She Was Climbing a Muddy Hill in the Storm… with Something Small by Her Side

The rain didn’t fall so much as attack.

It came in sheets—horizontal, slamming into the hillside as though the sky itself wanted to peel the forest from the mountain and drag it down into the valley. The wind roared through the trees, snatching leaves and branches, bending trunks that had stood for a hundred years. Thunder grumbled somewhere behind the clouds, a low, constant growl rolling over the ridgeline.

Amelia Carter dug her boots into the mud and pulled herself up the hill one handful of wet roots at a time.

Her breath came in quick, white puffs, instantly stolen by the wind. Her hair, plastered to her forehead, dripped rain into her eyes. The headlamp strapped around her beanie cast a weak yellow cone into the storm, barely illuminating the next few feet of slick, treacherous ground.

She wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her rain jacket and glanced downward.

“Keep going, Daisy,” she shouted over the wind. “We’re almost there!”

Beside her, struggling but stubborn, a small shape moved up the hill—her dog, Daisy. She was a mix of something small and fast—maybe terrier, maybe beagle, no one was sure—but in that moment, she was just pure determination. Her paws slipped and slid, splattering mud up Amelia’s shins, but she never stopped, never hesitated.

Lightning cracked overhead, turning the world white for a fraction of a second.

Amelia paused, gripping a root, and counted under her breath.

“One… two… three… four…”

Thunder answered. Four miles away, give or take, she guessed. The storm was close enough to be dangerous, far enough that she had a thin margin of time.

Of all the nights to be out here, she thought.

Then again, she hadn’t planned on a storm.

Or on any of this.

 

 

The Call

Six hours earlier, Amelia had been sitting in her small apartment, headphones on, editing audio for her podcast, Bigfoot Society. A half-finished mug of coffee had gone cold beside her laptop. The waveform of a recent interview flickered across her screen, a squiggle of lines and peaks that had long since become her second language.

“—I know what I saw,” the man in the recording insisted. “There were two of them. One big one… and a smaller one. Like a child.”

Amelia had paused the audio, frowning.

Two of them. A smaller one.

She’d heard hundreds of Bigfoot stories—sightings, screams in the night, footprints in the mud, shadows between the trees—but pairs were rare. Family groups? Even rarer.

She’d clicked back a few seconds and played it again.

“—I know what I saw…”

Her phone buzzed on the desk.

Unknown number.

She stared at the screen for a beat, debating letting it go to voicemail. But something—a tiny twinge in her gut, that same feeling that had made her start the podcast three years ago—made her swipe to answer.

“Hello, this is Amelia.”

A woman’s voice, shaky but urgent, came through the line.

“Is this… um… the Bigfoot podcast? Bigfoot Society?”

Amelia straightened in her chair. “Yes, it is. Who’s this?”

The woman hesitated. “My name’s Jenna. I got your number from your website. I… I think I’ve got something you need to hear.”

“Okay,” Amelia said. She softened her voice, used to how people sounded when they were about to say something they were afraid to be judged for. “Take your time.”

“I’m in Washington,” Jenna continued. “Near Mount Greyson. There’s a storm moving in, but that’s not why I called. I’m… I’m not crazy, okay? I heard your episode with the guy from Oregon, the one who saw the two creatures near the logging road.”

“The multi-sighting episode,” Amelia said. Her heart ticked faster. “Yeah, that one. You had a similar experience?”

Silence on the line. Then, in a whisper:

“I saw them too. A big one. And a small one. Not once… but three times. I’ve been seeing them for the past week.”

Amelia muted her mic instinctively as her own radio producer brain kicked in. This was it. The golden grail of cryptid podcasting: a cluster of sightings, same area, same witnesses, close in time.

“When was the last time you saw them?” Amelia asked.

“Last night.” Jenna’s voice trembled. “And I think they’re still nearby.”

The Decision

By the time the call ended, the sky above Amelia’s city was heavy and gray. Rain smeared down the windowpane. She sat motionless, Jenna’s words echoing in her mind.

“I saw her,” Jenna had said. “Not just him—her. The smaller one. Like a child. Covered in hair, but… her eyes. They were terrified. Like she was lost.”

