‘I Was Sent To Hunt Down Bigfoot’ – Pilot’s Terrifying Sasquatch Encounter Story

The Contract in the Cassiar

Chapter 1: A Man in the Wrong Hangar

I never believed in cryptids until three months ago.

Fifteen years of flying bush planes in northern British Columbia will make you superstitious about weather, engines, and maintenance schedules, but not about monsters. I believed in fuel gauges and torque values. I believed in altitudes and checklists. Anything else was just bar talk.

.

.

.

Then the man in the expensive coat walked into my hangar and changed everything I thought I knew about the mountains.

It was early October, gray light seeping in through warped hangar doors, the air smelling of oil, aluminum, and damp pine. My little charter operation was barely breathing. Two months behind on hangar rent, creditors calling twice a week, and my bank making noises about repossessing the only plane I owned.

That’s when he appeared.

He looked wrong in my hangar—like a surgeon in a scrap yard. Tailored jacket, immaculate boots that had never met real mud, a watch that probably cost more than my annual fuel bill. His hair was perfect in that “I pay someone a lot to make it look casual” way. He stood there, carefully not touching anything, and asked for me by name.

He said he represented a private consortium operating remote research and survey camps in the Cassiar Mountains. He didn’t name the company. Didn’t show a logo. Just slid a leather folder onto my workbench and started talking.

Over the past six months, he said, they’d “lost contact” with three field teams in a specific region. Equipment missing. Camps ransacked. Two researchers gone without a trace. The official story was “logistical disruption.” The way he said it told me the unofficial story was a lot uglier.

They wanted aerial reconnaissance—regular flights over a twenty–square–mile grid in one of the most remote patches of wilderness I’d ever seen on a map. Detailed photographs from multiple altitudes. Reports on anything unusual: clearings, structures, smoke, movement.

Five thousand dollars per flight. Minimum of ten flights guaranteed.

I almost laughed in his face. Not because it was funny, but because it was more money than I’d made in the last three months combined. My co‑pilot—Tommy, not his real name—was there when the guy laid it out. I saw the same calculation flicker behind his eyes. Two sets of eyes are better than one in country that will kill you if anything goes wrong, and he’d been flying with me for five years as my spotter and backup.

Tommy used to guide hunters and trappers in these mountains. He can track anything, read clouds like a book, and tell you which berries will feed you and which will drop you in minutes. Where I trusted instruments, he trusted the dirt and the wind.

We both knew a deal this good meant we weren’t getting the whole truth.

We should have asked why a supposedly legitimate survey consortium wasn’t hiring a professional aerial mapping outfit with twin‑engine birds and mounted sensors. Why they were paying a desperate bush pilot and his wilderness buddy a ridiculous amount of cash for “simple photos.”

But when your plane is one bad month away from being chained to a bank’s yard fence, you don’t interrogate miracles.

You just sign.

Chapter 2: Signs in the Trees

The Cassiar coordinates they handed over mapped to deep nowhere. Even by northern BC standards, this was wilderness with a capital W. No roads. No cabins. No mining scars, logging cuts, or old ranger towers. Just an ocean of black-green spruce, jagged ridges, permanent snowfields, and the occasional high, cold lake that never saw a boat.

Our job was to fly cross‑hatched patterns over that grid, cameras running, Tommy leaning out his side window with binoculars and a telephoto lens, calling out anything that looked off.

The first three flights were uneventful. Trees. More trees. A few avalanche scars. Shadowed draws where the snow lingered. Moose tracks along streambeds. Once we saw a grizzly shouldering its way through dwarf pines, its back like a moving stump. We marked everything, photographed everything, sent it all in.

Our client was always waiting at the little office I shared with two other outfits, immaculate as ever, asking specific questions about elevations and coordinates but never volunteering what they were actually looking for.

It was the fourth flight when things got strange.

We were flying low, no more than a few hundred feet above the treetops, when Tommy tapped the window and pointed down. Through the gaps in the canopy, I saw it too: a line carved through forest that had no business being there.

Not a game trail. Not a logging road. A corridor.

Wide enough for something big to move comfortably, it wound between trunks in a way that looked deliberate—too clean, too consistent. Every thirty or forty meters, we saw breaks in branches at heights a moose could never reach. Eight, nine, ten feet up, limbs had been snapped clean rather than fallen, leaving pale, raw scars against dark bark.

