‘My Drone Spotted Bigfoot and It Hunted Me for This’ – Terrifying Sasquatch Encounter Story

The Drone That Shouldn’t Have Seen

Chapter 1: One Perfect Weekend

I lost more than a $1,200 drone that weekend.

I lost the feeling that the woods were just trees and trails and quiet. I lost the comfort of being alone miles from anyone. I lost the part of me that believed the worst thing out there was slipping on wet rock or surprising a bear.

.

.

.

What I gained was the knowledge that something watched me from the timbered ridges above. Something coordinated. Something angry. And something that absolutely did not want a camera in its sky.

It was last October. The Cascades were at their best—crisp air, gold along the river bottoms, enough cold in the mornings to make coffee matter. I’d been staring at my DJI Mavic since January, itching to get it out of city parks and cul‑de‑sacs and somewhere real.

My brother had given it to me for Christmas. Nice setup, not top‑of‑the‑line professional, but way more than “toy” level. I’d spent months flying it over the local soccer field, around abandoned warehouses, over my apartment complex. Practicing landings, hovering inches off the ground, threading between trees. I wanted everything to be perfect the first time I flew it somewhere I actually cared about.

There’s a spot about three hours east of Seattle, up in the Cascade foothills, that I’d always loved as a kid. My family used to camp there before life turned into overlapping schedules and half‑hearted plans. An old logging road snakes up into the hills, unused for decades. Most people turn around when the potholes get big enough to swallow a Civic. If you keep going, though, if you bump and grind your way up past the washouts and the downed limbs, you hit a series of switchbacks that open into these staggering valley views.

The kind of place drones were made for.

I left Seattle after work on a Friday, the bed of my truck loaded with tent, food, extra batteries, and the drone case that had become something like a pet. By the time I turned off onto the logging road, twilight had already sunk into the trees. My headlights carved tunnels of light through second‑growth timber, the road degrading from asphalt to gravel to packed dirt to a suggestion.

It took nearly an hour to grind up to my usual spot in the dark. The road folded back on itself in a sharp switchback there, and the outside edge flattened into a little clearing just big enough for a tent and a truck. Beyond it, the slope dropped away into blackness.

I parked, killed the engine, and stepped into a silence so complete it felt like a physical thing. No distant traffic. No city hum. Just the tick of cooling metal and somewhere far off, the faint bark of a coyote.

I set up my tent in the wash of my headlights, ate a cold dinner because I didn’t feel like dealing with the stove, and lay down with the kind of anticipatory excitement you get before a big trip. Tomorrow, I thought as I drifted off. Tomorrow I’ll finally see what’s down there.

Chapter 2: The Thing in the Canyon

Saturday morning was the kind of day pilots make calendars out of. Clear blue sky, no wind, the low angle of autumn sun throwing long shadows across ridges. It was cool enough that I could see my breath, but not so cold I had to wrestle with numb fingers.

I drank instant coffee leaning against my truck and looked out between the trees. Somewhere beyond those trunks, the land dropped away in folds of forest and rock that I’d never really understood from the ground. Today I’d see it from above.

I hiked about a quarter mile up the road to where the valley opened into a natural bowl. The logging road cut through the bottom of it, but the slopes rose up around me in a loose horseshoe, thick with fir and cedar. It was perfect—room to launch, line of sight to the sky, no powerlines or random tourists to worry about.

The first flight was tentative. I eased the Mavic up, listened to the change in the pitch of its rotors, watched the live feed on my phone as the ground fell away. Little by little, my shoulders unclenched. The controls felt the way they always did—responsive, smooth. The drone hovered exactly where I told it to. I sent it out over the lip of the bowl and watched the world open.

Ridges unrolled below in waves, their spines lit by sun, their flanks drowned in shadow. Valleys that from the road had always been just walls of trees now revealed hidden meadows, unseen creeks, glimmers of rock. The camera drank everything in—pine crowns, moss‑cloaked logs, forgotten logging spurs half‑swallowed by regrowth.

