Archive 112 Bigfoot and Dogman

but it's not the easiest. While working on a piece of equipment in the shed, one of my hands drove up and skidded to a stop and frantically ran over to me, saying he had knocked a deer down a few minutes ago. Well, that wasn't odd news, not so that he would be sweating and speaking so fast that I hardly understood half of what he was saying. I asked him to slow down and catch his breast that I could follow, and he took a few minutes and appeared to lower his heart rate and get control of

his breathing. All right, there was a nice group of those that walked out of the trees in the south field where I've been hunting. This year. The season's almost over and we need some meat, so I killed her, he said. He looked at his feet for several seconds, and I thought he was done, And then his breathing began coming in shallow heaves again. Come over here and sit down and relax, I said, pointing to an old log stool next to the barn door. Now catch a breath,

and let's start over. He sat down and took several deep breaths, and he continued, I didn't hit that dough right little above her heart. I think she jumped straight up in the air and ran back to the tree line, and when she tried to jump the fence, her rear legs caught on the top wire and she went down. Well, I sat there until she was dead, and I climbed out of the shooting house. And when I turned away from the lighter to go get her, there was a

huge bear standing over her. Now I don't know where it came from. I haven't seen a bear all year, but there it was, honkered over her. Now yelled at it to run it off my deer, and it stood up on its rear legs and it looked right at me. But it wasn't a bear. It was a giant, hairy monster. I think. I took a step forward, and as soon as I moved, it bent down and threw that dough over its shoulder, and he walked up into the trees. I stood there for several minutes until I couldn't see

it anymore. That thing took the whole fence with it when it stepped over. I guess it got its leg hung up in the barbs, and it took a few posts with it and then started snapping staples out of the post. Well, he was way up in the woods when I saw the fence go slack. Now I think he either broke the wire or got himself untangled. There was a long silence that I broke. Well, how far was the deer from the shooting house? I asked, maybe forty yards. He said, let's go look at the fence.

I said, I'm not going back down there. He said, you can go, but not me. I drove on down there, and sure enough he was telling the truth about the fence. I don't know what dragged that fence up into those trees. I couldn't have done it without a tractor. No human or even a bear could have done that. Much damage. He said it was an animal. Well, it must have been a big one. A few months later, I was supposed to meet one of my hands in a field

to repair another fence. I got to the site and I gathered my tools and material and I walked through a ravine to the area that we were to work. He should have been there waiting on me. I was ten minutes late. I waited another thirty minutes and here he came running down the slope straight at me. What's your rush, I asked, Why? Part next to your truck? He said, And I got out and I shut the door, and I looked over the bed of the truck about to get my tools out, and out walks this giant,

hairy monster from the trees. He walked across that ditch right there and straight through the field and down into the swampy area on the low end of the field. I didn't know what that thing was, so I laid down on the grass behind my truck so he couldn't see me, and I watched him walk right down into that slough from under my truck. All right, show me where he was, I said. The guy was not afraid as the other one who wouldn't go back to the

spot where he killed the deer. And we walked to the trucks and down to the edge of the mud where the wetlands started. You see that big limb laying there in the water, He said, yeah, what about it? I asked. He bumped his head on that limb when he walked under that tree, and he acted like the limb pissed him off. And he reached up and yanked that limb off with one hand and through it where it's laying now. Man, that limb must weigh two hundred pounds. I said. It was a big limb that I would

have had to cut up to even move it. You say he threw that thing. Damn right, he did. That's why I said it was a monster. Let's get out of here. I'm getting the creeps, he said. Truthfully, I was getting the wheelies too, So I agreed and we went back to work. My father once told me that he and some teenage friends were raccoon hunting on a cold,

moonlit night in the nineteen twenties. In those days, their equipment was made up of a miner's lamp, a twenty two single shot rifle, and a pack of raccoon dogs. The dogs had treed a raccoon, or so they thought. It took them a while to get to the dogs, but when they got there and shine their light into the tree, there wasn't a coon. The dogs weren't jumping up in the tree like normal. They kind of hung

back and they just kept barking. My father lowered his leg to ground level, and standing there behind the tree was a creature, he said, looked like a giant wolf on two legs. The creature lunged at the dogs and they took off back to the truck, with my father and his friends right behind him. My father said he didn't know if that thing was chasing him, but they

sure ran like it was. They never hunted that area again, but then he saw it again two weeks later on a cold night, running across the field, not too far from where the dogs had it cornered over. Twenty years later, while driving Old Leesburg Pike or Route seven in northern Virginia, he and my mother were driving across the bridge over Goose Creek. In the middle of the bridge, he thought he could see a man standing there. When he was closer and the lights illuminated the man better, he saw

