Archive 181 Bigfoot Attack

this story out for all the world to hear. I was born in southeast Kentucky in nineteen sixty four to a newly married young couple. I actually think they married because Mama got pregnant with me. Not long after that, my father was drafted and sent off to Vietnam. Mama and me stayed with papau down at the head of a holler. Mama passed away while I was still ins so the arrangement worked out fine with Paul. Paul having a woman around to take over Malma's housework and cooking

were just the ticket. My days were spent playing with my cousin Scott, who everyone calls Scooter. My father was the youngest of seven brothers, and Scooter's Daddy was the oldest, even so Scooter was a month younger than me. Being so close in age made us naturally close in all things. The years passed in a hazy daydream of woods and streams and rocky hillsides to explore and conquer without a

care in the world. And then, one hot July day, the year Scooter and I were set to start school, a couple of soldiers showed up at Paupaul's door in their dress uniforms. I thought it was my dad. He'd been gone since before my memories were formed, so I couldn't have known that these men were not my father, but the bearers of bad news that my father wasn't ever coming home. We didn't even get to bury his body, just an empty pine box meant to represent him. I

guess it was fitting. He'd been absent from my world and life, and now he was absent in death as well. School started and it wasn't easy for me. I mourned never having known my dad more than I mourned his death, but Scooter was there for me and helped me get through it. Now I was finally beginning to adjust and move forward when one day, as we were getting off the bus. Papa was waiting for us at the stop. This was something he never did now. I could tell

by the look on his face that he was worried. Boy, I got some bad news for you, he said, looking right at me. Your mama has run off. Apparently she'd gotten daddy's insurance check, packed her suitcase, and drove off in the old truck. I never saw her again. To this day, I don't know if she was alive or dead. I can't even remember what she or Daddy either one looked like. I guess that was the best thing that could have happened to me. There's no telling what my

life would have been like with her. Pap Paul could have sent me to an orphanage, but he didn't. Instead, Scooter's mom and dad took me and raised me as their own. I quit calling them Uncle Ruths Shaw and Aunt Annie, and I started calling them mom and Dad. They were my parents, and they never treated me as anything less than a son. Life was tough in those years, and Dad worked hard, driving a coal truck and sometimes lumber rigs, but he didn't make much money. Scooter and

me rarely got new clothes. We tended to wear our uncle's old clothes that were stored away at Pappau's. Our genes were generally full of holes, almost never the right length, and always out of fashion. We took some ribbing for that, but a few bloody noses and black eyes soon taught the bullies that we were nothing they wanted to mess with. The next year was the first time that I remember Dad closing up all the windows and setting bars to hold them in place. For the next month and a half,

we were not allowed to leave the yard. We had to use the chamber pot or bucket after dark instead of going to the outhouse. There was a well at the edge of the porch, but once everything fell, neither Scooter, me nor our sisters were ever allowed to be out there. If we heard the coyotes howling. Even Mom wouldn't go outside, and Dad brought all the livestock into the lower pasture next to the house and moved all the chickens to

the coop closest to the house as well. Six weeks or so later, about the time it got to be Halloween, the coyotes would quit howling and things would go back to normal. This was the routine every year. Right after schools started, Dad would spend a week locking down the house and moving livestock. All the neighbors did the same, all because of a pack of coyotes moving through the area. We would occasionally lose head of livestock or a dog

wouldn't come home. There always seemed to be a tree limb that fell on the chicken coop that time of year, with a few hens coming up missing. One early mid July morning, the year I turned twelve, our oldest sister Ella came tearing down the road in her ragged old truck as hard as she could run it. She'd gotten married the year before, and she and her new husband lived in a trailer across the haller. She pulled into

the yard and Dad ran out to the truck. Minutes later, she was headed back down the road and Dad was coming back up to the porch where me and Scooter were standing. Back then, Papaul was the only one in the holler with the phone, so this was the only means of communication. We had. Boys, get you guns and meet me at the truck. He told us we'd both been giving Stevens four tens for our tenth birthdays. It must have cost a fortune. To get us both guns,

and our birthdays being only a month apart. I can't imagine how much Mom and Dad did without to make that happen, but it's a tradition in our family, and Dad was never one to break with tradition. We listened as Dad explained to Mom that Ella's husband Bo had gone squirrel hunting last night and he didn't come home. It wasn't squirrel season, but back then, hunting seasons were easy to overlook when one had an empty stomach. Ella couldn't come to the house last night because her truck

