I Made A Bear Call In Montana, BUT… BIGFOOT Screamed Back And Hunted Us For Hours
The Scream in the Bitterroot
Chapter 1: The Man I Used to Be
My name is Jacob Reed. I’m twenty‑seven years old, I live in Missoula, Montana, and eight months ago I was a completely different person. Back then, I was a hunter. I’d been one as long as I could remember—twenty years of autumns spent in the woods, tracking elk, whitetail, and black bear, cutting sign in fresh snow, glassing ridgelines at dawn. I knew the Bitterroot range like the back of my hand: the way the ridges folded, where the wind curled through the canyons, which benches held animals when pressure pushed them deep. If you’d asked me then, I’d have told you with absolute confidence that I understood the woods, understood the animals, understood the rules of nature and my place in them.
.
.
.
Today, I sleep with every light on in my apartment—even at two in the afternoon. I sold all my hunting gear for pennies on the dollar. I can’t drive past certain turnoffs on Highway 93 without my hands shaking so badly I have to pull over and breathe into my fists until the panic backs off. I haven’t had an unbroken night of sleep since October. Something happened to me in the Bitterroot Mountains. Something that shouldn’t be possible. Something that splintered every assumption I had about what exists in this world. I’ve spent eight months trying to convince myself it wasn’t real, trying to rationalize it, trying to forget. I can’t.
The proof isn’t in photos or casts or recordings. It’s in what it did to me. In the way my nervous system behaves now—how my pulse jumps at the sight of a stand of trees, how my chest tightens when the wind gusts through the alley between buildings and sounds just wrong for half a second. Trauma, they say, rewires you. I used to think that was metaphor. Now I know it’s structural. There’s no going back. No reset. No un‑knowing. I’ve tried to tell people. My father. A ranger. A therapist. I see it in their eyes: polite concern, careful skepticism, the little flinch when they realize I’m not joking. People can’t grasp what they haven’t felt in their own bones, and maybe that’s mercy. I would not wish this knowledge on anyone.
So why am I writing this? Why am I putting it into words at all when I know exactly how it sounds? Because I can’t carry it alone anymore. Because the weight of it is crushing me. Because somewhere out in the Bitterroot–Selway Wilderness, there is something that hunts and kills and terrorizes, something that’s been there longer than our trail maps, and if my story makes one person think twice before doing what I did, then the ridicule and doubt will be worth it.
Chapter 2: The Call
You want the exact moment it went wrong? I can tell you down to the second: October 17th, 2024, 4:23 p.m. Somewhere near the Montana–Idaho border, my cousin Noah put his hands around his mouth and made a black bear distress call into the canyon below us. Something screamed back. We were on a rocky finger jutting into a deep basin, ponderosa pines dropping away in waves. The air smelled of sun‑warmed sap and dry needles. Noah had just finished a run of squeals on the little rubber call—a high, frantic noise that usually brings curious or hungry bears. For a few seconds, there was just the sigh of wind. Then the world tore open.
The sound that came up at us from maybe two hundred yards downslope didn’t fit anything I’d heard in twenty‑six years of hunting. It started low, like a diesel engine idling inside the earth, then climbed into a shriek so loud it felt like it peeled the bark off the trees. Rage is the only word I have for it, and even that seems too small. I watched Noah’s face go from cocky amusement to confusion to bare, animal terror in about three seconds.
Now I sit in my Missoula apartment with every light on midday and I can still hear that scream in my head, clear as if it’s echoing off the plaster. Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks has my statement, and Noah’s, and a report from a ranger who later found our camp gear scattered across a quarter mile of timber. There are no photos. No audio. No clean evidence of anything except two grown men who abandoned fifteen hundred dollars’ worth of camping equipment and ran down a mountain like kids fleeing a nightmare. The worst part is we never saw it clearly. Just movement in the trees. Just those sounds. Just the feeling of being hunted by something that moved through dense forest like water flowing downhill.
