‘SASQUATCH IS NO MORE’ – Hunters Terrifying Encounter With Bigfoot

The Week I Killed a Sasquatch

Chapter 1: Five Grand and a Lie

You want to know why I don’t hunt anymore?

Why a guy who grew up in the woods, served in the military, and made a living behind rifles now crosses the street to avoid a sporting goods store?

Sit down.

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Three years ago, in October, I did the one thing every backwoods legend says never to do: I killed a Sasquatch. That week cost me my friends, my sleep, and whatever illusion I had that humans are the apex predator in every zip code.

At the time, I was working freelance security. Corporate gigs. Warehouse overnights. Private events where the worst thing that happened was a drunk executive trying to fight a potted plant. My military days were behind me. I still ran drills at the range, but it was habit, not purpose.

One Tuesday evening, I got a message from my contact—a guy who lined up off‑the‑books work. He said there was a potential “big client” looking for a small, professional team. Good money, quick turnaround, no uniforms.

Meet him at a bar.

That should’ve been my first warning. Legitimate clients do coffee shops or conference rooms, not sticky floors and neon beer signs. But my rent didn’t care about my instincts, so I went.

The bar smelled like spilled beer and fried food, as all good sins do. I took a booth in the corner, back to the wall, line of sight to the entrance. Old habits die hard.

He found me.

No handshake, no introduction. Just slid into the opposite side of the booth like he owned the place. Expensive clothes. Barely there watch that probably cost more than my truck. Haircut sharp enough to slice bread. He had the kind of calm you only see in people who’ve spent their whole lives getting their way.

He didn’t give me a name. Just said he represented a “landholding entity” in the mountains four hours north. They had a problem, he said. A “rogue bear” had been terrorizing a worksite. Equipment damaged. Laborers spooked. Some had refused to come back.

Official channels—rangers, wildlife authorities—were too slow and too limited in what they were allowed to do. Paperwork. Public outcry. Etc.

He wanted it handled quietly.

“Five thousand for the weekend,” he said, pushing a manila envelope across the table. Cash edges showed at the flap.

Five grand for a bear.

I should have laughed in his face and walked out. Instead, I opened the envelope, thumbed the stack of bills, and ignored every red flag waving in my peripheral vision.

“You’re ex‑military,” he said. “We like that. You’re used to… nonstandard engagements.”

He told me there’d be three other contractors on the job. I’d meet them tomorrow, early. Coordinates and a list of gear sat in a slim folder that joined the envelope.

He never once said the word “legal.”

I left the bar with my pockets heavy and my head lighter than it should’ve been.

Chapter 2: Four Men and the Wrong Tracks

We met in a gravel lot behind a gas station where the mountains start to rise in earnest.

Three other guys, all with that same look you see around army bases and cheap motels near training ranges—alert, coiled, too aware of exits.

First was Cole. Older than me by a decade, gray threaded through his hair, beard kept neat. His hands shook very slightly when he wasn’t using them, but his eyes were clear. Forty years of hunting had carved lines into his face and wisdom into his gaze.

Second was Reyes. Ex‑mil, like me, but he carried himself like his battlefield had been uglier than mine. Lean, almost wiry, movements economical. He had a way of constantly—not nervously, just steadily—scanning his surroundings, like he expected trouble to step out from behind a gas pump at any moment.

Third was Mason. Big in the way that makes you rethink the structural integrity of furniture. Six‑four at least, two hundred and fifty pounds of muscle layered over what looked like farm work and weight room hours. Quiet. Hands the size of dinner plates. We all immediately pegged him as the guy you want between you and anything coming head‑on.

We loaded gear into Mason’s truck—a battered but well‑maintained pickup—and headed north. Pavement shrank to two lanes. Two lanes to chipped blacktop. Blacktop to gravel. Gravel to twin ruts clawed into dirt.

The “base camp” our client had indicated on the map turned out to be a clearing barely larger than the footprint of the truck. Someone had left a fire ring, a couple of tarps, some rope, and vacuum‑sealed rations that looked like they remembered a previous decade.

Cell reception had died twenty miles back. The client had given us a sat phone “for emergencies,” but the canopy here was thick enough that you could have convinced yourself it was permanent twilight.

