FARMER SHOOTS BIGFOOT STEALING LIVESTOCK, THEN THIS HAPPENS!

Three Shots at 1:17

Chapter 1: The Shot

I pulled the trigger at exactly 1:17 a.m. on October 7th. The instant that .308 round left my rifle, I knew I’d just done something I couldn’t take back. The thing was standing over my sheep forty yards away, eight and a half feet of muscle and matted fur frozen in the beam of my spotlight. When the bullet hit its shoulder, it didn’t go down. It screamed. God, that scream—if you’ve ever heard words like “not quite human,” you think you know what it means. You don’t. This sound started deep, like a bull bellowing inside a cave, then climbed into something high and knife‑sharp that made my teeth hurt. Bones in my chest vibrated like tuning forks. That scream is the reason I’m sitting in a hospital parking lot right now with fourteen stitches in my own shoulder, staring at my hands shaking around a phone I can barely hold.

.

.

.

I shot it. I wounded it. Then it came back for me. It gave me exactly three days. Three days after I pulled that trigger, it returned to my property, and when it did, it wasn’t interested in livestock anymore. It circled my barn for twenty minutes, throwing rocks the size of softballs at the metal roof while I sat inside with my remaining animals, rifle raised, waiting for the door to explode inward. When it finally hit that door, the whole building shuddered around me. I did the only thing I could think of: fired three rounds through solid wood, blind, praying something vital was on the other side. It screamed again. I heard it stumble away. For maybe ten seconds I thought I’d won.

I was wrong. I didn’t understand until forty‑eight hours later, standing in my barn looking at what it had left behind, that I wasn’t dealing with some mindless animal acting on instinct. I’d been tangling with something that understood cause and effect, that understood pain, that knew I had hurt it, and had decided I needed to learn what that felt like. By the time I figured that out, I’d buried three sheep, watched a horse be torn apart for no reason other than spite, and watched my wife put our entire life on a “For Sale” listing because we no longer felt safe where we lived. The blood tests on the samples came back “unknown primate.” The hair samples: “unknown species.” The tracks—those massive sixteen‑inch prints—wandered into the timber and vanished as if the earth had swallowed them. All that’s left is a story everyone laughs at and a wound that aches when it rains.

So I’m recording this, sitting in my truck outside Skagit Valley Hospital, because nobody believes me and I need somebody to know what happened on my land between October 3rd and October 9th.

Chapter 2: The First Tracks

My name is Robert Henley. I’m forty‑six. I had, until recently, a two‑hundred‑acre farm outside Concrete, Washington. I’ve been working that land for eighteen years: sixty acres in grass for hay, the rest timber and pasture. We had forty‑two sheep, a dozen chickens, four pigs, two horses—nothing fancy, enough to keep my wife Emma feeling like she was still living the life she grew up in and enough income from hay and sales to keep the place afloat. We own the land outright. No mortgage. This place was supposed to be where we got old.

October 3rd started like any early autumn day on a farm: up at 5:30 a.m., coffee before the sun, checking the forecast. Clear for the week. Good. I walked the usual loop—chickens, pigs, horses, sheep. The chickens were quieter than usual, not yet in their full morning racket. The sky was just going from black to charcoal when I noticed the silence. Not peaceful quiet—the wrong kind. No owl, no coyotes, no distant truck. Just the soft hiss of the creek in the ravine and my own boots in gravel.

Halfway to the chicken coop I stopped. That prickle between shoulder blades—that ancient, evolutionary alarm—turned on. Someone was watching. I turned toward the tree line that pushes up like a wall behind our pasture, dense Douglas fir and western hemlock that run straight into National Forest land. Nothing moved. Just trunks and shadow. I told myself I was jumpy. Bears pass through a couple times a year; I’ve seen their asses vanishing into brush often enough. I finished with the chickens, collected eggs. It wasn’t until I got to the sheep fence that I saw the tracks.

