9FT BIGFOOT HUNTED ME IN THE RIVER, HOW I SURVIVED THE ATTACK!

The Clearwater Screamer

Chapter 1: The Motel Clock

Ethan Cole had been awake since 3:00 a.m., not because he couldn’t sleep, but because the silence of his Boise house had taught him to wake up early and move before thought could catch him. In the dim glow of a headlamp, he tied his last fly—an old, reliable Copper John—hands steady in a motel room that smelled like stale coffee and pine cleaner. Through the thin walls he heard the occasional rumble of a truck on Highway 12, a reminder that the world still moved even when your life felt paused. He’d driven eleven hours the day before, truck loaded with waders and rods and the kind of gear you pack when you’re trying to outrun your own mind. Late September in Orofino had that crisp bite that promised winter was coming, and somehow that suited him. Clean cold. Sharp air. A place where breathing felt like it mattered.

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.

.

He checked his watch—4:15. If he left now, he could be standing in the river by first light, alone, exactly the way he wanted it. Solitude wasn’t a luxury anymore; it was medicine. He pulled on his waders, grabbed his rod case and tackle box, and stepped into an empty parking lot where his Ford F-150 sat under a scatter of stars. The air turned his breath into pale ghosts. Twenty minutes later he was winding along narrower roads, the kind that shook your teeth and made you feel like you’d slipped off the map. He’d studied topographic lines and access points for months, hunting a stretch of the Clearwater far enough from the usual pullouts that he wouldn’t hear other anglers. He didn’t want conversation. He wanted rhythm—cast, drift, lift—until the noise inside him softened.

The turnoff appeared in his headlights: a dirt track that vanished into timber. He slowed and turned, truck bouncing over roots and rocks as the forest closed in on both sides. A quarter mile later the road ended in a small clearing barely wide enough to turn around. When he killed the engine, the silence that followed felt physical, like pressure on his eardrums. He sat for a moment, letting his eyes adjust, then grabbed his gear and stepped out into damp earth and rotting leaves. Somewhere below, he heard the faint rush of water like a promise.

Chapter 2: The River’s Edge

The trail down to the river was steep and slick, and Ethan’s headlamp beam bounced across trunks, branches, and the quick flash of small eyes that vanished into underbrush. Waders swished. His breath came harder as he descended. After ten minutes the river grew louder, and then the trees opened and he stood on a rocky bank facing dark swift water. Even in pre-dawn gloom the Clearwater looked impossibly clean, a ribbon of moving glass sliding over stones and around boulders that formed pockets where trout liked to hold.

He checked his watch again—4:50. The eastern sky had started to lighten, black shifting to deep blue. Ethan assembled his rod with practiced fingers, threaded the line, and waded in. Cold pressed against his legs through neoprene, a bracing shock that made him feel present. The current tugged harder than he expected; he braced on slick rocks until he found balance. Twenty feet from the bank, he began to cast, line unfurling in long arcs, fly landing soft upstream. The rhythm soothed him. It demanded attention and gave it back as calm.

For half an hour he worked upstream, casting into seams and behind rocks, letting the fly drift naturally, scanning for the subtle tug of life. Birds began to call—jay to his right, crow farther back—small sounds that made the world feel ordinary again. Ethan caught nothing, but he didn’t mind. Fishing was patience with a purpose. He started back toward the bank to change flies, thinking he’d try a small silver streamer, something with flash.

That was when the forest went quiet.

Not gradually, not in the normal way birds pause when a shadow passes overhead. It was sudden and complete, like someone threw a switch. The jay stopped mid-song. Even the crow fell silent. Only the river kept speaking, loud and constant, as if it didn’t know the rules had changed. Ethan paused with his hand in his tackle box and looked around. The stillness put a prickling line along the back of his neck, the old instinct that says: Something is here. Something you haven’t seen yet.

He tied on the streamer anyway—because routine is what you do when your brain wants to panic—and turned back toward the water. The light had strengthened enough to show details he hadn’t seen before, including movement downstream on the far bank. At first he thought bear, a dark shape hunched low over something near the rocks. Bears came to rivers. Bears fed. But as he stared, the shape felt wrong. Too big. Too dense. And the way it moved wasn’t a bear’s rolling slump.