The nearest ranger station might as well have been on the moon.

That first night around the fire, we went over the story again.

Problem bear. Unusually aggressive. Attacked equipment. Charged workers. No fatalities yet, but several near misses. The logging company—or whatever shell company our client actually represented—wanted it gone before it started making headlines.

Cole frowned as he listened. “Bears this time of year are filling up for winter, not picking fights with people,” he said, poking at the coals. “Something pokes them, they bluff‑charge. They don’t keep coming. Not unless they’re sick or starving. You see any recent fires up here? Any dead livestock? Signs something changed their food supply?”

We all shook our heads. The dossier had been thin. Too thin.

Reyes spread a topo map across his knees. The firelight flickered over elevation lines, creek markings, and contour shading. “We start here,” he said, tapping the clearing. “Creek runs to the northeast. Bears like water. Tracks will be clearest near soft ground. We follow sign as far as we can, stick together, and if anything feels wrong, we pull back to higher ground. Sat phone might work from a ridge.”

Mason just nodded, tossed another log on the fire, and asked about ammo.

The client had provided rifles—.300 Winchester Magnum bolt actions. Overkill for most black bears, adequate for a grizzly. Heavy recoil, heavy rounds. Enough stopping power, in theory, for anything on four legs.

We all slept lightly. The forest was too quiet. No owl calls. No coyotes harmonizing. Just the occasional crack from somewhere beyond the fire’s reach, as if something large were testing the weight of branches in the dark.

At first light, we geared up and moved out.

It didn’t take long to find tracks. Just not the ones we’d been promised.

Near a small stream, in damp earth that still held last night’s chill, impressions sank deep into the soil.

Footprints.

Human‑like in shape—heel, arch, ball, five toes clearly defined. But each print was twice the length of my boot and significantly wider. The toes were longer, thicker, ending in blunt tips. No claw marks. No boot tread.

The stride length between prints was massive. Whatever had walked here had legs long enough that standing next to it, I’d have felt like a child.

“Okay,” Reyes said slowly. “That’s not a bear.”

“Don’t say it,” Mason muttered.

Cole knelt, fingers hovering an inch above the impressions like he was afraid touching them might make them vanish. “Weight’s… hell, I don’t even know,” he said. “Four, five hundred pounds easy. More, maybe. And look here—” He pointed to a series of stones mid‑stream. “It stepped on rocks where it could. That’s not a panicked animal blundering around. That’s something making choices.”

“Giant guy in snowshoes?” I offered weakly.

“Show me the snowshoes that leave toe prints,” Reyes said.

We followed.

The trail threaded into deeper forest, using terrain the way a local uses alleyways in a city. It skirted dense underbrush, chose gradual slopes over sudden inclines, stepped over deadfall in places we had to detour around. You don’t get that kind of travel pattern from something confused or enraged.

Around midday, we found a small opening where a lightning strike had taken down a tall fir years ago, ripping a wound in the canopy and letting sun through. Reyes lifted the sat phone toward the gap and finally got bars.

He called the number our client had provided.

“Tracks aren’t bear,” he said calmly when someone picked up. “Bipedal. Large. Intelligent movement patterns. You send us up here chasing the wrong thing?”

There was a pause. Long enough that I thought the call had dropped.

Then a voice said, neutral, “Proceed with the mission.”

“Proceed with—” Reyes started. “What exactly are we hunting?”

Click.

He tried dialing back. Nothing. No connection. The satellite icon blinked, then went dark.

We stared at each other.

Mason broke the silence. “We’re already here,” he said. “We got paid. We’re armed. Whatever it is, it bleeds.”

Cole shook his head. “I’ve learned to listen when the woods tell you to leave,” he said softly. “They’re yelling right now.”

Reyes rubbed his temples. “If we walk away, you know that money comes back out of our accounts, right?” he said. “Guy like that didn’t get rich by handing out free cash.”

We kept going.

Chapter 3: The One We Killed

The further we went, the older the forest felt.

These weren’t second‑growth trees clawing their way back from logging. These were giants that had stood when my great‑grandfather was a boy. Douglas firs and cedars thick enough that three of us together couldn’t have wrapped our arms around them.

