We Hunted a 400lb Bear in Idaho.. Found Bigfoot Instead. One Didn’t Survive!

73 Shots in the Clearwater

Chapter 1: The Hearing Room

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I’m standing in front of the Idaho Fish and Game Commission at 2:17 p.m. on a Tuesday in September, hands clamped to the podium hard enough to leave dent marks in the wood, and I can’t stop shaking. The room smells like old carpet, burnt coffee, and the stale patience of people who’ve heard every excuse a man can invent. They want to know why I discharged my weapons seventy-three times in a protected wilderness area over the course of six hours on October 8th. Why I left my hunting partner’s body in the woods for four days before leading search and rescue to the location. Why every casing recovered from the scene showed wild, erratic firing patterns with no clear target. Their faces already have verdicts in them—reckless, unstable, liar, maybe all three—and my attorney’s earlier warning keeps tapping at my skull: Stick to the bear. Say nothing about the thing. But they’ve asked me directly what I encountered out there, and the oath isn’t just words to me. I can’t lie under it, even if the truth costs me my license forever and buys me the kind of quiet pity reserved for men people talk around instead of to.

So I tell them I’ll start at the beginning. I tell them my name is Tyler Brennan. I’m thirty-two, diesel mechanic out of Lewiston, Idaho, and I’ve been hunting since I was fourteen. I know what fear is and what it isn’t. I know how adrenaline can warp distance and make shadows look like monsters. I also know when your mind is trying to save you by refusing to name what your eyes already recognized. I tell them that the explanation is going to sound insane because sane is a word people use when they want the world to stay tidy. Then I close my eyes for a second, because in my head I can still hear that sound—a screaming roar that didn’t come from any bear that ever lived—and I begin with the phone call that lit the fuse.

Chapter 2: The Bear That Didn’t Fit

Derek Hastings called me at 11 p.m. on October 2nd, excited in that controlled way he had when something was good enough to be dangerous. He managed a sporting goods store in Orofino and spent every spare hour scouting the Kelly Creek backcountry, cameras up on every trail like a quiet net. He told me he’d gotten footage of a massive black bear—four hundred pounds, maybe more—hitting the same game trail three nights in a row, and he didn’t have to sell me on it because I could hear the grin in his voice. We’d hunted together since high school, fifteen years of shared cold mornings and long drags through brush, the kind of trust you only build when you’ve pulled each other out of stupid situations without judging. He said Brian Kowalski was in too—Forest Service guy, knew the Clearwater like a second language, and he’d already confirmed the area was open, the bear was legal, and the window was perfect.

We met at the Forest Road 250 trailhead at 5:30 a.m. on October 3rd, our headlamps cutting pale cones through the cold. Derek handed us printouts from the trail cam, and even grainy night footage couldn’t hide how huge the animal was. The bear filled the frame like a moving boulder, shoulder hump thick, gait heavy with the fat of a good summer. Brian studied the photos like he was reading a report that mattered. After a long minute he said four-fifty, maybe more, and warned that a bear that size could be territorial and mean if we bumped it in thick cover. I checked my .30-06 for the fourth time that morning, 180-grain loads, trusted rifle, trusted hands. Derek and Brian did the same. Then we started hiking into the darkness following GPS coordinates like they were scripture.

The trail ran along Kelly Creek for three miles, water loud enough to swallow our voices unless we stayed close. Brian took point, Derek in the middle with gear and bags, and I brought up the rear, watching our back trail out of habit even though only our trucks and empty road sat behind us. The plan was clean: get to the trail, set up with good lanes, wait for dawn, take the shot, and pack out. We’d done versions of that plan a dozen times. That’s the part that still makes me sick when people ask if I was careless. I wasn’t careless. I was competent. And sometimes competence is just a longer runway for disaster.

Chapter 3: Knocks on the Ridge

We reached the game trail at 7:15 a.m., sky just starting to pale behind the eastern ridge. The first thing I noticed wasn’t what I saw but what I didn’t. The forest felt too quiet. No casual bird chatter. No squirrel scolding. Just a held hush like the woods were waiting. I mentioned it to Brian, and he nodded, saying a big predator can shut smaller animals up, and that it might mean our bear was still close. Derek set up his small video camera on a tripod—he filmed hunts the way some people filmed vacations—and Brian and I spaced out about forty yards apart with solid backstops and clear lanes.

