be on the ground there with light to spare so we could glass the basin in the evening. He said fine. We moved around mid morning. We came on the first thing. It was a young pine, maybe four inches at the base, that had been twisted and laid

across the trail at about chest height. I've seen damage from the wind snow load, and bear damage, and I've seen what porcupines and moose can do to a young tree. This wasn't any of those. The pine was rooted on the uphill side of the trail, it had been bent across the path, and the top had been driven into the ground on the downhill side, and it was holding. The trunk was twisted, not snapped. The bark had pulled and split along a spiral. I stopped and looked at

it for a long minute. Conrad came up behind me and asked what the hold up was. I told him I wasn't sure. He pushed past me, ducked under the trunk, and kept going up the trail. Drew looked at me, and I looked at Drew. I gave the trunk a tap with my hand, and the whole thing held like it had been planted. We went on. Stay tuned for more backwoods big stories. We'll be back after these messages. About forty minutes later we came on the second thing.

There was an old cedar stump beside the trail, the kind of stump that had probably been cut by a hand crew sometime around World War One. It was mossed over and weathered down, and on top of it sat a stone. The stone was the size of a small watermelon. It was wet, the way riverstones are wet, with that dark sheen on it. The nearest running water was the

feeder creek we'd left more than a mile below. The stone had been balanced on the stump in a way I couldn't have replicated if you'd given me an hour and a level. Conrad stopped this time. He looked at the stone for a long moment, and I could see him working out what it was. Then he reached out and pushed it. It rocked but didn't fall. He pushed harder, and it tipped off the stump and thudded into the dove.

He looked at me and smiled, and his smile was the smile of a man who has just decided that something as a prank. He said, somebody's been up here messing around, probably the same locals you said were spooked. I told him I didn't think so. He told me very pleasantly that what I thought wasn't what he was paying me for. That was the moment, if I'm being absolutely truthful with you, that was the first moment I should have turned us around. We hadn't yet crossed any line.

We were still on the right side of where I knew we ought to be, and I had a way to get him back to his vehicle by nightfall if I leaned on it, and I sat there in the trail and heard my own voice in my own head saying the truck payment and the boots and the propane, and I let him win. We went on. We came up on the creek a little after one in the afternoon.

It was, I have to tell you, a perfectly ordinary creek, maybe twelve feet across at that crossing, knee deep in the deepest channel, running clean over a bed of dark stones with a little white foam where it broke around two larger rocks in the middle. There were old logs lying along the banks, and the woods came down close on both sides. If I'd been showing it to a fly fisherman, I'd have told him it looked like a

good cutthroat stretch. The trail dropped down to a flat where you could pick your way across on stones, and a faint track continued up the bank on the far side. I stopped on our side and dropped my pack. Conrad asked me what I was doing. I told him we needed to talk. I sat him down on a piece of log. Drew sat down beside him, with his camera bag on his lap. I squatted on my heels, the way old men in this country squat when they want

to say something serious without standing over you. I told him about the line, not every word of it, and I didn't quote any of the old men. I told him that locally this creek was treated as a boundary, and that I'd been into the country on the far side a few times in my life, but only for water, and never to take I told him that what we were here for, regardless of what either of us believed in, it was the kind of thing the people who lived in this country didn't do across this creek. I asked

him to consider hunting from this side. I told him I'd extend the trip by two days at no charge, and that if we glassed the basin from the ridges on this side, we'd have the same shot at seeing whatever there was to see. He listened to me. I'll give him that. He didn't interrupt when I was finished. He was quiet for a moment, and then he asked me a question. He asked me, do you believe what

you're telling me? I told him the truth. I told him I didn't know what I believed, but that I knew what I'd been told, and I knew the men who told me, and I trusted them more than I trusted my own opinions about country I didn't live in full time. He nodded, He took a sip of water from a stainless bottle and looked at the creek for a long minute. Then he stood up, picked up his pack, and said, all right, I respect that, but I didn't

come fifteen hundred miles to glass from a ridge. He stepped down to the and he walked across the creek without taking his boots off. Drew stood there beside me, and I could see he was scared. He was a kid. He looked at me with his mouth a little open, and he said, very quietly, what do we do? I'll tell you what I was thinking at that moment, because I've thought about it almost every week since. I was thinking that I could let Conrad go on alone. He

was on his own now, by his own decision. I could sit on this side with Drew and we could wait, or we could walk back out and I could mail him his half of the deposit. That was a real option, and I had it in my hand. I didn't take it. I told Drew to follow me across, and I picked up my pack and I went. The water was cold in a way I remember specifically, not the cold of a normal creek in October, but the cold that comes

off glacial melt, A hurting cold. I was through it in maybe ten seconds, and my feet ached for an hour after up the far bank. That was when the country went quiet. Let me try to describe this, and I'm not sure i'll do it justice. The sound of the woods doesn't stop all at once. It steps down the way a stage light steps down at the end of a play. There's a moment when you realize you haven't heard a chickadee in a while, and then you realize you haven't heard a creek bird in a while.

