A Hunter Was Dying in the Forest. A Bigfoot Appeared. What Happened Next Will Shock You!
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A Hunter Was Dying in the Forest. A Bigfoot Appeared. What Happened Next Will Shock You.
My name is Cecil Ward, and I am 54 years old. I’ve hunted the mountains of central Oregon since I was twelve. My father taught me how to track, how to read sign, how to move through timber without being noticed. I grew up thinking there was very little in these woods I didn’t understand.
I was wrong.
The story I told the sheriff, the search-and-rescue team and my family after it happened was simple: I slipped in the rain, broke my leg, made a shelter and a splint, and somehow held on until they found me.
That story was a lie of necessity.
This is the real one.
Opening Day
It was November 15, 1986, opening weekend of deer season, and I’d been planning the trip for months. My wife, Margaret, woke with me at 4:30 a.m. in our little house in Bend. She packed my thermos with strong black coffee, slipped two Snickers bars into my vest when she thought I wasn’t looking, and kissed me in the doorway.
“Be careful, Ceil,” she said, cinching her blue robe a little tighter against the cold.
“I always am,” I told her. “Pot roast tonight, remember.”
She smiled and waved as I pulled away in my ’82 Chevy Silverado, headlights cutting across the frost on the lawn. We’d been married thirty-two years. She knew the routine: I’d leave before dawn, come home after dark with a deer in the bed and some story to tell over dinner.
The drive out to Deschutes National Forest took about an hour and a half. The local AM station was playing news about the Iran‑Contra mess—President Reagan on the hot seat, talk of covert arms deals and denials. After that came Merle Haggard. “Okie from Muskogee” carried me the last miles toward the mountains.
Dawn was just brushing the ridge tops when I pulled off onto a narrow spur from Forest Road 46. It was a little clearing I’d used for years, tucked away from the main traffic. The nearest town, Sisters, lay fifteen miles behind me. The deer population in that corner of the forest was good, the terrain rugged enough to keep most folks away.
By 6:15, I was geared up: my old Winchester Model 70 .30‑06 slung over my shoulder, a bright orange wool coat, heavy canvas pants with long underwear beneath, and my red‑wing boots resoled three times. My vest held extra ammo, a silver compass from Bi‑Mart, thirty feet of nylon rope, a buck folding knife, a small first‑aid kit, a whistle, and those two candy bars I pretended not to notice Margaret slipping in.
It was about 38 degrees. The radio had mentioned possible rain in the afternoon, but I expected to be back at the truck long before anything serious rolled in.
I slipped into the trees as the sky lightened behind me.
The Rhythm of the Hunt
The morning was near perfect. The air had that crisp, pine-and-earth smell that only exists in the mountains just after dawn. Under my boots, layers of needles and leaves muffled my steps. The forest murmured with small sounds: jays calling, a squirrel working over a cone somewhere overhead, the distant caw of a raven.
By 7:30, I’d picked up fresh deer tracks on a slope—a decent buck by the depth and spacing of the prints—and began working my way up a ridge, moving slow, watching the wind. I’d taken this route dozens of times. There is a rhythm to good hunting most people don’t understand. It isn’t storming through the woods with the latest gear, hoping to blunder into something. It’s patience, stillness, and a kind of quiet respect.
Out there, I wasn’t Cecil the mechanic from the Texaco station, hands black with grease from carburetors and oil changes. Out there, I was just another animal among many, following instincts older than history.
Around nine, I reached a familiar plateau and settled in behind the fall of a massive Douglas fir, struck by lightning years ago. The trunk was at least six feet across, its fallen bulk forming a natural blind overlooking a narrow clearing where I’d taken more than one buck over the years.
I poured coffee from the thermos. It mingled with the scents of wet bark and cold earth, and for a while, everything in my world was exactly as it should be.
For nearly two hours I barely moved, letting the forest forget I was there. Dad used to say a good hunter doesn’t chase animals; he becomes part of the landscape and lets them come to him. I’d spent half a lifetime learning to do that.
The forest around me breathed and shifted, a living thing of wind and sound. Somewhere a woodpecker tapped. Trees creaked. The squirrel above finally quit its busy work. I knew what those sounds meant, knew which could be ignored and which demanded attention.
That’s why, when the sound came at 11:20, I knew instantly it didn’t belong.
The Sound That Didn’t Belong
I saw the buck first. A four‑point stepped cautiously out of the treeline seventy yards away, just where I’d hoped he would. He was a fine animal, probably one‑eighty on the hoof, gray‑brown coat thickened for winter, muscles moving under his hide like coiled springs.