That’s when the little wrong things started piling up. Twenty yards up the trail, a pine as thick as my forearm had been snapped off about seven feet high, fresh sap running. Bears claw trees, bite them, rub on them, sure—but snapping a healthy pine like that didn’t fit. Derek shrugged it off as lightning damage or a widowmaker from above. I let it go because I didn’t have a better explanation I could say out loud without sounding like I was auditioning for a campfire story. Then the smell drifted through. Rank. Wild. Not quite bear musk, not quite elk stink, something thicker and sharper that made the back of my tongue taste metal. Brian caught it too, nose wrinkling, head turning slightly like he was trying to locate a source he didn’t want to find.

We waited. The sun climbed. The forest tried to wake itself back to normal. A gray squirrel worked branches above me, the creek kept running, and my legs started to cramp from stillness. That’s when the first knock cracked through the woods—wood on wood, sharp and solid, coming from somewhere up the ridge behind us. Dead branches fall all the time, but this didn’t sound like accident. It sounded like intention. Thirty seconds later it came again, closer. Then a third knock from a different direction, off to our left. The pattern moved around us like something circling.

Brian stood, scanning with binoculars, shoulders tense. Derek swung his camera toward the ridge, hand tightening on his rifle. Another knock, then another, and the rational part of my brain tried to line them up as wind and coincidence while the old part—the part that doesn’t speak English, only survival—kept insisting we were being pushed.

Brian crossed to Derek in a low crouch, and I followed. Brian whispered we needed to pack up and move, that something up on the ridge was going to blow game out and we were wasting our time. I agreed too fast, because I wanted off that trail more than I wanted any trophy bear.

We were halfway through breaking down the camera when the first rock hit.

Chapter 4: Stones with Aim

A baseball-sized stone cracked into a tree trunk ten feet from Brian’s shoulder, gouging bark and throwing splinters. The impact had the blunt authority of something thrown hard, not dropped. We froze, heads snapping toward the ridge. Another rock landed behind us in the trail, softball-sized, hard enough to crater soft ground. Derek said, tight and disbelieving, “Bears don’t throw rocks,” and Brian hissed at him to shut up and move.

We started retreating down the trail toward the creek, fast but not running. The stones kept coming for two hundred yards—arcing in from both sides, landing close enough to be intentional, but never hitting flesh. It felt like herding. Like a warning with teeth behind it. I kept expecting to see a person—some lunatic with a grudge, some prankster—until the angles made my stomach twist. The throws came from positions that put the thrower too high, too clean, as if the thing lobbing stones stood eight feet off the ground without needing a rock to stand on.

We splashed across the creek without using the log bridge, and the throwing stopped as soon as we hit the far bank, like we’d crossed a line it respected. We collapsed behind a fallen log and watched the far side with rifles held uselessly at low ready because there was nothing to aim at. That’s when I saw it—only a glimpse, maybe two seconds—a massive upright shape moving between pines fifty yards back from the game trail. Too big to be a bear. Too vertical. A stride that ate ground in a way that made my bones feel small. It turned its head slightly toward us, and the movement carried something that chilled me more than size: assessment.

None of us spoke. I think we were all doing the same thing—holding the word in our mouths and refusing to let it out. Because once you say it, you can’t put it back.

We hiked the remaining three miles to the trucks in under an hour, moving like men who’d forgotten why they’d come. At the trailhead Derek finally said what we were all thinking: this wasn’t normal bear behavior and maybe we should report it. Brian shook his head and called it adrenaline and misinterpretation, said maybe we’d bumped a grizzly, said we should go home and sleep before we decided to embarrass ourselves with a story no one would take seriously.

I drove back to Lewiston and tried to believe him. I took a long shower, drank three beers, fell asleep on the couch with football noise filling the room like insulation. For a few hours I almost convinced myself my eyes had lied.

Then my phone rang at 11:47 p.m., and Derek said, “I reviewed the footage.”

Chapter 5: The Frame That Looked Back

Derek showed up twenty minutes later with a laptop and a face that had already crossed into the territory where jokes die. We sat at my kitchen table, the overhead light too bright, the house too quiet, and he played the video. It started normal: game trail, dawn light, empty woods. Then the section where the knocks began—Derek had zoomed toward the ridge, and in the distance, between trees, something dark and upright flickered into view for a frame or two, then vanished. He paused, pointed, and my throat went dry because the proportions were wrong. Not bear wrong—world wrong.