And then a wind comes through the cedars overhead, and it sounds, for the first time in your life, like it's the only thing making any noise on the entire mountain. By the time I got to the top of the bank, I could hear my own heart beat in my ears. I wasn't afraid yet, I could hear it because there was nothing else to listen to. The squirrels had stopped chittering, and the jays were gone, And although the wind in the trees was loud, underneath that wind sat the deepest

silence I've ever stood inside of. Conrad was already thirty yards up the trail and didn't seem to notice. Drew came up behind me and stopped beside me. He said, very quietly, where are all the birdsards? I told him I didn't know. We caught up to Conrad, who'd stopped beside a cedar that had to be eight feet through

at the base. He was looking up at it. The bark on the uphill side had been rubbed off in a vertical strip about as wide as a man's torso, and the strip ran from the duff all the way up to a height i'd put at eleven or twelve feet off the ground, higher than any elk could rub, higher than any bear could reach. Conrad ran his hand over the bear wood and smiled. He said, that's our boy. There was no fear in him. There was excitement, and

there was a kind of possession. He'd already decided that whatever was making this sign was his, It belonged to him. He'd walk through this country and accumulate evidence of it the way a man walks through a buffet line and accumulates plates. We pushed on for another two hours, climbing steadily, and we came on three more rub trees, four more twisted saplings, and one more stump with a stone on it. The stone on this one was bigger than the first. It was wet, and I don't know where the water

on it came from. The nearest running water was the creek we'd crossed. Around five in the afternoon, we came up onto a flat bench above a rock outcrop, with a clear sight line down a long basin to the south. It was a good camp. There was a small spring running off the rock and a fire ring I'd left there myself, maybe seven years before. It was the place I'd told Conrad we would set up. I'd planned that camp before I knew we were going to cross the creek.

It was sitting, by my best estimate, about a mile and a quarter on the wrong side of the line we made camp. Drew set up his cameras on tripods at the edge of the bench, looking down into the basin. Conrad got out his thermal optic, which was a unit I hadn't seen before. I'd seen night vision in the Marines, and I'd seen the early commercial thermals that were just starting to come into the hunting market in the late nineties,

and this thing was a generation ahead of both. He told me, with a great deal of pride, that he'd bought it through a contact who worked in defense procurement. He set it on a tripod beside Drew's cameras and tested it on a coyote that crossed the basin a quarter mile down. I cooked, Drew helped me. Conrad sat in a chair he'd had Drew carry up for him and watched the basin. The sun went down behind the

ridges to the west, and the country stayed quiet. Not silent now, exactly the way it had been right after the creek, but quiet underneath the wind in the spring. There was no animal sound. No coyote yipped, no owl called, and the bull elk that had bugled the night before on the far side of the line was nowhere up here. About an hour after dark, the first thing happened. Conrad sat up sharply in his chair and made a small grunt of attention. I came over to him. He was

looking through his thermal. He pointed, without taking his eye off the optic, and he said, west ridge two thirds up. Looked with my naked eyes, I could see nothing at all. The ridge was a black shape against a slightly less black sky. Drew swung one of his cameras around. Conrad slid out of his chair very quietly, and reached for his rifle. This is where I want to stop and tell you what he was carrying. He had a custom Mauser M ninety eight chambered in three seventy five H

and H magnum. It was a beautiful gun. The wood was figured walnut, the metal work was case hardened, and it had a Schmidt and Bender scope on top of it in a different context, I'd have admired it with both hands. He was carrying it that night with a thermal clip on attachment that made it to his daytime scope. The whole setup had cost more than my truck, including the trailer hitch. He stood up, shouldered the rifle and

looked through the thermal. I have to be straight with you here, I didn't see the shape on the ridge. I have only what Conrad described, and what he described changed in the telling even that night. The first time he said it, he said it was a man shape standing. The second time he said it, he said it was leaning. Drew for his part, swore on the next day that he'd had something on the camera, and we'll come back

to that. What I know is what happened next. Conrad fired the report, came off the rock face behind us, and slammed back across the basin in a way I felt in my chest and the muzzle flash strobe the bench like lightning. I had my hands over my ears, and I still felt it. There was a beat of silence after the shot, a long beat. Then Conrad lowered the rifle and turned toward me with his face lit up. He said, I hit it. I hit it dead solid. It went down. I asked him, are you sure? He said,

