#2432317 - 06/30/11 04:08 PM
Re: I want to hear them...BIGFOOT!
[Re: Deer Whisperer]
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bowriter
Non-Typical
Registered: 08/31/02
Posts: 40301
Loc: Lebanon,TN USA
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BW, I have that story and can post it with your permission. I saved it exactly as you posted it.
Not the same story, never told this story. But you can post the one youhave. My hands are still killing me. The one you have, as I have said many times, is fiction. The one in the tetons is not.
_________________________
Constipation has ruined many a good day. Not as many as stupidity, though.
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#2432324 - 06/30/11 04:15 PM
Re: I want to hear them...BIGFOOT!
[Re: bowriter]
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bowriter
Non-Typical
Registered: 08/31/02
Posts: 40301
Loc: Lebanon,TN USA
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Deer Whisperer- I believe this is the one you have.
Of late there has been a great deal of speculation about Bigfoot-Sasquash-Yetti or whatever. Every few years the speculation and debate heats up. It has been going on a long time. The following is a story I wrote many years ago for an adventure magazine. I made no claims as to its’ veracity, just ran it. It produced calls from some folks at the Bigfoot Institute or some such place, wanting to interview me. I thought I’d run it here.
After all, everybody loves a good story.
This just in. This story was just picked up and run on something called Bigfoot Encounters web site. They used the fair use doctrine to avoid paying me despite the fact I own the copyright. I think it is time I had a little fun with these people. Watch for continuing episodes. Big smile and wink, here.
I make no observations regarding the following. It was as I have written it.
August 23, 1962, I had been out on my own for six months, living by competing at rodeos. I was just 18. I had just finished a rodeo in Washington State and had a couple hundred in my pocket. Three fellow hands asked me to go with them on a canoe trip in BC to get their winter meat. They were all B.C.natives.
They were Jim Palmantier, “Kid” Chatlain and Earl Condon. Jim and Kid were sons of French trappers and native mothers. Earl was a full-blood native. They had lots of equipment and knew the area to the north and east of Riske Creek. We would launch the freighter canoes, 20 ft long with 7.5 Evinrude kickers at a place near Horsely, east of Williams Lake and go north and east from there up a string of lakes and rivers.
We took two canoes with 35 gallons of spare gas, spare prop and 100 shear pins. We had a tent in each canoe, a rifle and shotgun, two fishing rods, one tackle box, bed rolls and grub box. We traveled light because we knew there would be portages and since they were all Natives, could shoot anything as we went. We had 20 pounds flour, salt, pepper, tea, lard, pemmican, and tobacco to give to natives we encountered. My friends were from 20-23 years old. I was the baby.
The first two days were uneventful. We made good time and moved steadily up a series of lakes and creeks. The first night we camped at an abandoned mine of some sort and dined on fresh fish and rice and beans. Day two the streams got narrower and swifter and we had two portages. Still we made nearly 50 miles.
In our canoe, Jim Palmantier and I, we had Savage, model 110 30.06 and my 12 gauge, Model 12 pump. Ducks and geese were everywhere and we had those for dinner the second night, fixed with some French name I can’t recall. You pick them, rub them with lard and season them. A green branch is bent in a U and inserted in the cavity and they are suspended over the coals. Best duck I ever ate.
On day three, Kid and Earl in the lead canoe, rounded a bend and shot a young moose of about 600 pounds. We spent four hours dressing and boning caching the meat on an elevated platform. It froze every night. We were at the base of a small lake and as we were working, three canoes with natives came down the lake at full speed. Kid waved them in. There were four adult males and two maybe teenagers and three adult women and one girl of about 10. I assumed they were an extended family. We gave them about 100 pounds of meat and some flour and tea and tobacco. They spoke no English, at least not in front of me and I understood not one word except twice when one of the women said “sasquash” and laughed twice. At the time, I assumed she was making a joke for me.
They left after smoking with us and giving us three big whitefish and some pemmican. We took maybe 20 pounds of prime meat, caching the rest under a tarp and some bark. The platform was standard cache for that area, about 12 feet off the ground.
We went on, still heading north and east.
We left the small lake and went through a chute into another lake and then east into a smaller river. This stream was maybe 40-60 feet wide and medium swift. About seven we started looking for a campsite and found one on the north bank in a bend of the river. The right bank was covered with boulders, rounded by glaciations and current but the left bank was clear with a flat area under some trees. We were all tried and hit the sack before full dark. It doesn’t get dark there until tomorrow.
Sometime, maybe 2 or 3 in the morning, Jim and I were awakened by a loud crash in the campsite. Thinking bear, we grabbed our guns and kicked back the tent flap. Nothing. Jim had a flashlight and he turned it on, Earl and Kid were now out of their tent and armed. A boulder about the size and shape of a bowling ball had destroyed our Dutch oven and part of the cook box.
We stood around trying to sort things out when a second boulder hit Kid and Earl’s tent dead center. It came straight down through the trees. I was standing there, open mouth when both Kid and Jim grabbed me and Earl and drug us deeper into the trees. Naturally there was a lot of discussion but I won’t relate the tenor of that. We spent the rest of the short night in a circle, back to back, safeties off. From time to time we would hear more rocks hit and once, just once, some sort of strange hooting from the other side of the river.