But it didn’t start with the scream. It started three days earlier, when Noah called from Darby to say he’d drawn a black bear tag for zone 250 and did I want to come up for a long weekend before the season closed. I said yes without thinking. I always said yes when it came to hunting with Noah. His family had hunted the same drainage for three generations; he knew that country like other people know their own neighborhoods. I took a couple days off from my warehouse job, loaded my Remington 700 and a pack with five days of supplies, and drove south on 93 as the Missions slid into the rearview and the Bitterroots rose in front of me like a serrated wall.
Chapter 3: The First Night
I picked Noah up at his place in Darby around nine. He tossed his pack into my truck bed and climbed in, grinning the way he always did before a hunt, eyes bright under his ball cap. He’d been scouting, he said, and found a basin eight miles up trail 362, along the West Fork of the Bitterroot, with fresh bear sign all over it—scat, clawed stumps, overturned logs. Remote enough that we wouldn’t see many others. Close enough that if we killed something, packing it out wouldn’t kill us.
We hit the trailhead around 10:30 and started up. Conditions were perfect: mid‑50s, crisp and sunny, just enough breeze to carry our scent uphill. We passed a couple bowhunters heading down who said the elk were quiet. Nothing unusual. The spur trail Noah led us onto later was rougher—tight switchbacks, deadfall to step over—but by mid‑afternoon we were in a small meadow at roughly six thousand feet, a clear creek cutting through, aspens just starting to blush yellow, dark timber rising on three sides. It looked like a painting.
We set camp the way we always did: tent tucked in near the aspens, fire ring scratched together from rocks, food hung high on a cross‑limb. Noah showed me the route on his GPS—up and around the basin to take advantage of thermals and visibility. He was excited, the quiet, focused kind of excited he got when he knew he was onto something good. The plan was simple: glass from the tops, call into promising cuts, and work smarter than the bears.
That first night, after freeze‑dried stroganoff and stories around a small fire, the wilderness felt like it always had to me: big, indifferent, beautiful. We zipped the tent and lay listening to the creek. I must have drifted, because when I woke it was to a sound that didn’t belong: footsteps in the dark.
Something large was moving through brush near the water. Slow, deliberate steps, not the fluttery skitter of deer, not the light tap of a fox. I held my breath. The thing circled the camp, just at the edge of hearing. I reached over, touched Noah’s shoulder. His eyes opened instantly in the glow of the dim LED lantern. He’d heard it too. We lay there like that—two grown men flattened by the weight of night—counting the passes. It didn’t come too close. It didn’t huff or stomp like a bear. After a while, the steps faded. The creek’s babble swelled to fill the void. Eventually, we slept.
At dawn, we checked around. Nothing. Just our own bootprints and old deer tracks, a few squirrel diggings near a stump. Noah shrugged, said it was probably an elk that came down to drink, that sounds bounce strangely at night. I nodded. The explanation fit well enough. But as we shouldered our packs and headed upslope with rifles in the crook of our arms, I noticed he kept glancing at the tree line more often than usual.
Chapter 4: Tracks and Knocks
We spent the morning doing what we’d come to do. We glassed distant benches and shadowed timber, spotting elk far off, a lone coyote cutting a hillside, a hawk riding a thermal. We found cougar scrapes and three‑day‑old bear scat. The sign was there; if this had been any other hunt, the day would have been a good one. Around noon we ate on a rocky outcrop with a commanding view of the basin.
That’s when Noah pulled out the call again. A little rubber tube with a reed, nothing special to look at. “Let’s see if we can get something moving,” he said, that competitive glint in his eye. I suggested waiting until later, but he was already bringing it to his mouth. The squeals it produced sounded convincingly like a distressed cub—high, desperate, wrong in a way that makes your skin crawl if you’ve ever heard the real thing.
He called. We waited. Silence. Ten minutes later, he called again. After the fourth series, I realized the forest had gone quieter. It wasn’t something you hear so much as feel—birdsong thinning, chipmunk chatter dying off, the air itself tightening. I pointed it out. Noah shrugged. “Predator calls do that,” he said. “Everything shuts up and listens.” It was true. But this quiet felt… thicker.
We were working our way around the basin when Noah stopped so abruptly I almost walked into him. “Tracks,” he said. They were in a patch of damp earth near a seep, half‑filled with water but sharp enough. My first thought was “big bear.” Then I knelt.