Amelia had listened, asked questions, recorded the call with Jenna’s permission. Locations. Times. Distances. Sounds. Smells. Every detail was consistent with other accounts she’d studied—rock throws, tree knocks, a foul, musky odor, sudden silence among animals.

But there was something else too, a thread of emotion that ran under Jenna’s words: fear, yes. But also… concern.

“She was struggling to climb the hill,” Jenna had said. “The little one. The mud was so thick, and the storm was starting. He kept looking back at her, like he was trying to help. Like…”

“Like a parent?” Amelia had suggested.

“Like a parent,” Jenna repeated. “I think they’re trying to move higher before the creek floods.”

Amelia had looked at her calendar. She’d had plans: edit, schedule two episodes, answer a dozen emails, script an upcoming live show. Normal, safe things.

Instead, she found herself opening a flight app, checking last-minute tickets to Washington.

It was insane.

She did it anyway.

Into the Storm

Now, hours after that call, Amelia was on that same muddy hill, in that same forest, in the teeth of a storm that the weather app had said would “likely stay north.”

“Likely,” she muttered as another gust of wind nearly knocked her sideways.

Daisy barked once, sharply, as if to scold the wind itself.

“You and me both, girl,” Amelia said.

Her backpack dug into her shoulders with each step, laden with gear: a digital recorder, two spare batteries, a compact shotgun mic, night-vision camera, thermal monocular, and a small collapsible tripod. There was also a first aid kit, a foil emergency blanket, water, and a bright orange signal whistle.

She loved the hunt for stories, loved the adrenaline of chasing leads— but she wasn’t foolish. The forest, especially in a storm, didn’t care about podcast ratings.

At the top of the hill was a narrow plateau that overlooked a ravine and the swollen creek below. According to Jenna, that was the area where she’d last seen them.

It was also where she’d heard something else.

“Like crying,” Jenna had whispered over the phone. “High-pitched. Not quite human, not quite animal. It went right through me.”

Amelia’s boots slid, one nearly disappearing in a patch of black, sucking mud. She gritted her teeth and hauled herself up the last few feet, grabbing hold of Daisy’s harness to help steady them both.

They crested the hill.

The wind hit them hard, unobstructed, tearing at their clothes and howling through the trees. Lightning flickered, illuminating a dark, rolling landscape of firs, moss, and rock.

For a moment, there was nothing but storm.

Then the forest went quiet.

Too quiet.

No frogs. No birds. No rustle of small creatures in the underbrush. Just the wind, and the distant roar of the swollen creek below.

Daisy’s body stiffened against Amelia’s leg. A low growl vibrated in her chest.

Amelia’s pulse hammered. She slid the backpack off her shoulders and knelt behind a half-fallen log, using it as partial cover. Her fingers, slick with rain, fumbled with the zipper.

She pulled out the digital recorder and turned it on, clipping it to the strap of her raincoat. The tiny red light glowed, steady and calm, in stark contrast to her racing heart.

“Okay,” she murmured into the mic, half out of habit, half to ground herself. “This is Amelia Carter, field recording for Bigfoot Society. It is currently 10:24 p.m. I’m in the Mount Greyson region, on a ridge above a ravine. Thunderstorm in full effect. I’m here following multiple sighting reports by a witness named Jenna.”

Lightning flashed again, far enough away that the thunder was delayed.

Daisy whimpered, pressing closer to her.

“It’s okay,” Amelia whispered, rubbing the dog’s ear. “I’ve got you.”

She stood slowly, scanning the tree line, the ravine, the slope beyond. The beam from her headlamp cut through the rain in a hazy cone, catching on raindrops, branches, and nothing else.

Then she heard it.

A sound that didn’t belong to the storm.

The Cry

At first, she thought it might be the wind—some strange note it had found among the branches. A high, thin sound, rising and falling.

Then it came again, clearer. A keening, pitiful cry that set every hair on Amelia’s arms on end.

“Daisy, stay,” she murmured, one hand on the dog’s back.