The light dimmed under the canopy. Sound changed, too. Footsteps sank into a carpet of needles and moss that swallowed noise. Our own breathing and the occasional clink of gear were the only reminders we weren’t moving through a painting.

We saw more sign.

A sapling, eight inches in diameter, twisted until its fibers snapped, the upper section hanging at a warped angle. Fresh. Sap still wet.

Another tree stripped of bark from six to ten feet up, pale wood beneath scored with four deep grooves that ran parallel, like fingers dug in and dragged downward.

“This is… not nothing,” Reyes said quietly.

We were about five miles from base camp when we found the clearing.

Fifty yards across, roughly circular, a stream cutting through one side. Grass and low plants flattened in several areas, as if something heavy had lain there repeatedly. The air smelled wrong.

It hit like a wall.

Body odor turned up to eleven. Wet dog, but not quite. Underneath it all, the sweet‑sick tang of rot. It filled the throat, coated the tongue, made the back of the nose throb.

Mason actually gagged, stepping back toward the trees and pressing the crook of his arm over his nose.

Cole moved toward one of the flattened areas, crouched, and brushed aside crushed leaves. Beneath, a depression in the earth, roughly human‑shaped but much larger. It had been padded with gathered moss and grasses, arranged in a way that suggested comfort, not just convenience.

“Bed,” he said. “Nest. Whatever you want to call it. Something sleeps here regular.”

Food remains lay nearby: cracked bones sucked clean of marrow, fruit rinds, bits of fur and feather.

Reyes turned slowly, scanning the tree line. “You see how this is set up?” he said. “Open enough to see anything coming. Stream for water. High trunk density for exit routes. You don’t get a vantage like this by accident.”

The sun was lowering behind the ridge, shadows pooling at the edges of the clearing.

“We camp here?” Mason asked.

“Hell no,” Cole said immediately.

Reyes hesitated, torn between tactical advantage and the prickling sensation that we were standing in someone else’s bedroom.

We didn’t get to decide.

The sound hit us like a physical blow.

At first I thought it was distant thunder. Low. Rolling. It swelled upward, deepening, thickening, until it wasn’t thunder at all but a roar that climbed into something almost like a scream.

I’ve heard men scream in battle. I’ve heard wildcats scream when trapped. This was neither. It carried a complexity, a modulation, that made the hair on every inch of my body stand up.

It came from everywhere at once. Echoes off trees, off hills, off the very air. My brain couldn’t pin down a direction.

Our rifles were up without conscious thought.

Out of the tree line opposite us, it stepped.

For a second, my brain tried to keep up by feeding me wrong comparisons. Big man in a ghillie suit. Bear reared on hind legs. Gorilla from some escaped zoo.

Then those lies fell away.

It moved on two legs, each step deliberate. Its shoulders were as broad as a refrigerator door, fur dark brown shading to black in places, muscles sliding under it with every motion. It had to be eight and a half feet tall, maybe more. The calves alone were thicker than my thighs. Its arms hung long, almost to its knees, ending in hands that flexed slowly as it approached.

The face—that’s what I see when I close my eyes at night. Heavy brow ridge shading deep‑set eyes. Nose broad and flat. Jaw massive. Lips parted just enough to show teeth built for meat and plant alike.

And in its eyes, no animal emptiness.

It was thinking.

It stopped at the edge of the clearing. The smell coming off it hit us in a wave—stronger even than the background odor. It looked at us. Not in a generalized way, but individually. One to the next. Measuring. Weighing.

Those few seconds stretched. The forest held its breath.

Then it took a step forward.

Reyes fired.

The crack of the .300 Win Mag shattered the quiet. The recoil rocked his shoulder. The round hit center mass—I saw the fur puff, saw dark spray.

The creature jerked. Then roared.

It charged.

Whatever you’re picturing, make it faster.

It ate up the ground between us in monstrous strides, each impact punching into the earth. Its arms pumped, hands curling into something between fists and claws. Its mouth opened wider, teeth bared, roar becoming an unbroken line of rage.

“Shoot!” someone yelled, maybe me.

We opened up.

