Army Patrol Spots Sasquatch in North Dakota, Then the Worst Happens 
COLD WATCH
I used to think the cold was the worst thing North Dakota could throw at you.
I was wrong.
Winter warfare training was supposed to be tedious—long nights, frozen boots, numb fingers. Nobody warned us about the silence. The silence was the worst part. It seeped into you, pressed against your eardrums until you swore you could hear your own heartbeat. The kind of cold, empty quiet where every fear you’ve ever buried decides to crawl out and sit beside you.
Our patrol that night was routine. Me and Carter—two boots assigned the least desirable shift because that’s military justice for you. Midnight to 0800, eight miles of perimeter road, snow thick enough to erase your footsteps as soon as you make them.
We weren’t equipped for anything exciting: sidearms, radios, flashlights, and more layers of clothing than any human should logically need. The wind stung like needles, pushing sideways across the road so hard it erased the horizon.
“Bet they don’t mention this in the recruiting commercials,” Carter muttered through his balaclava.
“Yeah,” I said, my face numb. “Guess they stopped telling the truth after the ‘free college’ part.”
We trudged on. The base was a dark smudge of lights behind us, swallowed by drifting white. Ahead was nothing but shadowed trees and darkness thick enough to chew.
Around mile two, we saw the first strange thing.
A track—massive, deep, toe-shaped. Not a bootprint, not any animal I knew. And not old either. Snow hadn’t filled it in.
Carter crouched beside it, brushed the powdery surface.
“Bear?” he asked, though he didn’t sound convinced.
“No bear walks on two legs,” I said.
He gave me a look through the goggles. A look that said: Don’t start.
We kept walking.
Then came the second strange thing—broken branches eight or nine feet up the pines. Snapped clean, like something tall had barreled through without caring who heard it. The third strange thing was the smell. Not rot. Not normal musk. Something… primal. Like an animal that belonged to a different era.
Carter stopped walking. “Hey… do you hear that?”
At first I thought it was the wind. But wind doesn’t walk.
Footsteps. Slow. Heavy. Pacing us in the tree line.
We swung our lights toward the noise. Nothing but trunks and blackness. But the sound didn’t stop.
Crunch.
Crunch.
Crunch.
“Probably a moose,” Carter whispered.
“Moose don’t follow patrol routes,” I said.
We radioed in. The sergeant on duty sounded irritated—he thought we were exaggerating wildlife. Told us to continue and stop wasting airtime.
So we kept moving. What else could we do?
The footsteps followed.
The perimeter road narrowed near the northwest corner, trees leaning in overhead like a frozen tunnel. Snow muffled every sound except our boots and that steady, heavy presence keeping pace in the woods.
Then everything stopped at once.
The wind.
Our footsteps.
Even the unseen creature.
The world went dead still.
“What the hell…” Carter breathed.
A shape stepped onto the road ahead of us, not twenty yards away.
At first, in the swirling snow, it looked like a deformed shadow. Then it moved—and I realized how wrong I was. This wasn’t a shadow. It wasn’t a bear. It wasn’t anything I had a name for.
Eight feet tall. Maybe more. Covered in dark fur, thick enough to shrug off the cold. It walked upright, shoulders as broad as a doorway, arms too long to be human.
But the eyes—oh God, the eyes. They reflected our flashlights with a flat, predatory shine. Intelligent. Focused. Assessing.
I felt something inside my brain stutter. Like my instincts couldn’t decide whether to run or kneel.
Carter whispered, “This… this isn’t possible.”
The creature took one slow step forward. Snow crunched under its weight.
Then, from the woods behind us, another crunch.
Then another.
There weren’t just one.
There were several.
We backed up instinctively, weapons drawn but uselessly shaking in our hands. You don’t train for monsters. You train for humans. For things that bleed predictably.
These things didn’t feel predictable.
“Back to base,” I said. “Now.”
But the creature in front of us moved first.
It let out a noise that didn’t belong in this world—a roar that vibrated the air, the ground, my bones. A sound that felt like rage and warning and ownership.
Then it charged.
We fired. Reflex. Training. Panic.
Muzzle flashes lit the storm in strobing bursts—snow, trees, teeth, eyes. The bullets did nothing. Maybe they hit. Maybe they didn’t. The thing didn’t slow.
Carter shoved me sideways as it closed in, and the creature barreled past us, brushing so close I felt its fur slap my arm. It wasn’t attacking.
It was herding.
Driving us toward something.
We ran.
Branches whipped past us as we sprinted down the road, lungs burning, legs shaking. Behind us—footsteps. Not one pair. Several. Running. Fast.
Carter fell once. I hauled him up. Neither of us spoke. Speech felt pointless, too small compared to whatever was happening.
Half a mile later, the road bent—and there, directly across the curve, stood another creature.
This one didn’t charge. It simply stood there, watching us with those yellow eyes, breathing clouds of steam. A sentinel. Blocking the path to base. Blocking escape.
Behind us, the others slowed. We were surrounded.
My hands shook so violently I dropped my flashlight. The beam rolled sideways across the snow, illuminating a footprint—so deep and wide it might as well have been a grave.
“It’s over,” Carter whispered, voice barely audible.
Then… something unexpected happened.
The sentinel creature lifted its head and made a short, sharp vocalization—almost like a bark.
A command.
The others froze.
Then, slowly, they retreated into the trees. One by one. Shadows slipping back into deeper shadow. Until the sentinel was the only one left.
It stared at us for a long moment. Snow swirled between us. My breath trembled in the air.
Then it did something I still don’t understand.
It turned away.
Walked into the forest.
And vanished.
We waited five minutes before we started moving. We didn’t run. We couldn’t. Our legs wouldn’t work that fast. We walked back to base in silence, the storm swallowing our footprints.
We reported everything. They dismissed everything.
Wildlife. Nerves. Exaggeration.
The incident never made it into official records.
But I know what we saw.
We weren’t attacked.
We weren’t hunted.
We were warned.
That forest wasn’t our territory.
It never had been.
And something in those trees wanted us to remember that.
Every day since, I have.
