I Lived with BIGFOOT for 6 Months and Learned Their TERRIFYING Rules
THE THREE RULES OF THE DEN
A strange confession by Elias, former timber cruiser
Chapter 1 — The Pills Don’t Keep the Smell Out
There’s a bottle of sleeping pills on my nightstand. The doctor says take one. Most nights I take three, because one doesn’t silence the part of my brain that still lives underground. Even when I finally drift off, the dreams find me. I’m back in the damp, suffocating dark with rough stone pressed into my spine and a ceiling so low my lungs feel borrowed. My wife, Sarah, rubs my back when I wake up screaming, soaked in cold sweat, and she tells me I’m safe in our Seattle house, wrapped in concrete and streetlight glow. She doesn’t understand that civilization is only a thin veneer, a bubble we pretend is permanent. Once you step into their world—once you feel it close around you like a mouth—you never really come back.
.
.
.
What haunts me most isn’t death. It’s the smell, fused into my nerves like a brand. Imagine a wet dog rolling in sulfur, rotting venison, and ancient pine needles, then magnified until it becomes a physical force that punches you awake. That is the scent of a Sasquatch den. It trips a primal alarm in the oldest part of your brain and screams one command: leave. For six months—one hundred eighty-three days—I lived inside that smell. I didn’t catch a blurry glimpse while hiking. I became part of their pack, or their property, or their winter storage. I ate raw fish and grubs beside them. I learned their hierarchy, their patience, and the most terrifying truth of all: they aren’t dumb animals. They have a society. And, most importantly, they have rules.
They made it clear that if I broke even one, I wouldn’t leave that cave alive.
Chapter 2 — Devil’s Throat
For twenty years I worked as a timber cruiser on the Olympic Peninsula, scouting old-growth cedar and fir for harvest. If you’ve never been in the Olympics, you can’t understand how dense it is. It’s not a forest so much as a wall—green stacked on green until light becomes a rumor. In places, the ground looks untouched by human feet for centuries. That kind of country makes you feel watched even on an empty trail, and you learn the difference between peaceful quiet and the quiet that’s listening.
Late October, sector maps called it “4,” but the old-timers in Forks called it Devil’s Throat. Steep ravines, unstable shale, devil’s club that tears skin, and trees that blot out the sky. Around three in the afternoon I should have turned back. The canopy was thickening into evening and the air pressure dropped like a stone. I felt that needle-prickling sensation on my neck that says you’re not alone. But I saw a stand of cedar across a ridge and thought of the bonus check. I pushed on.
Fog didn’t drift in—it materialized. One minute I could read the ravine’s shape, the next I was swimming in thick white soup that muffled sound and swallowed distance. I stepped onto what looked like a mossy log. It was rot and air. The ground vanished. I slid down loose shale, tore my clothes on roots like skeletal fingers, and hit bottom with a crack that stole my breath. Pain detonated in my right ankle. I vomited bile into the dirt and tried to stand, but the leg folded under me like it belonged to someone else.
I was at the bottom of a limestone sinkhole, forty feet down, in darkness so complete it felt solid. The silence was absolute until it broke—huff… huff… huff—heavy wet breathing that sounded almost human and far too large. My hands shook as I unclipped my flashlight. I was terrified of what I might see, but the darkness was worse. I clicked it on.
The beam hit fur first—dark, matted, mud-caked—then climbed a leg thick as a tree trunk, a torso wide as the tunnel itself, and finally a face eight feet off the ground. Flat nose. Skin like dark leather. Eyes amber and intelligent, catching the LED light and holding it. For ten seconds neither of us moved. In that stretched moment I understood, with a sinking certainty, that I hadn’t fallen into a pit.
I’d fallen into a living room.
Chapter 3 — The Carry Down
The creature didn’t snarl like the posters. It was calm in a way that chilled me more than aggression. The lines around its eyes looked old, as if time had been pressing its thumb into that face for a long while. Those amber eyes didn’t blink. They assessed me like an unfamiliar object dropped into familiar territory: not prey, not threat—yet.
I tried to scramble backward. The moment I put weight on my injured leg, lightning shot up my thigh and I screamed. The sound bounced off limestone, small and pathetic in a space that felt endless. The creature’s head tilted slightly, listening. It made a low vibration in its throat that I felt in my own chest. Then it moved.