Slowly, I raised the Winchester, settled against the log, and eased my breathing. The crosshairs found his shoulder, that familiar little pocket behind the front leg.
My finger tightened on the trigger.
And then that sound ripped through the trees.
It began low, like a growl buried in the earth, and rose into something between a howl and a roar. It rolled over the ridge and through my chest, vibrating my ribs. It came from everywhere and nowhere at once, echoing off timber and rock.
I have heard black bears huff and pop their jaws. I have heard grizzlies across draws in Montana, elk bugles in the rut, mountain lions scream, coyotes yip and wolves howl. This was none of those. It was deeper, more complex, threaded with something that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck in a way no cougar scream ever had.
The buck bounded away in three leaps, vanishing into brush as if he’d been yanked on a string. Whatever had made that sound had scared him worse than any human scent.
Then the forest went still.
Not quiet—still. The kind of silence where even the birds stop, where the life in the trees seems to hold its breath. The squirrel overhead froze. The wind seemed to hesitate in the needles.
The feeling of being watched came over me like ice water. It wasn’t imagination. The instincts you hone in the woods are real, and they don’t lie.
I lowered the rifle slowly and scanned the timber, trying to locate the source of the sound. In the shifting acoustics of the forest, it was impossible to tell exactly where it had come from. A hundred yards. Fifty. Closer.
Cold reason cut through my unease. Whatever it was, I didn’t want to be near it.
I decided to head back toward the truck.
The Fall
On another day, in different weather, I would have made it. I’d walked that trail in rain and snow and ice. But that November afternoon, the storm rolled in faster than the radio had predicted.
It started as a drizzle, soft and gray, and within minutes became a full Pacific Northwest downpour. The trail turned slick, the ground turning to grease under my boots. A mist rose between the trees, thick enough that visibility shrank to twenty feet.
Water ran off the brim of my orange cap. My wool coat, so good at keeping cold out, soaked through and gained weight with every step.
About a mile from the truck, the trail curved around a rocky outcrop—nothing difficult in clear weather, just a narrow edge above a steep slope. I’d navigated it as easily as a sidewalk more times than I could count.
This time, what looked like solid trail ahead was nothing but overhanging dirt and needles, undercut by erosion from the recent storms. The rain and mist hid the drop.
I stepped. My boot found air.
I went down hard, arms flailing, snatching at branches that snapped around my hands. It wasn’t a long fall—maybe eight feet—but it was enough.
I hit on my left side. In the same instant I heard and felt something in my leg snap, a white‑hot bolt of pain that stole my breath. For a moment all I could do was lie there in the mud, rain hitting my face, my lungs refusing to work.
When the first groan finally clawed its way out of my chest, it sounded like it belonged to someone else.
My rifle had flown from my hands and remained somewhere up on the trail. I tried to move my left leg and saw it twisted at an angle no limb should make.
I didn’t need a doctor to tell me it was broken.
Alone in the Cold
Training and stubbornness are poor substitutes for medical care, but they’re better than nothing.
I rolled slowly until my back found a tree trunk and used my arms and good leg to pull myself up into a half‑sitting position. Every movement sent shards of pain through my body that made my vision gray at the edges.
Rain still poured from the sky. The forest floor around me was turning into soup. With the trail now above and behind me, I was technically off‑trail, down a little slope that no one would see from above unless they practically tripped over me.
This was 1986. No cell phone. No GPS. No satellite messaging device. Just my gear and whatever I could improvise.
I forced myself to take inventory. My vest had stayed closed in the fall. The knife was still on my belt. In my pockets, the rope, the compass, the whistle, the two Snickers bars, matches in a waterproof case. The thermos lay in the mud beside me, dented but sealed.
It wasn’t nothing, but it also wasn’t rescue.
I knew I had to immobilize the leg. Shock is as dangerous as the break itself, and I could feel it creeping in—hands shaking, breath shallow, a cold that had little to do with the weather.
I used the knife to cut two straight branches from a nearby deadfall, about eighteen inches long and an inch and a half thick. Splint material. It took nearly half an hour—my hands clumsy with pain and cold—to position them along my leg and lash them in place with lengths of rope.
When I finished, I leaned back against the tree, drenched and shaking. The pain had settled into a pounding throb that matched my heartbeat.
