Missionary Lived With a Bigfoot SINCE 80s. The God They Pray To Will Shake Your Faith…
Chapter 1 — The Missionary Who Carried God Like Luggage
We are taught that faith is the evidence of things not seen. We are taught that man was made in God’s image, and that only we carry the spark of the divine. I believed that with the clean certainty of a man who had never been properly humbled. In 1983, I was Thomas, thirty-two years old, Jesuit-trained, newly ordained, packed with scripture and confidence. My order sent me into the Yukon with a simple assignment dressed as holiness: reach a remote band of First Nations who had pulled away from government schools, make contact, “bring the good news.” I did not understand how much violence hides inside those words.
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A bush plane dropped me at a lake near the Peel River watershed. I stood on the shore watching the aircraft shrink into the sky until its sound was swallowed by northern silence—an enormous silence that didn’t feel peaceful so much as indifferent, like the face of stone. I felt thrilled. I imagined myself as a saint in wilderness ink, history waiting to be written.
Three days later, the river tore the pen from my hand.
Chapter 2 — The River’s Judgment
The mistake people make about the Yukon is thinking it hates you. It doesn’t. Hate requires attention. The wilderness is simply itself, and you survive only if your body and your arrogance are equally small. I had been moving downriver too quickly, driven by a missionary’s impatience. When the wide, lazy flow narrowed into cliffs and white foam, I should have portaged. I should have respected the V-shaped tongue of current. I didn’t. A submerged log—stripped hard and barkless, invisible in glacial silt—caught my canoe like a hook catches flesh.
The impact sounded like a rifle crack. The canoe didn’t tip; it disintegrated. Wood split, supplies erupted, my waterproof bag—Bible, chalice, everything I thought proved my purpose—skittered away downstream like a prayer refused.
Glacial water is not cold. It is a violent kind of fire. It steals breath, locks the ribs, turns the lungs into a panicked machine. I tumbled through whitewater, struck stone, swallowed silt. Wool became an anchor. Boots became lead. I saw the surface above me like tarnished silver, then felt the bottom, then nothing at all.
I say I died because I know the exact moment a drowning brain shuts the world off. There is no drama—only a dimming, a surrender.
When sensation returned, it didn’t return with heaven.
It returned with smell: musk, pine resin, wet fur, and something metallic like blood. I coughed water so cold it seemed to tear my throat. Pain arrived next—thaw pain, the agony of blood moving again through frozen limbs, as if veins were refilling with broken glass. Then I opened my eyes and saw firelight walking across stone.
I was in a cave. A small smokeless fire burned with careful dryness, like a thing tended by hands that understood patience. Shadows danced. I tried to sit up; my head spun. I fell back into furs.
And then the shadow over the fire became a shape—massive, upright, eight feet of matted dark hair and shoulders that made the cave feel suddenly smaller. I pressed myself into the stone and began the Lord’s Prayer with the reflex of a frightened professional.
“Our Father, who art in heaven…”
A hand touched my chest.
Not a claw. Not teeth. A heavy palm—huge, warm, gentle—resting over my heart as if confirming it was still working. The face leaned close. Dark, leathery skin. A broad flat nose. Thin lips pressed in concentration. And eyes—amber eyes—deep and intelligent, not checking whether I was food or threat, but checking something else: life.
The creature placed its ear to my chest, listened to my heartbeat, and rumbled softly. Then it dipped a finger into a wooden bowl and touched it to my lips. Warm water with something sweet—honey, maybe. “Drink,” the gesture said without language. I obeyed.
Then it chose a piece of driftwood, placed it on the fire, looked up at the smoke rising through a crack in the ceiling, closed its eyes, clasped its wrists over its own chest, and began to hum—low, mournful, deliberate.
It was praying.
And the horror of it wasn’t that a monster prayed. The horror was that the posture of prayer looked familiar, as if the shape of gratitude had existed long before my church learned to name it.
Chapter 3 — The Cave-Home and the Unwritten Altar
He left with a spear—a sharpened sapling with a lashed stone tip—moving out into snow without a backward glance, as if danger was an ordinary weather he understood. Alone, I dragged myself around the chamber. It wasn’t a den. It was a home. Bundles of dried herbs hung from the ceiling. Beds of furs were arranged with practical care. Tools lay where they belonged: stone scrapers, wooden bowls, cord made from sinew.
And in the corner, on a rock shelf like a deliberate table, was an arrangement that made my throat tighten.
A white river stone. A shed antler. A dried flower. A small bird skull. And in the center, a raw gold nugget the size of a walnut.
Not treasure. Not currency. Just an object set aside with the others as if each piece carried the same kind of meaning. The gold had no more status than the bird skull. It was not valued for what it could buy, but for what it was.
I had come north believing I carried God in my backpack like a packed lunch. But staring at that simple altar—natural, wordless, indifferent to human economics—I felt a thought take root that frightened me more than the river.
I hadn’t brought God to the wilderness.
God had been here first.
When I fell asleep again, it was not with prayers for rescue, but with a growing dread that rescue might be the wrong kind of salvation.