I watched it fall. I asked him where exactly? He pointed. I marked the spot on the ridge as best I could. We couldn't get there in the dark. The country between us and that point was steep, broken loose rock, and going over there in headlamps would have been begging for a turned ankle or worse. I told him we'd find it at first light. He nodded, but his hands were shaking, not with fear, with excitement. He clapped drew on the

shoulder and laughed. We went to bed about two hours later, after Conrad had calmed down enough to drink some water and eat. I checked the perimeter of camp before I turned in the way I always do. I walked the bench, walked the spring, walked the edge of the rock. I came back to my tent, climbed in, and lay there in my bag for a long time with my eyes open. I didn't sleep that night, not really. I dozed maybe an hour total, in stretches. The thing that kept me

awake wasn't what Conrad had done. What kept me awake was that the country hadn't made a single sound in response to that shot. We got up at first light. Conrad was up before me, which surprised me. He was already dressed and standing at the edge of the bench, glassing the ridge with his daytime optic. He turned to me when I came out of my tent, and he was wearing the same look I'd seen on him the

previous night, only sharpened. He looked the way a man looks who's been waiting for Christmas morning his whole life, and woken up to find it was finally here. I made coffee. We ate quickly. Drew packed a daypack with two of his cameras. Conrad slung his rifle in a smaller pack. I took a coil of rope, a first aid kit, and a plastic tarp to wrap whatever we found. It took us almost two hours to work our way

over to the spot. We had to drop down off the bench, cross a saddle, climb the west ridge from the south side, and traverse a face of broken rock. I had to go ahead twice to find a root. By the time we got to the place Conrad had marked, my legs were burning and Drew was sweating through his shirt. We searched. We searched for an hour, then two. We worked concentric circles, then downhill where any wounded ants animal would have run, then uphill in case it had gone

the other way. We checked along ledges and under blowdowns. We found, in total four things. The first was a smear of something on a flat piece of rock, about thirty feet downhill of where Conrad said the shape had been standing. The smear was about eighteen inches long, dark and sticky, and the morning sun hadn't dried it. I knelt beside it and didn't touch it. It was the wrong color for blood, the wrong color for any blood I'd ever seen, and I have in my career seen a

great deal of blood. It was blacker than venus blood, thicker, with a faint sheen on top of it, the way an oil slick has a sheen. Drew filmed it. I wouldn't be surprised if his footage of that smear is still on a hard drive somewhere. The second was a single hair caught on a piece of bitter brush about ten feet from the smear. It was reddish brown end to end, close to seven inches long. It was coarse. I bagged it in a sandwich bag I had in my coat pocket and slipped the bag into my coat.

I'm sure I lost that bag somewhere in the months that followed. I never had it tested, and I never wanted it tested. The third was a track, just one. The ground was mostly broken rock, and there was only one place in the whole search area where there was enough soft duff for any kind of impression to register. The print was in that duff. It was conservatively sixteen inches long, with five toes, and the toes were the

wrong shape, not human and not any animal toe. I knew there was a clear ball of the foot, and the impression was deepest at the heel and at the ball, the way a footprint is deepest when something heavy is walking, not running. Drew film the print. Conrad stood over it for a long time, not saying anything. The fourth was the absence of a body. There was no body anywhere, no trail, no drag mark, no further blood beyond the smell. Stay tuned for more Backwoods bigfoot stories. We'll be back

after these messages. Whatever had been on that rock had gotten up and walked off, and it had walked off in a way that left no trace beyond the single track. After three hours, Conrad called the search. He was furious in a quiet way. He wasn't yelling. He was walking with his jaw set, kicking at rocks, shaking his head. He told me, as we worked our way back toward camp, that the shot had been good and the animal had been hit. I told him I believed him. I did

believe him. I just believed something else, too, and I didn't say it out loud. What I believed was that we'd wounded something that shouldn't have been wounded, and that we were now in country that knew it. We got back to camp in the early afternoon. Conrad ate a freeze dried meal, drank from a flask, sat in his chair and watched the basin. He was waiting, I think, for whatever he'd hit to come back into view. Drew

puttered around with his cameras. I cleaned up the camp, refilled water from the spring, and split some wood for the night's fire. The sun went down, the country was quiet again. We ate. Conrad went to bed early. He told me he wanted to be up well before light to glass the ridges at dawn. Drew went to bed shortly after. I sat by the fire for another hour, then banked the coals and turned in. I slept that night. I don't know why. Maybe my body had decided that

it had to. I went out hard, and I dreamed something I can't remember the details of, only that in the dream, I was walking through a stand of cedars, and there was someone walking parallel to me through the trees, just out of sight, matching my pace. I woke up an hour before dawn because Drew was outside my tent saying my name. He was saying it the way you say a name when you don't want to wake anybody

else up. He was crouched beside the door of my tent, and his face, when I unzipped, was as white as a bone. He didn't say anything else, He just made a small motion with his head toward the edge of the camp. I pulled on my boots and went with him. The fire was down to coals and there was just enough gray in the eastern sky to see by without the headlamp. Drew walked me out past the edge of the bench to the little flat on the south side of the camp where the spring ran out before it

dropped over the rock. There were six animals laid out on the flat in a circle. Picture this. The circle was maybe eighteen feet across. The animals were laid with their heads pointed inward toward the center, and they'd been arranged, every one of them with care. The ground around them was undisturbed. There was no blood on the ground, no spray of any kind. The first animal closest to me was a coyote with its neck broken. The body was

