I Believe!

I believe in many things. I believe in ghosts especially after my Grandfather appeared at the end of my bed 3 days after he died. I believe in God. I believe in kharma. One thing I've always believed in was confirmed, for me at least, this past August.
Mid August Hubster and I were awakened at 1:30 in the morning to the sound of a single gunshot coming from our neighbor's house. Since we had the window above our beds open it sounded like he was standing right outside our house. We laid there for a few minutes and heard nothing else. Assuming he was scaring off either a bear or racoons we fell back asleep. I later awoke to Hubster shaking my shoulder and whispering "Dear do you hear that?". Bleary eyed I looked at the time. 3:31 am. Just as I was just about to backhand Hubster for waking me up from a wonderful slumber my ears registered this horrendous sound. The sound was coming from an animal. A big animal from the way it was echoing off the mountain behind our house. The animal was from the direction of the sound about a half a mile away and heading towards the house. I couldn't tell what kind of animal was making this vocalization and Hubster who is an avid outdoorsman and works in the woods for a living could not identify it either. Hubster said when he awoke from the sound he had gone outside in the yard to listen. Within moments of being outside the hair on the back of his neck stood up and he immediately ran back into the house and woke me up. This is a man who against my better judgement has chased black bears on foot out of our yard. So for him to be freaked out bothered me immensely. We listened to this cry as the pitches went from high to low gutteral sounds. Finally at 3:34 the cry ended. This animal performed these vocal ranges for at least 6 minutes steady and with a lung capacity unimaginable unless you heard it for yourself. We both laid there for sometime after breathing shallowly listening for sounds of the animal approaching the house. No twigs snapped, nothing. Finally sleep overcame us once again. At 4:00 am the familiar sound of the train crossing bells dinged and we listened as a the passing train rumbled and blew his whistle. Hubster and I commented on how the train whistle did not echo off the mountain. Strange.
The next morning I got on the internet and started a search for wildlife recordings. I downloaded various sounds of mountain lions, bull moose, cow moose, bears, elk, deer, anything I could find that lived in our area. Finally I came across a wav. file that was titled sno_howl. I clicked on the link trying to think what this could be as it loaded. Sno? Snow owl? Hmmm? I opened the file in my realplayer and pushed play. It was the sound! I had found our mysterious animal! I went back to the web page where I had found the wav. file and followed the link to a web site for the Oregon Bigfoot Society. I laughed and thought no. No way. Throughout the rest of the day I searched several bigfoot sights and listened to two different recordings of supposed bigfoot vocalizations. The one I had originally recorded was from Snoqualmish Washington...hence the sno_. in the wav. file.
Hubster arrived home from work and I had him come to the computer and I played all the different animal calls I had downloaded from the cougar to moose. He agreed none of them were the call we had heard. Then I pushed the sno_howl file and told him I hadn't figured out which animal this was for sure. Immediately upon playing the file he started rubbing the back of his neck, "Shit! F^ck! Thats it!" I brought up the web site for the Oregon Bigfoot Society and said this is where the recording came from. Now throughout our relationship I have on several occasions told Hubster that I believe Bigfoot exists. When I was 11 yrs. old and camping with my family and another family, a boy and myself came across a foot print that was almost triple of mine in a muddy patch by a creek. Scared witless we ran back to camp and got our Dads. Unfortunately we couldn't find the exact location of the print and since we were leaving that day our search was cut short. I know my Dad thought we were imagining it, but I swear what I saw was not human or any other known animal's print. My husband had always scoffed at my theory saying that as often as he has hunted, hiked and worked in the woods that he has never seen any sign of such a thing as Bigfoot. Standing in front of my computer this past August, my husband began to believe. In discussing this with a few of our closest friends we found out that a local man claims he saw a creature on the edge of a construction job he was on, but had quit discussing it after being teased so bad about it. A friend of mine told me she and her husband knew that they saw Bigfoot earlier in the summer while out on their ATV. She was driving while her husband was sitting behind her. She looked up a hill they were passing and saw this figure silhoutted by the sun. She drove a short distance and stopped whereupon her husband said "Did you see that too?" So they backed up and the figure was still there. They watched and she said she could see it sway every once in awhile, but due to the position of the sun could not see features. They went on up the road and about a half hour later returned to the spot they had seen the figure and nothing was there. I have read several sighting reports in our surrounding area on Bigfoot pages.
For the next several days after our mysterious episode, our dog Griz acted strange. His hackles would go up and he'd bark towards the wooded area by our house. Now we've dealt with bears for several years here and Griz got to the point maybe because of his age that he would just stand a distance away from a bear in our yard and look at Hubster like "Are you going to take care of him?". It was like he got used to bears coming around. Anyway I still don't know for sure what we heard. We talked to the neighbor and he shot at a racoon that night. So the possiblity that he injured a large animal was eliminated. And anyways the shot fired and the animal howl were 2 hours apart. So I don't know. I guess its still a mystery, but I find that I keep my blinds shut at night now where before it didn't bother me to have them open since we have no neighbors close enough to see in. But every once in awhile I get this feeling something is out there watching me.