"I Was Prepared for Hunting, Not for This"

0:00 Either you're listening to the Big Fort Society podcast and I'm Jeremiah Byron. Every week I talk to individuals who have experienced Sasquatch in some way or another, so you won't want to miss an episode. Make sure you're subscribed on the platform that you're listening to, and share this episode where a friend does not cost a thing, and it helps the show continue to grow. If you'd like to hear Bigfoot Society episodes early in ad free, you can do so by becoming a Patreon supporter or a YouTube channel member. Links to those are in the show notes in Bigfoot Society. I've taken far too much of your time so far, so let's get on with the show. Over the last few weeks, I've been receiving emails from a gentleman named Randy, and Randy is all I'm going to share regarding his name. I'll start reading the emails that I've been receiving. This is an extremely long, ongoing story that I have started to share twice now and have had to stop for one reason or another. When I try to discuss it with pretty much anyone except my wife and the members that were involved. Some type of odd panics starts setting in, and that's a feeling. I'm just not accustomed to being an ex retired SSgt from the one hundred and first Airborne Special Forces Black Ops Sniper recon At any rate, I will give it a shot. However, I'm not going to spend two hours writing this story until I hear back from you personally and

1:30 that you are interested in doing a program on this topic. I swore to my best friend that not a word of this would come out during his lifetime. Unfortunately we lost him back in April of twenty twenty two, so it's time and it just keeps bothering me, the nightmares, etc. I sometimes feel like once you see these things, they can now see you whenever, wherever. It's very unlikely, but it's just odd sometimes. And every summer my friend and I and a few others camp on and off way up in northern Maine, about an hour and a half north of Moosehead Lake. Come each fall, we are up there early camping and getting set up for the hunting season. And to be continued if you reply next email, thank you, Jeremi. I have not shared this full story anywhere. I did touch on it and send the first half to a site. It may have been called learn to hunt, or perhaps how to hunt, something of that nature.

2:30 He wrote back and wanted to hear more, but again, my friend was still alive and therefore I was not at liberty to disclose much information. Okay, so I believe I told you the background of what we did. You see, the three of us always went up north an extra week before hunting season to set up base camp, which was no small feat considering sometimes would have more than a dozen hunters come up to camp during the week of hunting. Along with our many responsibilities of setting up base camp was scouting. Of course, this was done all year long, but during the week prior to hunt week we picked up our scouting routine. Every morning before dawn, we were somewhere deep in the North main Woods preparing to enter at the crack of dawn, same routine, every dark, icy morning. My friend would be fumbling under his four x four jeepsya for his thermos of hot coffee, while I'd be loading bullets reputlessly back into my three to eight clips. And it would begin. He would say something like, I don't know why you bother bringing that right now, we're not hunting, We're scouting. And I would then answer him with a blank stare and say something like because I don't want to be friggin' eaten. He was my best friend in the entire world.

3:46 I worked with him too as his partner assistant installing flooring, so I spent way more time with him than I did my own wife. This story may be running on. Please stop me if so, I can get directly to the point and I apologize. I'll wait to hear back from you again. I apologize from Randy. A few days later. There is another email, so Jeremiah. On Wednesday morning, I was up off Silver Road about a mile and a half down at the end of a logging road, just checking scrapes, tracks, etc. While my friend had gone across the road and hiked up three Bear Mountain. We had plans to meet down on Golden Road before going back to camp that evening. Now, where I was tracking a very large buck. It led me down into an old growth forest, pretty much the only one I'm aware of up in this area, as northern Maine is very much logged and harvested year round. As a matter of fact, most all of northern Maine is owned by logging companies. That's why we have to buy daily gate passes to enter the northernmost forests. Another interesting fact, there's little to no snow plowing law enforcement besides an occasional game warden food or in fact fuel, so planning ahead is necessary. The nearest s door is about a two and a half hour drive away. Any flats and you get a lot from rough roads. We have to fix them ourselves. So

5:19 as I'm following this monster bucks tracks, I see something baffling. A bare footprint, a large bear footprint. The way the weather cycles up here, there's no way that print could have been there in deep This person was heavy. Now, I've heard a bigfoot many times, but growing up in the country hunting my entire life, serving in the US Special Forces as a black op in many theaters, I did not allow for such foolishness. But what was this? I estimated this print at around nineteen inches. It was located about four inches from the side of the creek. When I stompd with all my night might, I could not make a quarter of an in indentation.