I flew six, maybe seven flights over the next few hours. Twenty minutes up, return, swap batteries, repeat. Each time I pushed a little farther, tested a little more altitude, a little more distance. The signal stayed solid. The drone handled the thin mountain air just fine. My confidence grew.

Around noon, with the sun high enough to burn just a touch of warmth into the air, I decided to go farther than I had all morning. North of the bowl, the land dropped into a hidden canyon system. From the road, it looked like nothing more than a dark notch between shoulders of rock, but I’d always wondered what lay down there.

This was my chance.

I launched, climbed to a few hundred feet, and guided the drone along the ridge to the lip of the canyon. The live feed showed the ground tilting away sharply. The canyon was deeper than I’d imagined—three, maybe four hundred feet from rim to bottom, walls layered in moss, ferns spilling out of cracks. A creek ribboned through the middle, bright where the sun caught it.

I followed the creek upstream, watching the screen, adjusting the yaw. The world on my phone was hypnotic—untouched forest, no trails, no clearings, no sign of human presence at all.

Then something moved.

It was subtle at first—a flicker of motion where everything else was still. In the mottled shadows of the canyon floor, a shape slid between trees. I thought bear immediately. Black bears are common up there, and seeing one from above would have been cool.

But the movement was wrong.

Bears roll. They’ve got a certain heavy, side‑to‑side rhythm, even when they’re moving fast. This thing moved like it knew exactly where its feet were landing. Long strides. Upright.

My fingers tightened on the controls. I dropped the drone a little lower, nudged it sideways for a better angle.

The figure stepped into a slanted beam of light.

For a second I thought it had to be a person. Maybe some crazy ultralight hiker who liked bushwhacking into impossible spots. Except no human is that big. Or that… thick. It was covered head to toe in dark hair that looked almost black in the camera’s IR‑assisted feed.

It walked fully upright along what looked like a faint game trail beside the creek, arms swinging with each stride, head moving, scanning. Eight feet tall if it was an inch. Shoulders like a linebacker wearing a fur coat. The proportions weren’t like anything I’d ever seen—legs slightly shorter relative to the torso, arms a bit longer, but everything in balance. Built for that terrain.

My heart slammed against my ribs so hard the phone screen trembled in my hands.

Every joke, every “found footage” video, every campfire story you half pay attention to and then forget—they all snapped into focus in that moment. Because whatever I was looking at was not a guy in a suit. Not at that distance, not with that mass and that effortless way of covering ground.

I eased the drone closer, inching the gimbal to keep it centered in the frame. My world narrowed to the view on my phone, to the little blinking telemetry indicators telling me altitude, distance, battery level. Fifteen minutes of flight time gone. Enough left for a good look.

The creature moved with intent, not wandering or foraging, but following a route, stepping over logs like it had done this a hundred times. I lowered the drone another ten or twenty feet.

That’s when it stopped.

Mid‑stride, it froze. It hadn’t stumbled or seen something on the ground. It had heard something.

Slowly, almost mechanically, it lifted its head and looked straight up.

The camera locked onto its face.

The features were somewhere between human and ape, but not really either. The brow was heavy. The nose wide, the mouth broad. Hair framed the face but didn’t obscure it. In the center, two eyes looked directly into the lens.

Curiosity burned there for a few seconds. Tight focus. Assessing. Then something else flared through them.

Rage.

Not the flash of a startled animal. Not fear. Anger. Controlled and hot.

The thing exploded into motion.

Chapter 3: When the Sky Makes You a Target

I’d flown my drone close to birds before—hawks, crows, even a bald eagle once by mistake. They’d veered off, annoyed, or taken a swipe and then left it alone when they realized it wasn’t worth it.

This was different.

The creature launched forward like someone had fired a starting gun. Its upright walk turned into a full sprint, legs driving, arms pumping, head still locked upward. It tore through brush that would have slowed a man to a crawl, vaulted fallen trunks like hurdles.