They were pressed deep in the damp border of dirt and pasture where the ground stays darker from dew. Not hoof, not paw. Long. Narrow‑ish. Five toes. Sixteen inches from heel to toe, about seven wide across the front. The heel impression was deeper than the rest. If you’d asked me cold what left that print, I would’ve said “someone joking in big fake boots,” except there were no boot tread marks. Just skin‑like curves, toes splayed in a way that looked unpleasantly… right. There were two, leading up toward the fence line. Beyond that, the ground went to packed grass and gravel where prints don’t take well.

I knelt there with my coffee steaming up past my nose, thinking: bear? Bears plant weight differently. Their rear prints can look tricky, but the toes line up wrong and there are usually claw marks. This had none of that. I should have grabbed my phone right then. Instead, I filed it under “weird, keep an eye out” and went about my morning. That was the first mistake.

Nothing else screamed wrong until that night. At 1:28 a.m. my eyes snapped open. Emma snored softly beside me. The digital clock glowed red in the dark. I felt it before I heard anything. That pressure of something out there. Then, from the direction of the sheep pen, three deep knocks. Wood on wood, heavy enough that a faint vibration came through the house frame. Pause. Three more from a different angle. I slid out of bed, heart already thumping, and went to the back window. The yard beyond the house lay in a gray strip under the stars, barn a darker block against darker trees. No lights out that way. No movement. The knocks didn’t repeat.

Could be a horse kicking its stall, I told myself. Could be a branch shifting. Could be the refrigerator. I lay back down. I dreamed of something large moving just out of sight between trunks, breath steaming in cold air.

Morning October 4th, the fence near the sheep pen looked wrong. Not down, just… tested. Corner posts bent, mesh stretched. The sheep were bunched tight in the far corner, eyes rolling in their heads, heads all turned toward the forest. The ground there told the story. Those same prints from yesterday, only more of them. Coming from the trees, right up to the wire, pacing. The smell hit me then, faint but distinct: wet dog layered over swamp and something old and sour underneath. Predator funk. Not bear. Not cougar.

I walked twenty yards into the trees following the broken fern and crushed duff. The deeper I went, the quieter it got. At ten yards in, bird sound cut off like a switch flipped. No squirrels. No wind sighing in branches. Just my own breath and that smell. Every nerve screamed at me. Go back. Whatever had been here might still be here. I listened. I obeyed. Back at the fence, my hands shook as I dialed Fish & Wildlife.

“We’ll try to get someone out in the next few days,” the guy named Derek said. “Hang a couple motion lights. Lock the animals in at night. Could be a big black bear. You don’t want to surprise it.”

I hung up feeling like someone had told me to put a nightlight on for a home invader.

Chapter 3: Eyes at the Window

We moved all the stock into the barn that afternoon. The sheep packed into the east side, pigs in their pens, horses in their stalls. I put up two battery‑powered motion lights I’d been promising myself I’d install for the last year. By dusk the animals were inside, the barn doors shut and chained, the new lights blinking red in standby.

That night I slept with my Winchester .308 leaned against the nightstand. At 2:00 a.m., my phone alarm nudged me up. I pulled on jeans and boots, grabbed the rifle and a flashlight, and stepped into cold October air. Frost glittered on the grass. Breath plumed white. The barn loomed, quiet, the little motion LEDs steady. I walked the perimeter, beam cutting across boards and metal. Nothing.

I should have gone back inside. Instead, I drifted toward the tree line, as if drawn by a magnet. Twenty yards from the forest, I stopped. That now‑familiar pressure gathered behind my ears. The flashlight beam probed between trunks, carving tunnels of gray. That’s when I saw the eyes.

They were too high. Fifteen feet up, perched between two dark trunks like twin coals catching my light. Not glowing on their own, just reflecting, big and steady. They didn’t blink. For ten long seconds, neither did I. Then something shifted behind them—bulk, silhouette—and the eyes slid sideways, disappearing behind bark. Branches shifted. Footfalls heavy, yet somehow not breaking twigs the way a deer would. The smell rolled over me, thicker now. My brain yelled: run. My pride yelled: stand. My legs chose run.

I sprinted back to the house, banged the door shut hard enough to rattle dishes. Emma shot upright in bed, hair tangled, asking what was wrong. “Something’s out there,” I said. “Bigger than a bear. It watched me.” My voice didn’t sound like my own.

