Welp, you don't see that every day, do ya?
He was seventeen in the summer of 1998, and it was his turn for the fishing trip. Every year his uncle took one of the cousins out to his cabin near Randle, in the hills between Mount Rainier and Mount Adams, to fish the water around Lake Scanewa. The cabin sat three quarters of a mile up a winding gravel road, with ravines on every side and miles of forest running back into the Gifford Pinchot National Forest.
The first day was quiet. On the second they fished until evening, caught a couple of small steelhead, and drove back up to the cabin around a quarter to eight, with the light still good. As the truck came up the last stretch they both saw someone moving fast through the thin alders by the cabin. It was upright and big, and it moved, he says, the way a large house spider does: far quicker than something that size should. His uncle stopped the truck, thinking a prowler had been at the place.
The figure stopped among the trees with its back to them and began to sway, and in the shade it all but disappeared. When his uncle rolled the truck forward to about ten yards away, it came out of the trees, seemed to realise it was cornered, and squatted down, dropping something it had been holding.
Now they could see it plainly. He guesses it would have stood a little over six and a half feet: lean but muscular, broad through the chest and shoulders, narrow at the waist. Its fur was blackish grey with brown flecks, like a chimpanzee's, and it had burrs and thistles caught around its shoulders. The skin of its face was dark and wrinkled like an elephant's hide, the eyes dark, the head small for its body. It looked, he says, almost comically terrified. Its lower jaw jutted out and its lips quivered. It picked nervously at the gravel and rocked its upper body in a circle, the way an owl does. He had the strong feeling they were looking at a youngster.
For about ten seconds nobody moved. Then he reached, very slowly, for the Polaroid camera they kept in the console for photos of their catch. The moment he opened the truck door, a spray of gravel rattled off the windshield and off him, and the creature was gone into the brush with a crash. Only later did he work out that it had probably flung a handful of stones behind it as it ran.
His pictures came out blurry. What he remembers clearly is what it left behind: the 'stick' it had dropped was a flattened, dried-out garter snake about a foot and a half long. The air smelled of singed hair, wet dog and very strong body odour. His uncle, a dry, no-nonsense man, looked at the spot and said, 'Welp, you don't see that every day, do ya?', and then would only talk about fishing.
Around half past ten that night his uncle stepped onto the deck for a cigarette, and the two of them heard something big crashing through the brush in the ravine below, perhaps fifty yards away. With it came deep, chesty shouts that he can only compare to the yells in an old kung fu film. One deep voice began a kind of chant, starting the same phrase again and again and breaking off each time into a long, booming 'baaa-woop'. His uncle joked that the young one was getting told off. Years later, he says, hearing the recordings known as the Sierra Sounds sent a chill through him, because they were so close to what he heard that night.
He has hunted, fished and hiked the Northwest ever since and never seen or heard anything like it again. Most people he tells don't believe him, and he has made his peace with that.