I jerked the sticks, pulling up hard, trying to gain altitude. The view tilted, canyon walls rising in my periphery, the figure growing smaller, but not nearly fast enough.

It reached the spot directly beneath the drone, planted one massive foot, and jumped.

From the canyon floor to thirty‑plus feet in the air in one vertical leap. Its body uncoiled like a spring. For an instant, it hung there, hand outstretched, fingers splayed. On my screen, those fingers looked close enough to brush the lens.

They missed by maybe two feet.

The drone’s altitude climbed, but not quickly enough. I was fighting the altitude limit I’d set earlier, my own safety protocols now strangling me.

The creature dropped, landed in a crouch, then spun to the nearest tree.

It hit the trunk at a run and went up.

Climbing is too gentle a word. It flowed. Hands, then feet, then hands again, long limbs eating vertical distance. Bark chipped under its fingers. Branches flexed under its weight and snapped back as it passed. Thirty feet, forty, fifty. I watched it rising through limbs that would never support me, let alone something its size.

I kept dragging the altitude slider up, up, up, until the drone hovered a good hundred feet above the canopy. I should have flown it away. I should have pulled back, climbed higher, put distance and steel‑and‑plastic between us.

Instead I hesitated, transfixed.

The creature reached the crown of the tree and paused, partially shielded by a fan of needles. For a second, the camera caught its face again between branches, framed by sky.

The fury in its eyes had sharpened. It wasn’t just anger now. It was something like offense. Violation.

Then it stepped out.

Into empty air.

Its arm swept up in a powerful arc. The image jolted as something hit the drone—not a glancing feather swipe, but a full, solid impact. The view shook wildly, the sky smearing into streaks of blue and green. Then the feed dissolved into gray static.

The controller in my hands beeped once, then fell silent, a dead, weighty thing.

I just stood there.

The canyon below glowed on the phone’s last frozen frame in my mind’s eye. The creek. The trees. The figure in motion.

The drone was gone. So was my proof.

I don’t know how long I stared at the “No Signal” warning before the first scream tore through the mountains.

Chapter 4: Voices in the Timber

It started as a low, distant sound—too low and too long to be a person. It swelled into a roar that rolled down the canyon, up the ridges, across the bowl where I stood.

I had never heard anything like it. It wasn’t a cougar scream or an elk bugle or the weird, human‑sounding terror of a fox. It was deeper, more complex, layers of tone riding on top of each other. It went on and on, far beyond what a human lung could manage.

As it faded, another one answered.

From somewhere across the canyon, from the opposite ridge. Different pitch, slightly different cadence, but clearly the same kind of voice. That one ended, and another started from yet another direction. Then another. Within minutes, the air was full of those calls, echoing back and forth, triangulating.

It hit me then: they weren’t just making noise.

They were talking.

I couldn’t understand content. But the pattern… the pattern was clear. One call with a certain rhythm would sound from the north. Another from the east would answer with a variation. A third from the south would cut in with a shorter, sharper sequence. It reminded me of radio chatter—different units checking in, relaying positions.

The hairs on my arms and neck stood straight up.

It wasn’t just one of them. There were at least four. Maybe more, if some were out of earshot.

And I had just pissed them off.

Panic drove me back to camp. I half‑ran, half‑slid down the logging road, grabbing my gear with shaking hands. The calls followed me, always in the background, sometimes closer, sometimes farther, but never gone.

I told myself if I could just get back to the truck and start it, I’d be fine. Inside a metal box, tires on dirt, moving downhill toward cell coverage and other humans. Away from this.

I broke down my tent in record time, stuffing it and everything else into the bed of the truck with none of my usual organization. Every few seconds I’d stop and listen. The forest would go unnaturally quiet, as if holding its breath. Then a branch would snap somewhere downhill, or a clump of leaves would rustle uphill, just enough to let me know something large was moving out there.

I could feel eyes on me.