The small shape beside her trembled but obeyed, trained from countless hikes and late-night field excursions.

Amelia reached into her bag and pulled out the thermal monocular. She raised it to her eye and scanned the ravine.

Black. Gray. The cold, wet world rendered as a smear of shapes.

Then—there.

A blob of heat among the trees, about thirty yards downhill. Small. Moving slowly.

Her breath caught.

Beside it, for a heartbeat, a larger shape flickered in the viewfinder—massive, upright, then gone behind a tangle of trunks.

“Jesus,” she whispered.

Her mind tried to rationalize. A bear? A person? A deer with a weird gait?

The smaller form stumbled and fell, vanishing behind a fallen log. The high-pitched cry came again, sharper this time, full of distress.

Instinct overrode caution.

Amelia lowered the monocular, clipped it to her vest, and started down the slope.

“Daisy, heel!”

The dog bounded after her, staying close, sliding when she slid, jumping when she jumped.

The hill was steeper on this side. Mud sucked at her boots, tried to swallow them with every step. She grabbed at anything solid—roots, rocks, branches—to keep herself from plunging uncontrollably into the ravine.

The crying sound grew louder.

Closer.

She stumbled around a dense cluster of ferns and nearly lost her footing as her boot skidded off a slick rock. She went down on one knee, palm slapping into mud. Daisy barked, two sharp barks that sounded like a warning and a protest all at once.

“Yeah, I know,” Amelia gasped. “Terrible idea. We’re already in it.”

She pushed forward.

Lightning flashed again, closer this time. Thunder chased it almost immediately, the explosion rattling in her chest.

She rounded a moss-covered stump and stopped dead.

There, half-collapsed at the base of a fallen tree, was something small and wrong and impossibly right all at once.

The Small One

The creature was curled in on itself, one long arm wrapped around its knees, the other splayed awkwardly in the mud. Its body was covered in shaggy, dark hair, soaked and plastered in clumps against the lean frame beneath. Mud streaked its limbs, its chest, its face.

Its face.

Even in the flickering lightning and stuttering beam of her headlamp, Amelia saw the unmistakable features: the heavy brow ridge, the short, wide nose, the deep-set eyes that were squeezed shut in pain.

It wasn’t human.

It wasn’t any animal she’d ever seen.

And it was small—maybe three and a half feet tall, four at most. A juvenile.

Daisy growled, low and uncertain.

The creature’s eyes snapped open, twin pools of dark, reflective brown. They locked on Daisy first, then flicked to Amelia.

For a heartbeat, everything froze. Rain hammered the leaves, thunder rolled overhead, but in that small circle of light, time stopped.

Fear poured off the little creature in waves. It pressed back against the fallen tree, baring small, flat teeth in something between a grimace and a snarl.

Amelia’s entire body screamed at her to back away slowly, to put distance between herself and this terrified, unknown being.

Instead, she did the one thing she never would have predicted.

She knelt.

She lowered herself carefully into the mud, making herself smaller, less threatening. Her hands were open and empty, palms facing outward.

“It’s okay,” she said, voice trembling but gentle. “It’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you.”

The creature flinched at the sound of her voice. Its chest heaved. A soft, keening whimper escaped its throat, rising in pitch.

Another sound followed, from somewhere deeper in the trees—a low, chest-rattling rumble.

Not thunder.

A warning.

Daisy’s ears shot up. She turned, staring into the darkness behind them, and gave a single, sharp bark.

Amelia’s mouth went dry.

The larger one. The parent.

Of course.

She knew, with a clarity that went bone deep, that she was now in the center of something fragile and dangerous: a wild animal’s fear for its injured young.

She didn’t stand.

She didn’t run.

She stayed kneeling in the mud, hands open, every instinct screaming but knowing that a sudden movement could be the trigger for disaster.

Lightning slashed across the sky, turning the forest into a black-and-white photograph for a split second.

In that flash, she saw him.

The Guardian

He stood partially behind a trunk, massive hand braced against the bark. His body was hunched, coiled with tension, as if ready to lunge.

He was enormous.