had no headlights and she didn't dare walk it. She just sat and cried all night. We got our guns and we headed to Paul Paul's. When we arrived, our uncles were all there waiting for us, along with as many of our cousins who still lived in the air and were old enough to handle guns. All told, there were probably thirty of us. Everyone was carrying shotguns and had pistols strapped to their hips. Papa A walked over to Scooter and me and handed us five forty five

long coat cartridges to use instead of shotgun shells. We all knew both secret squirrel spot was at the top of the ridge where the beech nut and red oaks grew near the big rocks. He was careless to leave all his cigarette butts and spent shotgun shells laying around when he was done for the day. He was the only one in the family who owned a twenty gage. My dad called it a lady's gun, since there wasn't a tree or rocking those hills that we didn't know.

Wasn't long before we discovered his spot and started hunting it as well. Of course, we were all smart enough to pick up our shells and not leave signs of anyone having been there. We marched up the mountain like a small army in Sir of Bow. Thirty minutes later we were standing in the middle of the rocks. In a few minutes after that, cousin Leroy found Bow's gun. The barrels bent all the way back until it was

touching the other end. Then Uncle Barry turned to his brothers and he urgently ordered them to get the boys off the mountain. Now he'd found a boot. It was Bo's boot, and Bo's bloody foot was still in it. I was still trying to imagine how Bow's foot could still have been in the boot when I heard the coyotes howling all around us. They were so loud, but we couldn't see him. Suddenly we were headed back down the mountain, but my mind was still on the boot.

Had something biting his leg into had it been twisted off? How did Bow lose his foot? We got back to Paul Paul's and someone called the state troopers. They showed up with bloodhounds and a game warden. Dad and his brothers, along with some of the other cousins, took the officers up to the spot where they found the boot. The troopers turned loose to hounds, but they started whining and they refused to follow the trail. They ran back down to the cruisers and sat and waited to be let

back inside. They all came back to Paupov's house, where the game warden began preaching to all of us about hunting out of season. He claimed it was a bear that killed Bow and drug him off. Dad, clearly upset by the game warden's words, walked him back out to his car. We could all clearly hear him tell the game warden that should he ever speak to his family, that way again, he would be wishing that it was

a bear that had hold of him. He also told him not to ever come on the property or speak to his family again, or it would not end well for him. There might not even be a boot left of view to find. Dad said, me and my brothers drag you up on that ridge. Our family wasn't known for being bad or violent, but we were tough and we knew what it took to survive. Dad spent that night sitting on the front porch with a shotgun. There weren't many deer in that part of Kentucky back then,

so no one felt the need on a rifle. A shotgun was all we had. The next day, all the uncles were busy getting the livestock rounded up and closing up the house. We even parked the tractor against the cellar door. Once we secured our house, they went to Papas's to do the same. Then they went to the next to ken down the road, and so on and so on. The entire community batten down in just two days. That year, we buried Bow's foot next to my father's

pine box. Ellen moved in with Paupaul, and she never once went back to her trailer, not even for her clothes. She just started wearing Mamaw's clothes. That year, we lost some cattle we never found them alive or dead, and our neighbors and cousins lost animals as well. Uncle Barry's big german shepherd, Goliath, was found dead hanging about twenty feet up in a tree behind his barn. He was missing his legs and his head was twisted completely around,

with the spine broken in half. The poor dog's head was just hanging from the torso by its skin. At night, our house was pelted with rocks and sticks that kept us awake in our beds. Dad was so upset that the coodes had come over a month early that year and that he had not been prepared for him. Kept asking himself what signs he had missed. The next year, he was ready early, but the codies came back at their normal time. There seemed to be more of them though.

That was when he finally told me in scooter the truth. It wasn't coyotes we'd been protecting ourselves from. It was well, I had no idea what a booger was, so Dad tried its best to explain to us that boogers were part man and part beast. Every year since our ancestors came to the valley, the biggers would come through and kill either livestock or people. Our forefathers were some of the first settlers to venture through the Cumberland Gap, and

no booger was going to run us off. It was their house that we had heard at night when the windows were boarded up. They were the ones who threw the rocks and sticks at the house. Dad warned us that they were always watching us and would grab anyone who wandered off alone or got too close to the woods. They were the reason we used the chamber pot at night and never ventured out on the porch for water after dark. We had a lot of calves born that year,