We called 911. The dispatcher asked, with the careful tone of someone tiptoeing, whether I’d been drinking. “No,” I said. “I know what bears look like. This isn’t a bear.” A deputy would be sent, she said.

Deputy Martinez rolled up an hour later, young, tired, clearly thinking about his next call. He walked the fence with me, the yard, the barn. By then a light fog had settled, softening the ground. The tracks I showed him seemed to make an impression, but when I tried to explain the eyes, the height, the knock sounds, his gaze slid sideways in that way people’s eyes do when they’re filing you into the “eccentric” folder. He told me to keep the animals secured, lock my doors, call if I saw an actual person or a confirmed bear, and left.

I didn’t sleep after that. Dawn came as a relief. What I found in the daylight made the previous night look gentle.

Tracks circled the house. Big ones. Same shape, same size, pressed deep into the lawn all the way up to our bedroom window. On the back porch, where Emma likes to sit with her coffee in summer, the rail bore five smeared impressions in a film of dew and dust: a hand. A goddamn handprint. You could see the pads of fingers, the arc of an opposable thumb, claw‑like nail marks sunk into the wood at the tips. I took photographs. Lots of them.

The second call to Fish & Wildlife landed me with someone different. A woman, mid‑forties by the sound of her voice, introduced herself as Janet Reeves, wildlife biologist. When I described the tracks, the smell, the knocks, the eyes and the height, there was a silence long enough I thought we’d lost the connection.

“Mr. Henley,” she said finally, “I’m going to ask something off the record. Have you heard of Sasquatch?”

Not “are you drunk.” Not “have you considered raccoons.” Sasquatch. I expected sarcasm. Her tone was clinical. I told her I’d heard the stories, same as everyone in Washington, and never given them much credit. She said my description matched several anecdotal reports from the North Cascades over the years. Officially, the department did not recognize such an animal. Unofficially, she’d documented enough “unusual incidents” that she took mine seriously. She’d be out in the afternoon, she said, and recommended we stay indoors after dark, keep the animals locked, and for God’s sake, not go into the forest alone.

She came at 2:30 p.m. in a state truck, clipboard and sample kits in hand. Tall, lean, weather‑creased face, eyes that missed nothing. She measured the largest print—seventeen and a half inches. Poured plaster casts. Tweezed hair from the porch rail into vials. Asked precise questions. I could see her mind working, unwilling to say the word, but not willing to dismiss it either. When she left, she didn’t say “it’s just a bear.” She said, “If anything else happens, call me first, then the sheriff. And stay inside tonight.”

We did. October 5th into 6th passed in a strange quiet. No knocks. No screams. No new tracks in the morning. I allowed myself to exhale. Maybe it had passed through. Maybe it had decided our little farm wasn’t worth the trouble. The universe gave me one day of that lie.

Chapter 4: The Rocks

October 6th morning, the property wore a new decoration. A line of rocks, each about the size of a baseball to a softball, arranged in a crooked path from the tree line to the center of our gravel drive. They hadn’t been there at dawn; I walk that path every morning and would’ve kicked them. They weren’t left randomly. Each of them sat dead center in the tire ruts. I picked up the one nearest the house. It was cold and faintly damp, like it had been in shade until recently. At my feet, another rock. And another, stretching back toward the forest like breadcrumbs.

Messages don’t always need words. This one was simple: I can come right up to your house and you won’t know until I want you to.

I photographed them, called Janet again. She listened quietly, said she’d return the next day. “In the meantime,” she added, “keep doing what you’re doing. Don’t escalate.” That phrase stuck with me. As if this was some kind of negotiation.

The day oozed by. Emma and I moved through the house like people trapped in a submarine, always aware of pressure outside the hull. She suggested, more than once, going to her sister’s in Bellingham. I kept telling her “after tonight,” as if there would be a clear line where the situation shifted from bad to resolved.