“Not wind,” Tommy muttered into the headset. “Not snow load, either. Those were broken. Twisted.”

Other clearings we’d written off as lightning strikes or blowdowns began to look different when we scrutinized them. Fallen trees were arranged almost geometrically, trunks parallel, crossings at near‑right angles, sometimes forming crude Xs and grids.

The forest out there wasn’t untouched. It was managed.

By what, we didn’t know.

We saw no signs of the “missing survey teams.” No tents. No tarps glinting in the sun. No cut platforms for helipads. No orange flagging tape fluttering from branches. For three supposedly active field teams, there was remarkably little human presence.

On our sixth flight, the mountain invited itself into the cockpit.

It started with the radio.

One minute we were listening to the usual static and occasional chatter from distant forestry aircraft; the next, every frequency we flipped through was hijacked by a low, rhythmic pulse.

Thump. Thump. Thump‑thump. Pause. Thump. Thump.

It wasn’t electrical interference I recognized. It sounded disturbingly like drumming. Deep and regular, too precise to be random atmospherics, and it intensified whenever we crossed certain sectors of the grid—always the same ones.

Then the compass went crazy.

The needle spun lazy circles anytime we flew over those same zones, ignoring the magnetic north it had faithfully loved for years. I had to fly purely on GPS and visual references, and out here, one glitch in either could mean a fast introduction to treetops.

On the way back to base, the engine started running rough. Not catastrophic, but enough to set my teeth on edge. A persistent hiccup in one cylinder, a faint lag on throttle response.

Back on the ground, my mechanic checked everything. Fuel lines. Magnetos. Plugs. Compression. He found nothing. The engine purred like it had never hiccuped in its life.

Mentioning the radio and compass issues to our client got me a flat, unsurprised nod.

“Yes,” he said. “Our field teams reported something similar before we lost contact.”

He said it like he was confirming the weather forecast.

Tommy and I exchanged glances. We both knew this had gone beyond “odd.” But the checks were clearing. Five flights in and I’d already pulled my business back from the cliff.

We agreed to keep flying, but we watched the mountains with different eyes after that.

Chapter 3: The Ones in the Dark

On the tenth flight—the one that was supposed to be our last under the original contract—the mountains took their shot.

We were halfway through the grid, midday sun throwing knife‑sharp shadows across ridges, when the engine misfire that had been a whisper decided to scream.

Oil pressure dropped like a rock. The RPMs fluttered. A thin trail of smoke started feathering from the exhaust stack. The plane shuddered with every prop rotation.

My eyes flicked across gauges, then out the windshield. Up here, there’s no such thing as a safe crash. There’s only “less suicidal than the alternatives.”

“Lake,” Tommy snapped, binoculars up. “Two o’clock. Small one. East side looks like a beach.”

I banked hard. Through the cockpit glass, the world swung and filled with trees, then water—dark and still, cradled in a bowl of forest and stone. On its eastern edge, a narrow strip of pale gray where gravel met water: our only runway.

We came in low over the treetops, skimming needles, my hands locked around the yoke, coaxing a dying engine to give me just thirty more seconds. Twenty. Ten.

The impact with the water punched the breath out of me. The floats slammed down, kicked sideways, then we were skimming, plowing, shuddering, dragging. The prop caught a wave and bit air wrong. I heard the ugly shriek of metal bending. The plane finally staggered to a stop in the shallows, half‑floating, half‑dragging.

We got it onto the beach by pure stubbornness and adrenaline, wading in chest‑deep water, pushing against aluminum and current until it ground onto gravel.

Then everything was quiet.

The ELT should have triggered automatically, broadcasting our distress to anyone listening on the emergency frequency. When I checked it, the antenna had sheared off in the landing. The unit blinked, but its crippled voice went nowhere.

We were alone. Completely.

It was already after three. In October, that means you have a couple of hours of decent light before the world shrinks to the diameter of your campfire. We had an emergency kit—rations for three days if we were conservative, a tarp, a small stove, some tools, water purification. We rigged the tarp off the plane as a lean‑to, used the fuselage as a windbreak, and started hauling driftwood and deadfall for a fire.

Tommy was working the tree line with an armload of branches when he stopped dead.

“Tracks,” he called quietly.

In the mud along the shoreline, just beyond where the last waves had lapped, were footprints.