The engine turned over on the first try. For an instant, the familiar sound calmed me. Then another thought struck: if I could hear the engine this clearly from inside the cab, they could hear it for miles.

Too late.

I put the truck in gear and pointed it downhill, tires crunching over ruts and loose rock. The road twisted down through the forest, each blind curve a new chance to meet something in my path.

A mile or so from camp, I hit my first obstacle.

A tree lay across the road.

It was fresh—needles still bright, sap gleaming at the cut. And it was cut. The stump on the uphill side showed clean, angled marks. Not snapped, not blown down. Felled.

There hadn’t been any wind. There hadn’t been any chainsaw noise. And there had definitely not been a tree here the night before when I drove up.

They’d dropped it after I passed.

My stomach turned over.

The trunk was maybe eighteen inches in diameter. Too big to move alone. Too high to simply roll over without risking getting high‑centered. I sat in the cab, engine idling, staring at it while the screams rolled again through the hills. Closer now.

I backed up fifty yards, put it in drive, and floored it.

The truck lurched forward, suspension groaning as it bounced through potholes. The trunk rose up in the windshield. I aimed for the lower end, where it had caught on another tree and sat slightly humped off the ground.

The impact shook my teeth. The front tires hit, climbed, then skidded. For a terrifying instant, the truck tilted upward, nose high, as if it might roll backward. Then momentum carried it over. The undercarriage scraped like something being dragged across a cheese grater.

Then all four tires slammed back onto dirt.

I didn’t stop to celebrate. I kept driving.

Behind me, the screams turned jagged. Anger sharpened them. But they didn’t fade. They followed.

Chapter 5: The Blocked Road

For a while, I let myself believe I’d beaten them.

The road wound on, descending in tight switchbacks, passing through stands of younger timber and pockets of older growth. Sunlight flickered between trunks, strobing the interior of the cab. My hands gripped the wheel hard enough to hurt.

No more trees blocked my path. No more calls erupted just around the next bend. In the side mirror, the road stretched back empty and dusty.

Then, three miles down, I rounded a long, sweeping curve into another choke point.

And there it was.

Another tree, this one bigger, sprawled across the road. Its trunk spanned from hillside to drop‑off, leaving no gap. Unlike the first one, it lay in a place where the road pinched between two steep slopes. The forest rose impossibly dense on either side. There was no way through the underbrush around it, no room to angle the truck off road. No way over. No way around.

The perfect trap.

I stopped fifty yards back, engine idling, and just sat there. The air in the cab felt stale. Outside, the forest had gone silent again, that vacuum hush that’s somehow worse than any sound. Somewhere far off, a jay scolded, then cut itself off mid‑call.

I realized I was holding my breath.

Then came the movement.

Not up ahead, but in the trees on both sides of the road. Soft at first—the rustle of foliage, the crack of twigs. Then more. Footfalls, heavy enough to be felt as much as heard, pacing the truck from within the forest band.

They didn’t rush me. They didn’t break cover. They paralleled.

My mind skittered through options. Stay in the truck and wait? Reverse back up the road toward the first fallen tree? Try to wedge the truck into the trees and somehow bushwhack around on foot?

All the scenarios ended the same way: me, stuck in a dead end while something that knew the terrain and my position closed in.

On the road, I was a pin in a corridor, and they held both ends.

On foot, at least, I could go where they might not expect.

I killed the engine. The silence that slammed in afterward actually made my ears ring.

I grabbed my pack, threw in my water bottle and a few bars, shoved my phone into my pocket out of habit even though there wasn’t a hint of signal, and stepped out, leaving the truck and its illusion of safety behind.

As I started walking down the road, I could hear them adjust. The footsteps in the forest shifted, matching my speed. Every now and then, a branch snapped a little harder than it needed to, a bush rustled just a touch too much—reminders.

They weren’t trying to be invisible. They wanted me to know I was being escorted.

I don’t know how far I walked like that. A mile. Maybe two. Time stretched and twisted, tied to the rhythm of my steps and the answering rhythm in the trees.