They weren’t bear. Bears have splayed pads and claws that register ahead of the toes. These were long, narrow, roughly human in shape, with five distinct toe impressions and no claw marks. Sixteen inches from heel to toe, at least seven inches wide. Stride between them longer than I could comfortably step. I set my boot beside one and it looked like a child’s next to an adult.
We didn’t say anything at first. Just knelt there, studying, each of us waiting for the other to crack a joke, to offer a rational explanation, to break the spell. Noah finally fumbled for his phone, the obvious move. Dead. Zero percent. “That’s weird,” he said, frowning. “It was full this morning.” I checked mine. Same. We’d both charged them overnight. The temperature was mild; there was no reason for both batteries to tank. We looked at each other, tracks between us, dead phones in our hands, and the world shifted a half‑inch out of true.
We should have turned around then. Should have treated those prints like a warning in a language we couldn’t read. Instead we laughed—too loudly, too forced. Called them “somebody’s prank.” “Deformed grizzly.” “Hipster snowshoes.” Anything but what they resembled. We kept going.
Not long after, we heard the knocks. Three sharp, hollow cracks somewhere four or five hundred yards to our south. Wood striking wood, deliberate and clean. We stopped. Waited. Three more, same rhythm. The hair along my arms rose. Woodpeckers don’t sound like that. Trees don’t fall in neatly spaced triplets. “Maybe it’s another hunter,” I said, not believing it. Noah’s jaw worked. “Yeah. Maybe.” The knocks ceased. We moved faster.
We started seeing our own backtrail intersected—our bootprints crossing patches of softer soil where, overlapping them, were those same large tracks. Not ahead of us. Behind. Whatever had made them was following us at a distance close enough to shadow, far enough to stay unseen. That realization sank like a stone in my gut. Noah saw it too. His face went pale. “We need to get back to camp,” he said. “Now.”
Chapter 5: The Scream
We hustled for the ridge, no longer even pretending to still-hunt. Packs thumped, branches slapped, sweat pricked under our hats. When we finally stopped at a high point to catch our breath, Noah did the last thing I expected. He pulled out the bear call again.
“Don’t,” I said, sharper than I meant to. “Seriously, man. Enough.” He looked down into the shadowed timber falling away below us, something stubborn in his jaw. “I want to know if it’s still there.”
The call’s squeal sliced into the canyon, bounced off rock, hung. For about thirty seconds, nothing answered. I started to exhale—and the forest exploded.
The scream rose from far below, but it felt like it erupted under our boots. It started as a low, rolling bellow, deep enough I felt it in my ribs, then climbed and climbed until it hit a pitch so high it felt like it might crack teeth. Rage and warning and hunger all braided together. It lasted five seconds. Maybe ten. It might as well have lasted an hour. When it cut off, the echo ricocheted around the canyon like something trying to find purchase, then died. The silence that followed was complete and so oppressive it felt like pressure on my eardrums.
Noah dropped the call. It bounced off the rocks and vanished into duff. He didn’t look at it. His eyes were locked on the trees below, wide and glassy. “What the fuck was that?” he whispered. I didn’t have an answer. I’d heard elk in rut, cougars screaming, wolves howling, bears bawling. This was none of those.
Branches started breaking downslope—big branches. Something moving uphill toward us, making no effort to conceal itself. That snapped us out of our trance. We ran.
There’s a kind of running you do in the woods when you’re not trying to be quiet anymore, when you’re past thinking about twisted ankles or rolled knees. We crashed through understory, slamming into saplings, stumbling, recovering, lungs afire, the scream still ringing in our ears. Behind us, the forest thrashed. At least once, something hard smacked into a tree trunk near me—rock or branch thrown with force. I didn’t look back. Looking back is for when you have options.
We didn’t stop until our legs refused to keep going. We collapsed behind a wind‑thrown log, chests heaving, sweat chilling fast in the high‑country air. For a long minute, we listened. Nothing. No footfalls, no branch breaks, no breathing but our own. The absence of sound made my skin crawl. “We have to get back to camp,” I said finally. “We have to get out of here.” Noah only nodded, his whole body shaking.
