Truck Hits Sasquatch at 100 MPH and Video Shocks Everyone: “HE JUMPED IN FRONT OF THE TRUCK!”
Chapter 1 — Mile Marker 2:34
I’ve hauled freight through the Northwest for thirty-four years, long enough to believe I’d seen every kind of bad luck a road can throw at a man. Blowouts that turned tires into shrapnel. Black ice that made a forty-ton rig feel weightless. Elk herds spilling over a hill like they owned the pavement. I thought I knew what everything looked like in high beams. Turns out I didn’t.
.
.
.
It was late September, northern Montana, Route 93 cutting through the Flathead National Forest. Rain had started around midnight and it wasn’t the polite kind. It came down in sheets that flattened the world into a narrow tunnel of light and reflection. My CB radio hissed with static—nobody on, nobody close, not for miles. Just me, the rain, and those endless walls of pine pressing in on both sides like the forest wanted the road back.
I was fifty-eight, too old for overnight runs, but the money was good and my ex-wife, Linda, had a talent for turning my paycheck into her retirement plan. The dashboard clock glowed 2:34 a.m. when I reached for my thermos. Coffee was stone-cold, but I drank it anyway. You don’t get picky at that hour. You just stay awake.
The road curved through a valley and I downshifted, keeping my speed around fifty. This stretch of 93 is about as isolated as Montana gets—no gas stations, no rest stops, no comforting glow of some town. Just forest and mountains and the occasional lonely mile marker. My wipers swept back and forth like metronomes and the rain hammered my cab roof in a steady drumbeat that would’ve put me to sleep if I wasn’t trained by decades of deadlines and fatigue.
Then the curve straightened and I saw it.
Something stood in my lane maybe a hundred feet ahead. My brain tried to label it fast—deer, elk, bear—because that’s what the brain does in emergencies. It grabs the nearest known shape and slaps it over the unknown. But the silhouette was wrong. Too tall. Too upright. Arms hanging too low. A broadness that didn’t fit any animal I’d ever seen centered in a set of headlights.
“Holy—” I didn’t even finish the sentence. It ripped out of me as I slammed the brakes and cranked the wheel left. Forty tons of truck and timber began sliding on wet pavement. The trailer fishtailed. Metal screamed. For a sickening second I felt the beginning of a jackknife, that horrible yaw where you realize physics has decided you don’t get a vote.
Muscle memory saved me. Ease off, steer into the skid, pray the load doesn’t swing harder than you can correct. Somehow I brought the rig to a stop a hundred yards down the road. The engine idled. The wipers kept wiping. Rain kept falling. My hands stayed locked on the wheel like they’d fused there.
I sat panting, trying to force order into my thoughts. It had to be a bear. A freakishly big one standing up. That’s what I told myself because that explanation fit inside the world I knew.
Except bears don’t look like that in a headlight beam. Bears don’t have that posture. And bears—this is the detail my mind kept circling like a dog worrying a sore tooth—don’t look at you the way that thing looked at me in the fraction of a second before impact. There had been something in the eyes, a directness that didn’t feel like startled animal panic.
I reached for the CB, then stopped. What would I even say? I hit something that shouldn’t exist? No. Better to check the damage, see if the rig would run, and get to town. That was the plan. Practical. Normal.
I grabbed my flashlight and stepped down into cold drizzle.
The silence hit first. No insects. No wind. No forest noise. Just the idle of my engine and the rain tapping asphalt. It felt like the woods had gone still to listen.
I walked toward the front of the truck, beam cutting through wet air. I expected a carcass. I expected a broken shape in the road. There was nothing. The bumper was dented. The grill was busted. And caught in the twisted chrome were clumps of thick, dark hair—coarse, bristly, with a reddish tint where the light hit.
My stomach tightened.
I swept my flashlight across the pavement where the impact happened. A dark smear. Blood. And leading away from it, disappearing into the trees, droplets like breadcrumbs into the black.
I stood there with my training and my instincts fighting in my chest. The responsible thing—follow the blood, make sure the animal wasn’t suffering, report it. The smart thing—get back in the cab and drive until lights and people replaced trees.