He let it play. We saw the first rock’s arc, the trajectory coming from an elevated position that demanded height. Then the final segment—Derek’s camera held at his hip as we retreated—caught the thing moving through trees on our left flank for three clean seconds. Upright. Walking on two legs with a gait almost human but subtly off, as if the joints didn’t match our rules. Huge. Dark fur. And then, for one single frame, it turned toward the camera. Its face filled a corner of the shot: heavy brow, deep-set eyes, a mouth and nose that weren’t bear, weren’t human, and the eyes—God, the eyes—looked like something that understood it was being filmed.

We stared at that frozen frame until my coffee went cold. Finally I said we needed to show Brian, needed someone official to see it, needed to know what the hell was living in the Clearwater. Brian came over at 7:00 a.m. on October 4th still in uniform, drove straight from shift, and his face did the same slow collapse mine had done. We watched the footage three times. He tried to build explanations—man in a suit, camera artifact, optical illusion—but Derek had filmed animals for years and said with quiet certainty: it’s real.

Brian went quiet in a way that made me more afraid than any denial. After a minute he admitted there had been reports over the years, strange sightings written off as misidentification or hoax. He said if we took this public, we’d either become famous or become fools. Derek pushed for posting it, forcing attention. Brian argued we needed more evidence, more careful documentation, something that couldn’t be laughed away. I found myself siding with Brian, not because I cared about “science,” but because something about that frozen gaze made me feel hunted even through a screen.

We compromised. One more trip. Better cameras. Audio recorder. Plaster for casts. Evidence bags. Drone. GPS trackers. Satellite messenger with SOS. Enough ammo to fight off anything short of a small army, which in hindsight feels like the most pathetic optimism a man can have. We’d go back on October 5th, scout from a ridge, and only go in if we saw something we could handle.

That was the last time our planning felt like control.

Chapter 6: The Drone Falls

The hike to the overlook took ninety minutes in cold air that turned our breath into clouds. Brian launched the drone cleanly, and the tablet showed the forest from above: endless pine and fir, creek like a silver thread, game trail faint as a scar. For twenty minutes nothing moved except wind through treetops. Then Derek leaned in and whispered, “What the hell is that?”

On the screen, a small clearing showed ground torn up in a pattern that looked less like animal traffic and more like violence. Gouges radiated from a central point. Brian dropped the drone lower, and the details sharpened into tracks—massive overlapping prints, too large for any bear, stride length six feet or more, impressions deep enough to hold shadow. Derek filmed the tablet with his phone, because the instinct to document is hardwired in people who sense they’ll need proof later.

Then movement flickered at the far treeline of the clearing. Something large shifted in the shadows. The drone’s camera tracked it automatically. Brian froze the drone in place and we watched the shape edge forward, mostly hidden but clearly looking up—aware of the drone, aware of being watched. After ten seconds it reached down and picked up something from the ground and threw it.

The projectile rose in the feed, swelling fast, and then the screen snapped to static as the drone took a direct hit and fell out of the sky.

We stared for half a minute in stunned silence, then Brian said we had to recover it before the batteries died and we lost the stored footage. I argued that going near that clearing was insanity, that we’d just watched something knock a drone out of the air with accuracy that implied intent. Derek insisted the footage could prove everything, that we couldn’t leave it to rot. He and Brian outvoted me.

We descended toward the clearing with rifles ready, moving slow, scanning shadows. On the way we found trees pushed over and snapped at waist height—ponderosa pines that would take windstorms or vehicles to break, but there’d been no storms and we were miles from roads. The breaks showed compression on one side like something had shoved hard enough to exceed the tree’s strength. Three more broken trees formed a rough line, a boundary drawn in splintered wood.

When we stepped into the clearing, my throat went dry. The ground wasn’t just disturbed. It was destroyed—torn up like something had raged here and ripped the earth in fury. In the center lay an eight-foot-wide daybed of packed ground and branches, and the smell pouring out of it was overwhelming, concentrated musk and rot that made my eyes water.

We spotted the drone wreckage in tall grass twenty yards from the bed. Brian knelt to recover the SD card, hands shaking, and that’s when the roar started—low at first, a vibration in the chest, then climbing into a full-throated scream that echoed off ridges and sent birds exploding into flight. The sound seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, bouncing and multiplying until it felt like the air itself was shouting.

Then it stepped into view at the northern treeline, forty yards away, casual as an animal that knows it’s untouchable.

It was enormous—nine feet, closer to ten—built like a scaled-up gorilla with a mass that made my rifle feel like a toy. Dark fur covered it except face and palms. Its hands were the worst part because they looked useful: long fingers, articulated grip, nails like blunt tools. The face wasn’t monstrous. It was… wrong-human, the eyes too intelligent, expression too evaluative. It looked at us like we were a problem to be solved.