Amelia had heard estimates from witnesses. Seven feet. Eight feet. Some exaggerated to nine or ten, she’d always assumed. But there, in the rain-lashed forest, she understood why they reached for numbers that sounded unbelievable.

He was at least eight feet tall, his shoulders as broad as a doorway. His hair was darker than the juvenile’s—nearly black—and hung in heavy, wet tangles from his arms and torso. Muscles shifted beneath his fur as he breathed, every line of his body poised between fear and fury.

His eyes glowed faintly in the reflection of her headlamp, catching the light and turning it into something that looked almost like embers.

He was looking at her.

Then at the small one.

Then at Daisy.

He made a sound—short, sharp, almost like a bark.

The juvenile responded with a plaintive chirp, reaching one arm toward him but unable to rise.

Amelia’s gaze flicked down to the small creature’s legs.

One was twisted unnaturally.

In that instant, the entire scene rearranged itself in her mind. The storm. The hill. The muddy slope.

They’d been moving up, like Jenna had said, trying to gain higher ground before the creek flooded. The juvenile had slipped. Fallen. Twisted or broken something.

And now here they all were: a human, a dog, a young Bigfoot, and its enormous, frightened parent, encircled by the storm.

Amelia swallowed. Slowly, very slowly, she reached down and unclipped her backpack, letting it sink into the mud beside her.

“I’m not going to hurt her,” she said softly, glancing between the two creatures. “I’m just… I’m just here. Okay?”

It felt absurd, talking to them. But she kept talking anyway, words filling the space, smoothing the edges of the moment.

Daisy, sensing the weight of the situation, had gone perfectly still. The only movement was the slight wag of her tail, uncertain but not aggressive.

The large one—him, her mind supplied, though she knew she was anthropomorphizing—took one slow step forward. The ground seemed to shake under his weight.

Amelia’s fingers dug into the mud. Her heart hammered so loudly she was sure they could hear it.

He was close enough now that she could see details: the scar across his forearm, the small nick out of one ear, the way his chest rose and fell more quickly than she would have expected.

He was scared too.

Not of her.

Of losing the small one.

He made another sound, low and rumbling, his gaze flicking between Amelia’s hands and the juvenile’s twisted leg.

She understood it then, with sudden, unexpected clarity.

He knew she was different.

He’d seen humans before. Hunters. Hikers. Loggers. People whose presence meant noise and danger and disruption.

But she wasn’t standing. She wasn’t yelling. She wasn’t reaching for a weapon.

She was kneeling in the mud beside his injured child.

And she had a small companion of her own—a tiny, trembling creature that looked at her with trust.

He took another step forward.

The juvenile made a soft, urgent noise that sounded like a sob.

Every part of Amelia’s brain that dealt with safety screamed at her to back away, to put distance between herself and eight feet of wild muscle and unknown strength.

Instead, she did something far more reckless.

She reached out.

The Choice

Her hand moved inch by inch through the cold, wet air, fingers extended, palm up. She didn’t reach for the small one’s leg. She didn’t touch its fur.

She simply held her hand there, halfway between herself and the creature, an offering.

The juvenile stared at her hand, then at her face. Its eyes were enormous, reflecting every flicker of lightning, every shimmer of fear and pain and confusion.

Behind it, the large one emitted a low, questioning rumble.

Amelia didn’t know how much time passed.

It might have been a second.

It might have been a minute.

Then, slowly, hesitantly, the small one lifted its long arm and placed its muddy, trembling hand in hers.

The contact was electric. Not literally, though the air was so charged with storm energy that it might as well have been, but emotionally. The small hand was warm and rough, calloused in places, the fingers longer than her own but with familiar joints, familiar bones.

A sob caught in Amelia’s throat.

“You’re okay,” she whispered, though she had no way of knowing if that was true. “You’re okay. I’ve got you.”

Daisy leaned forward and gave a soft whine, tail wagging, as if trying to reassure the small creature too.

The large one stepped even closer. He was enormous now, filling the edge of her vision. If he wanted to, he could reach out and break her in half with a single movement.

He didn’t.

