I Tried To Hunt a Bigfoot, And It Went Terribly Wrong – Sasquatch Encounter Story

THE SAWTOOTH MAIMING

A hospital-bed confession in six chapters

Chapter 1 — Phantom Fingers and a Convenient Lie

I’m writing this from a hospital bed, staring at the place where my left hand should be. Three weeks ago they took my arm off below the elbow, and the strangest part isn’t the stump or the stitches or the way nurses avert their eyes when they think you’re trying not to look. The strangest part is the pain in fingers that don’t exist. Phantom pain, they call it—my brain lighting up old pathways like a bad habit, sending messages to a hand that will never answer again.

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.

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The doctors keep asking what happened. I keep telling them it was a hunting accident. That is technically true. We were hunting. It’s just that the thing we went after wasn’t any bear, no matter what the official report says, no matter what the search coordinator told the family, no matter how badly everyone needs that lie to be enough.

My buddy in the next wing over hasn’t spoken since they brought us in. He just stares at the wall like he’s waiting for it to open and swallow him. A psychiatrist visits twice a day and uses clean terms—acute dissociative disorder, severe PTSD—clinical language for a mind that went somewhere unreachable and locked the door behind it. Our third friend never made it out of the mountains. Search teams looked for two weeks. They found his backpack, torn as if something had treated nylon like paper, and one boot. No body. No blood trail leading anywhere that made sense. Just absence, like the mountain took him whole and didn’t leave so much as a receipt.

The insurance company wants a detailed statement. The police closed their file. The family wants answers. And I owe my friend more than a story that fits neatly into a form. I need to write this down while my memory is still sharp, before time and medication and other people’s certainty sand it into something easier to swallow. Because what lives up in those Idaho mountains isn’t folklore. It’s not a campfire joke. And it doesn’t care what anyone believes.

Chapter 2 — The Farmer Who Spoke Like He’d Been Cornered

It started with a phone call on a Tuesday morning. I was drinking coffee on my porch when my cell rang—unknown number, Idaho area code. I almost let it go to voicemail. I think about that sometimes, the way you think about exits you didn’t take.

The voice on the other end was rough, older, and tired in a way sleep doesn’t fix. He said his name didn’t matter, but he had land near the Sawtooth Range and something was killing his livestock. It began small: chickens disappearing late summer. Then it got bolder. Sheep torn apart inside their pen, fence intact. Something had climbed an eight-foot barrier like it was stepping over a puddle.

Then he lost a calf—dragged halfway across the pasture, neck broken. Three nights before he called me, it killed his horse. A quarter horse gelding named Duke, fifteen hands high and built like a tank. Twelve hundred pounds. The farmer said “broke its neck and dragged it two hundred yards into the treeline” and his voice cracked on the horse’s name like he’d just said goodbye to a friend.

I asked him why he hadn’t called animal control. He went quiet so long I thought the call had dropped. Then he said he already had. They came with professional leg-hold traps, heavy steel meant to hold a six-hundred-pound bear. The next morning the traps weren’t sprung. They were destroyed—ripped apart and scattered across his property as if something had taken offense at the idea of restraint.

He offered good money. Five hundred a day for each of us, plus two grand if we “dealt with it.” For three hunters who worked construction when the season was slow, that kind of cash speaks louder than unease. I told him I’d talk to my buddies. He said, “Bring plenty of ammunition.” Not like advice. Like a warning dressed as casual conversation.

Before he hung up, I pressed for details. Anything. Any sign. He paused again, then said the attacks always came from the north ridge near the old forest. “You’ll know it when you see it,” he said. And there was something in the way he spoke—like he wasn’t hiring us so much as handing the problem to strangers because he couldn’t bear to hold it alone anymore.

Chapter 3 — Three Rifles and One Bad Confidence

I called my two buddies immediately. We’d been hunting together since high school, almost fifteen years of shared seasons and shared stories. Deer, elk, the occasional mountain lion when permits allowed. We’d taken down a black bear once when one got too bold around campsites. A “problem bear” didn’t sound like anything we couldn’t handle.

We spent Wednesday packing like men who believed preparation was the same as control. I brought my Winchester Model 70 in .300 Win Mag—enough rifle for anything that walks these mountains. My older buddy brought his Remington 700 in .30-06, classic and reliable. The younger one carried a Savage 110 in .308, quick and familiar in his hands. We packed a hundred rounds each, which is absurd for a bear hunt, but the farmer’s “bring plenty” had crawled into my head and started nesting there.

We loaded camping gear—three-man tent, bags rated below freezing, stove, canned food, jerky, first aid, flares. We joked about who’d get the kill shot. We laughed like we were immune to the possibility of being wrong. Looking back, that laughter makes me sick. It’s the sound of men who still think the wilderness is a set of rules they understand.

We drove Thursday morning, six hours of roads that got worse the closer we got to the mountains. Pavement to gravel to rutted dirt. My truck bottomed out twice, metal scraping rock, and each time it felt like the land warning us in a language we refused to learn.