Ethan watched as the hunched figure tore at whatever was beneath it. A wet ripping sound carried across the water, faint but distinct. He considered calling out, clapping, making noise the way you do to discourage wildlife. Yet his throat tightened around the idea. The forest’s sudden silence made the scene feel staged, like the river was a corridor and he’d stepped into someone else’s private room.

He began wading back toward the bank, careful, quiet, eyes locked on the far side. When he climbed out and crouched behind a boulder, he could see it clearly enough to know his first guess had been wishful thinking.

Chapter 3: Feeding

It was a deer. Or what was left of one. The carcass sprawled on the rocks like a broken thing, rib cage exposed. The creature crouched over it, covered in dark fur matted with blood, and it used hands—hands, not paws—thick fingers gripping and pulling with methodical strength. It wasn’t frenzied. It wasn’t panicked. It fed like something that had all the time in the world. Every movement looked deliberate, practiced, efficient. The sounds were awful: tearing, chewing, low grunts that vibrated in Ethan’s chest through the river’s constant rush.

Ethan’s heart thudded slow and heavy, not from exertion but from the way fear changes rhythm. He thought: Back away. Leave. Now. Yet he stayed, pinned by the same force that makes people stare at car wrecks. The light grew stronger, and details sharpened into something he didn’t want his brain to record. Fur dark brown, nearly black. Shoulders broad and high even in a crouch. Arms too long.

Then the creature stood.

Ethan felt his breath catch as if his lungs forgot how to work. Upright, it was enormous—nine feet, maybe more—massively built with long arms hanging past its knees. Its head looked large and rounded on a thick neck with little separation, like the whole upper body was one continuous block of power. Water glimmered off wet fur. It turned slightly, and for a moment Ethan thought it was looking in his direction. He ducked lower behind the boulder, pressed his cheek against cold stone, tried to control his breathing.

His fishing rod felt ridiculous in his hands—thin graphite, a toy. No weapon. No partner. No voice on the other end of a radio. Alone in a place he’d chosen because he wanted solitude.

He began edging backward, keeping low. One step, then another. His foot came down on a loose rock. It shifted under his weight with a sharp scrape that sounded like a gunshot in the silence.

The creature’s head snapped up. It turned fully toward him.

Across the water, it stared with eyes that were small and dark and wrong—not because they were monstrous, but because they looked awake in a way predators’ eyes don’t always look. Not blank hunger. Not animal confusion. Something closer to recognition. Ethan froze, caught in the primitive logic of eye contact that says: If it sees you, you exist.

For a long moment they held each other’s gaze. Then the creature dropped the meat it held and moved toward the river.

Ethan didn’t think. He ran.

Chapter 4: The Chase

He crashed through brush toward the trail, waders catching on branches, rod banging against trunks. Behind him he heard splashing as the creature entered the water—too fast, too heavy—and then a roar exploded into the morning. It wasn’t a bear sound. It wasn’t any sound he’d ever heard from an animal. It was rage shaped into voice, loud enough to make the air feel like it trembled. Ethan ran harder, lungs burning, legs pumping up the steep trail.

He slipped on wet leaves, went down hard on one knee, and his rod snapped with a brittle crack that sounded pathetic next to the roar. He threw the broken pieces aside and hauled himself forward, hands grabbing roots, fingers digging into damp soil. The roar came again, closer. Heavy footfalls crashed through undergrowth behind him, not the stumbling chaos of something clumsy, but fast, direct pursuit.

Then the stench hit.

It rolled over him like a wave—rotting meat, feces, wet fur, something sour and feral that made his stomach heave. His brain screamed one word over and over: Danger. Not conceptual danger. Not “be careful.” The ancient, bodily certainty of prey.