Chapter 4 — Names That Don’t Fit and Songs That Do
I woke to rendering fat and the sound of scraping stone. The cave was crowded now. The patriarch—yes, I felt him as patriarch—tended the fire. A female sat to his left, slightly smaller, fur streaked with ash-gray, eyes guarded with the suspicion of a mother measuring risk. And behind her, peeking from shadow, a lanky adolescent blinked rapidly, fascinated by me the way a child might be fascinated by a strange animal.
My clerical collar was gone. Somewhere in the river, my thin white tab—the mark of my office—had dissolved into mud. Without vestments, without Bible, I was simply a shivering mammal in another species’ shelter.
I tried language. “Thomas,” I said, tapping my chest. I pointed to the patriarch, waiting for a name. He did not offer one. Instead he expanded his chest like a bellows and released a low vibration I felt in my sternum. It wasn’t a word. It was a signature: strength, boundary, father. The female produced a different vibration—sharp, quick—home, caution, mother.
I realized then that I was at my own Tower of Babel, trying to build bridges out of brick-and-mortar nouns to beings who spoke in the bedrock beneath the world.
Still, I was stubborn. I made a crude cross from two sticks and held it up like a key. “Jesus,” I whispered. The patriarch took it gently, examined it, sniffed it, and tossed it into the fire. It flared, blackened, and vanished.
Not mockery. Not blasphemy. To him, it was simply a stick.
He handed me smoked meat instead. “Eat,” his eyes insisted, as if correcting my priorities: you do not feed symbols to hunger. I ate, and tears came—part grief, part relief, part humiliation. The patriarch responded not with words but with a deep purring rumble that traveled through the floor into my bones. It was comfort rendered physical, empathy without theology.
Weeks passed. The valley locked under snow. I became the runt of their world, tolerated by the female, followed everywhere by the adolescent who watched my hands with wonder. And at night, after the meal, the real communication began: humming that felt like memory, low-frequency choir that did not tell stories so much as transmit them. I would close my eyes and receive impressions—caribou crossing a river, stormlight breaking trees, the moon turning red—data pressed into emotion.
One night, desperate to offer something back, I sang a thin Gregorian chant. Kyrie eleison. Lord, have mercy. My voice sounded small in stone. I expected laughter.
Instead, the patriarch listened with stillness, then repeated the melody back perfectly—dropped three octaves into a foundational rumble. He took my prayer and folded it into their own sound-world, as if accepting it as a legitimate offering.
That night, the female pushed a pile of furs closer to the center. I was no longer the stranger. I was the strange hairless relative who knew a sad song.
It would have been a comfort, if comfort could survive what winter was preparing to show me.
Chapter 5 — The Mountain’s Tithe
January arrived like an iron hammer. Minus forty. The game vanished. The river tightened under ice. Hunger did not feel like emptiness—it felt like madness slowly chewing at the mind. The patriarch changed. His gentleness dried up. He spent hours staring into embers, conserving breath. The female stopped producing milk. The adolescent’s bright eyes dulled.
On the ninth day without meat, the patriarch stood and did not take his spear. He took a heavy club fashioned from bone. He signaled to me: come.
We found an old bull moose trapped in a ravine, exhausted and stuck. Salvation stood before us in five hundred pounds of protein. My heart surged with relief so sharp it hurt. Timothy—yes, I had started thinking of the boy by a Christian name—would live.
The patriarch killed the moose quickly and cleanly, then stopped me when I scrambled forward to butcher it. He shook his head and pointed up—toward a black spire of mountain that pierced the clouds.
He hoisted the entire moose carcass onto his shoulders and began to climb.
The summit plateau was wind-scoured rock and a fissure in the stone that breathed sulfur and rot. There, he arranged the moose—straightened limbs, turned the head toward the crack like a face being presented—and pulled me into hiding behind a boulder.
“Watch,” everything in his posture said.
What emerged from the fissure defied the laws my mind depended on. It was Sasquatch-shaped but wrong—gargantuan, twisted, fur patchy, skin scarred and gray. Its eyes were milky white, blind, as if it had lived in darkness so long the world had stopped needing to be seen. The stench of it was ancient meat and sickness, like decay that had learned to breathe.
The patriarch trembled beside me.
The creature tore into the moose with violence that felt personal, crushing bones in its jaws, swallowing whole slabs of our salvation. It was not simply feeding. It was asserting a rule.
When it stopped, sniffed, turned its blind face toward us, and shrieked—thin and high like a dying woman—the patriarch pressed himself flat and began to hum a low submission drone. Small. Nothing. Obey.
The creature listened, grunted, dragged what remained of the moose into the fissure, and vanished.
We walked back down empty-handed. The female looked at the patriarch, smelled blood, saw no meat, and understood without a word. She hugged Timothy tighter and rocked him as if rocking could replace food.
That night I sat in the cave, staring at their altar, and realized with a sickness that had nothing to do with hunger: those offerings weren’t gratitude.
They were tithes.
They were bribes paid so the thing on the mountain wouldn’t come down and take the child.
I had preached that God provides. In this kingdom, God did not provide. God took. God was a mouth above the treeline, and worship meant feeding it.
Something in me snapped into a terrible righteousness: if this was their god, then I would save them from it.