Something that size should lumber, should be clumsy. It wasn’t. In two fluid strides it closed the gap and towered over me. The smell hit like a wall—musk, wet fur, stale earth, a metallic tang that coated my throat. I raised my arm, uselessly, bracing for teeth. Instead, a massive hand reached down and grabbed the back of my canvas coat. Not gentle, not cruel—efficient. With one heave, it lifted me into the air like a rag doll.
I kicked helplessly, breath stolen by panic and pain, as it turned away from the fading gray mouth of the sinkhole and walked into the dark. “No—please!” I yelled, thrashing. It tightened its grip just enough to compress my ribs. The message was wordless and absolute: stop making noise. It stepped into a fissure I hadn’t seen and carried me deeper. Stone scraped its shoulders. The air changed, heavier with moisture and minerals. My flashlight swung wildly, revealing flashes—slick walls, stalactites like teeth, then darkness again. The pain made me delirious. Somewhere in that descent, shock began to feel like sleep.
When the creature finally stopped, it dropped me onto a nest of dry ferns, pine boughs, and hair. I scrambled back, sweeping my light around—and my heart stopped for a second time. Dozens of eyes reflected in the beam: amber and green, watching from the cavern’s edges. Smaller shapes—juveniles—peered from behind rocks. Another massive figure sat near a ledge, slightly smaller than the one that carried me. I wasn’t facing one monster.
I was facing a colony.
The big male stepped into the light and made a series of vocalizations—chatter, whoops, guttural sounds that had structure, cadence. He pointed at me, then at a circle of stones near the wall. I dragged myself there, whimpering, and huddled with my back to cold rock.
The alpha leaned close, exhaled foul warm breath into my face, then tapped the ground three times—hard, deliberate—before pointing toward the tunnel we’d come through and shaking his head slowly.
No.
You stay. You do not leave.
Chapter 4 — Rule One: Don’t Challenge the Hierarchy
I don’t know when I slept that first night. It wasn’t rest, it was shutdown. When I woke, a murky gray light filtered from unseen cracks high above, and pain had become a living thing in my ankle. The swelling had turned my leg purple and tight. I needed to get my boot off before circulation cut out, but even the idea of touching it made me nauseous.
The cavern was enormous, and the colony moved through it with quiet purpose. The alpha sat near the center stripping bark off a thick branch with his teeth. Two smaller ones groomed each other. Others watched from the shadows, always watching. My throat was sandpaper. “Water,” I croaked, the word sounding ridiculous in that place.
The alpha stopped, turned his head, and I made my first mistake: I met his eyes. I stared into those amber irises like you stare at a man holding a gun, pleading for help.
The response wasn’t violence, but it was worse—authority. He slammed both palms against stone. The bang cracked through the cavern like a gunshot. He bared his teeth and blasted a roar of air and sound that vibrated my skull. I curled into a ball, hands over my head, waiting for the blow. It never came. After a minute, I dared to look up, but I kept my gaze low—chest, shoulders, anything but eyes. He grunted softly and returned to his branch.
That was Rule One, carved into me in a single heartbeat: Never challenge the hierarchy. Eye contact is a challenge. Submission is survival. In their world, you don’t negotiate your rank. You accept it, or you are corrected.
Hours later a female approached—lighter fur, reddish-brown—curious rather than hostile. She dropped a headless steelhead trout at my feet. Raw, bloody, dirt on the scales. My stomach rolled. I whispered that I needed fire, that I couldn’t eat it like that. She nudged it back toward me with her foot, tapped her chest, then pointed at the fish and at me.
It wasn’t just food. It was a test.
I sliced off a strip of pink meat with my pocket knife—miraculously still in my pocket—and forced it into my mouth. It tasted of river mud and blood. I gagged, swallowed. The female watched me do it and made a soft cooing sound, as if approving, then moved away.
Rule Two formed right behind the first: Accept the offering. Eat what the clan eats. You are not special.
Chapter 5 — Rule Three: Silence Means Safety
As the light faded, pain in my leg became unbearable. I had to get the boot off. I untied the laces with shaking hands and when it finally slid free, agony ripped out of me in a scream I couldn’t choke back. The cavern went still so fast it felt like someone had cut power to the world. The alpha stood. Others froze. My noise wasn’t just annoying—it was dangerous.