Ethan burst into the clearing where his truck sat. He fumbled for keys with hands that wouldn’t cooperate. Something whistled past his head, close enough that he felt air move, and slammed into the hood of his truck with a tremendous crash. Metal buckled. Bark fragments sprayed. Ethan spun and saw a log—six feet long, thick as his thigh—lying across the crumpled hood like it had been dropped by a machine.

At the edge of the clearing, half hidden by shadowed trees, the creature stood watching him. Those small dark eyes held him like pins. It didn’t rush. It didn’t need to. It let him understand what it could do.

Ethan yanked the door open, threw himself inside, hit the lock, started the engine—movements blending into one frantic sequence. The tires spun in soft dirt. For a sickening moment he thought he was stuck, and his mind flashed an image of the creature’s hands on the door, peeling it open. Then the truck lurched backward. He swung the wheel, jammed into drive, and floored it, bouncing over ruts and rocks as something slammed the passenger side—metal shrieking—before the trees swallowed the creature again.

When he hit the main road, he didn’t stop. He didn’t breathe properly until he saw Highway 12. Even then his hands stayed locked on the wheel, his whole body shaking like it had forgotten how to be still.

Chapter 5: Sheriff Rawlings

He drove straight to the sheriff’s office in Orofino, pulled into the lot, and sat staring at his crumpled hood as if it could tell him what he’d seen. Bark was embedded in the dent. The damage was undeniable. Whatever else they might doubt, metal didn’t fold itself.

Inside, the office smelled like burnt coffee and old carpet. A woman at the desk looked up and her expression shifted when she saw Ethan’s face—pale, damp, eyes too wide. He said he needed to report an attack. She asked if he needed an ambulance. He said no, he was okay, but he’d seen something big. She called the sheriff.

Sheriff Rawlings came out a minute later, tall and lean with gray hair and a weathered face that suggested decades of listening to other people’s fear. In his office, Ethan started from the beginning: the early wake-up, the drive, the trail down, the fishing, the sudden silence, the creature feeding on a deer, the roar, the chase, the log thrown at the truck. Ethan heard how impossible it sounded even as he spoke, but he forced the words out anyway because if he didn’t speak them, he’d be alone with them forever.

When he finished, Rawlings studied him for a long moment. “You’re saying you saw a Bigfoot,” the sheriff said, not mocking, but not convinced.

“I don’t know what I saw,” Ethan said tightly. “But it was real. You can see my truck. What kind of bear throws a six-foot log hard enough to do that?”

Rawlings leaned back. “Mr. Cole, I’ve worked this county a long time. People see things in the woods. Especially alone. Especially at dawn. The mind can play tricks.”

“My mind didn’t crumple the hood,” Ethan snapped before he could stop himself.

Rawlings held up a hand. “I believe you saw something that scared you. I’m not calling you a liar. But we get reports like this every few years, and we never find proof. No bodies, no clear tracks, nothing that holds up. I’ll send a deputy to the location. We’ll look. That’s what I can promise.”

It wasn’t enough. Ethan knew it wasn’t. But he also saw the limits in the sheriff’s eyes: budgets, policies, the risk of becoming the lawman who launched a county search for a story everyone would laugh at. Ethan gave directions and left, feeling hollow.

Chapter 6: The Clearwater Screamer

He tried to sleep at the motel and couldn’t. The roar replayed behind his eyes. The smell stuck to his memory like grease. Around two in the afternoon he drove back, pulled by the desperate need to prove to himself he hadn’t cracked. A patrol car was parked in the clearing. A young deputy stood beside it with a radio. “You Ethan Cole?” he asked. When Ethan nodded, the deputy told him what he’d found: blood on rocks, signs something had been torn apart, but the carcass was gone—dragged off by scavengers or something worse. There were prints in mud, but not clean enough to identify. “Could be bear,” the deputy said, and Ethan felt a flash of anger so hot it made him dizzy. A bear doesn’t use hands. A bear doesn’t throw.

Without physical evidence, there was nowhere for the story to land. It would slide off every official surface like water off stone. Ethan gathered the broken pieces of his rod from the leaves, a small humiliating ritual, and left. That night he checked out and drove back to Boise, the road stretching dark and empty ahead, his mind refusing to let the morning become past tense.