otherwise intact, the eyes open, the mouth closed. The second was a young raccoon with both four legs broken cleanly at the same point on each leg. Its neck had also been broken. Its tail was laid out behind it in a straight line, and its ringed pattern was perfect. The third was a fissure. I've only seen a wild fissure three or four times in my life. It's a hard animal to see. This One's spine had been broken in the lower back and its head had been turned

around backward. The fourth was a porcupine with every quill still in it. I don't know how anything broke a porcupine without losing fingers. Its skull had been crushed. The fifth was a marmot, which made no sense at all because we were below Marmot Country. The sixth was a young mule deer, a dough maybe a year and a half old. Her neck had been broken, her front legs had been broken, and her hindquarters were intact. Her eyes were still open and they hadn't yet glazed. None of

the six had been eaten. Not one bite had been taken from any of them. There was no scavenging, no flies, no smell yet of decay. They were fresh, laid down within the last hour maybe two. The circle was perfect, The spacing between the animals was even. The heads all pointed in the first thing that hit me about that

scene wasn't fear. The fear came later. The first thing I felt was something I have only felt one other time in my life, and that was when I was a young man at a military funeral and I watched the honor guard fold a flag for a friend's mother. The first thing I felt was that I was looking at something ceremonial. Somebody had taken the time to do this. Somebody had taken the time to pick up six animals

from across the country. We were standing in, one of them from above us, and one of them from a habitat we were below, and lay them out in the dark around our camp with their heads pointed in toward us. It wasn't a threat. Let me say that clearly, because it would have been easier. If it had been a threat I would have understood, and a threat I could have answered. But this seemed more like an indicet Drew came out of his tent ten minutes later. He stood at the edge of the circle for a long time

and didn't say anything. He had his camera out and was filming, but his hands were shaking and the footage probably wasn't usable. I watched Conrad's face the whole time he stood there. On that face for the first time, I saw a flicker of something that I hadn't seen before. Not fear exactly, something closer to insult. He looked like a man who'd just been told something he wasn't allowed to refuse. Then he did the worst thing he could

have done. He turned to me and asked me whether I had any plastic large enough to wrap the deer. He wanted to take it out as evidence. I told him no, and I told him the deer was going to stay where it had been put, and that we were going to leave the circle alone. I told him we were going to break camp right now this morning and walk out, and I wouldn't charge him for the second half of the trip. He looked at me. He

didn't raise his voice. He told me, very calmly, that he was paying me to be his guide and that I would do as he asked. I told him no a second time. I told him I'd been hired to bring him into this country and to bring him out alive, and that I was now telling him, as the man responsible for his life and the kid's life, that we were leaving. He reached into his bag. He pulled out a bundle of one hundred dollars bills and laid them on a flat rock beside the fire and set a

stone on top of them. He said, this extra five thousand dollars is your bonus on top of what we already agreed. The deer is going out with us. Drew was looking at me, I was looking at Conrad. The country was looking at all of us. I could feel it. I picked up the bills, put them back in his hand, walked back to my tent and started packing. He didn't follow me. He stood at the edge of the circle with the gray dawn coming up behind him, and he

stared down at the dough. I got my pack about two thirds packed, and I was rolling my sleeping bag when I heard Conrad's voice from the other side of camp. It said, Hey, Tim, can you come help me with this? It was Conrad's voice, the pitch, the cadence, the way he hit the consonants. He had a slight rasp on his vowels from years of cigars, and the rasp was there. I recognized the voice the way I recognized my own brother's voice on the phone. I stuck my head out

of my tent. Conrad was still standing at the edge of the circle. He hadn't moved, he hadn't spoken. The voice had come from the tree line on the north side of camp. I felt something happen in my chest. I don't have a word for a cold went all the way through my arms, and the hair on the back of my neck came up the way the hair on a dog comes up. I crawled the rest of the way out of the tent, stood up and looked at Conrad. He was looking back at me. His eyes

were wide. He'd heard it too. Drew came out of his tent at that moment and asked us if we'd called him. The voice came again from the trees, a little farther up the slope. This time it said, Drew, bring me the camera. Drew hadn't moved. Drew was right there in front of us. The voice was, I swear to you Conrad's voice. Drew sat down on the ground. He just sat down, very suddenly, as if his legs had stopped working. He looked at his boss, then at me.

His face was wet. I hadn't seen him start crying. I walked over to Conrad. I picked up his rifle from where he'd leaned it against a stump, walked it back to my tent, and put it down beside my pack. I didn't say anything. I don't entirely know why I did it. I didn't in that moment, trust anybody in our camp to be holding a firearm, including myself. The voice didn't call again. That morning we finished breaking camp.

