Grandmother's Secret Life Delivering Bigfoot Babies In Alberta Wilderness

There's a video floating around YouTube right now that stopped me in my tracks, and if you haven't seen it yet, you need to carve out some time for it. A man named Russell Sutton, a 73-year-old retired rural mail carrier from the Peace Country of northern Alberta, finally broke his silence about something his grandmother carried for decades before passing it down to him. And what she carried was absolutely extraordinary. The story begins with Edna Sutton, Russell's grandmother, who served as a lay midwife across the homestead belt of northern Alberta from the early 1930s until 1963. She delivered somewhere around 240 babies during her career, driving a 1946 International half-ton through some of the most remote country in Canada, often on tracks that were barely two ruts through spruce and muskeg. She learned her trade from her own mother, who learned it from a woman in Saskatchewan whose name was never passed down. This was a lineage of women who understood birth in a way that modern medicine has largely forgotten, and they operated in a part of the world where the usual rules don't always apply. In October of 1952, Edna received a call unlike any other. The message came through a neighbor, asking for her specifically, saying there was a woman in need of help north of the Hendricks homestead. She drove as far as she could, then walked four miles on foot in the dark with a lantern and her bag. At the end of that walk, she found a clearing with a deadfall on the east side, a low fire, and a figure large enough that her first thought was she'd come to the wrong place. She hadn't. What happened next, Russell explains, is that his grandmother did what she was called to do. She attended the birth. She didn't elaborate on the particulars, and Russell respects that privacy. But the birth resolved, there was a living child, and afterward, the large figure came around to where Edna was crouched cleaning her instruments and set something down beside her bag. It was a piece of birch bark about the size of a book, with a mat of dried medicinal root laid across the top, and a carved piece of antler smoothed down to a point. Edna understood it as a gift offered in return, without language. She took the carved piece. She left the root mat beside the fire. And she walked back to her truck. For the next 19 years, Edna went back twice that she admitted to, leaving something at the edge of that clearing and finding it gone before her next visit. There were two more years when she received calls from that direction, both in early winter, both in the small hours. She honored whatever was asked of her, and she was never given any reason to be afraid. The carved antler piece still exists. The fireproof tin box with the record book still exists. Russell has it. The entries for certain calls in certain years are in a different hand from the rest, and Edna was not a woman who let anyone else touch her records. And then there's the fall of 2009, when Russell himself, at 57 years old, stood in a spruce clearing 12 miles north of the Nauticoin road and looked down at something he could not explain away. His dog Bess sat calmly beside his boot, ears up toward the tree line, tail moving slow and easy. Not growling. Not pressed against his leg. Just watching the trees with the calm attention of a dog that had decided whatever was out there was not a threat. Three explanations were ready in his head before he crouched down. By the time he stood up, all three were gone. This account is remarkable for several reasons, and anyone who's spent time researching Sasquatch encounters in Canada will recognize why. The Peace Country of northern Alberta and neighboring British Columbia has long been considered one of the most active regions in North America for sightings. The Canadian Sasquatch, often referred to by different names depending on the Indigenous tradition in the area, has a long history of being described as respectful, reciprocal, and deeply connected to the land. Stories of exchanges between Sasquatch and rural families, of gifts left and gifts returned, are not new to the literature, but they are rare, and they are almost never told by someone who can point to a physical object that was handed directly from one of these beings to a human hand. The midwife tradition itself adds another layer. Midwives in remote homestead country operated in a space between worlds, often working with Indigenous knowledge and plant medicine that predated formal medical training by generations. The fact that Edna recognized the root laid on the birch bark, that she knew it was the proper one presented correctly, speaks to a shared understanding of plant medicine that crosses the usual boundaries we draw between human and non-human cultures. Russell is 73 now. His wife Karen passed in 2019. His mother Lorraine passed in 2003. He says he is the last one who carries it, and he has decided to break the habit of carrying things to the grave. The video is long, and it deserves your full attention. Russell speaks the way people from that part of the world speak, carefully, precisely, without embellishment, and with the kind of weight that only comes from holding something for a very long time. Watch it. Sit with it. And if you've ever wondered whether the beings people encounter in the deep woods might have families, might have midwives, might have their own ways of caring for one another that we are only occasionally allowed to witness, this account will stay with you.