I Spent 23 Years Living with a Sasquatch and This Is My Truth.

If you are reading this, then I am gone. I know you are confused, perhaps even angry. For twenty-three years, you begged me to come home. You sent letters, made phone calls, and even drove up this treacherous logging road trying to convince me to move back to the city. I always had excuses: the cabin was too much work to leave, I liked the silence, my health was better in the mountain air. Those things were true, but they weren’t the real reason I stayed.

The real reason has been living in the forest behind this cabin since the day I arrived. His name is a sound I cannot write down, a low vibration that thrums in the chest, but I called him my friend. You would call him a Bigfoot. Before you close this letter thinking I lost my mind in the isolation of the woods, I need you to keep reading. I need you to understand why I chose a “monster” over civilization.

The First Encounter: Tracks in the October Snow

I moved here at fifty-two, recently widowed and desperate to outrun the echoes of a life that felt too empty. The realtor promised the cabin was remote and peaceful; she didn’t mention that it sat on the edge of another world. The first few months were a blur of splitting wood and learning the rhythm of the wind. Then, October brought the first heavy frost.

I woke up to find massive footprints circling the cabin. Each print was seventeen inches long, pressed deep into the frozen earth. The stride was impossible—longer than I was tall. I should have been terrified. Any “sane” woman would have packed her bags. But as I traced the path of the tracks, I realized they bypassed my windows and woodpile with a strange, deliberate care. He wasn’t hunting me; he was observing me.

That night, I left a plate of stew and a jar of honey on the back porch. In the morning, the plate was licked clean, and the jar of honey was gone—the lid unscrewed and discarded nearby. It was the beginning of a silent conversation. For weeks, we traded. I gave him bread and fruit; he left me smooth river stones, pine cones arranged in perfect pyramids, and once, a massive deer antler placed carefully on my porch railing.

The Day the Shadow Spoke

I finally saw him three weeks later. The sun was low, casting long, amber fingers through the pines. I felt a weight on my back—that prickle of being watched. I turned slowly, and there he was, standing forty feet away. He was a titan, at least eight feet tall, covered in reddish-brown hair that shimmered like copper in the sunset. His shoulders were a yard wide, and his arms hung past his knees.

But it was his face that broke me. His eyes weren’t the eyes of an animal; they were deep-set, amber, and filled with a terrifying, liquid intelligence. He didn’t snarl. He simply watched me with a gentle curiosity that made my heart stop, then race. He made a soft huffing sound, turned, and faded into the trees like smoke. He didn’t crash through the brush; he belonged to it.

The boundary between us dissolved during the Great Blizzard of my second winter. The power went out, and the cold began to seep through the cabin walls like a physical weight. I was huddled under every blanket I owned, shivering so violently I thought my heart would stop. Then, I heard heavy thuds on the porch.

I looked through the frost-rimmed window and saw him. He was carrying logs from my woodshed, stack after stack, piling them against my door so I could reach them without stepping into the storm. Then, he pressed one massive, five-fingered hand against the glass. He held it there for a long minute—a silent promise of warmth. The next morning, there were three cords of wood on my porch. That was the day he stopped being a “creature” and became my best friend.

A Language Without Words

Summer brought a new milestone: speech. I was digging in the garden, struggling with a stubborn, ancient root, when a voice like falling boulders rumbled behind me: “Help.”

I nearly fell over. He was standing just five feet away, pointing at the root. I stepped back, and with a single hand, he plucked the wood from the earth as if it were a weed. From that day on, he began to learn. He didn’t speak often, and never in sentences, but his words carried the weight of the mountains. Cold. Rain. Good. Friend.

I taught him how to plant seeds; he taught me how to be still. In the city, I had spent my life “doing.” With him, I learned “being.” He could sit motionless for six hours, becoming a part of the forest itself. Watching him taught me that simply being alive was enough. He didn’t worry about yesterday; he didn’t fear tomorrow. He existed in a timeline I couldn’t comprehend—one that saw trees grow from seedlings to giants.

The Debt of Life

In my fifth year, I contracted pneumonia. I was too weak to drive, too stubborn to call for help. For three days, I lay in a fever-dream, convinced I was dying. Then, the door creaked open. He had to stoop to fit his massive frame into my home.

He stayed by my bed for seventy-two hours. He brought ice-cold water from the creek and made a bitter tea from pine needles and roots that broke my fever. When I finally opened my eyes, lucid and shivering, he was sitting on the floor, his huge hand resting lightly on my arm. His eyes were shiny, almost as if he were crying.

“Stay,” he whispered. I squeezed his hand and promised I would. From that moment on, my home was his home.

I returned the favor when he was injured by a fall on the jagged ridges. He crawled to my porch with a gash in his thigh that felt like fire. I cleaned the wound, used my last stockpile of antibiotics, and wrapped his leg in clean linens. For two weeks, he slept by my wood stove, his fur steaming in the heat. I talked to him about your childhood, about your father, about the world beyond the trees. He listened with a focus no human has ever given me. When he was healed, he touched my cheek with one soft, calloused finger and whispered, “Friend.”

The Wisdom of the Wild

You asked me why I wouldn’t leave. You said I was wasting my life. But how could I tell you that he taught me more about loyalty, patience, and beauty than any book or city ever could?

He showed me hidden hot springs where steam rose between ancient stones. He showed me ridges where the stars felt close enough to touch, far from the orange glow of streetlights. He gathered wild strawberries for me every June, his massive hands picking each tiny berry with impossible delicacy. He taught me that love doesn’t need a shared language, and that companionship doesn’t require constant noise.

I asked him once if there were others. He looked toward the deep peaks and said, “Gone.” I realized then that we were both the same—survivors of a world that was moving too fast, left behind in the quiet places. He was likely the last of his kind in these mountains, and I was the only one who saw him as a person.

The Final Walk

Now, my body is failing. My hip, which I broke in the garden last spring, never truly healed. He made me a cane from a sturdy cedar branch, and he lets me lean on his arm when we walk to the porch. He knows the end is near. He sits outside my window now, keeping watch as I write this.

Do not be sad for me. I have lived seventy-five years, and these last twenty-three have been the truest. I found a peace that passes all understanding. I found a friend who saw me for who I really was, not who I was supposed to be.

When I take my last breath, he will be the one to carry me. We have talked about it—as much as we can. He will take my body deep into the forest, to a place where the earth is rich and the cedars are ancient. He will let the forest take me back. No funeral, no headstone—just the natural cycle he taught me to love.

Please, I beg of you, do not come looking for him. Do not bring researchers, cameras, or curiosity seekers. Let him grieve in the silence he has earned. Let him remain a myth to the rest of the world, for that is the only way he remains safe.

He is knocking on the door now. Three slow thuds. Our old signal. He wants to come in and sit by the fire with me one last time. My hands are shaking too much to continue.

Thank you for being my family from a distance. I loved you all, but I became who I needed to be out here in the dark. The door is opening. He is walking over to my bed. He is taking my hand.

I am not alone. I never was.

With love, Your Mother.