Not moose. Not bear. Not anything I’d ever seen.

They were unmistakably feet—broad, long, with five pronounced toes. No claws. No boot tread. Bare. The smallest was eighteen inches long and nearly eight inches wide. The impressions were deep enough to suggest something heavy—very heavy—had walked there, and the stride length between them was far beyond any human’s.

We both squatted there for a long moment, staring, the breath steaming between us. I didn’t say the word out loud.

I didn’t have to. It was there, crouching in the back of both our skulls.

We built the fire high and hot that night. The temperature plunged as soon as the sun slid behind the serrated peaks, taking color with it. The mountains went from blue to black in minutes. Our firelight carved a small orange bubble out of the darkness.

We didn’t sleep.

Around midnight, the forest woke up.

Footsteps. Heavy ones. Not the nervous, fast scurry of deer or the soft patter of small predators. These came slow. Deliberate. Pacing. Circling.

We heard branches bend and then break under weight. The sound drifted in from the trees just beyond the reach of the fire, moved around, vanished, then reappeared on the opposite side. Sometimes there were two sets at once. Sometimes three.

Every now and then, a pair of eyes would catch the light: twin golden reflections hanging in the darkness six, seven, maybe eight feet off the ground. As soon as we swung our flashlights toward them, they disappeared. Whether their owners stepped back, ducked, or closed their eyes, we couldn’t tell.

We sat back‑to‑back by the flames, his .30‑06 rifle laid across his knees, my .44 heavy and too small in my hands. The forest pressed in around us like a held breath.

They watched us until just before dawn. Never closer than fifty yards. Never far enough that we could pretend they weren’t there.

When the light finally bled into the sky and color crept back into the trees, the sounds faded. We slept in snatches, the kind that doesn’t really rest you, just interrupts the panic.

In the morning, we saw how busy they’d been.

Chapter 4: The People in the Timber

The beach and the forest around camp looked like a crime scene.

Footprints—dozens of them—pocked the damp earth around our shelter, the plane, the fire pit. Large ones, like we’d seen at the waterline. Smaller ones, still enormous by human standards. Clearly, there were at least three individuals, probably more.

Our gear hadn’t been stolen. It had been…organized.

Our packs, which we’d left leaned against the fuselage, now sat several feet away, neatly lined up. Inside them, items had been carefully removed and reinserted into different pockets. The emergency rations lay in precise little piles: energy bars together, packets of dried fruit together, water purifier tabs stacked like coins.

Nothing was missing.

On the plane’s metal skin, the morning frost held prints. Not paw smears. Hands.

Huge, five‑fingered hands had explored the aircraft in the night. We traced the ghostly marks across the wings, over the cowling, around the doors, even along the bent propeller. The fingers were thick and long, the span enormous. The prints were placed deliberately—on hinges, seams, handles—as though someone had been methodically testing our machine’s anatomy.

“They’re studying it,” Tommy said quietly. “Studying us.”

Daylight didn’t bring much comfort. We moved around camp with our weapons close, nerves frayed, senses stretched. Here and there, between trunks, we caught hints of dark shapes. They never fully stepped out. A shoulder here, the suggestion of a head, the ripple of fur as something shifted weight.

Our visitors were still there. They simply preferred the second row.

By midafternoon, we both arrived at the same uneasy conclusion: if they’d wanted us dead, we already would be. They’d had all night. They’d encircled us while we were at our most vulnerable and outnumbered. No attack had come.

That meant something. What exactly, we didn’t know.

We started leaving small offerings at the edge of camp. A bit of jerky. Half an energy bar. A cheap multitool we could live without. We placed them in a clear spot on a flat rock just beyond the firelight’s reach.

By the next morning, the gifts were gone.

In their place were carefully arranged stones, smooth river rocks stacked into small, deliberate cairns. Beside them lay edible roots we recognized, bunches of late berries, and strips of what looked like smoked fish or dried meat—just a few pieces, arranged neatly on pine boughs.

They were feeding us.

What had begun as a siege was starting to feel uncomfortably like a…relationship.

On the second morning, we found fish—three fat trout, cleaned and laid out like an offering at the edge of camp. We cooked one over our fire and left the other two where we’d found them.

Later, the fish were gone, replaced with a cluster of medicinal herbs I’d only ever seen in survival manuals. Plants Tommy knew by their Indigenous names, leaves used for fever, roots that helped with infection.