None of us spoke. Conrad didn't protest when I picked up his rifle, and he didn't ask for it back. He walked behind me and Drew with empty hands. We left the city animals where they were. It was about half past eight in the morning when we shouldered our packs and started down the trail. We didn't get far. The trail down off the bench winds through a section of old growth cedar where the trees are big enough that two men can hide behind one trunk and not

see each other. We were about ten minutes into that section, single file, with me and the lead and Conrad in the middle, and Drew bringing up the rear. When I came around a bend and stopped, the trail in front of me was a mess. I don't know how else to describe it. Trees had come down. Two big cedars, maybe four feet through at the base, had been laid across the trail. They hadn't fallen because there was no root ball. They'd been pushed over and laid down Around

the cedars. Smaller trees had been twisted and woven. There were branches stacked into a kind of barricade, and there were stones, big stones set on top of the branches at intervals. It had been done in the time we'd been packing. It had been done silently. We hadn't heard a single tree go down, and we hadn't heard a stone strike a stone. None of it had made any noise that any of us had heard. I just stood there. I think I stood there for a full minute. Conrad

came up behind me and stopped. Drew came up behind him. We all three stood and looked at the barricade, and nobody said anything. The trail was the only safe way down off that bench. The country to either side was steep and broken and laced with blowdown, and going around the barricade would have meant a long detour to the south, dropping down maybe a thousand feet of bad ground in the hope of intersecting the trail again. Below the barricade was a message. The message was, you don't leave by

the way you came. I told Conrad and Drew to back up, and we retreated about fifty yards. I told them to stay there. I went forward, and I looked at the barricade more carefully, trying to find a way through. I looked for the gap. There wasn't one. The whole thing had been put together with care, the way a man who knows fence will splice fence, and the gaps that were there were too low to crawl under without going on your belly. I went back to Conrad and Drew.

I told them we were going to have to take the south route, that it would put us in steep country, and that we wouldn't make it out today. Conrad looked at me for a long time. He'd been quiet since the voice, and he wasn't the same man who'd crossed the creek. There was something in his face that hadn't been there before. I'll tell you what it looked like.

Drew's pack. There was a spring seep that turned one hundred yards of trail into wet clay. Conrad slipped twice. The second time he slipped, he went down hard on his right knee, tore his pants and came up bleeding and silent. We made about a mile and a half and three hours. That was when Conrad's pack came open. He was in the middle of our line, between me and Drew, on a flat stretch where the going was easy. I heard him say, very quietly, what the hell? I

turned around. He had his pack off and on the ground. The top was open. He was rummaging through it. He looked up at me, his face had gone gray. He said, my ammunition is gone. He'd been carrying a box of twenty rounds of three seventy five H and H. They'd been in his pack since we'd left the upper camp. The box had been in a side pocket with a buckled flap over it. The flap was still buckled. The box was gone. I looked at his rifle that I'd given back to him about two hours into our hike out.

He still had it slung over his shoulder. There was a single round in the chamber and four in the magazine from the previous morning. That was it. Drew checked his own pack. His batteries were missing, all of them. The ones in the cameras were still there, but every spare he'd carried was gone. The pack was zipped, the pockets were closed, and he hadn't taken his pack off in three hours. I checked my own pack. Mine was untouched. That wasn't lost on any of us. My pack was untouched.

Conrad's pack had been opened and emptied of ammunition while it was on his back, and Drew's pack had been opened and emptied of batteries while it was on his back. Mine hadn't been touched. Conrad sat down on a log. He sat down the way Drew had sat down that morning. His legs simply gave out. He didn't say anything. He stared at the open top of his pack. I made a decision. I told him we needed to get to a place I could defend, and we needed to wait

for daylight to make a plan. I knew of a small overhang about a mile farther on a place where the cliff cut back into a kind of shelter with a flat front. I'd used it in a storm one time. We could put our backs to the rock and have a sight line out front. We pushed for the overhang and made it just before dark. I built a fire bigger than i'd normally have built one. I had a feeling about light that night, and I wanted as much of it as I could make. Drew didn't eat conrad

ate a little. He sat with his back to the rock, held his rifle across his knees, and stared out into the trees. His knee was swollen up under his pants, and he had a streak of dried blood down his shin. Let me tell you what we heard that night, because we heard a great deal. The first thing we heard was a sound I think was meant to be an elk. It was a bugle. It came from the trees about one hundred and fifty yards out from our overhang. It

was the right pitch and the right shape. It went up the scale and broke at the top the way a real bugle breaks. It was a fine It was almost perfect, almost perfect, but not quite. Stay tuned for more Backwoods bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. Because a real bull elk pushing a bugle isn't breathing the way a man is breathing. The breath behind that bugle was a man's breath or something man shaped. The

lungs were the wrong size. The bugle was being made by something that had heard bugles and was trying to make one, and it was good at it, and it wasn't good enough. Conrad jerked his rifle up at the first note and kept it up while the bugle ran its course. When the bugle stopped, he didn't lower the rifle for a long minute. Then he lowered it slowly, turned to me, and his eyes in the firelight looked like the eyes of a man who's just been told he has a disease. The second thing we heard was