He lowered himself into a half crouch, bringing his face closer to the juvenile’s. He sniffed the air around them, around Amelia’s outstretched hand, around Daisy. His breath was hot and smelled of earth and wet leaves.

He made another sound, softer this time, a rumbling exhale that sent a shiver down Amelia’s spine.

The small one responded with a chirping noise that sounded very much like a child trying to explain something to a parent.

Amelia had no idea what was being communicated. Yet somehow, she understood the gist.

It was all right.

The human was helping.

She slowly eased her hand back, letting the small one’s fingers slip from hers. She resisted the urge to do what every caregiver instinct in her screamed to do: examine the leg, splint it, assess the injury.

This wasn’t her child.

This wasn’t her world.

Her place here was not to fix, but to witness—and to respect.

She met the large one’s eyes.

They were old.

Older than any human’s she’d ever seen. There was a depth there, a layered complexity of emotions that made her chest ache.

“They’re going to flood the lower forest,” she said quietly, though she didn’t know if he could understand words. “The creek is rising. You were right to come higher.”

A particularly loud clap of thunder shook the ground. The juvenile flinched, letting out a small Cry. The large one immediately shifted, placing one huge arm around the small body, shielding it from the worst of the wind and rain.

Daisy pressed against Amelia’s side. Amelia wrapped an arm around the dog almost unconsciously.

Two families.

Two different species.

One storm.

“Here,” Amelia said softly. She reached into the side pocket of her pack, moving slowly, narrating her actions under her breath. “I’m going to leave this. It’s… uh… it’s food. Safe. For her. For you.”

She pulled out a vacuum-sealed packet of high-calorie trail mix and a protein bar, then a small, tightly wrapped package of medical tape and a slender, rolled splint. She set them gently on a dry patch of moss a few feet away from the small creature, careful not to get too close.

The large one watched her every move. His nostrils flared at the scent of the food.

“I’m going to go now,” Amelia whispered. The words tasted like surrender and reverence. “This is your forest, not mine. But… thank you. For letting me see you. For trusting me. I won’t… I won’t betray that.”

A lump formed in her throat. The recorder on her coat strap blinked, capturing every word, every ragged breath, every distant rumble of thunder.

She wondered, briefly, if she would ever share this audio.

Long before she’d ever believed she’d get this close, she’d always said on the podcast that if she ever proved they were real, she would do it only if it didn’t put them at risk.

Looking at them now, a child in pain and a parent standing between that child and the world, she knew the answer.

Some secrets were bigger than fame.

Bigger than downloads.

Bigger than proof.

She eased herself backward, inch by inch, never turning her back fully. Daisy moved with her, backwards, one careful step at a time, as though she understood exactly what was at stake.

The large one watched them go, eyes never leaving them.

The small one let out one last soft sound, something that vibrated in the space between words, between languages, like a note from an instrument no human had ever learned to play.

Amelia’s chest tightened.

“Goodbye,” she whispered.

She didn’t know if it meant anything to them.

It meant everything to her.

The Descent

The journey back down the hill was a blur of mud and rain and adrenaline. The storm had reached its peak now, lightning strobing across the sky, thunder slamming into the ridgeline with bone-rattling force.

The creek below had become a churning, brown river, tree limbs spinning past in the current. Water cascaded down every slope, turning paths into streams and streams into hazards.

Amelia fell twice, once catching herself with an arm that would later bloom into a purple bruise. Daisy slid more than she walked, but somehow they kept moving—in part because stopping felt impossible, and in part because the forest behind them seemed to crackle with something more than just electricity.

It felt like a held breath.

Like the woods themselves were watching them leave.

When they finally reached the narrow dirt road where her rented SUV waited, half-hidden by ferns and fog, she sagged against the hood, soaked to the skin, shaking with exhaustion and something that felt disconcertingly like grief.

Daisy shook herself in a full-body spray of mud and rain, then jumped into the passenger seat the moment she saw the door open.

“Okay,” Amelia murmured, sliding behind the wheel. Her fingers were so cold it took her three tries to get the key into the ignition. “Okay. We did it.”

The engine coughed to life.

She sat there for a moment, hands on the steering wheel, listening to the frantic drumming of rain on the roof.