The temperature was dropping. My wool coat was soaked through, heavy and useless. I was already shivering hard. Hypothermia in November in the Oregon mountains is no joke, and with a broken leg my options were limited.
I thought about Margaret. She’d start worrying when dark came and I wasn’t home. She’d probably give me until eight or nine, not wanting to be “that wife” who panicked early. By tomorrow morning, she’d call the sheriff. They’d organize a search, but there were hundreds of square miles of forest and I was off the trail.
The odds weren’t good.
Afternoon dragged into evening. The rain slowed to a drizzle, then stopped. My world narrowed to pain, cold and the effort of simply staying awake. Every time my eyes closed, I jerked them open again, knowing that drifting off might mean not waking up.
At some point I must have blacked out anyway, because the next thing I remember clearly is the sound.
The Footsteps
It was late afternoon when I heard it again—the same deep, layered vocalization I’d heard on the ridge that morning. This time it was closer. Much closer.
It ended in a sort of questioning tone that raised every instinct I had to a razor edge.
Then came the footsteps.
They were heavy, deliberate, slow, and they made the ground tremble faintly with each impact, as if something very large were negotiating the slope.
I fumbled for my knife, my fingers numb and clumsy, and managed to wrap my hand around the handle. My rifle was still somewhere above. The knife was all I had.
The figure that stepped out from between the trees twenty feet away was something my mind refused, at first, to accept.
It was enormous—easily seven and a half feet tall, maybe more—broad across the shoulders, its head nearly brushing low branches. Dark, reddish‑brown fur hung in wet clumps over corded muscle. It walked upright on two legs, like a man, but everything was wrong: the arms too long, hanging past where its knees should be, the shoulders impossibly broad, the head set low and forward on them with almost no neck.
It was a Bigfoot. A Sasquatch. A creature from stories told in logging camps and around campfires since before I was born.
My grandfather used to swear he’d seen one in the 1920s when he was logging near Mount Hood. My father told those stories with a half‑smile, somewhere between skepticism and belief. I’d always liked them, but I’d put them in the same mental shelf as ghost stories and UFOs.
Yet there it stood in front of me, as solid and real as the tree at my back.
The creature stopped and looked directly at me.
Its eyes were dark and deep‑set beneath a heavy brow ridge, and they were not animal eyes. I have looked into the eyes of bears, deer, cougars, coyotes. Those eyes hold wariness, hunger, fear. These held something else entirely.
There was awareness in them. Intelligence. Something that recognized me not as prey or threat, but as a being.
We stared at each other for a long moment. My heart hammered. I dared not move. Part of me thought I must be hallucinating—feverish from the cold and pain, my brain inventing impossible shapes.
Then the creature made a low, complex sound, almost like a hum, and stepped closer.
The Touch
Every instinct in my body screamed at me to fight or flee, but my leg made the second impossible, and I was under no illusion that my knife would do much good against something that size.
The Bigfoot stopped an arm’s length away and began to kneel. The mechanics were odd; its knees seemed to bend a little differently than ours, but it lowered itself down until its face was only a few feet from mine.
Up close, the details drove the last thoughts of “hallucination” from my mind.
The skin on its face, where it showed through the shorter fur, was dark gray, weathered like old leather, especially around the eyes and mouth. Its breath came in slow, controlled clouds in the cold air. The fur ranged from three to six inches long, thicker on the shoulders and arms, shorter around the face and hands.
And those hands—there was no other word for them—were enormous. Bigger than any catcher’s mitt, fingers as thick as broom handles, ending in blunt, dark nails. Yet when one reached out toward my leg, it did so with improbable gentleness.
Warmth radiated from its touch through my soaked pant leg. The fingers probed delicately around the crude splint I’d fashioned. When they pressed near the break, pain flared white‑hot and I couldn’t hold back a gasp.
The creature pulled its hand back immediately and made a soft sound low in its throat, something that in any other context I might have called concern.
It looked at me again, longer this time, and in its eyes I swear I saw something like…assessment. A decision being made.
Then it rose in one smooth motion and stepped away, disappearing into the trees and the mist as quietly as it had come.
For a moment I wondered if the whole thing had been a delirious dream. But the footprints in the mud—eighteen inches long, seven wide—were too sharp, too real.
I wasn’t alone in the forest anymore.
The Shelter
I don’t know how much time passed after the creature vanished. Minutes, maybe an hour. The rain let up. The shivering worsened. I forced myself to eat one of the candy bars, hands barely able to tear the wrapper.
The sky dimmed toward late afternoon.