more than we'd ever had before or since. Dad herded them into the barn at night with the heifers and barricaded them them in. One night, we awoke to what sounded like a train running through the building full of dry two by fours. The next morning we discovered the barn doors completely ripped off of the building. Five of the calves were missing, and one of the heifers lay dead in the barn. Her intestines were completely gone. The other cattle were huddled up next to the house or

down at Paul Pau's. That was a rough year. We lost several more head of cattle before the boogers moved on. One of Paul Paul's bulls was killed. Its head had been torn off its body and dropped over one hundred yards away, right in the middle of the road. It was a devastating loss, and people brought heifers from all over to breed with his bull, trading hogs, goats, sheep, chickens, tools and guns for the right. One time, someone even traded him five pheasants, which he loved in a big, old, mean,

loud peacock. Over the next few years they came back, but they were never as mean as they'd been from nineteen seventy six to seventy eight. Eventually, Scooter and me graduated school and we went straight to the recruiter's office. We planned to always be together and to have each other's back, but somehow we ended up in two different branches of the service. Scooter ended up in Special Forces and I became a sniper, although I never had to

use the skill in battle. Man was I good at it. Meanwhile, Scooter became a regular badass. He got to where he could creep up on anybody and put them in a hole that Hulk Hogan couldn't escape. But until then he'd never bested me at wrestling, and after he honed his skills, I'd just lie down to save energy and give up. Well. During our six to eight years of military service, both Scooter and I sent our money home. We sent he

signed our checks and sent them to Dad. The army fed us and clothed this and put a roof over our heads, so we didn't need it for that. We'd never had spending money growing up, so we wouldn't have known what to do with it anyway, And unbeknownst to us, Dad was putting all that money into bank accounts for us. Scooter was discharged in nineteen eighty nine. He'd fallen in love while on leave, and he married a woman named Susan. He brought her back to our little valley to settle,

about five miles from Dad and Paul. Paul's and I stayed in for a couple more years until I was involved in an attack during the first weeks of desert storm and was sent home on a medical I ride back in Kentucky in October of that year. The boy was excited when Dad showed me my deposit book. I had nearly two hundred thousand dollars. I was rich, and by the end of the week, I'd purchase to brand new F two fifty and a Yamaha three point fifty Big Bear. To my surprise, Scooter had the same quad.

We decided right away that we'd hit the deer woods on opening day back at the family farm. We still had our stands there from when we were in high school, and the boogers would have been gone for over a month by then. That Saturday, two weeks before Thanksgiving felt like it would never arrive. I had purchased a Browning three to eight and picked up an Army surplus sniper scope

for it. I must have looked over one hundred of them before I found one that I liked, and I had it sighted in within five shots, and I was ready to go. The day finally arrived and I picked up Scooter at four thirty am. We hit our quads in the middle of a big honeysuckle thicket and we're slipping up the mountain before five, and by five point fifteen we were seated in our stands. We always set

our stands within sight of each other. He liked a tall, straight, white oak on the top of the ridge, and I much preferred an aar looking twisted old tree on the flat about one hundred and fifty to two hundred yards away. The morning was so quiet we could hear a nut drop from a tree one hundred yards away. Nothing was moving as we waited for the sun to rise. Sometime between six thirty and seven, the calm was shattered all at once as a young buck barreled down the trail

right at me at breakneck speed. It ran past my tree stand without slowing down. Just as night was beginning to fade in today, I glanced over at a scooter and saw a couple of doughs moving toward him. They were acting nervous, and they looked as though they'd been running for quite a while. They kept looking behind them as if they were being chased. So I followed their line of sight down to the flat, where I could

see movement in the shadows of the woods. I couldn't see him clearly, but I knew it was a troop of boogers and we were in the middle of their hunt. I turned to yell to Scooter, let's get out of here. But before I could get the words out, he shot and I saw a big dough fall to the ground. He hadn't even moved yet when I saw something huge moving in on him from his blind side. This thing was tall enough to reach up and pull Scooter out of the stand. That stand was fifteen feet off the ground.