that it wasn't a man. It was a tall, lanky, apparently covered in hair creature. His mind went back to those nights in the nineteen twenties when he was a teenager. My father made the decision not to back out of that bridge and instead to speed past this thing. As the car approached, the creature left onto the railing to avoid being hit, and as they passed, it swiped at the car. I don't remember my mother ever talking about

this night, maybe she wanted to forget it. In nineteen fifty nine, the year I was born, my father saw it again, crossing a field at night on our family farm. I don't know what this creature is. Maybe there are more than one, but my family and friends have seen it many times through the last years. Whatever it is, it must have a long lifespan or we're seeing its

offspring over time. They appear to stay well hidden and away from humans, and I assume it is by chance or that the odds are good that some humans will catch a rare sight of them while they move around at night. Last year, on June the second, I was writing into one of our base camps that we use for elk hunting. My younger brother and myself operate a guide service that we inherited from our father and his

father before that. We lease out hundreds of thousands of acres in several states and don't have any need to advertise or ask for clients because we're now booked out for five years in advance. We have professional athletes, billionaires, actors, and politicians as clients. Any one of these clients will pay sixy digits for a record book bull ELK Now, I really don't want to give my name because it could be devastating to my business if it was discovered

what I'm about to tell you. The only other person I've told was my brother, who I had to confide in. Arrived in the early afternoon after a pleasant two day ride on horseback. There are two ways into our camps, and that is horseback or helicopter, which we've had a couple of our clients opt to do. I crossed the bridge that my father and grandfather built over the fast moving narrow river that was still flowing quick from the

snow melt from the higher altitudes. I rode right into the makeshift corral with Dusty and the two pack mules that only offered an illusion of containment, because we wanted to give the horses a chance to run if a bear or cougar visited while we weren't around. We didn't worry much about the horses or mules running off because they were like big dogs rather than horses, and they would come back when we called them, and they wouldn't

travel far away even if there was danger present. I quickly took inventory of the camp and raised the coolers off the ground, as they had two weeks worth of food in them and I didn't want the local bear population getting to feel comfortable visiting the camp, and I cooked up dinner and I turned in for the night. For the next two days, I began to scout the area for elk sign, but I didn't find so much as a hoof print, even in the watering holes that

the bulls loved to dig up. Arriving back at the camp, I discovered my camp torn to bits and the coolers had been pulled down and emptied, only leaving a single pack of bacon in some bottles of frozen water. The mules didn't appear to be concerned whatsoever about the visitors, and in fact looked like someone had tried to braid

their manes and tails. Well. To me, this trip was over and I was going to head back to the truck the next day, but I decided that I would give this bear or people something to think about before I left. In the morning, I was up before sun up and ready to investigate the crime of stealing my food,

and I snuck off into the woods. I was able to track something for a distance and even found some of the wrappers from the meat that I had brought, But by noon the trail had gone cold, and I knew I had to get on the trail if I was going to make it back to the truck sometime tomorrow. I was being quiet as I approached the camp, and I could tell that something was amiss. At the edge, I could see something big and hairy in the corral with a horse, but they weren't excited like they were

in danger. They were just standing there. This animal still had a winter coat on it, and it was brown and it was four to six inches long. And I reached down to my side and grabbed my lever Action twelve gage and loaded a staggered buckshot deer slug combination for protection from bears or cougars. The first shot would be buckshot and it would tear up and knock it backwards, and then the slug would kill it, and I would

repeat it over two times. I had it in my grip now, and I flipped off the set with the most subtle click. But I was heard, and this animal began to raise up on its feet. It was in that moment that I realized that this creature was standing over eight foot tall, and it wasn't a bear. It was a sy squatch. Well, I was in shot as this thing turned toward me and it smiled at me. But when I smiled back at it, I guess I must have done something wrong, because it leaned forward and

it roared at me. Now, I have been roared at by grizzly bears and cougars quite often, but none that could match the volume or the duration of the roar, even in the slightest I snapped the gun up and was about to squeeze off the first shot when I was struck by another beast that was hiding just a couple of feet to my left. The force of the impact knocked me ass over ears, through the air and into the river. Suddenly I was being swept downstream in

this cold water faster than you could dream. But I was glad to see how fast I was moving because I saw the two creatures running along the bank trying to catch up to me. I knew that I had been in the water over twenty minutes, and I knew that I needed to get out soon or I would freeze to death in this sixty degree water. I had not seen the creatures for some time now, but I decided to make my way to the other bank just