The recorder on her coat strap was still blinking.

She reached up and turned it off.

Not because she didn’t want evidence.

But because she already had more than enough.

The Episode

Two weeks later, the storm was a memory, reduced to news clips about minor flood damage and a few washed-out hiking trails.

Amelia sat at her desk again, headphones on, the familiar glow of her laptop screen illuminating the darkened room. Daisy slept in a dog bed nearby, one paw twitching in some mysterious dream.

On the screen, an audio file sat waiting.

She pressed play.

The sound of the storm filled her ears: rain, wind, distant thunder. Her own voice, quieter than usual, came through the headphones.

“This is Amelia Carter, field recording for Bigfoot Society…”

She listened to the whole thing—the climb, the cries, the moment when the juvenile’s hand touched hers, the low rumble of the large one, the soft sound that might have been a farewell.

When it was done, she sat in silence for a long time.

Then she opened a new project file.

The episode that eventually went live two days later was titled:

“The Storm on Greyson Ridge: A Multi-Sighting Story”

In it, she included her entire interview with Jenna, who described her three encounters in careful detail. She included older interviews from the archive—witnesses who had seen pairs or family groups in other states, under other storms.

She included the sounds the forest had made before she reached the ridge—the tree knocks, the distant howls, the abrupt drop in wildlife noise.

But she did not include the most crucial part.

She did not play the moment when she met them.

She did not describe their faces in detail.

She did not give GPS coordinates.

Instead, she did something else.

At the end of the episode, she spoke directly to her listeners, her voice steady but raw.

“There are some experiences,” she said, “that don’t belong entirely to the person who had them. They belong to the place, to the creatures involved, to the fragile line between the known and the unknown. I went into those woods looking for proof, for a story I could bring you. And I did find a story. But it’s not one I can tell in full—not without risking something I’m not willing to risk.”

She paused, taking a breath.

“What I can tell you is this: sometimes the most important thing we can do isn’t to expose or reveal. It’s to protect. To respect. To acknowledge that we are not the main characters in every story this planet is telling.”

She thought of the look in the large one’s eyes.

The warmth of the juvenile’s hand in hers.

The sound it had made, halfway between fear and trust.

“So this episode,” she continued, “isn’t about proof. It’s about possibility. About what it means to share a world with beings we don’t fully understand. Maybe you’ll believe that. Maybe you won’t. Either way, I’m asking you—if you go into the woods, go gently. These places are ancient. They’re alive. And maybe… just maybe… we’re not alone in them.”

She ended the episode with a simple sign-off.

“This is Amelia from Bigfoot Society. Stay curious. Stay kind. And if you ever find yourself climbing a muddy hill in a storm, with something small by your side… listen closely. The forest might be about to introduce you to the unforgettable.”

The Legacy

The episode exploded.

Messages poured in—emails, DMs, voicemails—from listeners all over the world.

Some were angry.

“You promised us proof and then chickened out,” one wrote.

Others were grateful.

“Thank you for protecting them,” another said. “Whatever they are.”

And some, the ones she treasured the most, were from people who had seen things themselves, things they’d never fully been able to put into words.

“I thought I was crazy,” one message read. “But when you talked about the choice between telling and protecting, it hit me. I made that choice years ago. Thank you for reminding me I’m not alone.”

Weeks later, another message appeared in her inbox.

No subject line.

No signature.

Just a single sentence.

“I heard the storm on the ridge too.”

Attached was a photo—blurry, taken from a distance, through a screen door in heavy rain.

In it, lit by a flash of lightning, was a silhouette.

Tall.

Massive.

And beside it, a smaller shape, moving carefully up a muddy hill.

Amelia stared at the image for a long time.

Then she closed her laptop and went to sit on the floor beside Daisy, scratching the dog behind the ears until her own heart slowed.

Somewhere, in another forest, under another sky, a family was moving through the trees.

She didn’t need clearer photos.

She didn’t need a body.

She had something better.

She had a moment, on a storm-beaten ridge, when two worlds had touched—just for an instant—in trust.

And for her, that was enough.