Reyes worked his bolt like a machine, firing, cycling, firing. Mason’s big hands moved surprisingly fast, his rounds hammering into that broad chest. I shouldered my rifle and put two rounds into center mass, the way a lifetime of training has wired into my muscles.

The impacts staggered it. Blood welled, dark against fur, flowing down its torso. But it didn’t stop. It didn’t fall.

At fifteen yards, it looked like a nightmare filling my scope. At ten, I could see the whites of its eyes around the dark irises, fury edged now with something like… shock.

At eight yards, its knees buckled.

It crashed forward, momentum carrying it another few feet before that mass finally gave, dropping like a toppled tree. The ground shuddered under the impact.

It tried to push itself up.

That single attempt is burned in my mind. One hand planting, muscles in its arm bulging, fingers digging furrows in the soil. It looked at us, not with pleading, not with fear, but with the stubborn refusal of something that has never been bested.

Reyes stepped forward and put two rounds into its skull.

Silence.

The ringing in my ears faded slowly, replaced by the creak of trees, the distant rush of the stream, our own ragged breathing.

We edged closer.

Up close, everything we’d glimpsed at a distance sharpened into awful detail. The fur wasn’t uniform; it varied in length and thickness across the body. Scars crisscrossed its chest and arms, pale lines where hair grew thinner. Its hands were broader than any shovel, nails thick and dark, edges dulled from use.

The face lay slack now. The intelligence hadn’t drained out of it so much as frozen in, preserved in those glassy eyes that stared past us into trees.

I realized then that the eyes were not looking at empty space.

They were looking past us.

Reyes noticed too. He turned, rifle up, scanning the tree line beyond the clearing.

The first answering call rose from the woods.

Chapter 4: The Ones Who Came

The roar that answered was similar to the first, but not identical. Different tone. Different rhythm. It rolled in from our left. Another answered from our right. A third from somewhere behind us. A fourth, higher and shorter, cut across the others.

They were talking.

Not in any language we could map out, but in patterns. Calls and responses, overlapping and building. There was urgency in them now. Panic. Fury.

“They’re all around us,” Mason said softly.

“We move,” Reyes ordered. “Now.”

We didn’t argue.

We’d barely cleared the edge of the clearing when the forest exploded with sound.

Branches cracked. Underbrush thrashed. Something huge crashed through the trees parallel to us, just far enough away that we couldn’t see it.

We ran.

Tactical retreat, if you want to dress it up nice. Panic‑fueled flight, if you want the truth. The terrain that had been challenging on the way in became an enemy all its own. Fallen logs tripped us. Roots grabbed at ankles. Low branches clawed at gear and faces.

The creatures—and by then, we all accepted that’s what they were; there was no more room for the word “animal” in this equation—stayed just out of sight. We caught glimpses: a flash of dark fur between trunks, the swing of a massive arm, the ripple of muscle under hair. They paced us, not sprinting but moving with dreadful inevitability, like wolves jogging alongside prey.

Every time we veered in one direction, a crash ahead of us forced us to adjust. They were shaping our path, not just chasing us. Herding.

“Cliff,” Reyes panted from the front. “Ahead. We can use elevation.”

The trees thinned a little, revealing bedrock rising up into a wall maybe forty feet high. Halfway up, a dark smear cut into the stone—a cave mouth.

“We can’t climb that,” Cole gasped, glancing up. “Not fast enough.”

“We don’t have to be fast,” Reyes said. “We just have to be faster than them.”

He found a weakness in the rock face, a natural staircase of ledges and protrusions. “Drop packs,” he said. “We’ll die heavy.”

We stripped quickly—food, stoves, spare clothes thudding to the ground. Only rifles and ammo stayed.

The climb was hell. The rock crumbled in places, flaking away under fingers. My arms burned. My breath sawed. Twice, my boot slipped and my stomach lurched as my body swung out over the slope.

Below, the crashing grew louder.

Mason shoved from beneath when Cole faltered, practically lifting the older man onto the next ledge. Reyes, already halfway up, hauled him the rest of the way by his webbing. We scrambled, clawed, swore. Somehow, we reached the cave.

Inside, it was deeper than it had looked. Thirty feet back, the floor widened into a space where we could stand, turn around, breathe without plastering ourselves against stone.