to be safe. As I got to the bank, I realized that I was having trouble breathing and my left arm was stiff. I decided to head back to the truck, which would take me four to five days on foot, and I was going to have to be really careful because I lost my phone in shotgun and I only

had the forty caliber ruger on my hip. In fifteen rounds, I had walked two hours and stopped to build a fire to drive the rest of the way before dark sat in and the temperatures drop, and I had managed to doze off when I heard that roar again off in the distance, and it was answered other roars from different locations. There was no time to rest. Now I had to go. But I was hurting, and I mean I was hurting. But I sucked it up and I

started trotting off to the east. Anyone else would have been lost and running around in the darkness until sunrise when the sun popped over the horizon. But I've been hunting this area for the past forty years, and I knew it better than the ranchers that owned it. I continued to hear the roars that night, and something breaking limbs against tree up until the sky began to lighten up. But I never stopped, and I kept moving, and I only stopped a couple of times at some small lakes

to take a drink of water. And I traveled well into the afternoon, and I stopped against a tree and I was asleep in seconds. I was jarred awake by thunder in the distance, and I wondered if those creatures were still following me, and I forced myself to my feet and I started making tracks again after midnight, when the storm had passed and everything finally quieted down, which was when I heard another roar, and it was about half the distance away that I was the evening before well.

This gave me motivation to push harder, and I picked up the past, forcing myself to the extreme, knowing that if I didn't get out, they would be on me by morning. That night was the scariest twelve hours on the planet for me. The roarers became more frequent and closer, and just a couple of hours before the sun popped up in the east, I started to get hit with

rocks and sticks with amazing accuracy. I had no idea where they were being thrown from or how far away, so I kept going afraid to stop, thinking I would be dinner or I'd be torn apart. But I refrained from reaching for my pistol because I believed that that was the trigger that set the attack off the other day, and I was hoping that they were just trying to

push me out of their home range. I was relieved to see the sun crest the horizon that morning, and I knew it was about another twelve hours away from my truck. The good news was soon turned bitter, though, as I began to cough up blood and I realized now that I had a broken rib that must have punctured my lung and I was bleeding internally, and doubt swept in. I began to think of my two boys at home and my lovely wife, and I was wondering if they would ever find me out here before the

wolves or bears discovered my body. And then I became concerned about my brother because he would surely come looking for me, and I wondered what was going to happen to him if the creature saw another human in their area. All this gave me more strength than I thought was possible for one human to have, and I was nearing the top of a ridge about four hours from the

truck when I heard it. It was the sound of a truck nearby, and to my delight, I recognized it as one of the ranch trucks, but it was starting to pull away, and my heart sink into my stomach. I grabbed my ruger forty cow and I started popping off rounds as fast as I could, and then everything went black. I woke up in the hospital in Denver, where I had been flown in by a helicopter after the ranch hands came to my rescue and call the medics.

It was very expensive, but it was covered by a couple of our clients with deep pockets, which I'm extremely grateful to. My family was all there and they were excited to see me wake up. I had just been through an eight hour surgery on top of everything else, to remove part of my lung and one of my kidneys. Everyone had assumed that I had been thrown from my horse and hurt myself during the fall, but I knew better than to correct them and tell them what had

really happened. I asked my brother to stay back as everyone left to get rest, and I told him the story about what really happened. I don't think he can completely believed me, but he promised me that he would not go back to that site without several of our friends with him. Two weeks later, my brother came back from recovering the mules in Dusty and to tell me about what he had found. He said that the camp was completely destroyed, along with the corral and the bridge.

He found Dusty and the mules a short distance away, which came running when he called to them, and he also found huge footprints in the mud around the camp, and then the rocks started being thrown at them and they fled the area, riding all night long to get back to the trucks and the trailer. Now he believes me I wasn't physically able to guide last year. Now I wonder if I'll be able to guide mentally now.

I decided to take on an apprentice to help me scout out other leases that we have, but I don't think we'll ever return to the bridge camp. Here is what I'm confused about. Why didn't they mess with the horses and the mules, and what did I do wrong to warrant the aggressive roar. I do understand that my reaction to that roar, by pointing my shotgun at the creature, was perceived as a threat, and that is probably what

caused a second animal attack on me. I also believed that they could have caught me at any time that they would have desired, so I think they were just motivating me to leave as quickly as possible. And I also wonder if they had driven out all the local wildlife, because I never found any tracks of anything on that trip.