The Belligerent Bigfoot (a creepypasta)
My name is Balaam Ishtar Ballard. Every year I ride out into the same strip of fold-and-pine country for a week of hunting and camping. It’s the kind of trip that resets something in me — the noise of the world drops away and what’s left is the cadence of my breath and the rhythm of the ATV under me. I’d done it since I was a kid. I’d never left with the taste of blood in my mouth until that year.
On the second evening, after two days of strange harassment, I stopped trying to tell myself it was only raccoons or wind. At first it was noises in the treeline — heavy, like someone shifting furniture in the dark: a roar that sounded like the world tearing itself open, then the smack of something big hitting bark. Rocks, thrown hard enough that the air went flat at the spot they hit. Whatever it was didn’t move like an animal I knew.
It came to a head just after dusk. I had my satchel and my scoped rifle — the old high-caliber I’d carried for years, the one with that orange-brown rail frame that looked like a rusted halo around the barrel. I’d never wanted to use it on anything but deer; it felt obscene to point that thing at anything else. But two days of being woken by stones and the thunder of those roars had a way of dislodging any ceremony.
I found a place where the trees opened up in a shallow bowl and sat, pressed flat against a trunk. I told myself I wasn’t waiting to ambush anything. I was resting. The forest breathed around me. Then the sounds swelled — closer, angrier. I didn’t have to look to know it was coming.
It pushed out of the shadow like a bad memory made real.
Eight feet of muscle and hair stepped between two trunks. It was gorilla-sized, but wrong in every way that mattered. Its shoulders hunched like a bear’s, its arms long enough to sweep the earth, but the face… Jesus. The face was human enough to make you hate the world for what you were seeing. There was brow and nose and mouth where there shouldn’t have been, and it was making a sound that lived halfway between a howl and speech.
It moved with a terrible purpose, not a creature spooked and fleeing but one that sought me. In its heady rage its whole body thrummed; it thumped the trunks as it passed, scattering birds. When it stopped, it was only ten yards away, standing upright enough to tower over me, eyes locked on the orange glare of my scope.
People talk about Bigfoot being shy, running off at the first sign of a human. There are stories and jokes and soft-cam footage and speculation. This thing wasn’t shy. This thing wanted me. It had a face that wanted to be seen and a fury like a furnace.
I remember thinking, with a clarity that has haunted me, that it looked like a demon wearing fur. The left eye stared at me like a living thing; the right eye — there was only a dull, glassy white where an eye should have been. Blood ran in a dark seam from that socket and pooled on its cheek. It didn’t slow it down. If anything, it pushed it faster.
I don’t remember making the decision. My hands were steady. I put the crosshairs on that face and fired.
The bullet hit the socket. The thing shrieked, a sound that pressed into my chest and made the night fold inward. It clawed at the wound like a man trying to tear off his own face, rearing back to gouge and throw itself. For a heartbeat I thought the shot had missed what mattered. Then, in that awful, furious scramble, it pulled its hand away and I saw white: the back of the skull where the eye should have been a ragged, angled place.
I fired again.
The second shot drove home. The body convulsed, trees rattling from its thrashing. When the noise finally died the forest went silent as if someone had pinned down the world with a thumb. I sat there until my teeth ached, waiting for the creature to rise, to turn into something that screamed about old debts and old hunting grounds. It didn’t. It lay still. The breath stopped.
I knew I couldn’t drag that mass anywhere. I couldn’t leave a body that big in the middle of public land without explanation — and I couldn’t stay. I mounted my ATV and rode until my arms burned, until the sky began to blur into a color you only notice when dawn is trying to hurry night out of the way. It took me five hours of flat and backwoods to reach the ranger station.
The man behind the counter listened, the way you listen to a man tell you a dream that was, shockingly, not a dream. He rubbed his jawline and asked where exactly. He asked what I’d seen. When I told him, he asked the question people ask when they don’t know which version of the world they’re supposed to accept: “You’re sure you didn’t imagine it? Stress, isolation—”
I showed him where I’d left the ATV. I showed him the tracks, the broken underbrush, the gouges in tree trunks. We walked the trail back. We walked to the bowl and the place where the monster had fallen. The body — or whatever it had been — was gone. The earth where it had lain was disturbed. There were grooves in the dirt like something huge had been dragged. Trees were scarred, bark torn in long, brutal arcs. The rangers traced those marks and nodded, their faces tight with the kind of concern you only see when reality is trying to push past the edge of explanation.
They didn’t believe everything I’d said. Nobody does in the beginning. But you don’t have to believe the thing itself to accept that something enormous had been there and then had been moved.