my own voice. The voice came from the trees on the south side of the overhang, and it said, in my own voice, Hey, Drew, can you come help me with this? It said it the way I'd have said it if it had been me. It even had the little hitch I have on the word help, which I've had since I broke a tooth as a kid. I've heard myself on tape. I know what I sound like. That voice was my voice. Drew didn't move. He looked at me, and I looked at him, and I shook

my head very slowly. Drew nodded. The voice came again from a different direction. The trees on the west side. It said, Drew, I need you to come over here. A minute Drew started crying again. He wasn't making any noise. There were just tears running down his face. He looked at me and mouthed the word please. Here's what I think now, looking back, I think the voice was trying to separate us. It had picked up that Drew was the youngest, and the most frightened, and the most likely

to break. It had picked up my voice and Conrad's voice during the day, and it had sat in the trees and listened to us, and it had practiced. I don't think it was trying to lure Drew to his death. I don't believe that. I think it was trying to Drew from us the way a wolf separates a calf from a herd, so that it could deal with us one at a time. Conrad and Drew didn't go anywhere that night. None of us slept. We sat with our backs to the rock and the fire in front of us,

and we listened to the woods and the woods. Sometime after midnight went quiet again. The quiet was almost worse than the voices. Around three in the morning, I heard a sound on my side of the overhang, and I looked over. There was a handprint on the canvas of the shelter half i'd stretched across the rock as a wind break. The handprint was wet. It was made of mud or something close to mud. It was on the

inside of the canvas. Whatever had made it had been on the inside of the canvas behind me while I was sitting there with my back to it, and I hadn't heard it. The handprint had five fingers. The fingers were almost twice the length of mine. The palm was the size of a dinner plate. The thumb was set lower than a human thumb is set. The hand wasn't the wrong shape exactly. It was a hand, It was just bigger and longer, and the thumb was placed differently.

It had been pressed into the canvas the way a man might press his hand against the inside of a door to lean and listen. I'll be honest about what I felt. I was afraid. I won't pretend I wasn't. But the fear wasn't on top. The thing on top was something else, the same feeling I'd had standing over the circle of animals. It was the feeling of being looked at by something that had decided after watching me that I wasn't the problem. The handprint was on my

side of the canvas. Neither Conrad's side nor drew side had one, just the single print where I'd been sitting all night. It had been left for me to see, the way you might leave a note on the door of a friend you'd stop by to check on while you were on your way to do something else. I didn't tell Conrad Drew about it that night. I rolled the canvas up before dawn so that the print was on the inside of the roll, and I put the canvas in the bottom of my pack. I don't know

why I did this. It felt important at the time, and it feels important now. I think the print was a courtesy. I think it was a thing being said, and the thing being said was I see you. You're not why I'm here. Dawn came slow. The fire was down to a few coals, so I built it up. I made coffee, and I made it strong because I wanted the smell. Conrad had finally fallen asleep around four in the morning, sitting up against the rock with his rifle across his knees. Drew was lying on his side

with his eyes open. He wasn't asleep. He was looking at the fire. I told Drew very quietly that I was going to step away from the overhang for a minute to relieve myself. I told him to stay where he was, not to wake Conrad, and that i'd be back in five minutes. I walked maybe thirty yards south down on slope into the trees. I did what I needed to do. I started back. When I came around the last of the trees, the overhang was empty. Conrad was gone. The rifle was on the ground where he'd

been sitting. Drew was sitting up exactly where he'd been, looking at the place where Conrad had been. He wasn't crying anymore. His face was empty. I asked him what happened. He said, in a voice I could barely hear. He was looking at something in the trees, and then he stood up and he walked into them. I asked him if he'd said anything. Drew shook his head. I asked him how long ago. Drew said maybe a minute, maybe two.

I picked up Conrad's rifle and checked the chamber. The single round was still in it, and there were still four rounds in the magazine. I shouldered the rifle. I told Drew to stay at the overhang, to keep the fire up, and not to call out, no matter what he heard. I went after Conrad. The trail was easy to follow it. First, he'd gone west into a stand of fur and hemlock, and he hadn't been trying to

hide his passage. He'd gone in a straight line. There were boot prints and patches of douff, and a place where he'd brushed past a low branch and broken it. About one hundred yards in the trail changed. This is the part I've spent the longest time thinking about, so let me try to describe it carefully. The boot prints kept going, but they began to wander. They went left, then right, then left again. They went around trees that he could have walked past straight. They went over a

dead fall that he could have gone around. They were the prints of a man who wasn't picking his own line. About fifty yards farther on, I came on a place where the Prince stopped at the foot of a fir tree. There was a scuff in the duff where Conrad had stopped, and from the scuff, his prince turned ninety degrees and continued north. To his left, on the bark of the fir tree, there was a fresh gouge. The bark had been struck hard by something that had thrown a stone