That was when the footsteps returned.
The Bigfoot emerged from the trees carrying an armful of evergreen boughs—Douglas fir and cedar, freshly cut, still dripping.
It approached me without hesitation this time and began arranging the boughs around and over me, working with a sort of methodical care that reminded me of my father patching a roof. It layered them against the wind, building up a low wall at my back and sides and then angling more branches overhead, creating a crude lean‑to against the trunk I’d been propped against.
Within minutes, I was under a dense, fragrant shelter of green. The rain was broken, the wind deflected, and already I could feel a slight improvement in the cold biting at my bones.
The creature stepped back, made that humming sound again, and watched me. I could only whisper the word that came out of me without thinking.
“Thank you,” I said, voice raw.
It tilted its head slightly, as if listening, eyes flicking to my mouth and back. Then, slowly, it reached toward my vest, fingers hovering near the bulge of the thermos.
“You want this?” I asked, pulling it out and holding it up.
The Bigfoot took the metal container carefully, rolled it in its hands, and then began to unscrew the cap. It fumbled at first—the cap was small compared to its massive fingers—but it persisted, watching the threads and adjusting its grip with dogged focus until the cap finally turned free.
It sniffed the opening, made a small pleased sound, and handed the thermos back.
I took a sip of the now‑lukewarm coffee. It was bitter and thin but it was warm, and some of the cold inside me eased. The creature watched intently, as if making sure I drank.
When I was done, it took the thermos back, replaced the cap, and set it within my reach. Then it stepped away once more into the trees.
If you’d asked me before that day whether Bigfoot, if it existed, could understand that a human needed warmth and shelter and hot liquid to survive, I would have laughed.
But the evidence, dripping off the boughs over my head and steaming in the thermos at my side, was right there.
Fire in the Rain
Night comes early in November. By the time the gray light had faded completely, the temperature had dropped further. The shivers in my muscles turned to deep, uncontrollable shakes. My teeth chattered so hard my jaw ached.
My improvised shelter helped, but it wasn’t enough.
The Bigfoot came back shortly after full dark.
This time, it carried a bundle of dry moss and twigs, somehow gathered in a forest still wet from day‑long rain, along with a shallow wooden bowl that looked like it had been carved from a single piece of wood.
It knelt in the small open space at the mouth of my shelter and arranged the moss and twigs into a tight little pyramid. Then it gestured toward my vest pocket where the match container bulged.
I stared, comprehension dawning slow through the fog of hypothermia.
“You want a fire,” I whispered. “You know what fire is.”
My fingers fumbled the match case open. The first match skittered uselessly across the striker. The second caught, flaring yellow in the dark. The Bigfoot leaned in to watch, fascinated but not afraid.
I cupped the flame in my hands and touched it to the moss. It caught at once, dry as tinder despite the weather, and the little flame grew, licking at the twigs. The creature added slightly larger sticks it had brought, building the fire deliberately, feeding it just enough to grow without smothering it.
Soon a small but steady fire crackled at my feet, its heat seeping slowly into my soaked clothes and frozen skin. My eyes stung, and for a moment I thought it was smoke until I realized it was tears.
The Bigfoot picked up the wooden bowl, slipped into the night, and returned minutes later with it full of clear, cold water. It handed the bowl to me and watched as I drank.
We spent that first night in the forest together: a broken old man and a being out of legend, sharing warmth and silence under the dripping trees.
At some point, I fell asleep. When I woke in the thin gray before dawn, the fire had burned down to coals but still glowed faintly. The shelter had been reinforced with additional boughs while I slept.
And beside the fire, curled in a half‑seated, half‑crouched posture at the entrance, the Bigfoot was still there, keeping watch.
A Name in the Dark
The second day was clearer. The rain had stopped, leaving the forest washed clean and glittering under a pale November sun.
The creature left shortly after dawn and returned with food: camas bulbs, which I recognized from old field‑guide reading, some kind of edible fungi, pine nuts and—astonishingly—strips of dried salmon.
Where it had obtained dried fish in the middle of the mountains in November, I had no idea. I could think of only two possibilities, both remarkable in their own ways: it had either dried and stored them itself beforehand, or it had taken them from some human source.
Either way, the intent was unmistakable. It was feeding me.
I chewed the camas bulbs raw, their starchy, faintly sweet flesh filling my mouth. The pine nuts were oily and rich. The dried salmon was tough and salty and more delicious than any restaurant meal I’ve eaten since.
