Hunter Tracks 2,000lb Bear, BUT He Finds a BIGFOOT NEST – Sasquatch Encounter

The Thing on Kodiak Island

I never thought I’d be the one to find something like this. You spend enough time in the wild, and you convince yourself that the mysteries are just things we haven’t cataloged yet, or stories made up by bored trappers over too much whiskey. When I got the call from Wildlife Services that morning, I figured it was just another routine job. Track down an aggressive bear, relocate it, or put it down if necessary. I’d done it dozens of times before. But what I found in those woods that day changed everything I thought I knew about what’s out there. Some things you can’t unsee, and some truths you can’t unknow.

The call came in around 07:00, just as the coffee was hitting my system. The dispatcher’s voice had that edge to it—the kind that tells you this isn’t a raccoon in a dumpster. A farmer on the eastern side of Kodiak Island had reported an attack on his livestock. A steer, killed and dragged into the forest. The farmer claimed he’d shot at the predator, fired twice, and was certain he’d hit it. He described it as a massive Kodiak bear, pushing 2,000 pounds.

Now, farmers on Kodiak don’t scare easily. They live on the edge of the wilderness; they know the rhythm of the wild. But this guy sounded terrified. He wanted more than a report filed; he wanted a hunter. He said the “bear” had been stalking his property for weeks, circling at night, making noises that didn’t belong in a bear’s throat.

I’ve been with Wildlife Services for fifteen years. I have a degree in wildlife biology and a minor in ecology. I chose the field over the lab because I wanted the truth of nature, not the theory. Over the years, I’ve tracked black bears, wolves, mountain lions, and moose. I know the patterns. Bears are opportunistic, not malicious. An attack like this—stalking, killing without eating immediately, shaking off high-caliber rounds—was highly irregular.

I packed my gear: tranquilizer rifle, standard firearm for backup, tracking kit, GPS, radio. The drive took an hour and a half down a dirt track winding through dense spruce forests, the mountains looming like gray sentinels in the distance. This was real backcountry, where the line between civilization and the wild wasn’t just blurred; it was nonexistent.

The farm was isolated, hemmed in by old-growth forest on three sides. The farmer, a weathered man in his fifties named Miller, met me on the porch. His hands shook as he greeted me, his eyes darting toward the tree line.

“It ain’t right,” Miller said, leading me past the barn without preamble. “The way it moves. The way it sounds.”

We reached the edge of the pasture, and the scene was brutal. The earth was gouged deep, grass ripped out in clumps. The drag marks were massive—two foot-wide furrows cutting into the soil where a 600-pound animal had been hauled away like a ragdoll. The steer lay at the forest’s edge, chunks torn from it, blood painting the bushes in dark, violent streaks.

I knelt to examine the carcass. “This doesn’t add up,” I muttered.

Bear kills are methodical. They go for the throat or belly. These wounds were messy, chaotic. The flesh hadn’t been punctured by canine teeth so much as shredded by blunt, overwhelming force. It looked like something had grabbed the animal and simply torn it apart in a frenzy.

“I shot it,” Miller said, standing ten feet back, refusing to get closer. “Right as it was dragging the steer. It stumbled, but it didn’t drop. It just looked at me and kept going.”

I looked at the dark canopy of the forest. “I’m going to track it. If it’s wounded, it won’t go far. Stay inside, lock your doors.”

I radioed in my position, shouldered my pack, and stepped into the trees.

The blood trail was heavy, impossible to miss. Thick splatters on the devil’s club, smears against the rough bark of hemlocks. Based on the volume of blood loss, whatever this was should have been dead within a mile. But I walked for an hour, then two, and the trail just kept going.

The silence of the forest was heavy, oppressive. It was the “predator silence”—the hush that falls when every prey animal has gone to ground because death is walking nearby.