or hit the trunk with a hand. The gouge was at chest height and there was no stone on the ground. It was a redirect. The thing had stopped him at the tree, hit the tree to his left, and Conrad had turned right. I followed the new track. About thirty yards on. There was another scuff and another gouge, this time on a small alder, and the track turned again. Conrad was being driven the way I had driven elk in my career, the way Conrad himself had probably driven

a kudu in Namibia or a leopard in Zambia. He was being driven with sound and movement through country he didn't choose. I followed the drives for about a quarter mile. He'd been turned six times that I could count. Each turn took him farther from the overhang and deeper into the country we'd crossed into. The thing driving him knew the country it was using, the country It was steering him towards something. I came up onto a small ridge and from the top of the ridge I looked down

into a clearing. The clearing was maybe forty feet across. There was a flat in the middle of it, with a downed log along one side. The morning light was just coming over the ridge behind me, and it was lighting the clearing the way a stage light lights a stage. Conrad was on his knees in the middle of the clearing.

He wasn't bound, there was nothing holding him. He was on his knees in the duff, with his hands on his thighs, rocking back and forth very slightly, and he was making a sound that wasn't crying and wasn't a word. It was the sound to hurt animal makes a low, steady, broken sound. At the edge of the clearing, opposite him, in the shadow of a big fur, there was something sitting on the downed log. I'll tell you what I saw,

and you can do with it what you want. It was sitting with its knees drawn up and its arms resting on them, sitting like that. It was as tall as a tall man standing on its feet. I'd have said it was eight and a half feet eat maybe a little more. Its hair was a dark reddish brown, the same color as the hair I'd bagged off the bitter brush. Its face was in the shadow of its brow, and I couldn't then or later tell you what its

face looked like in any detail. There was a face, and there were eyes, and the eyes were watching Conrad. It wasn't making any move to touch him. It was watching him. It had brought him here, and now it was watching him. Understand. I stood at the top of the ridge with Conrad's rifle on my shoulder. I had a clear shot from where I was standing With the gun I was holding, I couldn't have missed. I didn't shoot. Let me tell you why. I'd been hunting in those

mountains for twenty years. I'd killed many animals. I'd killed an animal that morning, two trips before, for camp meat. I knew what killing was, and I knew the difference between killing a thing for food and killing a thing for any other reason. The thing on the log wasn't something I needed to kill. It wasn't threatening me, and

it wasn't threatening Drew. It had already twice gone out of its way to communicate to me that I wasn't the problem, the handprint on the canvas, the untouched pack, the fact that I'd walked thirty yards into the woods to relieve myself a half hour before, and I was still standing here breathing. There was also this. The thing on the log was watching Conrad the way a judge watches a defendant. There was no rage in it, and

there was no haste. It was waiting for something. I think now looking back, that it was waiting for Conrad to understand. Conrad had come up here believing that the country and everything in it belonged to whoever could afford to be in it, and the thing on the log had spent two days and two nights and one morning teaching him otherwise, it wasn't finished teaching him. I lowered the rifle. I cleared my throat. I didn't say anything. I just made the small sound a man makes when

he's trying to be respectful in a doorway. The thing on the log lifted its head and looked up at the ridge. It looked at me. I don't actually know how long it was. Time in that moment didn't work the way it usually works. I raised my hands. I held the rifle by the stock with my left hand away from my body, and I held my right hand open, palm out. The thing on the log looked at me, then back down at Conrad, then at me again, and then slowly it stood up standing. It was every bit

of what I'd guessed sitting maybe more. It was tall enough that the lowest fur branch over the log brushed across its shoulder. It didn't duck, it just shifted and the branch slid past it. It looked at Conrad one more time, then turned around and walked into the trees. It didn't crash through anything or crack a single stick. A thing that size moving through that country should have made noise like a freight train, and it made no

noise at all. I waited until it had been gone for account of sixty Then I went down off the ridge into the clearing. Conrad didn't look up when I came toward him. He was still rocking, still making the sound. I knelt in front of him and put my hand on his shoulder. He flinched as if he hadn't known I was there, and he looked up at me, and his eyes weren't the eyes of the man who'd crossed the creek. I'll tell you what I saw in those eyes.

I saw a man who had finally understood all the way down that there were things he wasn't going to win against. I'd seen that look on men in the Marines who'd been through their first real bad day, and I'd seen it on a man in a hospital after a heart attack. I'd never seen it on a man in the woods. I asked him if he was hurt. He shook his head. He couldn't at that moment speak. I helped him to his feet. His knee from the day before was very swollen and he couldn't put full

weight on it, but he could stand. I put his arm over my shoulder, held the rifle in my off hand, and walked him out of the clar It took us almost two hours to get back to the overhang. Drew was sitting where I'd left him. He stood up when he saw us. He didn't ask any questions. He just shouldered his pack and Conrad's pack, and we started south again. I won't draw out the walk out because the walkout was the longest two days of my life, and there's