Twilight came early under low clouds. We locked the doors, drew the curtains, and sat in the living room with lamps on low and a camp lantern on the coffee table. At 8:34 p.m., something hit the side of the house. Three times. Deep thuds that rattled picture frames. Emma grabbed my arm, nails digging through flannel into skin.

The knocks repeated on the opposite wall. Then the back of the house. It circled us, the sound moving from wall to wall, slow and deliberate. I pictured a hand the size of a shovelhead hitting siding, feeling the give, judging the strength. Every instinct screamed to open the door and fire in the direction of the sound. Every fragment of sense told me that would turn the situation from intimidation into war.

The knocking stopped. Footsteps creaked across the back porch. Heavy, slow, a limp in the rhythm. It paced. Back and forth. Back. And forth. Then, inches from where we sat behind drywall and studs, that not‑quite‑animal voice spilled through—the same rising howl I’d heard by the sheep pen, only closer. The glass in the picture frames trembled. My skin prickled with electricity.

We didn’t sleep that night. Nothing else happened besides that one circuit of our house and that one awful vocalization, but it was enough. When the sheep began screaming again at 1:17 a.m. on October 7th, I was already halfway out of my chair.

Emma shouted after me. I didn’t hear what she said. I grabbed the spotlight and the rifle and slid on my boots without socks, heart thudding, adrenaline slamming through my veins. In that moment I wasn’t thinking about warnings or biologists or the fact that whatever was out there had been escalating in a way that suggested intelligence. I was thinking: my animals are dying.

The barn doors I’d chained shut swung wide open as I stepped into the yard. The new motion lights flicked on and off, overwhelmed by something large moving in their beams. Inside, sheep shrieked in blind, high‑pitched terror. There was another sound beneath that: wet tearing, like heavy cloth and meat ripping together.

I hit the spotlight. The beam cut into the shadows. It lit blood on straw first, a sheep half opened like a butchered deer, then the creature bent over it. It was closer now than it would ever be again. The glare made its fur gleam almost black. It turned its head into the light. For the first time, I saw its face clearly.

If you took a gorilla and a man and asked an insane, cruel god to merge them, you’d get close. The brow jutted massive and heavy; the nose sat flat and wide. The mouth could have taken a basketball whole. The teeth were too many, too big. The hair on its face was shorter, showing dark, leathery skin. It had deep‑set eyes that reflected my light for a second like an animal’s, then adjusted. It squinted. It understood it was being illuminated. Then it saw me.

Recognition isn’t something you expect from a nightmare. But that’s what I saw: it recognized me. The moment stretched: me in the barn doorway, one boot on packed earth and one on concrete; it over my shredded sheep, one hand still sunk in wool and flesh. We stared at each other. Then it straightened. And for a second, its full height filled the doorframe—easily nine feet, shoulders almost brushing the jamb.

I don’t remember deciding to shoot. My finger pulled because everything in me screamed that if I didn’t, Emma would be widowed and our walls would be painted in us. The rifle bucked. The muzzle flash froze the scene in a snapshot. My crosshairs had been on the front of its shoulder. The hit rocked it sideways. That scream—pure pain and rage, no theater—tore out of its chest and into the night.

It didn’t charge. It didn’t crumple. It turned and ran, not stumbling, just clipping past bales and posts with that rolling, ground‑eating stride. I fired twice more, bullets splintering wood. It was out and into the trees before the echo of the first shot finished bouncing off the hills.

My sheep’s blood steamed in the beam of my spotlight. Two bodies lay torn, a third heaving in a pool of red. I finished that one quickly, as much mercy as I had left in me. Then I stood there shaking as sirens started their long, slow climb up the valley.

Chapter 5: Three Days

The deputies came. They took photographs, measured tracks, collected blood. The older one, Wilson, kept his skepticism behind his eyes rather than his mouth. “What do you think you shot?” he asked quietly when the younger guys were busy bagging shell casings. “Not a bear,” I said. “Not a man. Something else.” He studied me for a long moment. “Lock up your animals,” he said. “I’ll talk to Fish and Wildlife. You might want to think about staying with family for a few days.”