We weren’t just surviving in their territory. The inhabitants were helping us do it.

On the fourth day, the alpha stepped out of the trees.

Chapter 5: The Alpha and the Beacon

We were checking the plane for the thousandth hopeless time when Tommy stiffened and touched my shoulder. His gaze was fixed on the tree line.

It emerged from between two massive pines like a bear walking on its hind legs, except no bear has a chest like that, arms that long, or a face that can think.

It stood perhaps thirty yards away, half in shadow, half in dappled light. Eight and a half feet tall, at least. Shoulders wide enough to fill a doorway. Fur a deep, weathered brown shading to gray along the jaw and temples. This one was older. That much was obvious in the way it carried itself and the posture of the ones behind it, just barely visible, hanging back as if waiting for permission.

Its face was what pinned me in place. Heavy brow, deep-set eyes, broad nose, powerful jaw. It was not human. But there was no mistaking the intelligence in those eyes.

We both lifted our weapons automatically, then held them halfway, caught between instinct and the quiet, measuring way it watched us.

For a long breath, nobody moved.

Then it did something that shouldn’t have been possible.

It raised one enormous hand, palm facing us in a slow, deliberate gesture that every person on Earth recognizes: greeting.

My mouth went dry.

Tommy, God bless his insane heart, pointed a finger toward his own chest and spoke his name aloud. “Tommy.”

The creature’s head tilted, eyes flicking to his gesture, then back to his face. It made a low series of sounds—complex, layered, not random noise. It pointed, in the same way, to its own chest.

We had no hope of reproducing those sounds, but we understood what it was doing.

We spent the next hour in a strange, stumbling exchange of gestures and simple words. We pointed to the plane. To the fire. To the fish. To ourselves. It watched, mimicked, tried certain movements back. Behind it, half-hidden, we saw others—smaller, lighter-furred, one with a limp—peeking, listening, keeping their distance.

We showed it a match. Struck it. Flames jumped from phosphorus and friction. The alpha flinched, then leaned in, fascinated. It made a short, sharp call over its shoulder, and a darker shape in the trees shifted, watching.

We showed it a knife. Cut a piece of rope. It huffed, not in fear, but in something like approval, then turned its head to one side and made a sound that might have been repeated by an unseen watcher.

Their curiosity mirrored our own. Two species, at the edge of each other’s comprehension, feeling around for something that wouldn’t end in blood.

Later that afternoon, while going through our emergency kit for spare batteries, I found something that wasn’t supposed to be there.

It was a small, matte-black device about the size of a matchbox, with a stubby antenna and a single LED blinking an insistent green. I hadn’t packed it. It wasn’t part of any survival kit I’d ever seen.

A tracker.

Someone had hidden it in our gear before we took off.

I showed it to Tommy. His face darkened.

“We were never meant to come back,” he said quietly. “Or at least… not alone.”

The radio we’d written off as fried crackled suddenly to life. A voice I recognized—our polished contact—filtered through the static, clipped and efficient, speaking to someone else on another end we couldn’t hear.

“Ground teams will insert at coordinates Delta-Three at first light. Air support on standby. Primary objective: biological acquisition. Secondary: tech retrieval. Local assets”—that was us, I realized—“have provided location confirmation. Proceed with caution. Evidence of tool use and organized social structure.”

Then the line went dead.

They weren’t coming to rescue us.

They were coming to capture what we’d found.

We had maybe twelve hours.

Chapter 6: Choosing a Side

How do you warn something you can barely talk to that an armed hunting party is on its way?

We didn’t have a word for helicopter in their language. We didn’t have a word for “betrayal.” We barely had working symbols for “fish” and “thanks.”

But we had pictures. Dirt. Panting urgency.

We drew crude outlines in the sand: long shapes with rotors, men with guns, nets. We pointed at the sky. We mimed noise. We drew smaller figures—rough sketches of them—inside boxes. Then we slashed Xs through those boxes.

The alpha squatted, thick knuckles resting on its knees, and studied the drawings for a long time. Its eyes flicked to our faces, reading our posture, our fear. It grunted, low and complex, then tipped its head back and let loose a series of calls that rolled across the water and into the trees.