Three hours in, the anomalies started piling up. I found gouges in the trees—territorial markings, sap still weeping from the wounds. But they were twelve feet off the ground. No bear, not even the largest Kodiak on hind legs, reaches twelve feet. And the pattern was wrong. Not parallel claw rakes, but chaotic, singular tears.

Then I crossed a stream and found the footprint in the mud bank.

I stopped, my breath catching in my throat. I crouched, staring at the impression. It was eighteen inches long, maybe eight inches wide. But it wasn’t a bear track. There were no claw marks extending from the toes. The five toes were splayed, thick, and seemingly prehensile. The heel was elongated.

It was a human footprint. Scaled up to a nightmare size.

My scientific mind tried to reject it. Bear slipping in mud. Double register track. But the evidence was clear. Dermal ridges were visible in the clay. This was a bipedal organism, immense and heavy. I took photos, my hands trembling slightly, fighting the urge to turn around. But I thought of Miller back at the farm, terrified. I had to know.

As the terrain steepened, moving toward the rocky base of the mountains, I found something else. A structure.

It was crude, made of bent saplings and snapped branches interwoven into a rough dome. It wasn’t a natural deadfall. It was built. Inside, there was bedding made of dried moss and grass. And the smell—it hit me like a physical blow. Pungent, musky, like wet dog mixed with sulfur and rot. It made my eyes water.

Bears don’t build shelters. They den in caves or hollows. This implied tool use. It implied planning.

The sun was dipping lower, casting long, skeletal shadows through the trees. Five hours in. I was exhausted, my legs burning. The trail led me to the base of a sheer rock face, opening into a bowl-shaped clearing scattered with scree and sparse yellow grass.

And there, in the center of the clearing, lay the body.

At first, I thought it was a dark boulder. As I stepped closer, the shape resolved into anatomy. It was massive, lying on its side, steam rising from its cooling form into the chill mountain air.

I approached, tranquilizer rifle raised, though I knew it was useless. The creature was dead.

It wasn’t a bear. It was a biological impossibility.

The torso was barrel-shaped, broader than any human, covered in thick, dark, matted hair. The legs were thick columns of muscle, bent at the knees. The arms were long, powerful, ending in hands—massive hands with thick fingers and opposable thumbs. I circled to the head. The skull was conical, rising to a peaked crest. The face was flat, dark skin like leather, with a broad nose and a heavy, protruding jaw.

It looked like an evolutionary cousin that had taken a different path millions of years ago, embracing size and raw power. I could see the bullet wounds—one in the shoulder, one in the gut. Miller’s aim had been true. It had bled out here, just outside its home.

I stood over the corpse of a Sasquatch. The legends, the grainy videos, the jokes—they all shattered under the weight of the physical reality in front of me. This was flesh and blood. It was an animal, yet something more.

I reached for my radio to call it in.

Guh-RUMPH.

The sound vibrated through the soles of my boots. A low, resonant grunt that seemed to come from the earth itself.

I froze. Slowly, I turned my head.

Fifty yards away, camouflaged against the gray stone of the cliff face, was a cave mouth I hadn’t noticed. Movement shifted in the shadows. Then, one by one, they stepped out.

One. Two. Three. Four of them.

They were alive. And they were massive. The largest male stood nearly nine feet tall, his shoulders a wall of muscle. They moved with a strange, loping gait, arms swinging, making low, mournful vocalizations. They ignored me at first, converging on the body of the fallen one.

I watched, paralyzed, as they gathered around the corpse. One of them, a smaller female, reached out and touched the bullet wounds gently. They were grieving. This wasn’t just a pack; it was a family mourning their dead. The intelligence in their interaction was undeniable, and that made them infinitely more terrifying than any mindless beast.

I took a step back. A rock crunched under my boot.

The largest male—the Alpha—snapped upright. He inhaled deeply, nostrils flaring, testing the wind. Then, his head swiveled.

He locked eyes with me.

His eyes were small, dark, and set deep beneath a heavy brow ridge, but they burned with a recognition that chilled my blood. He assessed me. He saw the rifle. He smelled the gunpowder and the blood. He knew what I was.