As I ate, the Bigfoot sat a few feet away, watching with clear satisfaction.
At one point, it reached out and touched the fabric of my bright orange coat, rubbing the wool between its fingers. The color must have intrigued it; nothing in nature looks quite like hunter orange.
“It’s so other hunters don’t shoot me,” I explained, not really expecting understanding. “To show I’m not a deer.”
The creature watched my mouth as I spoke, eyes moving between my lips and my eyes. Then it touched its own chest with one massive hand and made a sound.
It was a complex vocalization, starting low and rising, formed of multiple tones layered together. To my ears it sounded something like “Oom‑mah.”
I blinked.
“Is that your name?” I asked. “Oom‑mah?”
It repeated the sound and nodded—an unmistakably human gesture.
My brain scrambled to catch up with what my eyes and ears were reporting. Names imply self‑awareness, identity, a concept of “me” and “you” that goes beyond simple recognition.
I touched my own chest.
“Cecil,” I said. “My name is Cecil.”
The creature—Oom‑mah, as I came to think of it—watched me closely, then made another soft, pleased sound.
“Okay, Oom‑mah,” I said quietly. “Okay.”
The Home in the Rocks
By the second evening, I was warmer and less weak, but the situation was still serious. My leg throbbed constantly. The swelling had worsened. I could feel the heat of inflammation under the bark splint.
Without proper medical care, infection would follow. Infection in my condition, out here, would be a death sentence.
The forest helicopter came overhead just after midday, its rotor thump rising and falling as it worked a grid pattern along the roads and ridges. I grabbed the whistle on its cord around my neck, took a breath, and blew three short blasts.
The sound seemed tiny in the vastness of the forest.
The helicopter passed, not directly overhead, but close enough I could hear the voices on the loudspeaker—blurred, but human. Then it faded northward, the sound diminishing until only the wind in the branches remained.
Oom‑mah had vanished into the trees the moment the helicopter grew loud, reappearing only after it had gone, gaze fixed on the sky with an unmistakable mixture of curiosity and unease.
“That’s a helicopter,” I told him, pointing upward. “They’re looking for me.”
He looked at me then, and I saw something like calculation in his eyes. I felt a strange twist in my gut. The more he understood about what that helicopter meant, the more danger he was in if humans found us together.
Late that afternoon, after checking my leg again and spreading a pungent plant paste around the break that eased the pain in minutes, Oom‑mah did something that changed everything.
He slid his arms under me, one beneath my shoulders, one under my knees, and lifted.
At nearly 200 pounds, I am not an easy man to carry. To him, I weighed nothing. Yet strength wasn’t what stunned me; it was the care with which he moved. Every step was measured to avoid jarring my leg. He adjusted his grip whenever I winced.
We moved through the trees with a smooth, rolling gait, stepping over deadfalls, ducking under branches. I tried to keep track of direction and distance, but the pain and disorientation made it hopeless. I heard water at one point, a stream over rocks.
After maybe twenty minutes, he stopped and gave that low, echoing call I’d heard before.
We stepped into a small clearing tucked against a granite outcrop, and there I saw it: a structure.
Not a cave, not a random jumble of fallen branches, but a constructed shelter built against the rock face. Fallen logs made up a crude framework, the gaps between them filled with layered bark, branches and dried mud. The roof was thick with overlapping cedar boughs and bark shingles, angled to shed rain. A small, carefully placed hole in the roof above a central pit let smoke escape. The floor inside, as I saw when he ducked us through the low entrance, was covered with dried grass and ferns.
This was Oom‑mah’s home.
He laid me down gently on the grass, propping my leg up on a roll of bark. The interior was larger than it looked from outside—maybe twelve by eight feet, with just enough height for him to stand bent at the center.
My eyes scanned, taking in details. Woven bark packs hung along one wall, each bulging with something: dried fish in one, roots and nuts in another, bundles of plants and herbs tied together in neat sheaves. Flat rocks had been arranged as work surfaces. Smooth river stones sat beside them, clearly used for grinding. Sharper stones—flake‑edged and deliberate—lay in another pile, tools as surely as any knife.
Oom‑mah knelt by a shallow fire pit in the center. With practiced motions, he placed a flat board on the ground, set a straight stick into a notch, and rolled it rapidly back and forth between his palms. Smoke rose in seconds. He caught the ember in a nest of dry moss, carried it to the pit, and within minutes a modest fire was burning, sending smoke up through the hole.