Eventually, I reached a fork.

The main road continued downhill. A narrower, rougher track veered off to the right, cutting up and over a hump in the ridge. I didn’t remember seeing that turn on the way up—it had probably been half‑hidden by brush from a driver’s perspective.

For a few minutes, I stood there in the dust, trying to decide. The main road was the logical route. I knew it led to pavement and then, eventually, home. But it was also the route they would expect a human to take. The side road was unknown. It might lead nowhere. It might be worse.

While I hesitated, the forest answered for me.

Movement surged on both sides. Down the main road, something big pushed through the undergrowth parallel to the path, close enough that I saw branches sway. Up the side road, the same. They had both options covered.

I stepped off the road entirely.

Chapter 6: The Ravine

Leaving the track meant plunging into real Cascades forest. It’s a carpet of ferns and huckleberry and downed logs slick with moss, stitched together with vines and roots that don’t care if you’re trying not to break your neck.

I angled uphill, aiming for the spine of the ridge between the two roads. If I could crest it and drop off the far side, maybe I could break their net. It was a terrible plan, but I was fresh out of good ones.

The slope steepened quickly. Sometimes I had to grab roots and haul myself up. Sometimes I had to detour around tangles of windfall that had decayed into sponge. My breath rasped in my ears. Sweat crawled down my back.

For a blessed forty minutes, the sounds of pursuit faded. The calls stopped. The footfalls became less distinct. I allowed myself the dangerous luxury of hope.

And then the screams started again.

This time they came from ahead of me. Higher up the ridge. They weren’t distant, either. The air shook with them, the sound wrapping around the trees in a way that made direction hard to pinpoint. One call came from my left, then another from my right, and then one from directly above.

They had moved ahead.

I stopped climbing and listened. Under the screams, I heard another sound—lower, muttered. Voices. Not the full‑throated calls, but shorter, spoken exchanges. I couldn’t make out syllables, couldn’t claim to recognize any pattern, but the cadence was conversational. They were talking to each other.

About me.

Sideways seemed like the only viable vector left. I began traversing the slope, keeping my elevation roughly the same, working along the contour instead of up or down. It was slow going, but at least it felt like I wasn’t blundering directly into whichever position they were steering me toward.

About half an hour later, I reached the edge of something the topo map in my head hadn’t included.

The earth simply fell away.

A ravine carved down into the hillside, thirty, then fifty, then maybe two hundred feet deep. Its walls were nearly vertical in places, raw dirt and exposed roots and jutting rocks. A narrow stream glittered at the bottom, more noise than water this late in the summer.

The ravine was both problem and possibility.

Crossing it was out of the question. The gap was too wide, the walls too sheer. But the bottom offered something I’d been lacking since the first scream—cover from above.

If I could get down there, maybe the steep walls would break line of sight and deaden sound. Maybe they’d be reluctant to follow. Or maybe I’d be trapping myself in a slot with no exits.

Either way, standing exposed on the ridge felt worse.

I searched along the edge until I found a stretch where the wall was marginally less suicidal—looser dirt, more roots, a few rocks that looked like they might hold weight. I tested one with my boot. It shifted but held.

I started down.

Climbing down a crumbly face is always worse than going up. Gravity keeps reminding you who’s boss. Every handhold had to be tested. Every step landed on something that might crumble. A slide here would mean tumbling all the way to the bottom with whatever rocks decided to come with me.

About halfway down, I reached for what looked like a solid outcropping, put weight on it—

—and the wall gave way.

There’s a moment in every fall when you realize you’re past the point of saving it. That you’ve moved from “scramble” to “freefall.” Mine lasted forever and no time at all.

Dirt and rock and roots tore past me. Branch tips whipped my arms. I tried to grab something, anything, but my hands skittered on mud. The stream rushed up at me in a blur.

Then everything went dark.