The farmhouse sat alone beneath the north ridge, old and tired and weather-beaten. The land around it was beautiful in that harsh way that reminds you you’re not in charge. Pines climbed the slopes. The mountains rose like teeth.

The farmer came out when we pulled up. Late fifties, maybe sixty, hard to tell with men whose faces are carved by weather. His hands were thick and calloused, but his eyes were what I can’t forget: dark circles, a haunted look, the gaze of someone who keeps listening for a sound he hates. He didn’t shake hands. He didn’t do small talk. He pointed toward the north treeline and said, flatly, that’s where it came from.

He gave us supplies he’d set aside—water jugs, rope, batteries, a first aid kit that looked used too often. When I tried to ask what he’d seen, he shook his head and said only that his dogs hid under the porch when the sounds started. Then he went inside. I heard one deadbolt slide. Then another. Then a third. Three heavy locks in the middle of nowhere, as if the door was the only thin line between him and something that knew where he lived.

We set camp near the fence line as the sun dropped and the cold came fast. We ate chili and drank coffee and planned the next day like the world was normal: head for the ridge at first light, look for tracks, find the horse remains, identify the predator.

Then night settled and the forest did something I’ve never experienced before. It went silent. Not “quiet.” Silent. No insects. No owls. No small animals in brush. Just our fire crackling and wind in trees like a held breath. Even my older buddy—who always had an explanation—stared into the flames with his jaw set tight.

Around midnight, the sound came from the north ridge. Low, deep, starting like a growl and rising into something that wasn’t a howl or a scream, but carried the same meaning both do: territory, warning, hunger. It echoed off the mountains and made the hair on my neck lift like my body recognized the truth before my mind could name it.

We tried to laugh it off. Elk. Mountain lion. Something normal. The jokes tasted like ash.

We took watches. I sat with my rifle across my lap, scanning darkness beyond the firelight, feeling watched in that old primitive way that makes your skin tighten. Nothing showed itself. Nothing moved. And somehow that made it worse.

Chapter 4 — The Track That Wouldn’t Let Us Lie

We started at first light, breath steaming in the cold. We moved north in a loose line, scanning ground and bark for sign. A mile from camp, the younger one found the first track in mud by a stream. It was enormous—eighteen inches long, eight wide, five toes clearly impressed, a heel and a flat arch like a human foot scaled into something grotesque.

We tried to explain it away because that’s what sane minds do when faced with insanity. Distorted bear print. Overlap. Mud shrinkage. But as we climbed and the forest thickened into old growth, we found more evidence that refused to fit. Branches snapped clean at six to seven feet high, fresh wood exposed. Deep scratches on trunks starting at nine feet and running higher. Too tall. Too strong.

Near noon, we found Duke. Or what was left of him. The smell hit first—sweet rot, heavy and thick. The carcass lay in a clearing, partially covered with branches and dirt like something had tried to cache it. Bears do that, sure. But when we pulled the covering away, my stomach turned. The ribs were cracked open outward, sternum shattered, as if something had reached in with hands instead of teeth. The neck was broken so badly the head sat at an angle that looked obscene.

The younger one vomited into the brush. My older buddy stood over the corpse and said quietly that this wasn’t normal bear behavior. Not the violence, not the strength, not the way most meat remained untouched. This didn’t feel like hunger. It felt like demonstration.

We followed drag marks uphill—deep furrows in dirt, snapped saplings, flattened grass—toward the ridge. We found another track, perfect and undeniable. No distortion. No overlap. Five distinct toes, pressed deep. My older buddy put his hand inside it and his fingers looked like a child’s. None of us spoke for a full minute. The silence between us was the moment belief shifted into fear.

By early afternoon we reached a clearing with stones arranged in a rough circle. Too large to move by hand, yet there were no roads, no equipment. Inside the ring lay bones—deer, elk, smaller animals—some old and bleached, others newer. The place smelled like decay and something else, something musky and animal, as if the air itself had been lived in.

We kept moving because we didn’t know what else to do. Turning back felt like admitting we were outmatched by a thing we couldn’t name. We told ourselves we needed more information. We told ourselves daylight was safer. We told ourselves lies until the ridge proved us wrong.

Chapter 5 — The Cave Mouth and the Amber Eyes

We reached the ridge face around four. The sun was already starting to slide, painting the mountain in gold and shadow. That’s when we saw the cave opening in the rock face—eight feet high, six wide, a dark mouth set into gray stone. The drag marks led straight into it. Bones lay scattered around the entrance, some fresh enough to still carry dried meat. Others were bleached relics.

The trees around the cave were dead. A rough circle of pines stripped of bark, branches broken, trunks scarred with deep vertical gouges. It looked like the forest had been punished for standing too close.

The smell coming out of that cave wasn’t just rot. It was a predator’s den: musk, old blood, damp fur, and something sour that made my eyes water. We should have marked it and left. We should have waited for morning. We should have called wildlife services and let the professionals argue about what “professional” even means against something that drags horses.

But we were tired, cold, and running on stubbornness. My older buddy said we should at least look inside, just to the entrance, just enough to identify what we were dealing with. We checked rifles, safeties off, flashlights strong. Then we stepped into the cave.