The response was immediate. Shadows detached from trunks and stepped forward. More of them than we’d imagined. Some smaller, juveniles peering around larger bodies. One matriarchal-looking female with silver streaking her hair. They gathered around their leader as it spoke in a deep, rhythmic language of huffs, clicks, and vowels. Their heads turned as one in our direction at certain points, then toward the trees, then skyward.

We watched what looked unnervingly like a council meeting.

Within an hour, the forest cleaned itself.

Footprints were smoothed with branches. The exchange stones were scattered. Any sign of the fish, the herbs, the little cairns—they vanished. A few strands of hair clinging to bark, a faint impression here and there, but nothing obvious. The overlarge handprints on our plane evaporated under swipes of damp moss.

Before they left, the alpha approached us one last time.

This close, it was overwhelming. You could smell it—musky, earthy, carrying the faint tang of cedar smoke and something like wet stone. Its eyes were level with the top of the fuselage.

It placed one massive hand on its own chest. Then, very slowly, extended that hand toward us in a gesture that felt like thank you and goodbye blended into one.

I don’t mind admitting my vision blurred.

We scratched away the drawings in the dirt. We wiped the tracker clean and turned it off. We spent the remaining hours making sure our camp looked like two stranded men who’d seen nothing but trees and their own fear.

At dawn on the seventh day, the sky filled with the thrum of rotors.

Three helicopters dropped over the ridge like large, angry insects, doors open, faces masked behind goggles. The men who stepped onto our beach weren’t SAR techs. Their gear was too dark, their weapons too specialized, their eyes too clinical.

Our well–dressed contact strode behind them, immaculate even in the dust and rotor wash, his coat zipped, his expression polite and sharp.

He asked how we’d survived. We told him the truth, just not the whole of it. Emergency landing. Broken ELT. Rationing supplies. Strange noises at night. Possibly bears. Maybe moose. Hard to say. Stress plays tricks.

He asked, too casually, if we’d seen anything “unusual.” Anything “walking upright.” Any “unconventional wildlife behavior.”

We shrugged. We’d heard things. Seen eyes. Found tracks we couldn’t identify. But no, nothing we could photograph. No, nothing we could swear to.

They didn’t believe us, not really. They turned the area inside out for three days, sweeping the forest with thermal imagers, running ground-penetrating radar, planting acoustic monitors, tromping through undergrowth like an invading army.

They found exactly what the creatures allowed them to find: a few isolated tracks, some ambiguous scratches on bark, nothing that could stand up in any lab or courtroom without being laughed out.

Finally, with growing frustration and no trophy to bring home, they extracted.

Back at my hangar, we were handed a check for fifty thousand dollars and a stack of confidentiality agreements thick enough to stop a bullet. We signed where they told us to. It turns out integrity is easier when your business isn’t one letter away from foreclosure.

The money pulled me out of my financial death spiral, but it didn’t quiet my head.

Because now I knew.

Chapter 7: What We Owe to the Unknown

Three months later, I still see its eyes when I close mine. The alpha, standing at the edge of our camp, absorbing us into its world with a gaze that weighed and measured and, somehow, forgave.

Tommy and I haven’t gone back to the Cassiar. We haven’t been asked to, and I don’t think we would, even if the money was twice as good and the contract came with a brand‑new plane.

Someone is still watching that grid. I can tell from the occasional offhand comment from other pilots, the way a certain big, unmarked helicopter passes over every few weeks, always headed in that direction. I know those mountains are under surveillance from people with more resources and fewer qualms than I have.

What we saw out there was not a glitch in nature. It was not a one‑off freak. It was a community. A society built in shadow and silence, wrapped in fur instead of Gore‑Tex, moving along corridors we barely recognized as paths.

They watched us for days before deciding to step closer. They fed us, traded with us, shared medicine we didn’t ask for. They understood enough of us to test our intentions and then vanish before our own kind arrived with nets and guns.

We didn’t save them. They saved themselves. They’ve been doing it for a very long time.

But for one brief, precarious week, we were more than intruders. We were guests.

If you fly over remote country someday and see something that doesn’t make sense—trees snapped ten feet up in neat lines, clearings too geometric to be natural, faint paths that look like they were brushed by something large and careful—do yourself and them a favor.

Observe quietly. Respect the fact that not every mystery exists for us to solve.

And for God’s sake, don’t call it in and sell it to the highest bidder.

Some beings have earned the right to remain legends.