“Get it together,” I muttered, lying to myself. “Wounded deer.”
But I’d hit deer before. This wasn’t deer.
Still, I followed the blood into the timber, because stubbornness has always been my worst habit.
Chapter 2 — The Blood Trail and the Wrong Kind of Quiet
The moment I stepped off the road, the air changed. It felt heavier, older, like stepping into a room where something had been waiting in the dark long before you arrived. Water dripped from the canopy. The blood trail pulled me deeper, bright on leaves, smeared on broken branches, heavier as it went. Whatever I’d hit wasn’t trying to hide. It was moving fast and bleeding hard.
Fifty yards in, I heard a low guttural sound—half growl, half groan. It wasn’t repeated. It wasn’t a warning call like a bear’s huff or a moose’s grunt. It sounded like pain held inside a throat too big for it.
My beam swept from tree to tree. “Hello?” I called before I could stop myself, and regretted it immediately. Calling into the woods at night is like knocking on a stranger’s door and announcing your weakness.
No answer. Only the rain and that dense, watching quiet.
The trail led to the base of a massive Douglas fir. For a second I thought it ended there, that the creature had climbed or vanished or simply collapsed out of sight. Then I saw the blood curve around the trunk. I circled slowly, my good hand hovering near the folding knife in my pocket, which felt like a joke. A pocketknife against anything that could dent a semi’s front end might as well be a toothpick.
My light found a small clearing on the far side.
And there it was.
Crouched low, one enormous hand pressed to its thigh where blood seeped between thick fingers. Dark coarse hair covered most of its body, wet and clumped from rain and brush. Its shoulders were too broad. Its arms too long. The proportions were wrong in a way my mind refused to categorize. The face—almost human, but not—held a heavy brow ridge and a wide flat nose. The eyes reflected my flashlight with an amber glow that made my skin tighten.
The creature looked at me.
Not past me. Not through me. At me.
And in that moment I knew, with the kind of certainty you don’t argue with, that I was looking at something intelligent. Not human—God, no—but not the simple awareness of a bear either. There was recognition in the gaze. There was fear. And there was anger coiled beneath both.
Neither of us moved. Rain ticked off leaves. Water ran down tree trunks. My heart hammered so hard I thought it might give me away as prey.
Then it rose.
It straightened to its full height with a controlled power that made my mouth go dry. Eight feet, maybe more. Massive torso, barrel-chested. Long arms that hung low. Legs slightly bowed but built like engines. It stood on two feet like it belonged that way. It didn’t wobble. It didn’t hunch like a bear trying to balance. It stood like a man stands, only wrong and enormous and wholly other.
I took an involuntary step back and my heel caught on a root. I stumbled. In that tiny lapse of control, the creature moved.
Even injured, it crossed the distance with terrifying speed. One huge hand reached toward me. Instinct exploded through my body. I swung the flashlight like a club and felt it connect with its forearm. The creature roared, and the sound didn’t just fill the clearing—it seemed to shake it, vibrating through trunks and through my ribs. Pain and fury braided together in that roar.
I didn’t wait to learn what it would do next.
I ran.
Branches whipped my face. Underbrush tore at my legs. My boots slipped in mud. Behind me, I heard it crashing through the forest, gaining. I could hear its breathing—deep, rhythmic, too close. The night became a narrow corridor of terror. I had no idea if I was running toward the road or deeper into nowhere.
Then the trees opened and I burst into a meadow fifty yards across.
I stopped, spinning, lungs on fire.
Not the road.
I’d run the wrong way.
The creature emerged at the treeline more slowly now, favoring the injured leg, but still moving with a fluid grace that didn’t match its size. It paused, and for one insane moment I wondered if it understood the shape of my fear, if it could read the pleading in the way I held my arms and kept my voice from cracking.
“Stay back!” I shouted. “I don’t want to hurt you!”
It took a step forward. Then another. Shoulders hunched in a predatory line.
It charged.
Despite the limp, it closed distance like a freight train. I swung the flashlight again, but this time it caught my wrist mid-swing. The grip was so strong I felt bones grind. A sharp pain shot through my arm. The flashlight dropped.