It went deeper than it looked, walls rough with strange scratch patterns—lines and gouges that almost resembled symbols, as if something had been marking stone the way men mark wood. The floor was uneven, littered with bones and decomposing matter that turned my stomach.

Two minutes in, our lights caught a clearing: a massive nest made of thick branches and pine needles, eight feet across, woven with a crude intelligence. Around it, skulls were arranged deliberately, not scattered—deer and elk and things I couldn’t name, set like trophies or warnings. The younger one whispered that we needed to leave.

Then the breathing began deeper in the darkness—slow, heavy, echoing, as if something large was awake and taking its time. Footsteps followed. Heavy footsteps. And then we saw the eyes reflecting our beams—too high up, too far above where a bear’s eyes should be. Amber. Almost orange.

It made a sound that started as a grunt and became a roar so loud the cave seemed to amplify it into a weapon. We ran for the entrance. Gunfire erupted behind us—three rifles in an enclosed space, deafening, concussive. I saw rounds hit fur and flesh. It barely slowed. It came out of the dark like a freight train—eight feet tall, shoulders impossibly wide, arms long and thick, a flat face that was too human in the wrong places, heavy brow, wide mouth, yellow teeth flashing when it roared.

It swung one arm and hit my older buddy across the chest. The impact lifted him off his feet and slammed him into stone with a crack I still hear in my sleep. The younger one and I burst out into fading daylight and kept running—until we heard him scream.

We turned. He was crawling toward the entrance, blood on his face. The creature stood behind him in the cave mouth, framed by darkness like it belonged there. Our friend reached for us, begging. The creature grabbed his leg with one massive hand and dragged him backward into the cave as if he weighed nothing. He clawed at dirt, leaving furrows, then vanished into black.

The screaming cut off. What followed was worse: a crunching sound, wet and final.

The creature appeared again at the entrance, standing there and watching us like it was daring us to return. And that’s when the truth locked in: it wasn’t just defending a den. It was making a point. It wanted us to understand what it could do.

We backed away. Then we ran.

Chapter 6 — The Fence Line and the Second Call

We sprinted downhill as the forest darkened fast. Behind us, crashing brush and grunting roars. It followed. It was fast, impossibly fast, and we could hear it closing distance, trees splintering as it moved. We hit a steep section and the younger one slipped, sliding down a slope. I went over after him, tumbling through branches and rocks until we slammed into thick brush at the bottom.

We lay still, gasping. My left arm was ruined—bone broken, pain radiating hot and sick. The younger one bled from the head, eyes unfocused. Above us, the creature stood silhouetted against the sky and threw a rock the size of a basketball down the slope. It landed ten feet away, crashing through branches. A warning. A test. A promise of what it could do if we moved.

After it finally withdrew, we waited until full dark and stumbled on, guided by moonlight and terror. Hours passed. Around midnight we heard the call again from up the mountain—and then an answer from another direction. Then another. More than one. They were communicating, positioning, herding us downhill like prey being funneled.

By two a.m., we saw the farmhouse lights through the trees. Fifty yards. Then twenty. We ran for the fence line like it was a border between worlds.

It caught us before we reached it. I heard the younger one scream and turned in time to see the creature lift him off the ground with both hands, holding him like a doll. I emptied my pistol into its body, aiming for the head. One shot hit something vital enough to make it roar in pain and rage. It dropped my buddy and clawed at its face, blood dark in moonlight.

I dragged my buddy under the fence. My arm collapsed under me and we hit the ground hard on the farmer’s side. The creature stood at the fence line watching, eyes reflecting farmhouse light, blood running down its face. It didn’t cross. It just stared, as if boundaries mattered to it in ways we didn’t understand.

We pounded on the door. The farmer yanked it open, face going pale, and pulled us inside. He slammed deadbolts and shoved furniture against the door with the practiced speed of someone who’d done this before. “I tried to warn you,” he said quietly, not angry—defeated. He told us he’d lost two ranch hands the year before. He told us everybody around here knew, but nobody talked.

Through the window, we saw it at the property edge, standing in moonlight, watching the house. The farmer told us not to look at it, not to engage, not to “invite it.” After five minutes it turned and walked back into the trees like a nightmare deciding to spare you.

Paramedics arrived. Then a helicopter. Then a trauma center. Infection took my arm anyway. The younger one’s mind shut down like a circuit breaker. The older one is gone, unrecovered, folded into the mountain’s silence. And every official report says “bear.” Because bear is a word people can live with.

But I can’t. I know what I saw in that cave. I know what drags a twelve-hundred-pound horse uphill and caches it like a toy. I know what stands eight feet tall with amber eyes and doesn’t fear rifle fire the way animals should.

So here’s my statement, my confession, my warning: if a desperate man in the mountains offers you good money and won’t tell you why he sounds afraid, don’t take the job. Some hunts aren’t hunts. Some are invitations. And some things in the Sawtooths aren’t being hunted at all.

They’re hunting.