Chapter 6 — Poison and the Breaking of a Covenant
Spring came violently. Salmon returned. Timothy laughed again. The tribe lived in the now, because the now is survivable. But I am human, and humans live in the tomorrow. I could not stop seeing winter’s mouth waiting above us.
I knew my plants. Jesuits are taught science as well as scripture. I found monkshood—wolf’s bane—purple hooded flowers near the treeline. I dug the roots with care, ground them into paste, mixed them with fat. A toxin that could paralyze, stop a heart, end a tyrant. I told myself it was holy.
The patriarch found me.
He sniffed the bitter scent and reacted with immediate horror, not fear for himself but fear for the order that kept his family alive. I tried to explain with gestures: the poison for the eater. I mimed the creature’s hunched back, blank eyes, clawing hunger. I mimed death.
The patriarch’s refusal was not simple cowardice. He hummed into me a vision: the eater dead, then the sky going black, the earth shaking, other tribes wailing in grief. The eater, he implied, was not merely a bully. It was a keystone, a vessel that contained something worse. Kill it, and chaos spills out.
I called it superstition. I pointed at Timothy and raged in the only language I had: it eats your children.
The patriarch tried to destroy the paste. I made a sinful bluff and threatened the river, leveraging fear like a weapon. Betrayal settled between us like frost. He turned his back and walked away from me, leaving me alone with my righteousness and my poison.
In late September, the shriek came from the mountain again. The eater was awake. The patriarch prepared the offering with dead eyes. The female wailed softly. Timothy looked smaller than ever in the cave’s darkness.
I went with them up the mountain carrying the poison like confession.
When the patriarch washed his hands at the creek, I smeared the paste into the caribou’s open chest cavity—into liver, heart, lungs—enough to kill something too big to name. I closed it up and stood back as if innocence could be performed.
At the plateau, the eater emerged and fed. One poisoned bite, then another, then it stopped. It gurgled, clawed at its throat, swayed as if confused by the betrayal of its own body. It raised a fist toward us, then collapsed like a falling tower, shaking the mountain.
“It’s done,” I whispered. “You’re free.”
The patriarch fell to his knees.
And he wailed.
Because the ground did not stop trembling.
The eater wasn’t the only thing in the fissure.
It was the cork.
From below rose a sound like a hive: countless clicking, scraping movements, as if the mountain had teeth. I stepped toward the crack and looked down into darkness lit by nothing—until I saw it: eyes, not two, but hundreds of faint glowing points shifting below.
The bottomless pit wasn’t metaphor.
It was infrastructure.
Chapter 7 — The Exodus and the Price of Mercy
What erupted from the fissure were not full-grown giants. They were smaller—five feet, maybe—but wrong in a different way: pale, hairless patches, bodies hunched, eyes sealed by darkness, ears oversized like bats. They moved on all fours with spider speed, driven by pure hunger as if starvation had become their only identity. They swarmed over the eater’s corpse and stripped it to bone in seconds, then turned their heads as if smelling sound itself.
They heard my heart.
The patriarch grabbed me and ran. Not out of forgiveness—out of survival. We plunged down the mountain like an avalanche, into trees whose complex acoustics confused the swarm just enough to buy seconds. The female heard the patriarch’s warning roar and dove into the cave with Timothy. We sealed the entrance with a boulder and held a siege through the night—stabbing at pale faces that dropped through the smoke hole, burning furs for light, fighting with the desperation of animals who understood that morality does not matter to hunger.
At sunrise the scratching stopped. The swarm retreated back to the mountain, burned by light, but not destroyed. The valley was defiled, the cave weakened, the war only postponed.
We fled south. Snow, hunger, and pursuit turned walking into suffering. The female’s arm went black with infection. She became the rear guard, placing herself between her child and the thing she could not reason with. At a frozen lake, when the swarm began breaching through ice, she made her choice: she sang a war cry that drew them to her, and while the patriarch dragged Timothy and me across the lake, she disappeared under a white wave of bodies and black water.
I watched the sacrifice I had preached about all my life, performed not by saints in paintings but by a mother with fur and blood and a love too fierce to bargain.
Weeks later we reached a logging road—the border of the metal men’s world. The patriarch would not cross. He turned to me and pressed the gold nugget into my palm, closing my fingers around it with calm finality.
Then he leaned close and spoke the only word of my language he had chosen to learn.
“Pay.”
Not a gift. Not gratitude. A transaction. He was buying his son’s life from me the way he had once bought it from the eater. I was the monster now, the curse-bringer, the one who had broken the covenant and opened the mountain.
He took Timothy’s hand and walked back into the trees. They did not look back.
I survived. I returned to cities and churches and people who wanted a miracle story. But I could never preach “God is love” again without seeing a moose arranged as an offering on a wind-scoured plateau, without smelling the fissure’s rot, without hearing a hive wake under stone.
So here is my confession, my last sermon, the only one I can still speak with honesty: stop going into the wild with cameras and arrogance. Stop forcing mysteries into corners so you can name them. Because you may not like what those guardians are truly guarding.
In that kingdom, you are not the king.
You are the tithe.