I didn’t go. Stubbornness is a stupid trait when something big and angry knows your address. I told Emma she could go to her sister’s until it was dealt with. She asked me if I was coming with her. I told her I’d follow “once this is done.” She looked at the barn, at the bloody straw, at the broken latch, and I could see the instant she realized I was choosing our land over our safety. She left the next afternoon anyway.

October 7th was a blur of hammering boards over windows, chaining doors, moving the remaining animals into the most fortified part of the barn. Fish & Wildlife came back—Janet with a game warden named Holland. They examined everything, took more samples, nodded a lot, said very little. “Whatever you hit is hurt,” Holland said. “Which makes it unpredictable. We’ll try to track it. You should leave.”

I stayed. That night, just before midnight, the rain started. The steady drum on the barn roof almost masked the first rock when it hit. Almost. The second and third were impossible to miss. The sound of stone on corrugated metal boomed like distant thunder. The sheep froze, then bolted in a panicked swirl. Rocks continued to slam down for what felt like ten minutes, hitting the roof, ricocheting off the walls, clanging off the chain on the door. Each impact felt targeted, not random—testing, probing.

Then silence. The sudden absence of sound is worse than noise when you know something is out there. I heard it limp around the barn. Its breathing was different now, rough and wet, catching on each inhale. It stopped at one window, fingernails scraping on the boards. The wood flexed. The nails held. It moved on. When it reached the door, I could hear every breath. It stood there, separated from me by two inches of wood and a chain.

The hit, when it came, was like a truck ramming the frame. The hinges screamed. A crack zigzagged across the plank beside the latch. Sheep shrieked. I backed up, rifle up. The second hit bent metal, snapped one of the internal cross braces. The third would take it. I didn’t wait. I fired three rounds at chest height straight through the door.

The sound inside that confined space was like grenades going off. Sheep went silent in a terrified slump. Splinters flew. Outside, something screamed again—shorter this time, ragged, furious. Footsteps staggered away. I stood there with ringing ears and smoke in my nose, watching the door tremble on its bent hinges, waiting for it to hurl itself at the barn again. Instead, I heard the uneven slap of its stride fade toward the trees.

The deputies came again. Blood sprayed across the dirt outside proved at least one of my shots had connected. More tracks, now clearly favoring one side. They brought K9s, tried to trail it, lost the scent in a creek about a mile into the woods. Holland organized a larger search the next day. Six deputies, his own team, volunteers. They followed a messy trail of blood and broken branches deep into the National Forest, found what he later described as a “nest”—a depression lined with ferns and moss, bones scattered around, some old, some disturbingly fresh. No occupant. The blood there was drying, not pooling. Whatever I was fighting didn’t die where they expected.

October 8th, we loaded up the remaining animals. The barn wore the scars of the assault. One of Emma’s mares lay dead in the pasture, torn apart and left. Not eaten. Not neatly killed. Destroyed. It felt like a message scratched into the land: you hurt me, I hurt you. We loaded the stock. Wilson urged me to go with Emma. “We’ll keep looking,” he said. “There’s nothing you can do by staying here but give it another target.” I finally listened.

We never slept in that house again.

Chapter 6: Aftermath

We moved into Emma’s sister’s spare room in Bellingham, fragile and exhausted. The first night there, every little creak of the apartment building felt like knocking on our bedroom walls. Emma slept eventually. I didn’t. My mind replayed every moment from the first strange track to the last time I saw that hulking shape between fir trunks. Part of me hated it. Part of me missed our farm like a phantom limb.

Holland called a few times over the next week. “We followed sign to a stream and lost it,” he said. “We found more of those trees stripped high up, some stone piles that don’t make sense, old kills. It’s been there a long time.” Once, in a hushed tone, he admitted they’d probably never catch it. “Too smart,” he said. “Too used to us. If we get close, it’ll just move deeper.” The official search wound down. The sheriff’s report chalked it up as a series of “probable bear attacks” and “unidentified wildlife activity.” Behind closed doors, I suspect the file wore a different label.

I went back once. I shouldn’t have, but I did. Ten days after the last encounter, while Emma was out with her sister, I took the repaired truck and drove out to what used to be mine. The “No Trespassing” signs the deputies had put up fluttered limp in the drizzle. The barn sagged like a beaten old dog. Police tape hung in tatters around the doors.