After good sunup we slowly crept back to camp. One tent was toast as were the cook box and most of the cooking equipment. I counted nine rocks ranging in size from bowling ball to beach ball size. The largest weighted maybe 150-200 pounds. Fortunately the canoes were undamaged and we quickly pulled camp and started out. We got the to the meat cache that morning and it was gone. Not destroyed, gone. Totally, 100% gone. No logs, no rope, no meat. No carcass. I have no opinion. We ran wide open going out and “camped” that night in the canoes in the middle of a lake.
Jim and Kid are now dead, killed in a floatplane crash some years ago. Earl, I don’t know about. I am certain of only five things regarding that trip:
1-Those rocks were not on the bank where we pitched camp when we pitched camp.
2-They were not carried into our camp, they were thrown.
3-No human being did it.
4-I have no desire to ever again go into that country.
5-I am not a believer or a skeptic. But I don’t exactly discount much if which I don’t understand.
Regarding scientific evidence: It is just in recent times we have learned that Caucasoids lived in North America as long as 12,000 years ago. If our ancestors had not lived in villages with middens, had they roamed in groups of two or three, we might still not know about Clovis Woman or many of them.
Try and throw a 150-pound boulder across a 50-foot stream. I saw it done. I don’t know what did it.That’s all I have to say about it.
John L. Sloan-2011
_________________________
Constipation has ruined many a good day. Not as many as stupidity, though.
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#2432347 - 06/30/11 04:55 PM
Re: I want to hear them...BIGFOOT!
[Re: bowriter]
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bowriter
Non-Typical
Registered: 08/31/02
Posts: 40301
Loc: Lebanon,TN USA
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Gene Jordan, Jay Mader and I were elk hunting in the Tetons outside Dubois, WY. It was 1968. We had three riding horses and two pack horses and were back in quite a ways. Gene was from the area and was sorta “guiding” us. In other words, we had no idea where we were. I suspect we were on Indian land.
The third night, we had one small bull boned out and packed and made camp near a small spring. It was a flat piece of ground and a perfect campsite. Just before dark it started snowing lightly and we took extra care to both hobble and tie the horses to a picket line. We had a snug camp and a good fire with great tenderloins for supper.
Sometime after midnight, Jay got up to take care of some business and he put a couple more logs on the fire. A little later the horses started raising a ruckus and we all woke up. I got up and checked and horses were fine. I lay back down and we all just lay there, awake but not really wide awake.
Jay said, “Something is out there. What is that?” he pointed out past the fire.
I looked but couldn’t see anything and about that time, Gene sat up and grabbed his rifle and said, “Is that a bear? Jesus that is a huge bear. Is that a bear? Something aint right.”
I then saw what he was talking about. At first I thought it was a pine tree, one of the short ones about six or eight feet high and bushy. Then it turned and with a loud snap or crash or something, vanished. The horses went berserk and we all had to get up and tend to them with our rifles in one hand and eyes going everywhere. We didn’t sleep anymore that night.
It snowed a little more that night and in the morning we could find no tracks but we did find one pine, about four inches in diameter, broken completely off a couple feet up. I mean snapped like a dry twig. Try that sometime. The only things we all agreed on was that it was walking upright and it was not a bear.
Whenever we get together which is not often, once every 20 years or so we still talk about that night.
_________________________
Constipation has ruined many a good day. Not as many as stupidity, though.
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#2432354 - 06/30/11 05:08 PM
Re: I want to hear them...BIGFOOT!
[Re: bowriter]
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Beekeeper
Good ol' Boys "Team Buckcreek"
16 Point
Registered: 08/26/09
Posts: 10943
Loc: McMinn Co. Tennessee
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Good story.
_________________________
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
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#2432375 - 06/30/11 05:36 PM
Re: I want to hear them...BIGFOOT!
[Re: Beekeeper]
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bearclaw
4 Point
Registered: 01/26/08
Posts: 347
Loc: Mid TN
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Makes for interesting fiction stories.
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#2432480 - 06/30/11 08:11 PM
Re: I want to hear them...BIGFOOT!
[Re: bearclaw]
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GRAMPS
14 Point
Registered: 09/12/03
Posts: 8600
Loc: Mount Carmel, TN
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I have never seen anything,but a good friend saw something he will only describe as a "booger" walking thru the woods at the Big Sandy area of Tennessee National Wildlife Refuge a few years ago. It shook him up so badly that he demanded that I take him home right then. He said he would never go back there again. In fact he no longer deer hunts at all. He told me later that I was crazy for walking into the woods in the dark. When I try to get him to talk about it, he refuses. When I asked why he did not shoot it, he only replied that he was not sure he had enough gun.
I have known this guy for 40 years and never known him to tell a lie.
_________________________
The older we get....the better we was.
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#2432521 - 06/30/11 08:48 PM
Re: I want to hear them...BIGFOOT!
[Re: GRAMPS]
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Mag
8 Point
Registered: 11/12/07
Posts: 1398
Loc: Hendersonville
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Years ago I was in a stand hunting The Big South Fork in an area with a bluff behind me. Before dawn it began to pour with thunder and lightening getting very intense. I was standing as close to the tree as I could get as each lightening flash lit up the woods. For some reason I turned around facing the bluff just as a flash lit up,silhouetting two figures on the ridge above me. Darkness followed and they were gone. It was like something out of a Friday the 13th movie. A few nervous moments later my hunting buddies show up headed to the truck....it was them headed out. One spooky moment.
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