He crossed the room in three strides and loomed over me. Then he did something so human my mind stuttered: he pressed a massive finger to his lips. Shh. He hissed a long sharp breath and pointed toward the tunnel leading up, toward the surface world. His eyes were wide—not with anger, but fear. He wasn’t threatening me. He was warning me.
Rule Three settled like a collar around my throat: Absolute silence. Noise attracts something outside this cave that even they respect. I bit my lip until I tasted copper and nodded through tears. The alpha watched, satisfied I understood, and returned to his post.
Weeks passed. Time became slurry. My leg knitted badly, crooked and scarred, leaving me with a limp and a driftwood crutch the female—my mind began calling her the matriarch—brought me. The juveniles stopped fearing me and started ignoring me, which felt like progress and insult at once. I became furniture in their stone cathedral. I learned to move silently, to keep my gaze low, to accept whatever was given. I learned their cues—when they stiffened, when they listened, when they froze so completely you could have mistaken them for rock.
Around week seven, the routine broke. A low vibration hummed through the stone, felt in my teeth before I heard it. The alpha snapped awake, nostrils flaring. Then came the sound that doesn’t belong underground: rotor blades chopping the air, low and searching.
A helicopter.
Hope surged so hard it almost made me drunk. I tried to stand and shout—I’m here!—but the alpha moved like a shadow and clamped a hand over my mouth and nose, suffocating the cry before it existed. His eyes were panicked. He dragged me into the deepest fissure where juveniles already huddled, shoved me behind the matriarch, and pressed me into darkness.
He wasn’t keeping me from rescue. He was hiding me from hunters.
Voices echoed from above, cold and amplified. “Thermal shows a heat pocket. Dropping a puck.” Something clacked onto stone near the entrance: a black device the size of a hockey puck, blinking red. “Audio sensors active. Anything moving?”
I lay there choking on dust, cheek pressed into the matriarch’s coarse fur, and realized what kind of men were overhead. You don’t hunt lost hikers with thermal pucks and audio traps. You hunt targets. If I screamed, I might be saved—but I would also doom the colony. And I had the sick certainty that I, witness to whatever operation this was, would become a loose end.
The matriarch turned her head and looked at me. Her eyes were wet. She placed a heavy hand over my chest, over my pounding heart, and held me still like a mother does a child.
I bit the inside of my cheek until blood filled my mouth. I forced my body limp. I didn’t cough. I didn’t scream. I chose them.
Minutes later, the voice above crackled: “Negative on audio. Probably a bear den. Moving to sector five.” The helicopter lifted away. The silence returned, but it was no longer empty. It was shared trauma, thick and binding.
The alpha stepped out, walked to the blinking puck, picked it up with delicate precision, crushed it into dust in one squeeze, and tossed the debris into a crevice. Then he came to me, touched my shoulder once—heavy, reassuring—and rumbled low in his chest.
Acknowledgement.
That night they moved nesting material and made space for me closer to the center of the group. I was still captive, but the air had changed. I wasn’t just property. I was an accomplice.
Chapter 6 — The Snare That Cut My Last Thread
Winter sealed the world. Snow fell for two weeks straight, choking the sinkhole entrance into a narrow chute and turning the cavern’s light into permanent twilight. Hunger became a constant ache that reshaped thought. By month four I’d lost forty pounds. My beard was a tangled mass. My clothes were rags stiff with dirt and dried blood. One morning, scraping marrow from an elk femur with a sharp stone, I realized I couldn’t remember the color of Sarah’s eyes. Hazel? Green? The answer dissolved when I tried to hold it.
The pack suffered too. Game moved down into valleys beyond the alpha’s safe range. The juveniles grew lethargic. The alpha’s coat dulled and thinned in patches. They were starving because their rules kept them hidden. They would rather fade than risk being seen.
After three empty hunts in a row, the alpha collapsed near the fireless pit, breathing ragged. The matriarch groomed his shoulder and made low mourning sounds. Something in me snapped—not fear, but obligation. I couldn’t chase elk through deep snow, but I had human knowledge. I tapped the ground near the alpha, drew shapes in dirt: a loop, a line, a bent sapling. I mimed a snare and pointed to the paracord still in my pocket, fifty feet of survival cord I’d never used. Then I pointed toward the entrance.
Let me hunt.
He watched me, then looked at the juveniles, then at my gaunt face. Desperation outweighed caution. He rumbled once.
Go.