The entrance was narrow enough that only two of us could stand shoulder to shoulder in it. Good, Reyes said, breathless. Force them to come at us one at a time.

If they came at us.

For a while, all we heard were our own hearts calming and the occasional rustle of leaves as the forest wind picked up. Then shapes moved among the trees below.

They were careful this time. No crashing. No roaring. Just gliding between trunks, shadows darker than the spaces they inhabited. We counted at least six. Some were shorter, no less than seven feet by our estimation. Others made the one we’d killed look… average.

They fanned out around the base of the cliff, never stepping fully into the open for more than a heartbeat. In those fragments of visibility, we saw faces turned upward.

They knew exactly where we were.

Night took its time coming. The sky narrow as a knife’s edge above the canyon deepened from blue to indigo. The temperature dropped. We huddled just inside the cave, rifles ready, watching the dark below.

When the heavy scraping started, it took us a moment to understand.

At first, it was a distant grind, like rock on rock. Then closer, accompanied by grunts and low calls. Something very big was being moved.

A shadow blotted out part of the stars beyond the entrance.

Reyes swore under his breath. “They’re not coming up,” he said. “They’re sealing us in.”

The boulder rolled slowly into place, guided by many hands. We saw glimpses of them through the narrowing gap—thick fingers digging into stone, fur bristling, eyes glinting.

When it finally slammed against the cave mouth, the echo reverberated through the chamber, dust sifting from the ceiling. Only slivers of light remained around the edges where the rock didn’t perfectly match the opening.

We were entombed.

Chapter 5: Four Days in the Dark

Panic is loud. It fills the air with shouting, breath, scrambling hands. It clawed up my throat the moment the boulder settled, but years of training shoved it down enough that I didn’t waste my oxygen hyperventilating.

The first hour was chaos anyway. Mason threw his shoulder against the stone, pushing until veins stood out on his neck. It didn’t budge. Reyes ran his hands along the edges, feeling for weaknesses. There were none. Cole sat down hard and muttered prayers under his breath.

Eventually, the adrenaline ran out. The reality remained.

No way out. No clear way to signal. No water in the cave. Food enough for maybe two days if we rationed hard.

Reyes took charge. It’s what people like him do when faced with crises. “We inventory,” he said. “We eat on schedule. We drink on schedule. We keep our heads. Nobody wastes energy.”

We had power bars, jerky, some nuts. Our water bottles were less reassuring—each of us had brought enough for a single day’s hike, assuming we’d refill at streams as needed.

There were no streams in here.

Day and night blurred. With only thin bands of light leaking around the stone, we judged time by how that glow brightened to gray and deepened to black. The air stayed cool but not freezing; the stone insulated us. Our bodies, huddled together, added their own heat until the cave smelled like sweat and fear layered over the faint, ever‑present musk of whatever had used this cave before us.

Occasionally, we heard them.

Footsteps outside. Rocks shifting. Low calls, less urgent now, more… conversational. We shouted through the gaps until our throats burned. Even if they heard us, they gave no sign.

By the second day, our mouths felt like sand. Every sip of water came with the knowledge that it was one closer to empty. Our stomachs hollowed. The gnawing ache of hunger was easier to ignore than the dry tongues sticking to the roofs of our mouths.

Reyes kept assigning tasks, even pointless ones. Check ammo. Clean rifles. Inspect every inch of the cave wall in case we’d missed a crack. It gave our hands something to do besides shake.

Cole deteriorated fastest. Age and dehydration are a cruel combination. His hands shook uncontrollably. At one point, he slumped against the wall and didn’t respond for almost a minute. We thought he was gone until his chest hitched and he sucked in a ragged breath.

“Sorry,” he whispered. “Just… tired.”

By day four—if our sense of time was right—we had nothing left to drink. Every swallow felt like chewing. Our lips cracked. Our urine had stopped being anything but a dark trickle.

Hope shrank to a thin thread.

That’s when we heard the scraping again.

At first I thought I was dreaming. My brain supplying sounds it wanted to hear. But Reyes heard it too. So did Mason. They crawled toward the entrance, ears pressed to the cool stone.

“Something’s moving,” Reyes said hoarsely.