nothing in it for the listener. We came down off the bad country in the late afternoon of that second day, and we hit the trail we'd come in on below the barricade. The barricade was no longer there. The trees that had been across it were gone, along with the branches and the stones. There was no sign on the trail that any of it had ever been. We crossed the creek. The water was the same dead cold it had been three days earlier. On the other side, the

country made noise again. A jay yelled at us from a stand of cedar. Within thirty seconds of our setting foot on the bank, A squirrel chittered at Drew's head. A grouse drummed somewhere up the slope. Conrad down on a log on the friendly side of the creek and put his face in his hands. He didn't cry. He just sat that way for a long time. Drew sat

down beside him and didn't speak. I built a small fire and made hot water, and we drank instant coffee out of metal cups, and the three of us sat there until the light went and we slept hard that night for the first time in three days. We made the trucks the next afternoon. Conrad paid me in cash in full. He paid me the second six thousand he'd agreed on, and he paid me the bonus five thousand he'd tried to give me at the camp. I tried

to refuse the bonus, but he wouldn't let me. He pushed the bills into my coat pocket with a hand that was still shaking, and he said, very quietly, take it. He never spoke to me again about what happened. I got two letters from him in the years that followed. The first one was a Christmas card the December after, with a short note that said only thank you for getting us out. He signed it with his first name. The second one came about two years later. It was

a typed letter. It thanked me again. At the bottom it said I have not been back into mountains. I have not hunted since. I hope you are well. He died in two thousand and nine of a heart attack at home. I read it in the paper. I didn't go to the service. Drew, as far as I know, is doing fine. He left the film business and works in a job that has nothing to do with cameras.

We exchanged Christmas cards for about ten years and then drifted apart the way men do I don't think either of us wanted to keep the connection alive, and I don't blame him the hair I bagged off the bitter brush, I lost the handprint on the canvas I kept. I still have it rolled up in the back of a closet. I've never had it tested. I've never shown it to anybody. I don't know what I'm keeping it for. Probably I'm keeping it because throwing it out would feel like a

thing I'm not allowed to do. I never guided again for outsiders after that fall. I finished out the season i'd committed to, which was three more elk hunts and a goat hunt for an old client of mine I trusted. After that, I stopped advertising. I did some work for fishing game over the years, and packed for an outfitter friend a few times. I never took another stranger into the high country. The country is still there, the creek

is still there, the line is still there. The thing that lives on the other side, if it's still alive, is still there too. I don't know how long they live. I don't know if it's one of them, or a family of them, or the descendants of the one that watched Conrad in that clearing. I don't believe it's a single being any more than I believe my whole town is one man. I do believe, after thirty years, that

what we ran into up there wasn't an animal. It was an animal in the same way that I'm an animal, breathing and walking and warm blooded, a creature on this earth. But it was something else too. It was a thing that knew a circle when it built one, and knew a voice when it heard one. It knew the difference between a man who'd crossed a line and a man who'd been hired to walk along behind him. It made that distinction deliberately, and it acted on the distinction. I'm

alive because of that distinction. A few years after all of this, I was up in the same general country, on the friendly side of the creek, packing for that outfit or friend I mentioned. We had a client who'd taken a nice bull, and we were boning him out near dark. I walked off about thirty yards to relieve myself. The way i'd walked off from drew at the overhang, and while I was standing there, I had the unmistakable feeling that I was being watched. I looked up across

the drainage. The light was almost gone. There was a ridge over there, maybe four hundred yards out, on the far side of where I knew the line ran. There was a shape on the ridge. I'll be honest with you, I don't know if what I saw was real. The light was bad, and I was tired, and i'd been thinking about the previous trip all day because the bull we were boning had come down out of the same basin where Conrad had sat in his chair with his

thermal optic. What I saw, or what I thought I saw, was a tall figure standing at the edge of the ridge. It wasn't moving, as best as I could tell. It was looking down across the drainage at me. I stood there for a long minute. Then I went back to the bull and helped finish dressing it. I didn't tell my friend what i'd seen. I didn't tell my wife

when I got home. I haven't told anybody until tonight, sitting at my kitchen table writing this email, with my coffee gone cold and my dog asleep on the rug behind my chair. That's the story. I trust you with it. Tell it however you want to tell it. Change what you need to change. Cut what you need to cut. I want you to know I appreciate your work. The reason I trusted you with this is the way you share other people's I don't want to sound sappy, but

that matters to the people that share their experiences. Of that, you can be sure. I have grandchildren, now, two of them, and one of them is a girl who's asking me about the woods every time I see her. I'll take her into the woods. I'll take her up the friendly side of the friendly creeks. I'll teach her what my father taught me and what the old men taught me. And one of the things I'll teach her is the thing I learned the hard way that fall. The country

doesn't belong to us. We're guests in it. Some of us are good guests and some of us are bad guess the country can tell the difference, and so can the things that live in it. Take care of yourself out there.