Chapter 7: The Bottom

I woke up lying on my side, half in the stream, half on wet stones. For a few seconds, I didn’t know where I was. The world existed in fragments—the smell of damp earth, the gurgle of water, the drums of my heartbeat in my ears.

Then pain registered.

My left ankle screamed every time I tried to move it. White‑hot, nauseating pain. I looked down and saw it bent at an angle that ankles shouldn’t bend. Swollen already, the skin tight and angry under my sock.

My pack lay a few feet away, half‑open, contents thrown everywhere. My phone was in a puddle, screen mercifully unbroken. I dragged myself over to it and checked the status bar.

No service. Not even a whisper.

Above me, the ravine walls towered in rough, jagged lines. From the bottom, they looked much higher. In some places, roots jutted out like skeletal fingers. In others, the dirt had been scoured clean down to rock.

There was no way I was climbing back up. Not with one leg that worked and one that didn’t.

I took stock.

Water: good. The stream was clear, cold, and moving. I had my bottle and a simple filter.

Food: lousy. A few bars, some trail mix. Enough for a day or two at most.

Shelter: questionable. The sky above was a ribbon. Trees leaned over the ravine edge, their branches knitting together in some spots to block direct sunlight. Fallen trunks from earlier landslides sprawled across the bottom, one of them wedged at an angle that created a kind of overhang.

And the best part: for the first time in hours, I didn’t hear them.

No screams. No footsteps. No conversational rumble. The ravine’s stone walls caught sound and held it differently. I could hear the stream, a few birds cautiously calling from somewhere above, the occasional cascade of pebbles when some small animal dislodged something.

It felt like sanctuary.

As the afternoon slid toward evening, I made my way—crawling, really—to that fallen tree and tucked myself under it. I gathered what dry wood I could find—dead branches that had been sheltered from the last rain under overhangs—and coaxed a small fire into life with my lighter.

I kept it tiny. Just big enough to warm my hands and take the edge off the mountain chill that would come with nightfall. Every flicker of flame felt like both friend and beacon. Anything looking down from the rim would see the glow.

Night dropped fast in the ravine. The strip of sky went from blue to purple to black in a short span. Temperature followed. The warmth of the day bled into stone and water, leaving the air thin and cold.

I fed the fire and listened.

At first, there was nothing but the crackle of burning wood and the liquid rush of the stream. Then, sometime around full dark, I heard it.

Footsteps.

Up above, along the rim. They passed overhead in a slow, steady line, stopping every few yards. Rocks tumbled occasionally, bouncing off the wall and clattering down. The sound moved along the ravine, checking sections, back and forth.

They were searching.

For me.

When they reached the spot where I’d fallen, the noise concentrated. More footsteps. Stones kicked loose in greater number. Silence would fall, heavy, then break again with the scrape and thud of movement.

Eventually, the rim directly above my position went quiet.

They knew where I was.

They did not come down.

That should have comforted me. Instead, it felt like having a sniper pin you in his sights and then decide to wait. The ravine was both refuge and trap.

Hours passed. The fire burned low. My ankle throbbed in time with my heartbeat. At some point I must have started to drift in and out of shallow, restless sleep.

That’s when the sound changed.

The heavy walking along the rim faded. In its place came a different noise—lighter, more precise: claws on rock, or fingers.

Something was climbing down.

Chapter 8: Stalked in the Dark

At first it was so faint I thought I was imagining it. A faint scrape, a small shower of dirt. Then again, a bit louder. A stone bounced off the opposite bank, splashed into the stream.

Whatever it was wasn’t falling. It was intentionally descending, choosing its holds carefully. The pattern of sound was too regular, too controlled.

I gripped my makeshift club—a thick chunk of wood I’d found—and pressed my back into the crook formed by the fallen tree and the ravine wall. The fire had burned down to coals, casting a dull red glow that illuminated only a few feet around me. Beyond that, darkness pooled thick and absolute.

The climbing sounds drew closer. Fifteen feet up. Ten. Five. At some point, they stopped.

The silence that followed was so total that my own breathing seemed loud.