We found the creek that led to our meadow and followed it upstream. I clung to the idea of camp like it was civilization itself. If we could just get there, just regroup, we’d figure it out. Maybe it was gone. Maybe it had been a one‑off freak event. Maybe—
Our camp looked like it had been hit by a truck.
The tent lay in ruins, fabric shredded in long, parallel slashes. Our food bags lay on the ground, cords snapped, contents torn open and strewn everywhere. Freeze‑dried meals, crushed. Energy bars, smashed. Sleeping bags ripped out of the tent, dragged through mud—if it was mud. The cook pot was dented, wedged in a bush thirty feet away. Nothing had been simply nudged or nosed aside. Everything had been attacked.
Bears will tear up a camp if they find food, sure. They root and toss and rip to get at calories. This looked different. Meaner. Focused. I remembered the tracks. The knocks. The scream. My mind tried to turn it all into “grizzly” and failed.
Noah walked into the wreckage like a sleepwalker, picking up bits of gear, turning them over, putting them down. His eyes were distant. His grandfather’s old Winchester lay where he’d leaned it earlier, untouched. My Remington, which I’d taken with us, was still in my hands. For some reason, that detail scared me more than the destruction.
“We can’t stay,” I said. “We can’t fix this. We have to go.” Noah didn’t argue. We grabbed what we could salvage—water filter, a few uncrushed bars, our knives, fire starters. We left everything else. That’s when the scream came again, this time from the northwest—the direction of the trailhead.
Noah’s head snapped up. “It’s cutting us off,” he said. He was right. Our only familiar way out lay through whatever had just announced itself there. Without speaking, we headed east, straight up the ridge, trading distance for terrain.
Chapter 6: The Night Above the Gorge
The climb was brutal. Loose rock, wet logs, pockets of slick mud hidden under needles. Twice I slipped, catching myself on roots. My thighs burned. My breath sawed at the cold air. Adrenaline kept me from noticing the ache in my shoulders from the rifle, the way my boots chewed at the backs of my heels. We weren’t moving efficiently. We were moving in the only direction that wasn’t directly toward the scream.
After what felt like forever, we hit a rock outcrop—a jutting rib of granite with two massive boulders leaned together to form a shallow cave. It had a view of the slope below and solid stone at our backs. “Here,” I said. “We stay here.” It wasn’t much. It was everything.
We squeezed in, side by side, knees drawn up, rifles across our laps. Shadows lengthened in the basin, spilling up the slopes. The temperature dropped like someone had pulled a plug. I felt every bead of sweat cooling into ice. Noah’s lips moved, forming words too soft to hear. Prayer, probably. I wanted to pray too and found nothing in my head but wind and static.
Dark fell in stages, the forest below—first a tapestry of greens and golds, then dusky shapes, then an indistinguishable mass. Sounds changed. Day birds gave way to night calls. And then, like someone turned off a switch, those quieted too. We sat there, two terrified specks clinging to a rock, waiting to see if the world would end.
Around midnight, I heard it again: footsteps. Not many. Not frantic. Just heavy, spaced, confident footfalls moving along the slope below us. I tracked them by sound, the crunch of duff, the crack of twigs. They circled our position at a distance, one hundred yards, maybe more. No panting. No clumsy stumbling. Something that knew exactly where every trunk and stone lay.
At one point, whatever it was paused. The silence pressed in, waiting. I kept my rifle pointed at the darkest patch, knowing that if it rushed us I might get one shot off before it was on top of us. Noah’s fingers were welded to his Winchester’s stock; his breathing was so shallow I had to glance over to make sure he hadn’t passed out. After an eternity, the footfalls resumed, arcing away, heading south. The night closed in again.
We didn’t sleep. Frost formed on the rock above us, touched our hair, our jackets. My teeth chattered so hard my jaw ached. Every sound was an attack in the making. None came. Dawn, when it finally seeped into the world, felt like deliverance.
In the weak gray light, we saw the tracks. Fifty yards below the rocks, in a strip of softer soil, the same massive footprints from the spring circled the base of our little fortress, impressions deep and sharp. They’d been there while we huddled above, listening, guns ready, thinking maybe it had moved off. It hadn’t. It had walked right underneath us, studying the place we’d chosen to hide.
That was the moment I understood something that would haunt me later: we weren’t just being scared. We were being evaluated.