6:00 Yet this track was two and a half inches deep in this hard ground. So this guy weighs well over seven hundred pounds. I'm thinking something is not right, and I had no camera or phone, nothing, So I took out my two way radio and called my friend to see if he could come pick me up, even though I knew we had to be seven to or five miles apart at the time. To my surprise, he immediately answered, in his typical sarcastic way. What I told him he needed to come back at these tracks I'd found, and gave him approximate coordinates. He told me he'd seen in twenty minutes, he'd see me in twenty minutes. So I sat down to take a break, and not even five minutes went by, and it seemed like my friend was throwing small rocks at me. So I kept yelling out into the bush, that was a pretty good time you run up here, and no response. Few minutes later, another stone was heard ricocheting off branches near me. I screamed, cut the crap, but hoole or I shoot your butt. Yeah, I edited that it's kind of a family show. I thought I heard a growl, so I got seriously concerned when I spotted my friend coming up over the embankment. That was another ridge away from me, at about half a mile away. Randy writes, I'll continue later, I need to pick my wife up. I had to wait another few days, and then I got the next email again. So I

7:32 was sitting on half rotted tree stump with my three to Z eight rifle between my knees. After the second rock came winging by me and I heard it coming hitting leaves and whatever else it may have hit on its way past me. And after I threatened to shoot what I thought was my friend if you didn't knock it off, And immediately after I looked slightly to my right and now spotted my friend cresting the hill about half a mile from me. I immediately fell wave of heat. I felt like my blood started boiling or something. I've since been told that it was probably the start of a panic attack, although even through dozens of major combat situations, I'd never had a reaction quite like how this felt. But I did upon spotting my friend just a bit after hearing this deep, reverberating growl, realizing all at once that I probably just screamed at what I presumed was a seven hundred pound sasquatch, I asked imate it that weight. After viewing the footprint, but before seeing the animal, I slowly stood up, but felt like I was going to pass out, so I planted the stock of my rifle into the moss patch next to the stump and held the barrel balanced myself, taking my first couple steps into my friend's direction, using my rifle like it was a five hundred dollars dangerous cane. I heard a tree, or at least a three inch limb, snapped just out of view, but within thirty to forty years yards of

9:03 where I was standing, just out of view in a bunch of thickets, where the swamp started and the high bush blueberries would have been a few months ago. I immediately came out of this temporary panic mode I had been in, and swung around with my rifle coming up toward my shoulder, when all at once, my friend touched off his old savage rifle. All this all at once in the same five seconds. That's what is so confusing. It seemed to me that my friend could never be where he was that fast. It should have taken twenty to thirty minutes to get down off the ridge. I'd seen him come over and head down, then cross a small brook, then up the other ridge that I was on the lower side of, down by the beginning the swamp. The reason I started turning and raising my rifle was not the snapping tree that was and did fall but misbe my fifteen or twenty feet No, it was that demonic screaming this thing started, and the eruption of branches, bushes and debris flying as a beast over nine and a half feet flew out towards me. I have no real idea if I could have got a shot off in time had my friend not been there. I had no real idea if this sasquatch was just bluff charging to intimidate a hunter that was way too close to his home. Because my friend was there and when he'd seen this thing just a minute or two before myself, he immediately fired one shot into his forehead, and as it stumbled, he buried one more shot into his chest. The ground noticeably shook when this beast hit the ground only about eight feet from me. My friend came fast walking toward the

10:35 two of us as it took a knee as I took a knee beside this huge animal, and I nudged it several times with my rifle no response. I tried rolling it over but could not. As my friend got there, he told me to get back from it. He wanted to put one more into the back of its head, just to make sure it was both not a threat but also was not suffering. I told him I'd seen the hair in a chunk of flesh fly from its center mass, just under the left pectoral muscle. I asked him to help me roll him over, and after much struggling and maneuvering his massive arms and legs, we managed to turn him over. To a horrible sight. I hadn't realized the first shot had hit him just above the right eye, and he had bled quite a blot before dying. His eyes were wide open and huge, oddly wide apart. I noticed this immediately. There's an immense amount of tension we were both experiencing, and the smell that was coming off of this dead beast was as if it had been dead for weeks before. Now, all of a sudden, we heard two loud, sharp, distinct knocks. I stopped breathing for a moment, gathered up my stuff on the ground, fast in rifle, turned to my friend and yelled run as I had already started heading up the first ridge.