I had stepped into the Stone Age and found it much smarter than we give it credit for.
As the warmth seeped into me, my shoulders loosened for the first time in days. Outside the shelter, the forest murmured and sighed. Inside, in the flickering firelight, a being that shouldn’t exist sat back on its haunches and watched me with something that looked very much like concern.
“Thank you,” I said again, the words inadequate.
Oom‑mah reached out and placed his hand over my heart, held it there a moment, then touched his own chest in the same spot.
Whatever that meant in his language, I understood it just fine.
Lessons in the Wilderness
Over the next two days, as I drifted between pain, exhaustion and awe, Oom‑mah began to teach me.
He showed me how he moved through the forest without leaving sign that a human tracker would recognize: traveling in streams, stepping from rock to rock, choosing stretches of ground thick with needles that wouldn’t hold prints. When he did have to leave marks, he sometimes scratched trees in patterns deliberate enough to mimic bear sign.
He showed me which plants to eat, handing me leaves and roots, watching closely as I sniffed, tasted, grimaced or nodded. Some were bitter but clearly medicinal. Others were surprisingly palatable. He mashed certain roots with water into a poultice and spread it around my swollen leg, wrapping it again with cedar bark and plant fiber cordage that put my rope work to shame.
We communicated mostly with gestures and tone. He would demonstrate; I would mimic. When he seemed satisfied, he’d make a contented hum that became his answer to my clumsy thumbs‑up.
The second night in the shelter, he took down a bundle from overhead and unwrapped it. Inside were small carvings made of softened, scraped wood and polished stone: crude but recognizable animals, trees, and shapes whose meaning I could only guess at.
He placed one in my hand: a deer, unmistakable in profile. It fit neatly in my palm. I ran my thumb along its rough lines.
“This is yours?” I asked. “You made this?”
He made a short, affirmative sound and nodded. Then he gestured for me to keep it.
It struck me then, with more force than anything else, that this was not an “animal” in any meaningful sense of the word. This was a person of another kind—one who made art, music (he produced a hollow piece of wood with holes and played a simple, mournful melody one afternoon), tools, medicine, shelter. Who planned ahead and stored supplies. Who felt fear, care, and what sure looked like affection.
“Do you have others?” I asked him once. “Others like you?”
He hesitated, then raised his hand, displaying all five fingers. Slowly, he folded down three, leaving two.
“Two of you?” I asked softly. “Just two?”
He nodded and looked away, something like sadness in his eyes.
I lay awake that night for a long time, listening to the fire crackle and his breathing as he sat by the entrance, thinking about what it meant to be one of only two of your kind in a world filled with humans.
Maybe that was why he’d helped me. Maybe he was as hungry for company as I was for survival.
The Choice
On the third day, the helicopter returned.
This time it was closer—so close the little shelter shook with the thump of its rotors. Voices called over a loudspeaker, faint through the roof: “CECIL WARD! THIS IS DESCHUTES COUNTY SEARCH AND RESCUE! IF YOU CAN HEAR US, SIGNAL!”
My heart lurched. Rescue was here.
At the shelter entrance, Oom‑mah stiffened, every line of his massive body tense. His eyes flicked to me, then to the wooden bundles hanging on the wall, then back to me.
He understood more than I’d have believed possible.
My hand found the whistle around my neck. I could blow it, call them in. They’d home in on the sound, find me here in this miraculous place. They’d see him. They’d know.
And the world would never be the same.
For me, a broken‑legged mechanic from Bend, that might have been a grand adventure. For Oom‑mah, it would be a death sentence.
Scientists. Game wardens. Reporters. Curious hikers. Hunters. The forest would not be his anymore. It would become a zoo without bars.
I met his eyes. In them I saw fear—not of the machine overhead, but of what my decision would mean.
Slowly, I let the whistle fall back against my chest.
The helicopter passed overhead, its search pattern sweeping on. No calls came closer. No branches crashed with human weight. After a few minutes, the sound faded.
Oom‑mah sagged, just slightly, and made a sound I didn’t need a translator for: relief.
“I won’t tell them,” I said quietly. “I promise. I’ll never tell anyone about you.”
He studied me for a long moment, then touched his chest and mine again in that now‑familiar gesture. I like to think he understood.
Two in the Doorway
That night, I woke to the sound of voices.
Not human voices. Two Bigfoot voices, layered and complex, calling and answering just beyond the shelter in the darkness.
Oom‑mah stood at the entrance, shoulders squared, gaze fixed into the trees. He turned once to look at me, then stepped out.