Chapter 7: Aftermath
We didn’t talk about it. We just left. East, then north, picking up what we thought might be an old logging road, following it because we needed something that looked like it led somewhere. Hours passed. Our mouths felt like paper. We drank from a seep through the filter. Our legs shook with fatigue. Every so often, we stopped and listened. Nothing. The silence felt different now—not charged, just empty.
The overgrown track eventually intersected another, then widened, and somewhere around late morning it spilled us into a small trailhead parking area. One old pickup sat there, dust film dulling its paint. No people. No note. Just emptiness and the yawning, ordinary world. We followed the dirt road down until it met Highway 93 and stuck out our thumbs. A rancher in a Ford finally stopped. He looked us over—filthy, scraped, rifles but no packs—and asked if we’d had truck trouble. “Got turned around. Lost some gear,” I said. The lie slid easy. The truth would not.
He dropped us at Noah’s. We stood in his driveway, not looking at each other. “We should probably… tell someone,” Noah said, voice flat. “Tell them what?” I answered. “That we heard a scream and ran away?” The words sounded ridiculous even to me. He nodded slowly, eyes unfocused. “Yeah. Right.” We agreed without saying it that we’d forget it. Move on. Not feed it more reality than it already had.
We didn’t talk again for three weeks. When we did, over a crackling phone line, Noah sounded distant, hollowed out. He’d quit his Forest Service job. “I can’t go back into those mountains,” he said. “I just can’t.” I understood. I was having nightmares every night, waking up seeing trees and darkness and feeling something huge rushing up behind me. I sold my gear. I told people I’d “lost interest in hunting.” I went to a therapist and described “a scary experience on a trip” in vague terms. She gave me prescriptions and mindfulness exercises geared toward car accidents and normal trauma, not encounters with unacknowledged predators.
I dug into missing‑person reports in the Bitterroot and Selway. Found the name of a man—Dale Morrison—who’d vanished in 1998 in almost the same area. Went out for an afternoon hunt and never came back. They found his pack and rifle. No body. His family never accepted the “fell and died, scavenged by animals” conclusion. Reading about him made my hands shake.
My dad asked why I’d stopped going out. I told him I’d grown tired of it. Saw his disappointment, felt it like a stab. How could I tell him the truth? “I think something that isn’t supposed to exist screamed at us and tore our camp apart and stalked us all night.” People nod politely at that sort of confession. Then they note the nearest number for a psychiatric consult.
Noah moved to Seattle, took an IT job, traded trail dust for traffic. We met once for coffee when he came back to see family. We talked about work, girlfriends, sports. We did not talk about the scream. It hung in the silence between us anyway, thick as the steam from our cups. After twenty minutes, we ran out of small talk. When we said goodbye in the parking lot, I had the sense we might never see each other again. Part of me was relieved.
Sometimes, on clear days, I can see the Bitterroots from Missoula. Jagged teeth of dark stone and timber, blue‑grey against the sky. I try not to look, but my eyes find them. I think about that basin. That shredded tent. Those circling tracks in the dirt. Whatever we encountered out there is still out there. It will never show up on a trailcam, never get tagged and collared, never be explained away in a glossy magazine article. It doesn’t care whether we believe in it. It doesn’t care about our categories and our confidence and our guns.
I don’t hike anymore. Don’t camp. Don’t even linger under cottonwoods by the river if the wind is up. When someone at work talks about going into the Selway for an extended trip, I clamp my jaw shut so I don’t scream at them to stop. Ignorance, I’ve decided, might be a kind of mercy. If you’ve never felt that scream vibrate inside your bones, the world is simpler. Kinder, even.
I’m not writing this to convince you that Bigfoot is real, or to convert skeptics, or to join the ranks of blurry photographs and tall tales. I’m writing it because I needed to put it somewhere outside my head, and because maybe there’s another person out there who heard something impossible in the trees and has been afraid to accept what it means. If that’s you, then at least you know you’re not alone. There are others of us—unacknowledged witnesses in a world that demands evidence before it will allow belief.
I’m Jacob Reed. I went into the Bitterroot a hunter and came back prey. Everything else is just fallout.