Word got out. Before I’d slept, people were calling. Camps sprung up on that ridge. Hunters and men with cameras arrived, the kind who decide there’s profit in terror. Somebody from a talk show called. Internet feeds filled with half-ruined photos and shaky videos. For a couple of days my name was in mouths I’d never heard, sometimes with admiration, sometimes with disbelief. People called me the man who shot an aggressive Bigfoot. They said it like it was a badge and like it was a curse.
I told them I didn’t want the badge and I sure as hell didn’t want the curse. I told them that it made no sense — that Bigfoot, Sasquatch, call it what you like, doesn’t usually look primed to murder. I told them I’d seen something broken in its head, something that made it hurt and rage in ways regular animals don’t. “Demon” is a word the papers liked. People love a myth that has edges. I told the interviewers that whatever it was, whatever pushed it to that level of blind rage, it was wrong. They edited it down to something pithier: “Man shoots demon Bigfoot.”
They asked me if I’d sleep out there again. They asked me if I regretted it. I lied when I said I wasn’t afraid. I’m not brave in the way they imagined. I’m just a man who knows how terrible the world can feel when it leans toward you. The thing I keep to myself is smaller, quieter, and worse: the look it had when it stared at me. One eye empty, one eye burning, like it was trying to remember which of us was the hunter and which was the prey.
People told stories. People speculated. The rangers never found a body, just those drag marks. That fact keeps the story going, keeps you from sleeping I suppose. Maybe something hauled it off. Maybe a herd of its kind came and took it. Maybe it wasn’t dead at all and the wounds were a lie or a section of some other puzzle I will never solve.
I still ride the woods sometimes, though not like I did before. There are nights I wake, hands clenched, and I can hear that first roar, the rock hitting pine, the creature’s footfall when it came out to meet me. I will never forget the way it looked up at me in those last moments, not like an animal cornered but like something betrayed.
When people ask what I fear most now, I tell them this: it wasn’t the size of it. It wasn’t the shape. It was the intelligence in that face, the way something that should have fled instead came for me with a grievance. I have a rifle. I have a story. I have the rail of rusted orange on a barrel that once struck me as ugly and now feels like the only thing between me and whatever waits in the buckets of the dark.
If you go out there, keep your eyes open. Not because you’ll find a body or because you’ll be famous if you survive, but because there are things in some parts of the world that wear flesh like a mask and make choices that do not sit in the nature books. I never wanted to be proof of one of those things. But for as long as I remember breath and blood, I’ll never get that creature’s eyes out of my head. They were too human to be anything but hate.
On the second evening, after two days of strange harassment, I stopped trying to tell myself it was only raccoons or wind. At first it was noises in the treeline — heavy, like someone shifting furniture in the dark: a roar that sounded like the world tearing itself open, then the smack of something big hitting bark. Rocks, thrown hard enough that the air went flat at the spot they hit. Whatever it was didn’t move like an animal I knew.
It came to a head just after dusk. I had my satchel and my scoped rifle — the old high-caliber I’d carried for years, the one with that orange-brown rail frame that looked like a rusted halo around the barrel. I’d never wanted to use it on anything but deer; it felt obscene to point that thing at anything else. But two days of being woken by stones and the thunder of those roars had a way of dislodging any ceremony.
I found a place where the trees opened up in a shallow bowl and sat, pressed flat against a trunk. I told myself I wasn’t waiting to ambush anything. I was resting. The forest breathed around me. Then the sounds swelled — closer, angrier. I didn’t have to look to know it was coming.
It pushed out of the shadow like a bad memory made real.
Eight feet of muscle and hair stepped between two trunks. It was gorilla-sized, but wrong in every way that mattered. Its shoulders hunched like a bear’s, its arms long enough to sweep the earth, but the face… Jesus. The face was human enough to make you hate the world for what you were seeing. There was brow and nose and mouth where there shouldn’t have been, and it was making a sound that lived halfway between a howl and speech.
It moved with a terrible purpose, not a creature spooked and fleeing but one that sought me. In its heady rage its whole body thrummed; it thumped the trunks as it passed, scattering birds. When it stopped, it was only ten yards away, standing upright enough to tower over me, eyes locked on the orange glare of my scope.
People talk about Bigfoot being shy, running off at the first sign of a human. There are stories and jokes and soft-cam footage and speculation. This thing wasn’t shy. This thing wanted me. It had a face that wanted to be seen and a fury like a furnace.
I remember thinking, with a clarity that has haunted me, that it looked like a demon wearing fur. The left eye stared at me like a living thing; the right eye — there was only a dull, glassy white where an eye should have been. Blood ran in a dark seam from that socket and pooled on its cheek. It didn’t slow it down. If anything, it pushed it faster.