Derek filmed with shaking hands. Brian raised his rifle but couldn’t steady the sight. We took one step back, and the creature took two forward, closing distance with strides that ate space. I fired a warning shot into the air. Both creatures—because a second one appeared at the eastern treeline—froze for a beat, heads tilting as if processing the sound. Then the larger roared again and the smaller began moving toward us with clear intent.

Brian fired into the dirt in front of it. The smaller stopped, picked up a rock the size of a basketball, and threw it with surgical accuracy. The rock smashed Derek’s camera in his hands. Glass and plastic exploded. He stumbled back screaming, blood running from his fingers.

That broke whatever illusion we’d been holding. We ran.

Chapter 7: 73 Shots

We sprinted south into trees, branches whipping our faces. Behind us came huffing sounds like apes—group-hunting breath, coordinated movement. Fifty yards in, the larger creature appeared ahead of us as if it had paralleled our route and stepped out exactly where it needed to block the escape. It charged, and I fired center mass. I saw the hit—saw it flinch—and it kept coming like my bullet had been an insult. Brian fired controlled double taps, bark exploding behind the creature where rounds passed through, but it didn’t go down. It didn’t even slow enough to matter.

Derek went down in deadfall. The smaller creature was on him in a blink—not biting, not clawing, but grabbing him and lifting him off the ground like he weighed nothing. Derek screamed in a way I still hear at 4:42 a.m., the sound a man makes when his body realizes it’s not the strongest thing in the room.

I turned to fire at the creature holding Derek, and the larger one hit me from the side hard enough to launch me into a tree. Ribs cracked. Air left my lungs in a single brutal punch. My rifle spun into brush. I hit the ground gasping, eyes watering, and the creature loomed above me. The smell was suffocating—musk, wet fur, rot. I thought: this is it. This is where I die and become another name someone writes off as accident.

It didn’t kill me. It grabbed my ankle and dragged me like cargo through ferns and roots, scraping skin, bouncing my broken ribs against the ground until pain became a kind of white fog. Behind us, Brian’s rifle kept firing—faster now, less controlled. That’s where the seventy-three casings come from. That’s why the patterns looked erratic. He wasn’t shooting at a clean target anymore. He was trying to keep death away with noise and lead.

Then the forest erupted with multiple roars, the kind that makes your brain shut down language. The shooting stopped. Derek’s screaming changed pitch into something worse—agony—and then cut off midcry. A crash of movement moved away through brush, and then there was only my ragged breathing and the sound of my own body being dragged.

After maybe two hundred yards the grip released. The creature vanished into the forest with impossible silence. I lay there for minutes that might have been hours, trying to breathe around shattered ribs, trying to move my left leg that didn’t want to obey. My phone was dead. My GPS was gone. My rifle—when I found it later—had been twisted and shattered like a toy snapped in anger. That’s when I understood the worst truth: this wasn’t just strength. It was choice. It had destroyed what I used against it.

I crawled south using the sun, moving like an injured animal. After what felt like forever, I heard human voices—search-and-rescue call patterns. I tried to answer and croaked air until someone finally heard and crashed toward me. Four Forest Service rangers. A stretcher. A radio. Faces that shifted when they saw me, the way faces shift when they’re looking at a man who has seen something they don’t want to imagine.

They airlifted me to Gritman in Moscow. Surgery. Plates. Stitches. Questions. When I told the investigators what happened, their concern curdled into skepticism and then something colder. One asked, carefully, if we’d had an argument. If something had gotten out of hand. That’s when I realized my story didn’t just sound insane—it sounded convenient.

They found Derek on October 7th in a ravine. Officially: fall from height. Off the record: impacts didn’t match. They never found Brian. The clearing looked “normal” when they went back. The drone footage was corrupted. Derek’s camera was gone. My phone was dead. My broken rifle had teeth marks in the splintered wood that no animal report included.

So a year later I’m back at a podium, shaking, telling men with clipboards that I fired because something that shouldn’t exist stepped into daylight and decided we were trespassers. I’m not asking them to believe in monsters. I’m asking them to accept that the wilderness isn’t always ours. That sometimes the thing you’re tracking isn’t the predator. It’s the excuse.

And when they look at me like I’ve already failed, I understand the last part: the Clearwater will keep its secrets. The paperwork will stay clean. The map will keep collecting names. And I’ll keep waking at 4:42 with that roar in my ribs, because the only proof I have left is the way fear rewired my life into a warning I can’t stop hearing.