The boulder ground against the rock. Dust rained down. Light brightened around the edges. It moved slowly—no dramatic roll, no sudden flood of day—just inch by inch, as if whoever pushed it measured each adjustment.

When the gap was finally large enough for a person to squeeze through, we didn’t wait.

Reyes went first, slithering on his belly, dragging himself into the open air. I followed, the exchange from dark to light making spots dance in my vision.

The late afternoon sky looked impossibly wide.

Mason hauled Cole out last, practically carrying him. The older man’s legs barely worked, his eyes sunken and glassy.

My first breath of outside air burned. Then I smelled the forest, the stream below, the pine. Life.

And I saw it.

Fifty yards away, at the edge of the trees, it stood.

Different from the one we’d killed, but clearly the same kind of being. Darker fur, almost black, with scars crisscrossing its chest and arms. Broader, somehow. Taller by a few inches. It watched us with an intensity that felt like a physical weight.

Its posture wasn’t aggressive. Its arms hung relaxed at its sides. Its hands were empty. It didn’t step closer. It didn’t bare its teeth.

We froze.

Our rifles were still in the cave. Even if they hadn’t been, I’m not sure we could have raised them. Our bodies shook from weakness. Our minds shook from something else.

The creature made a sound.

Lower than the calls we’d heard in the forest. Longer. It thrummed in my chest, resonated in my bones. It wasn’t a roar. It wasn’t a scream. If anything, it felt like words spoken in a language my ears couldn’t parse but some deeper part of me could feel meaning in.

It felt like: Go.

Then, without another sound, it turned and walked back into the trees. Two steps and the forest swallowed it. The others, if they were there, remained hidden.

We didn’t need more encouragement.

We half‑stumbled, half‑slid down the slope to the stream. The water’s sparkle was like a hallucination. We dropped to our knees and plunged our faces in, gulping greedily until Reyes yanked us back one at a time, forcing us to slow down, drink in measured amounts so we didn’t shock our systems.

We lay in wet moss, water dripping off our faces, chests heaving. Cole coughed, sputtered, then laughed—a rough, broken sound.

“They let us go,” he rasped.

“For now,” Reyes said.

That’s when the roars came again.

Chapter 6: Abandoned

They were closer than before. The forest to our right vibrated with them, then the forest to our left answered. The sounds moved—not stationary warnings but mobile, tracking calls.

“They’re coming this way,” Mason said, pushing up onto one knee, hand reaching for where his rifle would’ve been if we hadn’t left it above.

Reyes’ head snapped up, eyes scanning. “We can’t go back up,” he said. “We’re done with caves.”

“They’re not done with us,” Mason said. His jaw tightened. “I’m not running anymore.”

The stream cut a shallow trench through the valley here, its banks rimmed with rocks and scattered logs. Trees pressed close, but there was enough open ground to stage a fight.

“We make a stand,” Reyes said, decision snapping into place. “Use the stream as a barrier. They’ll have to cross somewhere. We pick them off in the water. High ground on the banks. Overlapping fire.”

He was slipping into combat mode. Planning kill zones. Assigning sectors.

Mason nodded. “About damn time,” he muttered.

Cole looked from one to the other, torn. His eyes were clearer now that he’d had water, but he still shook. “They could’ve killed us in that cave,” he said. “They didn’t. They let us out. Maybe… maybe they’re just making sure we leave.”

Reyes shook his head. “Or they’re shepherding us to a place of their choosing,” he said. “You want to wait until they decide they’re done playing?”

Their voices blurred in my ears.

I saw four days in the dark. I saw the way that huge creature had stood watching us, not gloating, not raging, just… deciding. I saw the way they’d moved that boulder—precision, not spite.

Mercy. Maybe. Or calculated risk management. Either way, it was more consideration than we’d shown when we had walked into their clearing and opened fire.

“Don’t,” I said quietly.

They didn’t hear me over the argument.

“We don’t know how many there are,” I said louder. “We barely brought down one when we were fresh and fed. Look at us. We can barely stand. You really think we’re going to win a second round?”

Reyes’ gaze snapped to mine. “You got a better idea?” he snapped.

“Yeah,” I said. “Leave. Follow the stream. Get out of their territory. Don’t shoot at the things that just chose not to kill us.”