I dropped to my knees, choking on shock.
The creature loomed over me, breath visible in the cold air. It smelled of wet fur and musk, and something else—an earthy rot like a den that hadn’t seen daylight in years. Every part of my brain screamed that I was done.
I reached for my knife with my good hand.
Before I could get it, the creature struck me—not a killing blow, not a bite, not claws. A heavy shove that sent me sprawling backward, dazed, the world tilting. When my vision cleared, it stood over me studying my face like it was reading a map.
Then it grabbed the front of my jacket and lifted me off the ground as easily as I’d lift a child.
Face-to-face, close enough to see details that still make my stomach turn: the flare of nostrils as it scented me, yellowed teeth beneath curled lips, skin visible around the eyes and mouth beneath matted hair. And in its eyes, I saw something worse than animal rage.
Calculation.
It was deciding what I was.
Threat. Prey. Nuisance. Mistake.
Then it released me.
I hit the ground hard. It took a step back. We stared at each other in the rain-damp grass, and I realized—cold and clear—that if it had wanted me dead, I would have been dead. That fact did not comfort me. It unnerved me.
With a final rumbling growl that vibrated in my bones, it turned and loped back into the trees, the limp visible but not slowing it much. The forest swallowed it like it had never been there.
I lay there shaking until my lungs remembered how to breathe.
Chapter 3 — The Lie I Told the World
My wrist was swelling fast, turning purple before my eyes. I could move my fingers, but pain shot up my arm with every shift. Broken, no doubt. A broken wrist in the woods isn’t the kind of problem that kills you by itself, but it can become a chain that drags you under if panic takes over.
I forced myself up, retrieved the flashlight, and tried to orient. The meadow gave me no landmarks. In my headlong flight, I’d lost direction completely. The only thing I could trust was my own trail—the flattened grass, the snapped branches, the churned mud where my boots had dug in. After twenty minutes of searching, I found it: a clear path of destruction through the undergrowth. Relief hit me so hard I almost laughed.
As I followed my trail backward, I began to hear it—the distant rumble of my truck’s engine still idling on the highway. The sound grew louder until the trees thinned and my headlights glowed on wet asphalt like a lighthouse.
I emerged fifty yards from the rig and hesitated, scanning the shoulder and the treeline. The highway was empty. No creature. No movement. Just rain and the hiss of tires on nothing because there were no tires out here but mine.
I sprinted to the cab, pain tearing up my arm, slammed the door, and clicked the lock like the sound itself could protect me. Only then did I collapse back in the seat, trembling, the kind of shaking that comes after adrenaline stops pretending it can keep you upright.
I sat there staring through the windshield while my brain tried to rebuild reality around what had happened. I told myself I’d hit a bear. I told myself I’d panicked. I told myself exhaustion and rain had made me see wrong shapes. None of it stuck. The amber eyes were still there. The grip on my wrist still echoed in bone.
I reached for the CB again and stopped again. If I reported this, they’d laugh or they’d worry. If they believed me—if anyone believed me—people would come. Hunters. Researchers. Tourists with phones. Men with guns and ego. The woods would fill with noise. That creature would be chased, cornered, killed.
And yet it had let me go.
That had to mean something.
So I did what men like me have always done when confronted with something too strange for daylight talk. I turned it into a smaller truth. A manageable lie.
I drove to Kalispell with one good hand, wincing with every turn of the wheel, and told the ER doctor I’d slipped checking damage after hitting a deer. She gave me a look that suggested she’d seen lies before, but she didn’t press. X-rays confirmed a clean break. Six weeks in a cast. No driving heavy machinery for at least a week. Probably two.
In a motel room later, I sat on the bed staring at the wall while the rain softened outside and the painkillers dulled the edge of my wrist without touching the sharpness of memory. I reached into my pocket and pulled out something I’d taken without fully thinking: a tuft of coarse dark hair I’d plucked from the grill before leaving the road. Evidence. Proof. The kind of thing that could flip my life upside down if I handed it to the right—or wrong—person.