I stared into the dark, every muscle tensed. My eyes strained for any hint of shape beyond the circle of dull light. Nothing moved. The stream kept up its small, indifferent murmur.

Minutes dragged. My grip on the club tightened and loosened in cycles. No lunges came. No teeth flashed from the black. Whatever had come down there with me was content to watch from just beyond my limited vision.

I picked up a small stone with my free hand and lobbed it toward where I thought the sound had been. It skittered across rock and plopped into the stream. No reaction. No flinch. No scuttle.

Either I’d aimed wrong or their nerves were better than mine.

Eventually, exhaustion outweighed terror. The pain, the cold, the adrenaline crash from the day—they piled on top of each other until my body simply shut down for short, fitful bursts.

When I woke for good, gray light was seeping down into the ravine. My fire was cold ashes. My ankle had swollen even more, the skin taut and discolored around the boot.

I pushed myself up onto my elbows and scanned the bottom.

That’s when I saw the tracks.

They circled my little fire pit in a wide loop, staying thirty feet out. Impressions in the damp sand near the stream—some partial, some clear. Footprints. Not from my boots. Not from any manufactured sole.

The prints were elongated, broader than a human foot, with five distinct toe marks pressed into the sand. At the end of each toe, a small score dug just a bit deeper, as if something had claw tips or thick, hard nails.

They had paced around me while I slept, staying out of the firelight, close enough to see me, far enough to bolt if needed.

There were no tracks leading back up the walls that I could see. Maybe they’d found a gentler slope somewhere down the line. Maybe they’d simply climbed out where the stone was hard enough not to take prints.

Either way, one thing was clear: I wasn’t alone down there, and I hadn’t been for some time.

Chapter 9: Crawling Back to the World

Sitting at the bottom of a ravine with a busted ankle and a dwindling sense of how long you can go without food does wonders for your problem‑solving skills.

Staying put meant dying slowly of exposure, infection, or whatever patience they had. Climbing straight up where I’d fallen was a non‑starter. So I followed the only path that remained.

Downstream.

The ravine widened as I hobbled along, using my makeshift stick as both crutch and probe. The walls that had been sheer started to crumble into slopes, then terraces. More debris littered the bottom—logs, boulders, mats of roots. Each obstacle took twice the energy because I had one leg doing the work of two.

The sounds from above returned as the day wore on, shadowing me. They never came close, never descended again, but every so often a stone would clatter from the rim, or a faint rumble of movement would drift down. They were still there, tracking my progress.

The further I went, the lower the walls dropped, until they were no higher than a two‑story house. Eventually the ravine opened into a broader valley, the stream flattening into lazy loops through meadow and scattered trees.

The screams stopped. So did the footfalls above.

For the first time since my fall, I could see more than sky directly overhead. I recognized, in a vague way, the contours of the surrounding hills from hikes I’d taken years before—not here, but near enough that my internal compass sparked.

Civilization lay east. Somewhere. A long way.

I followed the stream through the valley until it crossed under an old track—two faint tire ruts separated by a strip of grass. An abandoned Forest Service road, the kind that shows up as a thin gray line on a map but feels like a lifeline when you stumble onto it from the wild.

I turned onto it and started limping.

Hours blurred. Uphill sections felt like punishment. Downhill sections hurt in a different way, as my weight slammed into my damaged ankle with every step. I stopped often, drank from my bottle, counted breaths between pain spikes.

The road twisted around outcrops, dipped through small draws, climbed over saddles. Once or twice, I thought I heard something in the trees off to one side—a branch snapping, a rhythm of movement that wasn’t wind—but nothing emerged. The presence that had hemmed me in so tightly seemed to have thinned, spread out, or simply lost interest.

By late afternoon, when my legs were jelly and my ankle felt like it was made of glass shards, I heard it.

A truck. In the distance.