I grabbed one of his stone tools—a broad, flaked piece of rock he’d left near my bed—and waited, heart pounding, listening to the strange conversation outside. The tones rose and fell, overlapping sometimes, pausing, then starting again. It was language. I have no doubt of that.
After several minutes, the forest quieted. Heavy steps approached.
Oom‑mah ducked back into the shelter—and behind him, filling the doorway, was another Bigfoot.
She was slightly smaller, perhaps seven feet tall instead of seven and a half. Her fur was darker, almost black in the dim firelight. A woven band encircled one thick wrist like a bracelet. Her eyes, when they met mine, were just as intelligent as Oom‑mah’s, but softer somehow.
She knelt beside me with a grace that was almost dainty in a creature that size. Her gaze swept over my leg, the splint, the swelling. She made a sound that seemed to be a question. Oom‑mah answered, gesturing in the air as he mimed my fall, the break, his decision to bring me here.
The look she gave me held many things—curiosity, concern, and, I thought, a measure of skepticism. Then she reached out and, with incredible gentleness, touched my leg, fingers probing near the break but avoiding direct pressure.
She went to a bundle, mixed a new poultice with practiced motions, and spread it along the splint line. Within minutes, the throbbing eased again. Her touch was sure, experienced.
When she finished, she sat back and made a sound: “Kah.”
I repeated it. “Kah?”
She nodded.
“Kah,” I said again. “That’s your name.”
Oom‑mah and Kah settled together near the fire after that, occasionally trading soft vocalizations. At one point, Kah leaned her head against his shoulder and he wrapped his long arm around her.
I realized, watching them, that I had not been in the shelter of a lonely creature at all, but of a pair—a couple, a bonded pair, call it what you will. He had chosen to bring a dangerous, unpredictable human into the home he shared with the only other one of his kind he had.
That level of trust humbled me in ways I struggle to put into words.
The Last Morning
On the fourth morning, the human voices came.
“CECIL! CECIL WARD!”
They were faint at first, but growing closer. Kah and Oom‑mah stood at the entrance together, bodies tense, listening. They looked back at me with an expression I’ve seen on the faces of soldiers and paramedics: a quiet acceptance that things were about to change.
I knew the drill. Once ground teams got within shouting distance, it was only a matter of time before they swept the area. Staying hidden when men comb a forest in lines is much harder than staying hidden the rest of the year.
I also knew my luck wouldn’t hold forever. The poultices and bark splints had bought me time, but my leg still needed a surgeon, not folk medicine, no matter how effective it seemed.
Oom‑mah moved quickly.
Kah unwrapped my leg, applied fresh bark and fiber with swift, sure hands, and then did something unexpected: she slipped off the little carved pine tree figure from her woven wristband and pressed it into my palm.
A gift. A remembrance.
“Thank you,” I whispered, closing my fingers over it. “For everything.”
The searchers’ shouts were closer now. One voice—Jim Henderson, my neighbor—carried through the trees clearly: “Ceil! Can you hear us?”
Oom‑mah lifted me in his arms one last time. Kah grabbed bundles, quickly stripping the shelter of anything that showed deliberate construction. They moved with astonishing speed, breaking down the visible signs of habitation.
They carried me two hundred yards from the shelter and laid me gently on a bed of pine needles in a small opening not far off a likely search route. From where I lay, I could see the break in the trees where the voices would emerge.
Kah knelt, touched my cheek with one finger. Her eyes held sadness, yes, but also something like gratitude. Whatever this strange, impossible encounter had meant to me, it had meant something to them, too.
Oom‑mah placed his hand over my heart again, then over his own.
“Go,” I said, voice rough. “They’re close. You have to go.”
He made a soft sound—one I will hear until my last breath—and turned away. Together, he and Kah vanished into the trees.
Within seconds, they were gone. No crashing, no obvious movement. Just forest.
The voices grew louder.
“Over here!” someone shouted. “I hear something!”
I forced air into my lungs and blew the whistle three sharp times. Then I yelled, the sound ragged but loud enough.
“Here! I’m here!”
Branches parted. Jim’s face appeared, pale and wide‑eyed. Behind him came two other men from the search team, one already speaking into a radio.
“Jesus, Cecil,” Jim said, kneeling beside me. “We’ve been looking for you for days. How the hell did you survive?”
I lied.
