“Sasquatch Spoke To Me” – Old Man’s Terrifying Bigfoot 
THE VOICE IN THE TIMBERLINE
When I first retired to the mountains, I expected silence—clean, honest silence that had weight to it. What I didn’t expect was a voice.
I’m seventy-four years old now, and I’ve lived long enough to doubt my own senses. That’s why I never told anyone what happened the spring I came closest to death, and closest to something greater than myself. But when you live alone in a one-room cabin eight miles from the nearest power line, truth doesn’t come to you gently. It finds you like a cold wind slipping under the door.
It began with sounds that didn’t belong in the night.
My cabin sat on a ridge of old-growth pines that whispered with every wind, but beneath their murmuring, I started hearing steps. Heavy steps. Slow. Purposeful. Too deliberate to be anything that walked on four legs. I’d lie in bed with my bones aching and listen as something circled the cabin, pausing at my window like it was studying me through the glass.
I told myself it was a bear, but bears don’t walk in circles. They don’t stop to breathe fog on the windowpanes.
One morning, I saw prints in the mud by the pump—prints so vast my entire hand fit inside the heel alone. They were shaped like human feet, but stretched and wide, with toes that dug into the mud like claws. You don’t mistake something like that. Not when you’ve spent your life in the woods.
The next night, something drank from the pump. I heard the handle creak at midnight. At dawn, the ground was flooded and the metal carried the imprint of huge, muddy hands.
I should’ve packed up then. But stubbornness is the last luxury of an old man.
Things escalated quickly. First it took vegetables from my early planting—clean pulls, not messy browsing. Then it began leaving things behind. A stack of perfectly split firewood placed dead center on my porch. A stone, smooth and polished, left on the stump where I chopped kindling. Once, a bundle of wild onions tied with braided grass.
A trade.
That was when fear turned into something else—an uneasy curiosity. Something intelligent wanted my attention.
I tried to ignore it. I tried to convince myself it was loneliness bending my senses after so many years with only the mountains for company. That would’ve worked—if I hadn’t gotten sick.
It hit fast. Fever. Dizziness. A collapse in the kitchen that left a jagged cut above my eyebrow. By afternoon I couldn’t stand. By evening I couldn’t think clearly.
Night came like a curtain dropping, and with it, voices.
Not human voices. Deep, resonant tones, rising and falling like a chant carried on wind. They weren’t speaking to me. They were speaking about me. Arguing, almost.
Then came three knocks on my door.
I remember whispering, “It’s open,” because I knew I had no strength to stop whatever stood there.
The door eased inward, and something ducked under the frame—huge, broad-shouldered, covered in dark hair that glimmered like wet bark. Eight feet tall if it was an inch. Its eyes were black but not empty. They were thinking. Understanding.
Behind it came two more. A female, lighter in color, and a younger one whose hair was wild and tangled like rain-soaked moss.
I tried to speak, but all I managed was a wheeze.
The big one knelt beside me. Its hands dwarfed my head, yet they touched the bandage I’d clumsily pressed to my forehead with an impossible gentleness.
The female slipped outside, and when she returned, she carried plants—moss, roots, curled leaves glistening with dew. She crushed the roots with her teeth, mixed them with moss fibers, then pressed the paste to my wound. It burned, then numbed, then cooled.
The young one rebuilt my fire, carefully selecting each piece of wood like it was a ceremony. Within minutes, flames licked the kettle and warmth returned to my bones.
The big one studied me, tilting my face toward the firelight, watching my pupils react. He rumbled to the others—sounds that carried meaning even if I didn’t understand the words.
I should’ve been terrified. Instead, I felt… seen. As though some ancient neighbor of the forest had decided I was worth saving.
Through broken gestures and simple sounds, they introduced themselves. I named the big one Thron in my mind, because his voice carried like thunder through soil. The female I called Runa, soft but strong. The young one—quick as a squirrel—became Kesh.
For the rest of that night, they cared for me. They fed me a broth brewed from wild plants. They checked my fever. They dozed by the fire in shifts.
And as the fever lifted, I began noticing things I shouldn’t have been able to.
Their language wasn’t primitive. It was layered. Rhythmic. Full of tone and meaning. They gestured with purpose, their eyes bright with comprehension. They were people—just not like us.
When dawn came, they slipped quietly into the trees, but Thron paused at the door. He tapped his chest, then mine. A promise.
They returned three nights later.
This time with urgency.
“Men,” Thron growled, pointing east. “Takers.”
Through gestures, they showed me devastation—trees stripped, machines cutting scars across the land. Their home. Their way of life. Everything shrinking.
They needed me to see.
They led me along an invisible path through the timberline until we reached a ridge overlooking a distant valley. The forest was dying below us. Machines crawled like metal insects over cleared land.
Runa touched my arm. “Home…gone,” she rasped in broken human syllables.
It tore something inside me.
These beings—who healed me, fed me, trusted me—were being forced from the world quietly, unseen, unprotected.
Thron pointed at my cabin. Then at the forest. Then at me.
“Remember,” he said. His first clear word in my language.
It wasn’t a request. It was a charge. A burden.
A truth to carry when they no longer could.
That was the last time I saw them. The next morning, their lean-to was empty. Their tracks vanished into granite and shadow.
But I still hear them sometimes.
When the wind presses against the cabin…
when the pines sway like voices speaking far off…
when footsteps circle in the night and stop just where the firelight fades.
They taught me their word for that place.
The place where the known world ends and theirs begins.
The Between.
And I think they still walk there—waiting for the day someone else finally listens.