I stared at it a long time in the harsh bathroom light.
Then I flushed it.
Not because I was sure it was right. Because I wasn’t sure at all. But because I knew what people do to things they don’t understand. They don’t leave them alone. They don’t respect boundaries. They turn them into trophies.
I told my dispatcher the deer story. Another driver picked up my load. The company grumbled. Life resumed its usual grind. I tried to do the same, but when I closed my eyes, I saw the clearing and the creature rising to full height like a nightmare unfolding in slow motion.
That afternoon, a knock came on my motel door.
“Sheriff’s department,” a voice called. “Need to ask you a few questions.”
My heart spiked so hard it hurt.
Chapter 4 — Deputy Larsson’s Polite Questions
Deputy Larsson was middle-aged with the kind of weathered face you get from years under open sky. His eyes were alert, taking in my cast, my posture, the way my room smelled faintly of antiseptic and stale motel heat. He asked to come in. I let him.
“Hospital reported a trucker with a broken wrist,” he said. “Claimed you hit a deer on Route 93. Standard follow-up. Wildlife collisions can get messy.”
I nodded, doing my best to look bored by bureaucracy. “Not much to tell. Dark, raining. Hit something. Slipped checking damage.”
He listened, then asked if he could see the truck. My stomach tightened, but I’d already cleaned the grill. Rain had helped, too. In the parking lot, he circled the Kenworth slowly, examining dents and running his fingers along twisted metal.
“That’s odd,” he said finally. “Usually you get blood, hair, tissue. Something.”
“Rain probably washed it away,” I offered.
He looked at me for a long moment. “Probably.”
We stood there under the motel’s harsh lights, my breath making faint clouds, his notebook in hand. Then he said something that made my skin go tight.
“You know, we get a lot of reports of strange sightings in those woods,” he said. “Hunters. Hikers. Even truckers. Most of the time it’s imagination. Forest can do that. Especially at night.”
I said nothing.
“Usual stories,” he continued, eyes fixed on my face. “Something big walking on two legs. Footprints too large to be human. Something that watches but never shows itself clearly.”
He smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. It was the smile of a man testing the temperature of a room. “Like I said. Probably imagination. Brain fills in gaps.”
My mouth was dry. “What kind of stories?” I forced myself to ask.
He shrugged like it was nothing. Like he wasn’t describing the exact shape of my nightmare. “Just stories.”
Then he tucked his notebook away and touched his hatbrim. “If you think of anything else, call the office.”
He turned to go, paused, and added softly, “If you did see something unusual out there… it’d be good to know. For safety. For other folks on that road.”
That was the moment I understood two things at once. First: I wasn’t the first person to come out of those woods with a story that didn’t fit. Second: people in positions like his—people who worked close to the land—sometimes knew more than they were allowed to say.
“It was a deer,” I told him, too firmly. “Nothing more.”
He held my gaze, nodded once, and left.
When his patrol car’s taillights disappeared, I stood in the parking lot with rain misting my face and felt a strange mixture of relief and grief. Relief that I’d kept my secret. Grief because secrets have weight, and mine had just gotten heavier.
I went home to Spokane. I healed. The cast came off. Physical therapy rebuilt strength. My dispatcher welcomed me back. I took normal runs for a while—paper products, machinery parts, the usual. I told myself I’d never take Route 93 again.
Then two months later, the job list shifted and I found myself assigned a Montana run.
Missoula to Great Falls.
Route 93 through the Flathead.
The old dread rose like bile. Then, beneath it, something I didn’t want to admit: anticipation.
Chapter 5 — Ten Years Later, a Child Points at the Trees
Ten years does strange things to memory. It softens the edges, blurs the color, makes horrors feel like dreams you aren’t sure you had. But some memories don’t fade. They live in the body. The way my wrist still ached in cold weather. The way my chest tightened when a forest went too quiet. The way my eyes always scanned treelines without permission.
By then I was sixty-eight. Most drivers my age had retired. Linda remarried an accountant who came home every night. Good for her. I kept driving anyway, partly because it was what I knew, partly because stopping felt like admitting the road had been an escape I could never name properly.