In the weeks that followed he went to work at his engineering firm and tried to pretend he was fine. He attended meetings, reviewed blueprints, nodded at jokes, but his attention kept drifting to the river. At night he searched online, falling down rabbit holes of Idaho encounters, Bigfoot forums, stories that matched too closely—silence in the woods, the smell, the screams, rock throwing, deer kills torn apart. Some posts were obvious nonsense, but others carried the flat, reluctant detail of people who wished they hadn’t seen what they saw.

He posted his own account once. The responses ranged from supportive to vicious. Pics or it didn’t happen. Nice creepypasta. You were hallucinating. Ethan stopped checking because the arguments felt pointless. Strangers didn’t live in his body. Strangers didn’t hear that roar in the quiet moments.

A week after he returned, Sheriff Rawlings called. “Mr. Cole,” he said, “we’ve had more people come in. Reports of screaming up near that area. Late at night. Hard to describe. One said it sounded like a woman in distress, but louder. Another said it was like nothing they’d ever heard. Locals are starting to call it the Clearwater Screamer.”

The name iced Ethan’s spine. It made the thing sound like a rumor, a mascot, a story you could laugh about. But Ethan couldn’t laugh. Because he knew exactly what the sheriff meant by “hard to describe.” He’d heard it in his bones.

“What are you going to do?” Ethan asked.

“We’re keeping an eye on it,” Rawlings said. “If there’s evidence of an actual threat, we’ll act. Right now it’s just sounds.”

After the call, Ethan sat in his living room staring at the wall, realizing something he hadn’t fully accepted before: what terrified him most wasn’t that the creature existed. It was that the world could absorb it and keep going as if nothing had changed. That the system could label it unconfirmed and move on.

Later that winter, Rawlings called again. A hiker had found what was left of a campsite near the river—tent shredded, supplies scattered, no sign of whoever had camped there. No blood. “It’s like whoever was there just vanished,” the sheriff said.

Ethan felt cold spread through him, slow and certain. He didn’t know the missing person’s name. He didn’t know their face. But he knew the shape of their last night: the quiet, the wrong smell, the moment you realize you’re not alone.

Chapter 7: What He Never Said Out Loud

Spring came to Boise and life kept insisting on normal. Ethan sold the house that held too many echoes, moved into a smaller apartment, tried to build a new rhythm. He dated. Eventually he met Sarah, kind and grounded, the sort of person who made the world feel stable just by existing in it. He never told her the whole story. He told her the divorce had shaken him. That part was true. But it wasn’t the real fracture. The real fracture was the morning the forest went quiet and he watched something stand up on the far bank, too big and too wrong to fit into the world he’d believed in.

Time dulled some edges. The nightmares grew less frequent. The smell stopped visiting his waking hours. The news stopped mentioning the Clearwater Screamer. People moved on to other mysteries, other distractions. But Ethan never fished again. He never stood in a river with trees around him and felt safe. Something had been taken from him that he couldn’t name without sounding dramatic: the assumption that wilderness was simply scenery, a place humans could enter without consequence.

Years later, on a quiet evening, Sarah would find him on the porch watching the sunset with a haunted look and ask, gently, “You okay?” Ethan would hesitate and feel the old story pressing behind his teeth, heavy and sharp, wanting to be spoken. And he would swallow it again, because he’d learned what happens when you say impossible things out loud: people look for proof, and when you can’t provide it, they look for an explanation that makes them comfortable.

So he kept it private. A secret weight. A line drawn through his life: before the river, after the river. And sometimes, on nights when wind was still and the house was quiet, he would think about the Clearwater and feel that moment of absolute clarity return—the instant he understood the world had corners where humans were not the largest thing moving, not the final authority, not the top of anything.

Somewhere in Idaho’s deep timber, something had lived long before Ethan ever tied a fly in a motel room. It hunted, fed, and guarded its territory with sound and thrown wood and a silence that made birds stop singing. It didn’t need witnesses. It didn’t need belief.

It simply existed.

And that, Ethan learned, was the most frightening kind of truth.