I don’t remember making the decision. My hands were steady. I put the crosshairs on that face and fired.
The bullet hit the socket. The thing shrieked, a sound that pressed into my chest and made the night fold inward. It clawed at the wound like a man trying to tear off his own face, rearing back to gouge and throw itself. For a heartbeat I thought the shot had missed what mattered. Then, in that awful, furious scramble, it pulled its hand away and I saw white: the back of the skull where the eye should have been a ragged, angled place.
I fired again.
The second shot drove home. The body convulsed, trees rattling from its thrashing. When the noise finally died the forest went silent as if someone had pinned down the world with a thumb. I sat there until my teeth ached, waiting for the creature to rise, to turn into something that screamed about old debts and old hunting grounds. It didn’t. It lay still. The breath stopped.
I knew I couldn’t drag that mass anywhere. I couldn’t leave a body that big in the middle of public land without explanation — and I couldn’t stay. I mounted my ATV and rode until my arms burned, until the sky began to blur into a color you only notice when dawn is trying to hurry night out of the way. It took me five hours of flat and backwoods to reach the ranger station.
The man behind the counter listened, the way you listen to a man tell you a dream that was, shockingly, not a dream. He rubbed his jawline and asked where exactly. He asked what I’d seen. When I told him, he asked the question people ask when they don’t know which version of the world they’re supposed to accept: “You’re sure you didn’t imagine it? Stress, isolation—”
I showed him where I’d left the ATV. I showed him the tracks, the broken underbrush, the gouges in tree trunks. We walked the trail back. We walked to the bowl and the place where the monster had fallen. The body — or whatever it had been — was gone. The earth where it had lain was disturbed. There were grooves in the dirt like something huge had been dragged. Trees were scarred, bark torn in long, brutal arcs. The rangers traced those marks and nodded, their faces tight with the kind of concern you only see when reality is trying to push past the edge of explanation.
They didn’t believe everything I’d said. Nobody does in the beginning. But you don’t have to believe the thing itself to accept that something enormous had been there and then had been moved.
Word got out. Before I’d slept, people were calling. Camps sprung up on that ridge. Hunters and men with cameras arrived, the kind who decide there’s profit in terror. Somebody from a talk show called. Internet feeds filled with half-ruined photos and shaky videos. For a couple of days my name was in mouths I’d never heard, sometimes with admiration, sometimes with disbelief. People called me the man who shot an aggressive Bigfoot. They said it like it was a badge and like it was a curse.
I told them I didn’t want the badge and I sure as hell didn’t want the curse. I told them that it made no sense — that Bigfoot, Sasquatch, call it what you like, doesn’t usually look primed to murder. I told them I’d seen something broken in its head, something that made it hurt and rage in ways regular animals don’t. “Demon” is a word the papers liked. People love a myth that has edges. I told the interviewers that whatever it was, whatever pushed it to that level of blind rage, it was wrong. They edited it down to something pithier: “Man shoots demon Bigfoot.”
They asked me if I’d sleep out there again. They asked me if I regretted it. I lied when I said I wasn’t afraid. I’m not brave in the way they imagined. I’m just a man who knows how terrible the world can feel when it leans toward you. The thing I keep to myself is smaller, quieter, and worse: the look it had when it stared at me. One eye empty, one eye burning, like it was trying to remember which of us was the hunter and which was the prey.
People told stories. People speculated. The rangers never found a body, just those drag marks. That fact keeps the story going, keeps you from sleeping I suppose. Maybe something hauled it off. Maybe a herd of its kind came and took it. Maybe it wasn’t dead at all and the wounds were a lie or a section of some other puzzle I will never solve.
I still ride the woods sometimes, though not like I did before. There are nights I wake, hands clenched, and I can hear that first roar, the rock hitting pine, the creature’s footfall when it came out to meet me. I will never forget the way it looked up at me in those last moments, not like an animal cornered but like something betrayed.
When people ask what I fear most now, I tell them this: it wasn’t the size of it. It wasn’t the shape. It was the intelligence in that face, the way something that should have fled instead came for me with a grievance. I have a rifle. I have a story. I have the rail of rusted orange on a barrel that once struck me as ugly and now feels like the only thing between me and whatever waits in the buckets of the dark.
If you go out there, keep your eyes open. Not because you’ll find a body or because you’ll be famous if you survive, but because there are things in some parts of the world that wear flesh like a mask and make choices that do not sit in the nature books. I never wanted to be proof of one of those things. But for as long as I remember breath and blood, I’ll never get that creature’s eyes out of my head. They were too human to be anything but hate.
31-35, M