I walked the perimeter of the house first. No new tracks. No new handprints. The forest stood mute. When I forced myself to open the barn, that’s when I saw what I think of as the last message. In the center of the concrete floor, where the worst of the blood stains had been, someone—or something—had placed a rock. Same size as the ones that had hammered the roof. Beside it lay a clump of dark hair, longer than the samples Janet had taken, stuck to the floor with a smear of dried blood.

It wasn’t much. It didn’t need to be. I knew what it meant: I came back after you left. I could have taken whatever I wanted. I didn’t. This is mine. You are not.

I didn’t pick up the hair. I didn’t bag it for evidence, didn’t call Wilson, didn’t take a single photo. Standing there with the smell of old fear and hay and dried blood around me, I realized I didn’t want proof anymore. Proof meant more men with guns pushing farther into that forest. Proof meant escalation. Proof meant I’d never sleep again in any woods, anywhere. I walked out, closed the barn door, and left everything inside for the bulldozers.

We sold the farm to a developer who wanted the land more than the buildings. The closing papers didn’t mention repeated “unknown primate” lab results, or destroyed livestock, or deputies hunting something they couldn’t name. The disclosure said “past predator activity, likely bear or cougar,” and the buyer signed anyway. They’ll level it, pour foundation, plant lawns where my sheep once grazed, and kids will ride bikes in a place where, for a few nights, something older than the neighborhood line stalked my property line.

Chapter 7: The Thing That Stayed

Now I live in a rented house where the nearest forest is a city park and our nearest neighbors are thirty feet away, not thirty acres. Emma’s getting better. She still jumps at loud noises, but she wants to plant tomatoes next spring. That’s a kind of hope. Me, I’m in therapy, learning how to breathe when a truck backfire sounds too much like a door being hit from the outside.

People ask why we left the farm, and we tell them we had a “bad run‑in with a bear.” It’s easier than the truth. Say “bear” and people nod, frown sympathetically, maybe tell you their own bear story about knocked‑over garbage cans or a torn‑up chicken coop. Say “Bigfoot” and you’re not a farmer anymore, you’re a punchline. Not even the lab results—“unknown primate”—carry weight outside specialist circles. To the sheriff, to the neighbors, to our insurance company, it will forever be a bear. That lie protects us almost as much as locks do.

Sometimes, though, late at night, I think about the way it looked at me. That first night in the barn, eyes alive with calculation. The second time, in the trees, when it chose to turn away instead of charge. It wasn’t just animal anger; it was something more complicated. Territory. Retaliation. Maybe even something like confused fear. I shot first. It responded in kind. In its mind, maybe, it was just balancing a ledger.

I don’t kid myself: if it had wanted me dead, I’d be dead. There were plenty of moments it could have come straight through the door, gunshots be damned. It killed my animals instead—each attack more pointed than the last. It chose what to destroy and when. It chose, in the end, not to finish what we’d started. That knowledge sits heavy. I used to think owning land meant controlling it. Now I know better. We’re guests, at best, in places other things have learned to call home.

If you’ve read this far, you might be wondering what I’m hoping to accomplish with this story. I’m not out to convince scientists or change official policy. I don’t want expeditions tromping into the Cascades trying to prove what’s out there. I’ve seen what happens when we push too hard into someone else’s territory. All I want is this: if you have land backed up against deep forest, if you see tracks too big for any animal you know, if you smell that rank, wrong musk in your pastures, if you hear wood knocks in the night or rocks on your roof—take it seriously. Lock your doors. Protect your animals. And above all, think hard before you raise a rifle at something you don’t understand.

I was the farmer who shot Bigfoot stealing his livestock. And “then this happens” isn’t just a headline. It’s the part of the story I’ll be living with for the rest of my life: the rocks on my roof, the battered barn door, the horse’s torn body, Emma’s eyes full of fear and betrayal, the sale of the only home we ever loved. And somewhere, out there in the North Cascades, under those tall firs, something remembers me too.