“The hell with that,” Mason said. “I’m not letting them decide if I live or die.”

Reyes nodded. “We hold here,” he said. “Cole, you take that log. Mason, there. I’ll—”

I made my decision.

I put my rifle down.

They both stared at me like I’d dropped a child instead of a weapon.

“What are you doing?” Reyes demanded.

“Not dying here,” I said. “Not for ego. Not to prove I’m brave. I owe those things more than another bullet in one of their faces.”

The roar rolled closer.

“I’m going,” I said. “Upstream. Away. You want to fight, that’s on you. I’m done.”

“Coward,” Mason spat.

“Survivor,” I replied.

I didn’t wait for their answer.

I stepped into the stream. The water bit into my legs like ice. Rocks wobbled under my feet. I waded, turned my back on them, and started moving upstream, letting the current push against me and hoping it would carry my scent and sound in its own direction.

They yelled my name. I didn’t look back.

Two or three minutes later, the gunfire started.

It came in sharp, panicked bursts. No carefully timed shots. No coordinated volley. Just frantic firing, bolts slamming, rounds cracking into wood and stone.

The roars answered, a chorus. Some high. Some low. Some so loud they seemed to flatten the air.

Then screams. Human ones.

The shots became sporadic, then stopped.

Silence flowed in behind them.

I kept walking.

Chapter 7: The Price of Mercy

I stayed in that stream until my legs went numb, until my toes were more joint than sensation, until I was too tired to be sure of my footing. The water widened as tributaries joined, banks flattening. Somewhere in the night, I stumbled out, shivering, and collapsed under a tree.

When dawn came, slanting light through branches, I had lived through six days in the woods. Four in a cave, one climbing out, one walking away.

The stream eventually led me to a logging road. Old, overgrown, but still a scar of civilization cutting through the trees. I followed it with the plodding determination of a man whose decisions have been narrowed to one line.

Two days later, a work crew found me.

I gave them a version of events that fit easily into their world. Got separated from my hunting party. Got lost. Followed water out.

They took me to a clinic, where doctors hung IV bags full of clear, blessed water and marveled at my electrolyte levels. They said I was lucky. I agreed, without explaining how deep that statement went.

I never told them about Reyes, Mason, or Cole. Not by name. Not by story.

The client never called again. No one came knocking to ask about three missing men and a wad of cash. Sometimes I scan news headlines for “unidentified bodies found in national forest,” but nothing matches. It’s like that entire operation lived and died off the books.

I sold my guns slowly over the next year. First the magnums. Then the hunting rifles. Then the handguns. I kept one small pistol, more for the symbolism of not being entirely helpless than because I believe it would do anything if those things ever walked into a parking garage.

Now I work security in a building where the scariest thing I face is a teenager with a skateboard and a bad attitude. I sleep with city noise outside my window—sirens, engines, voices. Concrete walls and streetlights feel like armor.

Sometimes, late, when the building is quiet and the cameras show nothing but empty hallways, I swear I hear it. A low, distant rumble. A voice that isn’t quite a voice. The echo of something huge moving under a canopy of leaves instead of fluorescent lights.

Maybe it’s just memory. Maybe it’s my brain replaying trauma on loop.

Or maybe, once you’ve heard certain things, the world never quite goes silent again.

People ask me why I don’t go hunting anymore. They phrase it nicely. “Lose the taste for it?” “Too busy?” “City boy now?”

I tell them I got tired of killing things that couldn’t shoot back.

The truth is simpler.

I killed one of them. A towering, intelligent, furious being defending its home. Its family came for us. They could have erased us without effort. They chose instead to lock us up, to wait, to watch. And when we were near death, they let us go.

We repaid that by trying to shoot them again.

Reyes and Mason made their choice. I made mine.

The Sasquatch—call them that, call them something older and truer in a language we’ve forgotten—they’re still out there. They’re not movie monsters. They’re not cuddly forest guardians. They’re something in between—predators and protectors both, smart enough to strategize, strong enough to enforce their boundaries, and, sometimes, merciful enough to let the stupid, dangerous primates go.

I was one of the ones they let go.

I won’t test that mercy twice.