Moonshiner’s Farm is Harassed by a Bigfoot Tribe
Moonshine & Midnight Shadows
Folks in Baxter County always said the mountains were alive. Not just with bears or coyotes — but with watchers. Things older than log cabins and moonshine stills. I never paid those stories much mind. But that was before I became the story they whisper about.
My name’s Tom Garrison, last of the old-school moonshiners on Raven Ridge. Didn’t choose this life — just kind of backed into it after everything else in my world went wrong. My wife left first. Then work dried up. Kids stopped calling. All I had left was Rusty — half hound, half who-knows-what — and a still hidden deep in the pines.
The law stays out of these woods unless they’re lost or stupid. My business depends on it.
So, when hell came knocking, I couldn’t exactly dial 911.
It started with whistling.
Not birds. Not wind. This was… language. Three tones rising, one tone falling — repeated again and again from the ridge above my cabin. Rusty froze, ears stiff, head low. He whined like something was wrong with the world itself.
Night after night, the whistles got closer.
Then came the footsteps. Big ones. Heavy. Upright. Two-legged. The sound of a giant pacing the tree line just out of sight. I’d stand outside with my shotgun and flashlight, knowing damn well I wasn’t alone — but whatever it was always stayed just beyond the beam.
I told myself it was just a black bear. Maybe a curious hiker. A drunk hunter.
Until the handprints.
Huge, muddy smears on my smokehouse door — each finger the width of a sausage link. Thumb too low on the palm, like something that had evolved wrong. Even looking at them felt like breaking a rule.
Rusty wouldn’t go near the porch. Wouldn’t even pee outside anymore.
That was Week One.
On the eighth night, rocks rained onto my tin roof. Big enough to dent metal. The kind you’d struggle to throw across a yard — yet they came sailing from the trees with violent speed.
Boom.
Pause.
Boom.
Pause just long enough to spike my heart rate again.
Rusty barked until his voice got hoarse. I sat up clutching the shotgun, listening to my home being used for target practice. The next morning, I counted fifty-two rocks scattered around my yard.
Something was testing my patience… or my nerves.
Maybe both.
Week Two got worse.
They started scratching the cabin walls, dragging claws from corner to corner. They left antlers, clean-broken and arranged in neat little piles by my door. They stole shirts off my clothesline and shredded them high in the branches — too high for any man to reach without a ladder.
Every instinct I had screamed the same truth:
They wanted me gone.
And they wanted me scared when I left.
The final night… that’s when I saw them.
The moon was bright enough to read a newspaper by when the pounding started — fists, rocks, logs — shaking the cabin down to its foundation. The front window shattered. Rusty yelped and dove into the bathtub. I wasn’t far behind.
They circled my home in a ring of shadows too big to be real, hooting and growling in a language of hate. Then one stepped into the open — huge, thick with muscle, head brushing the roofline. Hair black like river mud. Eyes reflecting yellow.
Its chest heaved with each breath — slow, controlled, aware.
He— the leader — stared right at me through the broken window.
Not an animal look. Not confusion.
Intention.
I raised the shotgun and fired. The blast lit the room white, loud enough to make my ears ring. The shape stumbled, roared in pain, and vanished back into the dark — crashing through saplings like they were nothing.
For a heartbeat I believed I’d scared them off.
Then the others screamed — dozens of voices — shattered-glass howls that made my blood go cold. That cabin suddenly felt like a coffin someone else was nailing shut around me.
The night stretched forever.
I prayed.
Not to win.
Just to see sunrise.
At first light, silence.
Rusty and I stepped outside, and the air stank of musk and wet fur. More trees were twisted apart, entire trunks snapped like pretzels. The blood trail from the one I winged disappeared after a hundred yards — either it healed fast… or the others carried him.
But what chilled me most was what they left on my porch:
My copper moonshine coil — torn from the still, bent into a perfect circle, placed like a wreath. A warning made from the one thing I cared about.
They hadn’t come to kill me.
They’d come to evict me.
A sheriff would’ve found the still and locked me up before lunch. Rangers would’ve blamed bears and told me to quit drinking.
So I packed what I could. Rusty sat in the passenger seat with his tail between his legs. I looked at the cabin for maybe the last time — a lifetime of mistakes built from heartbreak and stubbornness.
I cranked the engine.
And the mountains exhaled in relief.
Three months later, I rented a tiny place down in Cedar Hollow. Got a job sweeping floors at a hardware store. Rusty sleeps through the night again.
Some evenings I sit on the back steps with a beer, staring toward the dark line of the ridge. Sometimes, when the breeze is just right…
I hear whistling.
Three notes up.
One down.
Like they’re checking to see if I’m dumb enough to come home.
I won’t.
But the mountains remember me.
The watchers too.
And they don’t like trespassers.