The Story I Told
They strapped me to a stretcher, carried me to a clearing where the helicopter could land. At St. Charles Medical Center in Bend, they cut away the bark and cloth from my leg, stared at the strange paste on my skin, then scrubbed it away and set the bone with pins.
“You’re lucky,” the surgeon told me later. “Another day or two and infection might have set in. Whoever splinted this did a decent job for the field, but you need the hardware.”
“Just did what I could with what I had,” I told him.
Margaret cried when she first saw me, then scolded me, then held my hand and refused to let go. Our kids, Sarah and Tom, drove in from Portland and Eugene. They called me lucky. The sheriff called me resilient. A reporter from the Bend Bulletin called me a miracle.
I told them all the same story: I slipped in the rain, broke my leg, managed to splint it with branches and rope, dragged myself under some fallen boughs for shelter, made a fire with the matches in my vest, found water in a nearby creek. I rationed my food. I suffered through the cold. I got lucky.
They believed me. Why wouldn’t they? It was a good story. It was even mostly true, except for the parts that mattered most.
When they asked about the bark and plant residue on my leg, I shrugged.
“I tried some stuff I remembered from a survival book,” I said. “Didn’t do much, I’m sure.”
No one questioned it. No one asked about the careful structure of the splint, the way the bark had been shaped and tied. They chalked it up to a desperate man doing his best in the wild.
Late one night, when Margaret was asleep in the chair and the hospital had finally gone quiet, I slid my hand under the pillow and touched the two small carvings hidden there: the deer and the pine tree.
They were my proof. My reminder. And they were mine alone.
What I Learned
I healed. The pins came out months later. I walked with a limp for a while, then not at all. The sheriff invited me to talk to the search‑and‑rescue volunteers about survival skills. I taught them how to build a lean‑to, how to make fire in the rain, how to stay put when lost.
I did not teach them how to accept water from a Bigfoot or how to listen to the language of creatures we pretend aren’t there.
The next fall, I went hunting again, because that’s what I’d always done. But when a buck stepped into my scope at seventy yards, broadside, perfect shot, I lowered the rifle.
I watched him walk away into the trees, muscles rolling under his coat, tail flicking once. For the first time in my life, the forest felt less like a place where I was entitled to take and more like a place where I was a guest.
I never hunted again after that season. Margaret said she’d “always known” I would hang up the rifle one day. She thought it was age, wisdom, maybe the scare from the broken leg.
The truth was simpler: after being saved and sheltered by a being everyone else insists is a myth, it felt wrong to stalk anything in those woods with a gun.
Years passed. In 1989, a flurry of Bigfoot sightings made the local paper. Hikers reported hearing strange vocalizations. A trucker swore he’d seen a huge, hairy figure cross a logging road at dawn. The stories were met with the usual mixture of ridicule and fascination.
Expeditions went out with plaster and cameras and tape recorders. They came back with blurry photos, dubious footprints and no definitive proof. People shook their heads and went back to their lives.
I read every article.
Sometimes, on clear evenings, I’d stand on my porch in Bend and look toward the mountains. I’d think of Oom‑mah and Kah in their shelter against the granite, tending their fire, weaving bark, caring for each other in the deep, hidden places beyond the reach of people like me.
I have never gone back to find that spot. Even if I could, I wouldn’t. My debt to them is not curiosity. It is silence.
Why I’m Telling You This
By the time you read this, I’ll likely be old enough that my stories are taken as just that: stories. Maybe I’ll be gone. Maybe I’ll still be sitting on that porch, watching the line of the mountains in the evening light.
I promised Oom‑mah and Kah that I wouldn’t tell the searchers, the sheriff, or the reporters. I have kept that promise. I will keep it while it matters.
But I also believe that some truths, once the danger has passed, deserve to be spoken—not to prove anything, but to remind us of humility.
Those three days in the forest taught me more than forty years of hunting and working on engines ever did.
They taught me:
That the world is bigger and stranger and more wonderful than we allow ourselves to believe.
That intelligence, compassion and culture are not uniquely human.
That sometimes the greatest act of love is keeping a secret, even when you want to shout it from the rooftops.
Somewhere, in the deep timber of the Deschutes, I believe two beings are still living their lives—quietly, carefully, brilliantly—just beyond the edge of our notice.
I am honored to have met them.
And if the price of that honor is that no one ever truly believes this story, that’s a price I am more than willing to pay.
Because that day, when I lay dying in the forest and a Bigfoot appeared, what happened next didn’t just shock me.
It saved me.
And it changed me forever.