I crawled out into the blinding white world, air so cold it felt like inhaling broken glass. I didn’t head for roads. Escape didn’t even feel real. My pack was hungry, and that had become the only truth that mattered. I found a choke point on a game trail, set a twitch-up snare with a bent sapling, and buried myself in a drift to wait.
When the young buck stepped into the loop and the cord snapped tight, hoisting it thrashing into the air, I felt something bloom in me that terrified me: predatory joy. Not relief. Not sadness. Joy. I finished it with my knife and dragged the carcass back up the ridge on one good leg, vomiting twice from effort, refusing to stop. When I shoved it over the sinkhole lip and tumbled down after it, the cave went silent.
The alpha approached, sniffed the cord, inspected the cut, then tore a massive chunk of prime flank meat free and handed it to me first. Not a kindness. A recognition: you fed the pack. You earned your place.
I ate raw venison with a ferocity that made me feel less human with every bite. When I saw my reflection in meltwater, a wild stranger stared back. I tried to say my wife’s name in my head. It took a full minute to find it.
Sarah.
The word sounded foreign.
Chapter 7 — The Men Who Don’t Respect Rules
The thaw began with a drip—steady, echoing—like time itself leaking back into the world. Sunlight started knifing into the sinkhole in bright blades. My body, depleted by winter, finally broke. A cough became a fever. Fever became pneumonia. I drifted in delirium, expecting the pack to abandon me. In nature, sickness is a liability.
They didn’t leave me.
The matriarch cooled my forehead with soaked moss and fed me a bitter green paste—chewed roots, willow bark—medicine disguised as food. Juveniles sat by my feet, watching. Scout, the smallest, placed a polished river stone on my chest like a talisman. The alpha didn’t nurse me, but he sat with his back to me at the fissure entrance, facing the cavern like a sentinel, ensuring nothing disturbed my recovery. On the fourth morning the fever broke. The matriarch groomed my beard with careful fingers, and I felt a kind of safety I didn’t know existed: primal acceptance that bypassed language.
That was when the bond became dangerous, because love makes you reckless.
The end didn’t come with a bang at first. It came with the smell of diesel. I was gathering fiddleheads near a stream when exhaust tainted the air and metal shrieked against metal. Not loggers—men in tactical gear, rifles in hand, standing at the sinkhole rim like they’d been invited. They weren’t curious. They were prepared.
A roar erupted from the earth. The alpha surged out, not fleeing—charging—drawing fire so the matriarch and juveniles could escape through back tunnels. Automatic gunfire ripped the morning apart. Bullets punched wet impacts into fur and flesh. The alpha hit the first man like a freight train, sending him into a tree with a crunch that turned my stomach.
I screamed without thinking—“Stop!”—and ran from the treeline, waving my arms. The mercenaries swung their rifles toward me. The alpha saw me enter the kill zone and changed direction, lunging between me and the gunman. A fresh volley tore into his back. He stumbled. Those enormous legs buckled. He crashed to his knees, earth trembling under him.
He looked at me. His amber eyes were dimming, but there was no accusation. Only command.
Run.
Then he collapsed forward, breathing turning wet and gurgling.
They tased me, zip-tied my wrists, and dragged me toward a black SUV on a newly cut road. Someone tossed a grenade into the sinkhole. The blast heaved the ground. Dust billowed. A radio voice said something about the entrance collapsing. I screamed into the dirt until my throat tore.
The next memory is antiseptic white—hospital walls, cuffs on a bedrail, men in suits offering an NDA and an official story about a bear. I remembered Rule One in a new context: submission is survival. I signed to go home. I went back to Sarah. I shaved. I tried to reintegrate.
But I brought their rules with me.
I walk quietly now. I scan perimeters without noticing. I sleep on the floor when the bed feels too soft. And sometimes, late at night, I drive out to the edge of the logging roads and turn off the engine just to listen. Last week, deep in the restricted zone where the government insists nothing exists, I heard a wood knock—sharp, deliberate—followed by a long mournful howl that raised every hair on my arms.
The matriarch is alive.
So I’m leaving this with you, not as entertainment, not as a conspiracy, but as the closest thing to a survival manual you’ll ever get. If the woods go silent, if birds stop singing and wind dies down, don’t be brave. Don’t be curious. Lower your eyes. Make no sound. Back away slowly.
Because you are not the hunter. You are a guest in their house. And they are always watching.