The others turned to look. The clearing fell into a suffocating silence.

Then, the Alpha opened his mouth, exposing thick, flat teeth, and roared. It wasn’t a scream; it was a concussion wave of sound that triggered every fight-or-flight receptor in my brain.

I ran.

I turned and sprinted for the tree line, abandoning all caution. Behind me, the earth shook. I could hear them crashing through the brush, branches snapping like pistol shots. They were fast—faster than anything that size had a right to be.

I dove into the dense timber, my lungs burning. I knew I couldn’t outrun them on a straightaway. My only advantage was size—I was smaller. I aimed for the densest thickets, the tightest squeezes between old-growth trunks.

Behind me, I heard them communicating. Deep, guttural huffs and whistles. They were coordinating. Flanking. They were hunting me.

I hit a ravine and slid down the loose shale, tearing my pants, cutting my hands. I scrambled up the other side and dove into a patch of blackberry brambles. The thorns tore at my skin, turning my arms to ribbons, but I pushed through. I could hear the heavy thuds of their footsteps circling, looking for a way around the thorns.

I shed my jacket and threw it to the west, hoping the scent would distract them, then cut east toward a stream. I splashed upstream for two hundred yards, the glacial water numbing my feet, trying to kill my scent trail.

I huddled beneath the root system of a fallen cedar, chest heaving, listening.

Silence. Then, the heavy, deliberate crunch of a footstep nearby.

I pressed myself into the mud. Through a gap in the roots, I saw legs—massive, hairy pillars—pass within ten feet of me. The smell of musk and rot washed over me, so strong I nearly gagged. It paused. I heard the deep intake of breath as it sniffed for me.

If the wind shifted, I was dead.

Minutes stretched into hours. Finally, the footsteps moved off, fading into the distance.

I waited until the sun began to touch the horizon before I moved again. I crept through the twilight, moving slow, staying downwind. When I finally saw the lights of the farmhouse in the distance, I nearly wept.

I broke cover and ran across the open pasture, expecting to feel a massive hand crush my spine at any second. I reached the porch just as Miller opened the door, rifle in hand. He took one look at me—bloodied, torn, wild-eyed—and didn’t ask a single question.

“Go,” I gasped. “Truck. Now.”

We peeled out of the driveway, gravel spraying. As we turned onto the main road, I looked back at the field.

At the edge of the forest, four dark silhouettes stood shoulder to shoulder, watching us leave. They didn’t chase the truck. They just stood there, marking the boundary.

We drove in silence to the Wildlife Services office. I sat in the back room with my supervisor and told him everything. The blood, the tracks, the shelter, the body, the family, the intelligence.

He wrote it all down, but I saw the look in his eyes. The polite skepticism. He asked if I had photos. I showed him the pictures of the tracks and the claw marks. He looked at them, nodded, and said they looked like “anomalous bear sign.”

“I saw the body,” I insisted, my voice cracking. “I saw them mourning.”

“We’ll send a team out at first light,” he said.

I filed the report. Then I got in my car, drove to the ferry terminal, and left Kodiak Island. I haven’t been back since.

I don’t know what the search team found the next day. I never checked the follow-up report. Part of me suspects they found nothing—that the family moved the body, cleaned the site, and vanished back into the deep wilderness. They are intelligent; they know how to hide.

Or maybe the agency found something and buried it. I don’t want to know.

I used to think I understood the natural world. I thought we had the planet mapped, cataloged, and tamed. But now I know that our understanding is just a thin layer of light painted over a very deep, very dark ocean.

There are things in the woods that don’t belong in our textbooks. They are smart, they are powerful, and they want to be left alone.

I don’t go into the deep woods anymore. Not alone. And if you’re ever out there, in the silence of the old growth, and you smell that musky rot or hear a sound that vibrates in your chest… don’t look for it. Just run.

Some things are better left undiscovered.