Drone Films GIANT SASQUATCH Carrying a Deer Body 
THE THING THAT WATCHES THE SKY
I bought the drone because the silence at home had become unbearable.
After Mom died last winter, the house felt like a museum of unfinished sentences. Her coffee mug still sat by the sink, her jacket still hung by the door, and every night I’d catch myself listening for footsteps that would never come again. So I threw myself into aerial photography—a new hobby, a distraction, an excuse to disappear into the Oregon wilderness where nobody expected anything from me except a video upload and maybe a sunset shot.
But the Cascades gave me something else instead.
Something alive. Something ancient. Something that hated the sky.
I hiked three miles into the national forest before the trees swallowed the sound of the highway. The morning was crisp and blue, the kind of air that feels clean enough to drink. I set up on a moss-covered ridge, the kind that makes you feel like you’re standing on the back of some sleeping giant.
The drone rose smooth and steady, its rotors whispering as it climbed above the treetops. Through my tablet screen, the forest unfolded like a living quilt—rivers threading between pines, fog pooling in low valleys like ghost breath. For the first hour, it was perfect. Peaceful. Still.
But peace is easy to break.
Around noon, I caught movement on the edge of the frame—something big, dark, and moving with a strange rhythm. For a moment I thought it was a bear, but the proportions were wrong. Too tall. Too narrow. And its shadow stretched long across the clearing, humanoid but enormous. It moved with purpose, not the lumbering awkwardness of a grazing animal.
I tried to steer the drone away, but curiosity tugged my hands back to the controls.
It stood in the open for only a second, but it was enough.
A towering figure, black-furred, shoulders wide as tree trunks, and a face I couldn’t fully see—only the pale suggestion of skin around deep-set eyes that glinted like metal. It carried something in one hand, something limp and heavy.
Not a deer. Not an elk.
Something with clothing.
I froze, my breath locked inside my chest.
The creature lifted its head—fast, like it had heard my heartbeat—and stared directly into the drone’s camera. The feed flickered with static, then sharpened again. Its eyes were impossible. Not animal eyes, not by any stretch. They burned with the sharp, penetrating intelligence of something that measured threats, calculated patterns… and recognized machines.
A moment later, the creature lowered the body it carried and raised its hand toward the sky.
Not in fear. Not in curiosity.
In warning.
I jerked the drone higher, but the creature exploded into motion—so fast the world blurred behind it. It sprinted into the trees, weaving between trunks with impossible agility, moving in long, rolling strides that devoured distance like a storm front.
I turned the drone toward me, accelerating to maximum speed.
Thirty miles per hour.
Not fast enough.
Through the camera, I saw flashes of the creature pacing beneath, tracking the drone without hesitation. It wasn’t following sound. It wasn’t following sight.
It was following the path I had taken to get here.
I dropped the controller in shock. My mind sputtered between disbelief and terror, flicking through possibilities like a dying light bulb. What had I stumbled across? A killer? A hidden species? A thing with rules humans had forgotten?
I grabbed my pack and ran, lungs burning immediately from the cold air.
Branches whipped my face. My boots slid on wet leaves. Every instinct screamed at me to find somewhere small—somewhere too tight for that monster to follow—but the forest was wide open, a cathedral built for giants.
Behind me, a tree snapped.
Then another.
Heavy footsteps thudded against the forest floor like slow, deliberate thunder.
It wasn’t chasing to kill me.
It was chasing to drive me.
I reached an old fire lookout tower by pure accident, nearly collapsing when its silhouette emerged between the pines. The wooden structure looked ready to crumble under its own history, but it had a ladder. Four stories up. A single hatch.
Something I could defend.
I scrambled up, slipping once but catching myself on a rusted rung. My breath came in panicked bursts as I pulled myself onto the top platform.
The forest below was still.
Too still.
Wind died. Birds vanished. The world held its breath.
Then the creature stepped into the clearing.
Up close, it was even larger than I’d realized—easily nine feet tall, with arms that hung low and powerful. Its fur shifted in the low light, dark but streaked with mud and bits of forest debris. The thing’s chest rose and fell with slow, controlled breaths.
And it looked up at me.
Not like a predator.
Like a warden.
Then it spoke.
Not a word. Not anything human. But a sound—low, resonant, rippling through my bones with the weight of meaning older than language.
Leave.
That’s what I felt in the hollow of my chest.
Not a threat.
A command.
An order given to an intruder who had broken a rule they didn’t understand.
It reached down and lifted the body again—now clearly a person, a hiker from the look of the torn backpack straps. The creature held the corpse gently, almost reverently, as though it were carrying a responsibility rather than prey.
I expected it to roar again.
Instead, it stepped backward into the shadows and vanished without a sound.
I stayed in the tower until sunrise, too terrified to climb down, replaying the creature’s stare over and over in my head. When I finally descended, my legs trembled so badly I had to crawl the last few feet.
The drone was destroyed, but the memory card had survived, wedged in a crack in the controller housing. I pocketed it and ran to my truck, engine sputtering awake like an old friend startled from sleep.
I drove until I hit town. Then I kept driving.
That was three weeks ago.
I haven’t shown the footage to anyone.
Not because I’m scared of not being believed—people don’t scare me anymore.
The forest does.
The thing in it.
The rules it enforces.
The graves it guards.
Sometimes I swear I can smell that musky, earthy scent outside my window at night.
Sometimes I dream of those impossible eyes staring up—
not at the drone this time.
At me.
Watching.
Waiting.
Making sure the sky stays empty.