There was no time to yell. I simply pulled the browning up, put my crosshairs on the creature's neck where the base of the skulls should be, but there was no neck. I prided myself on always taking neck shots and training, I knew that shot would bring down anything and everything without so much as a twitch. I had to look for the next kill shot at the temple right behind the eye. I knew if I went center masts, I might not take out enough vital organs to keep

the beasts from reaching Scooter before dying. With the mechanical precision that comes from years of training, I pulled the trigger and watched as the booger crumbled into a lifeless heat. Scooter spun around just in time to see the creature hit the ground. He was trying to get his safety belt undone so he could get down from the stand. I never used one because I had a lot of limbs to bounce off between me and the ground. The hills and hollers came to life with howls unlike anything

I could ever have imagined. Rocks and sticks were thrown at us from every direction, and more roarers, even deeper and louder, answered the first howls. They were moving in fast, and Scooter hit the ground and ran toward the quads. All was seconds behind, having jumped down from the tree. We climbed onto the quads and I saw all two huge buggers coming at us from just two or three hundred yards down the trail that we'd come up on. We had a millisecond to decide stay or fight or run.

I don't think Scooter had any faith in the damage his little two forty three would do to one of those things. He started his bike and I followed suit, and we took off, flying down the trail toward Uncle Berry's. There was no way that we'd be able to make it to Paul, Paul's or Dad's without going through the buggers, and I never dreamed those bikes would come off that mountain so fast. All the while we could hear what sounded like a herd of elephants running through the woods

all around us. It was balls to the wall when we hit the edge of the woods. Richard Petty and A. J. Foyt, running shine and being chased by revenuers would have had a hard time catching up with us. Our lives dependent on how fast we could make those bikes go. Uncle Barry was already at the fence with his rifle in hand. He raised his rifle and he shot past us. As we reached him, he yelled getting the house, and I noticed that his house was all boarded up and his

livestock were in the corral. That's when I realized the buggers had come late that year and we hadn't known about it. Both Scooter and I had lost our weapons on the way out, so Uncle Barry ushered us inside and armed us with two of his You boys really stirred up a hornet's nest this time, he said, I've been hearing them cruiters yelling like a bunch of angry demons coming from the pits of hell for the past couple of minutes. We didn't have time to respond. The

house was under attack. The boggers were pounding on the sides of the house and testing the window coverings in the back door. Seemed like they were on every side. Even on the roof. We could hear the helpless cries of his cows. His big draft horse was in a fight for his life. The dogs were now silent as they were either dead or had run off, and our sense of security was ripped away with the roof. They

were inside now throwing furniture around upstairs. We knew we were going to have to make a break for it. Uncle Barry yelled us to get in his truck. Keys are in the ignition, He said, no, I'll bring up the rear. We didn't know Uncle Berry was going to stand his ground and give us a chance to get away. We heard five shots from a shotgun, choosing that weapon

over his rifle. Being so close to them. Between the cursed words he was throwing at them, I could tell when he threw a shotgun aside and switched to his forty four mag His last words were run, boys, Run. We knew in our hearts that Uncle Barry was no more. His old Chevy was well cared for and ran like a race cars. We tore down the road and out of a hull. We pushed that truck as hard as it would run, and all the while fighting back the tears that stung our eyes. Scooter was driving, and I

took the duty of gunner watching the rear. Didn't seem like they were chasing us anymore. I couldn't see him coming down the road anyway. Scooter pointed down the road and he said, look up ahead, I see Dad coming down the road at us. We got within one hundred feet of each other when a big tree came crashing down on the cab of my dad's truck. We could only hope that he'd managed to get down in the

seat far enough to survive the hit. We hadn't even come to a stop when something hit the side of our truck, sending it rolling off the side of the road and down into the creek. The truck came to a stop on its top, and I had no idea how many times we'd rolled, but everything was thrown about in the cab. For the first time in my life, I'd lost my grip on my rifle. I looked over to see if Scooter was okay, but he wasn't in

the truck. A sudden, violent slam against the undercarriage, which was now the top, sent blood rushing down over the side window next to my face, and Scooter's lifeless body was thrown twenty feet or more to the other side of the creek. His head unattached, rolled down the creek bank in front of the truck, and my heart fell into my stomach and my brother, my best friend, he was dead. I felt a hand bigger than anything I'd ever seen, grabbed my leg and pull let it through

the door that had come open in the crash. I tried to reach over the seat for my uncle's rifle, but I couldn't get to it before the hand pulled my leg again, pulling me away from it. I was being pulled harder and harder as I held on to anything I could for dear life, and I saw my life flash before my eyes and seconds and I made my peace with God. I knew my life was over. This devil pulled and pulled at my leg again, just like I'm pulling your leg. This is not a true story.

It's just for entertainment and fun. And this was written with no disrespect for anyone who has had an encounter with one of these creatures or hopes to. I simply wrote it as a story with a hope that some people will enjoy a little bit of tomfoolery.