I had heard a Bigfoot and didn't know it until twenty years later.
The teller spent the 1980s and early 1990s deep in the California hardcore punk scene, and on weekends when there was no show he'd load his Toyota pickup with a bike, fishing gear and a sidearm and head alone into the Sierra Nevada. He wasn't looking for anything in particular, just some kind of connection with life or the universe.
A favourite spot was Rock Creek, a campground with proper bathrooms that was nearly empty in late spring and early fall. One October, when he was about thirty, he drove up after work on a Friday, two weeks before the campground closed for the winter. The only others there were an older couple and the elderly ranger, whom he knew from his many visits.
Saturday was perfect: a long bike ride on familiar trails, some fishing, dinner, and bed around ten in the back of the truck under the shell. It was bitterly cold. Sometime in the night he woke up, and as he was dozing off again he heard a big rig's brakes on the curves of the highway above the camp, a sound he was used to. Then he heard another sound he couldn't place.
It was a whoop. It wasn't close and it didn't last long, but it lodged in his memory. He decided it must have been an owl, and the weekend went on without incident.
Years later he was eating dinner in front of the TV when an episode of a wilderness survival show came on. Alone in the mountains, the host hears a strange call in the dark and is clearly shaken by it. As it played again and again, the hair on the teller's arms stood up. It was the sound from Rock Creek, exactly, note for note. He found himself crying, not from sadness. He still isn't sure why.
He thought about all the years he'd spent alone in those mountains, and about a couple of other times when a wave of dread had hit him for no visible reason and he had fled. Once he left in such a hurry that he tripped over a rock and went face-first into a puddle before scrambling back to the truck. He had always put those moments down to imagination, or intuition, or maybe a bad spirit. He never went back to those spots.
That TV episode, he says, was the end of his love of the mountains. He is fascinated by the idea of a wood ape and horrified by it in equal measure. He has no wish ever to see one or hear one again. When he posted, he was about to move to Yelm, Washington, and wasn't looking forward to it.