Fireside Chat: Hunter frightened after watching Bigfoot through rifle scope

A random conversation...

Date: 1980's
Location: Montana
Witness: Hunter
Context: Hunter sees Bigfoot 400-500 yard away through his rifle scope
Source: http://hunting-washington.com/smf/index.php?action=printpage;topic=27475.0

I may or may not have told this story on this sight or not, but here goes.

A good friend of mine and I went scouting for elk one August back home in Montana, this was in the 80's, we were carrying our hunting rifles as to be honest, it was all grizzly country and we had better scopes than we had binoculars. We were about 3 miles back up a trail when we split and he headed up one ridge and I headed up the other, was just getting light enough to see a ways, and we were gonna glass seperate basins. I had just gotten set up on my ridge for maybe ten minutes when I look over towards his ridge and here he is hot footing it back to the trail. I watch him for a minute and see he is headed for the truck like he needs to get there, so figuring he hurt himself somehow I head out and find him waiting in the passenger seat white as a ghost. Here is his story:

He was heading up the ridge when with the naked eye he see's a grizzly bear standing up looking him over from about 4-500 yards, standing in some huckleberry brush. He continues up the ridge and looks over again 5 minutes later and the bear is still standing there, looks like he's eating berries. James continues on and get's to his spot and he starts to glass through his rifle scope. He's there maybe 10 minutes and looks towards the bear, and it's still there. Now James has been hunting for many years in Western Montana and he's never seen a bear stand upright in the same place for that long, so he swings his rifle scope around and crosshairs it to see what it's doing. He tell me he stared at it for about 45 seconds through a Leupold on 9 power, maybe 3-400 yards away. Says there was just something funny about it. Then he realizes he is looking at the face of a man. He says he couldn't believe it so looked away, then back again, and sure enough this dark hairy object had a mans face and was standing upright, and thats when he realized it was a bigfoot, scared the living hell outta him.

When he told me this story I asked him why the hell he didn't shoot it. He kind of looked at me surprised and said, it never crossed his mind. The only thing he could think of was an absolutely overwhelming urge to get the hell outta there.

Now I knew James well at the time, and he didn't rattle easy, not easy at all. I can tell you this, this was not someplace that anyone would go wearing a Monkey suit to try and play Bigfoot. There was no one else at the trailhead, and would be 20-30mile walk from any other direction. He was flat scared and you could see it in his eyes. As long as I knew him, probably another 7-8 years, he never hunted there again, never. And this was a spot that he had killed elk in for quite some time. I never went back that year, as the look on his face was enough to give me the willies. I know I never went back in there that I didn't have my eye's peeled for a Grizzly with the face of a man.

Was it really a Bigfoot, hell I don't know, I didn't see it. Do I believe his story, ya damned right I do. I know for damn sure he believes he saw Bigfoot.