11:58 Now you have to understand my friend and I, we are not exactly athletic types nor runners, yet at this point we did a fair job at it, so we thought. By the time I was almost to the top of the second ridge, I didn't have much more run in me. My friend had passed me going up this ridge as he hit the top, and I yelled to him that I was done running, so I stopped, and as I slowly climbed the rest of the ridge, I was checking the clip in my rifle as well as my backup. My friend met me as I topped the ridge, and we discussed if we should stay here and have the higher ground if more of them came for us, or should we keep heading to the jeep as fast as possible. I told him high ground won't mean anything if they came for us, especially more than one. He said something like, it's only about a mile if we cut through somewhere. I don't remember exactly what he said then, because we heard a loud, long, mournful howl call from what could be nothing but another sasquatch, and we started running again like track stars. The scariest part of the entire event was the last quarest mile across this old cutting area in landing. This is full of small stumps left over, short pieces of logs, and brush, with about two and a half feet of crabgrass growing up covering all that junk, so if you're not extremely careful, you could easily turn an ankle or worse.

13:16 We made it to the jeep, covered with sweat and about as anxious as a man could be. As my friend fired up the jeep and started throwing mud, dirt and rocks, I heard another scream off to the right side of the Tote road, about fifty yards away outbound two more sasquatch, one large what I believed to be a female, the other another large male. As we tore it out of there and headed back down Golden Road towards camp, my friend asked if I thought these creatures could track us somehow and find us at camp, or if we left camp, could they track us over two hundred miles to down home. I remember telling him I'm no bigfoot, whisper or nothing, and don't really know all these things, but I sure would be a lot more comfortable packing up and heading out of camp like asap tonight. We did exactly that. Sadly, I never went hunting that season.

14:11 As a matter of fact, I stopped hunting, I stopped camping, I stopped going up north. I soon got very sick with stage four cancer. Survived, but I caught sepsis and some other nasty stuff that kept me down several years. My best buddy was the only friend that would drive out of states to the hospital they had me in. By the way, we swore that as long as we both were breathing, no one would hear about that last trip up into the North main Woods. God speed, my friend. And that's the email I got from Randy. It's very interesting, and I'm sure listeners have a lot of different thoughts or opinions about this. You're welcome to leave them in the comments. If you have any questions for Randy, leave those in the comments as well, or email me at Bigfoot Society at gmail dot com. It's hard for Randy to talk right now because of what he's been through stage four throat cancer. I believe there is a chance he might be able to come on for a short period of time, So if you have any questions about what Randy and his friend experienced that time up

15:46 in the Northern main Woods and there are dealings with the Sasquatch and dispatching of it. You're welcome to contact me Bigfoot Society at gmail dot com or leave your question in the comments if you have any interactions with a Bigfoot, any stories you would like to share that you would love for me to read on the podcast. I would love to be the one that shares way you've experienced on the podcast. You can email me directly, as it says in the outro Bigfoot Society at gmail dot com. Please include if you would like me to read this on the podcast, that you give me permission to do so, and what name you would like me to use for yourself as well if it's an alias or first name only. That allows me to not have to go back and forth in an email chain with you and I appreciate you all listening. Have a great day. I know a lot of you listen at night. Make sure you're subscribed, and please share this with your friends.

17:06 Thank you. Here at Bigfoot Society, our goal is to provide a platform for those that have encountered Bigfoot to share their encounter and a safe and respected environment. But We need to hear your story. If you've experienced something that you just can explain, please send me an email at Bigfoot Society at gmail dot com. Then we can start the conversation. And I know a lot of you have not shared your encounter at all. It's been twenty years and it's time that you get this off your chest and then you can get some well deserved for rest, because I know you haven't been sleeping. I understand what you're going through, and I appreciate every one of you listening