The growl of an engine on pavement never sounds quite the same again after you’ve spent a day with your whole world reduced to boot soles and dirt. The road emerged suddenly into a small gravel lot, a weather‑beaten sign tilting at its edge, and beyond that, blessedly, a strip of blacktop with double yellow lines.

The first car that came along was an old pickup. The driver—a rancher with the kind of face that has seen too many early mornings—saw me, braked, and leaned over to pop the passenger door.

He didn’t ask many questions. I didn’t offer many answers.

Chapter 10: What Hunts and What Hides

The clinic X‑rays showed what I already knew. Two fractures in the ankle. A torn ligament on the other side. A boot and pain meds and instructions to follow up with orthopedics when I got back to the city.

“How’d you do this?” the doctor asked, looking over his glasses.

“Fell while hiking,” I said. The words tasted thin and cowardly, but true in the most legal sense.

The next day, a friend drove me back up the logging road. The first felled tree was still there, the gouge marks from my truck’s passage bright and raw on its bark. The second tree—that beautifully placed barrier—lay across the road just as I’d left it. We cleared enough branches and cut enough trunk with a borrowed saw to get the truck out.

Everything was exactly as it had been… except for the drone. I’d walked us back to the rim of the canyon where I’d been flying from. There was no shredded plastic in the underbrush, no cracked battery casing, no SD card glinting in the dirt. It was like it had never existed.

The creatures hadn’t just destroyed the drone. They’d removed the evidence.

Back in my apartment, propped on my couch with my boot elevated and my ankle throbbing in time with my heartbeat, I replayed the last flight in my head a hundred times. The canyon. The movement. The face turning up. The leap.

I had no footage. No blurry frames to share online. No shaky clips to argue over. All I had was the controller sitting on my coffee table, a glossy, useless shell that beamed nothing to no one.

People I told—very few, at first—gave me that look. The one that mixes concern with skepticism. Some suggested the fall had scrambled my brain. Maybe I’d had a concussion. Maybe I’d hallucinated. Maybe the screams were just elk, closer than I’d realized. Maybe the trees had fallen naturally and my panicked mind had knit everything together into a story.

It’s a comforting theory, in its way. It makes the world small and tidy again. Bears and cougars and simple physics.

But it doesn’t account for how the trees were cut. Or how many calls answered that first roar. Or the systematic way they blocked my escape routes. Or the fact that something climbed down into that ravine at night and walked a circle around me while I slept by my fire.

Or the eyes I saw through that camera, staring up at the drone with a fury that understood exactly what a lens is.

So I’ve done my research.

I’ve read the stories. The Native American legends that talk about people of the forest who speak their own language and steal away those who get too close. The modern reports that everyone laughs at—rock throwings, wood knocks, strange calls recorded on handhelds. The tracks found in places no human has any reason to be.

Bears don’t fell trees across roads in exactly the right places. Poachers don’t scream across ridges in some alien chorus to coordinate their movements. Humans can’t leap fifteen feet straight up from a standstill and claw a drone out of the air.

Whatever those things are—whatever name you want to give them—they are:

Big. Bipedal. Intelligent.

They understand sound. They understand light. They understand what a camera is, or at least what it does. They understand that secrecy is survival.

I still go outdoors. The mountains are in my blood. The day I never hike again is the day I admit in full that they beat me. I’m not ready for that.

But I don’t go alone anymore.

I don’t sleep as easily in a tent miles from anyone. I don’t assume that a snapped branch off in the dark is just a deer clumsily stepping wrong. When the forest goes too quiet, I pay attention.

And I haven’t flown a drone in the mountains since.

Sometimes I catch myself opening tabs, pricing new units, reading about better cameras, longer ranges, quieter props. The part of me that watched that creature through the lens and thought I’m seeing something no one gets to see… that part still whispers.

But louder now is the memory of those eyes. The coordinated calls. The trees across the road. The sense of being a piece on someone else’s board.

Whatever lives in those canyons, on those ridges, in those shadowed pockets of old growth, they’ve sent their message.

They don’t want to be seen.

Once was enough.

I believe them.