I’d driven Route 93 in daylight dozens of times since that night. I never saw the creature again. But sometimes—especially in the long straight stretches where the forest presses close—I felt that prickling awareness, the sensation of being watched. The dispatcher thought I’d gotten weird, always requesting Montana runs nobody wanted. I couldn’t tell him why it felt like returning to a place where something unfinished waited in the trees.
Then one March, everything changed in a way I didn’t expect.
I was hauling electronics through the Flathead when I saw a minivan on the shoulder, hazards flashing. A young woman stood beside it with a small boy, maybe five. No cell signal out there. You don’t leave people stranded. I pulled over.
Her name was Emma. The boy was Josh. Dead battery or alternator, I told her after a look. She needed a tow. Then she mentioned Josh’s epilepsy medication was overdue.
“Kalispell’s forty miles,” I said. “Ride with me. We’ll get his meds, then we’ll come back and deal with the van.”
Josh climbed into the cab wide-eyed, nervous and fascinated. We’d driven maybe five miles when he leaned forward, face pressed to the window, and said a sentence that turned my blood to ice.
“Mommy,” he said calmly, “what’s that big furry man?”
Emma laughed automatically, the way tired parents laugh at children’s nonsense. “What furry man, honey?”
“In the trees,” Josh said, pointing. “He’s following us.”
I glanced at my mirrors. Saw nothing but forest and road spray.
“His meds affect perception sometimes,” Emma explained quickly, embarrassed. “He sees things.”
But Josh kept talking for the next ten miles, tracking something I couldn’t see. Sometimes close. Sometimes far. Always keeping pace. Always watching.
“He’s really big,” Josh said, voice thoughtful. “Bigger than Daddy. And he has friendly eyes.”
Friendly eyes.
Ten years ago I hadn’t seen them as friendly. I’d seen them as judgment. Calculation. Threat. I wondered, sitting high in my cab with a child talking like he was narrating the weather, whether fear had painted my memory darker than it deserved.
At the pharmacy, while Emma got the medication, I sat staring at the windshield, remembering the creature releasing me. Remembering the way it had chosen not to finish what it could’ve finished easily.
On the drive back, Josh was calmer. Then, as we neared the stranded van, he perked up and pointed again.
“The furry man is back,” he said. “He’s glad we’re okay.”
This time Emma didn’t laugh. She looked at me with a careful, frightened intelligence. “Josh,” she said softly, “describe him.”
Josh described long arms, the way it moved, the reddish tint in dark fur. He described it too cleanly for a random hallucination. Emma went pale.
She leaned toward me, voice low. “He’s not imagining it, is he?”
I should have denied it. I should have protected her comfort. Instead, I nodded once.
“I saw one,” I said. “A long time ago. Right around here.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“Potentially,” I admitted. “But… intelligent. Not aggressive unless threatened.”
The tow truck arrived. We got them sorted. Before they left, Josh pressed his face to the back window and lifted a small hand in a wave—not to me, but to something behind me.
I turned toward the treeline.
The forest looked empty. And yet that familiar sensation returned, stronger than it had been in years. The feeling of attention. Not hostile. Not friendly. Simply there.
I stepped to the edge of the trees, not crossing in, just standing at the boundary like a man who’d finally learned boundaries matter.
“I know you’re there,” I said quietly. “Thank you.”
The forest remained silent, but the silence felt different—less like a closed door and more like acknowledgment.
That night, in a motel room, I took out the small box behind my sleeper berth—the hair sample I’d kept for a decade like a talisman. For ten years, I told myself it was proof. That I might need it someday. But I didn’t need it anymore.
Josh had given me something stranger than proof: the reminder that the creature still existed, still moved through those old woods, still noticed lives passing through its territory.
I flushed the hair sample without regret this time.
And the next morning, I called my dispatcher and told him I was retiring at the end of the month.
Some mysteries don’t need to be solved. Some are meant to be respected. I’d spent ten years carrying a secret like a weight, but now it felt—finally—like a promise kept.
