Arkansas Hunter Rescues Baby Bigfoot From Flood, Keeps Secret 43 Years

# 43 Years of Silence: The Arkansas Hunter Who Pulled a Baby Sasquatch From a Flash Flood You know, every once in a while a story comes along that just stops you in your tracks. This is one of those stories. A hunter out of Newton County, Arkansas — a man named Hollis Yates, born in 1942 in the little town of Jasper — has finally broken his silence after more than four decades. And what he has to say is the kind of account that reminds you why so many of us keep digging, keep listening, and keep believing. ## The Setting: Newton County, Arkansas Before we get into the encounter itself, you have to understand the place. Newton County sits up in the Boston Mountains, part of the rugged Arkansas Ozarks, where the Buffalo River cuts its way through ancient bluffs. It's the kind of country where the hollows run so deep and tangled that the map looks like someone wadded up a piece of paper. To this day, there isn't a single stoplight in the whole county. The people who live there like it that way — and the Sasquatch who live there, according to this account, like it that way too. Yates grew up the way Ozark boys grow up — squirrel hunting first, then deer, then bear sign at night. His grandfather, a man simply called "Oo," born in 1898 in a log house up a hollow off the Little Buffalo, taught him everything about those woods. Most importantly, Oo taught him to read water. To stand on a gravel bar and look upstream and know what the creek was going to do before it did it. That last lesson is what makes this story possible. ## The Signs He'd Been Missing His Whole Life Looking back, Yates realizes there had been signs all along. A heavy, warm animal smell in the deepest hollows — not bear, not hog, something else. A morning in 1971 when he came back from the spring to find a field-dressed deer gone, rope and all, the rope not cut but snapped clean, with a drag trail leading uphill — something no cat and no pack of dogs would make. And the knocking. Anyone who's spent real time in the Ozark backcountry knows the knocking — a single sharp crack of wood on wood from a ridge across the way, answered sometimes from another ridge, always at dusk or full dark. The old men would look at each other over the fire, somebody would say "limb fell," and everybody would nod and nobody would believe it. But the most striking piece of family history came from Oo himself. Back in 1964, when Yates was 22 and his grandfather was 66, the old man asked him out of a long silence why he had never once hunted the hollow at the head of a certain creek. When Yates guessed the walking was too rough, Oo said something that stuck with him for the rest of his life: *"There are folks living back in there."* Oo said his own father had traded with them — leaving a measure of corn on a stump at the field edge in the hard winters, and finding the stump swept clean with a mess of fresh fish laid there some mornings. *"They were here before us, and they will be here after us, and the only thing they ask of a man is to be let alone, and a Yates lets them alone."* ## October 9, 1982 The day the drawer finally came open was a Saturday — October 9, 1982. Early squirrel season weather, hickories just turning, warm afternoons, the kind of bluebird morning that makes a man lie to himself about the sky. Yates wasn't hunting that day. Deer season opened the next month, and he was scouting. He'd driven his truck to the end of a log road and walked into the head of a drainage, maybe four miles from anything — a place he'd hunted the edges of all his life but never worked all the way into because, as he'd once told his grandfather, the walking was too rough. He had his daypack, a rope (because a man alone in bluff country carries a rope), a sandwich, and a thermos. He told his wife Reeba he'd be home by dark. It was the last ordinary morning of his life. ## The Storm That Sat on the Mountain Around noon, sitting against a big chinkapin oak on a bench above the creek, Yates noticed the light change. The sky above him stayed blue for another half hour. But away north, over the mountain at the head of the drainage, the horizon had gone a color he wants you to remember — a green-black, like a bad bruise, stacked up tall and flat on top, with gray hanging curtains underneath that meant rain was coming down somewhere with a violence you can't picture until you've stood in it. He watched that storm for twenty minutes. It wasn't moving toward him. It sat on the mountain like it had been nailed there — which, as anyone who knows the Ozarks can tell you, is exactly the worst thing a storm can do. A storm that sits pours all its water down one funnel. The old people called it a *headrise*. Water coming down from a storm you might not have even heard, arriving under a blue sky sometimes — a wall of foam and logs with a sound in front of it like a train. People die that way in the Ozarks every few years to this day. ## The Scream in the Flood Yates had given the storm twenty minutes and shouldered his pack. He was maybe a half mile downstream when he heard the creek start to talk. It's a sound you feel in your feet before your ears sort it out — a cold, freight-train mumble that doesn't belong to the trickle you've been stepping across all morning. The trickle beside him was already changing, coming up dirty, sticks riding it, the pools joining hands. He did what his raising told him to do. Got off the bottom, climbed the sidehill maybe eighty feet to a bench, and stood on solid rock. From there, he watched a headrise take that hollow. And that's when he heard it. A scream. A baby Sasquatch, swept up against a root wad in flood water the color of creamed coffee, slipping, drowning. *"Help me! I am scared. I am slipping."* Yates says the scream had meaning in it, plain as words. And his boots were off and his rope was cinched around his waist before his good sense could even catch up to his moving hands. He had about one minute to decide if he was going to die trying to reach it. He went. ## What He Pulled Out of the Water What Yates pulled out of that flood changed the whole rest of his life. He held it, he got it to higher ground, and he did what he could. The details of that moment — the small body, the eyes, the weight of it — are in the video, and they're the kind of details that will stay with you. But the story doesn't end there. ## Before Dawn What came down out of the timber before dawn the next morning, moving around his fire in the dark — big as parked trucks and quiet as fog — is the reason Yates kept his mouth shut about all of it for forty-three years. The family had come for their baby. And they let him know, in the way that families of the forest let a man know, that they knew exactly what he had done. ## Why This Story Matters There are a few things that make this account stand out from the thousands of Sasquatch stories out there. First, the specificity. A named witness, a specific date, a specific location down to the county and the drainage, a family history that goes back generations, and a grandfather who spoke of "folks" living in the hollows as a matter of practical knowledge — not folklore, but lived experience. Second, the reciprocity. The tradition Oo described — corn left on a stump, fish left in return — echoes accounts from other regions where Indigenous and old settler families spoke of leaving offerings and receiving them back. It's a relationship, not a sighting. Third, the moral weight of the encounter. Yates didn't go looking for Sasquatch. He didn't want to see one. He heard a baby screaming for help and he went in, knowing the water could kill him. And the family came back — not in anger, but in acknowledgment. That's a story worth sitting with. ## Watch the Video This one is told in Yates's own voice, in his own words, with the kind of slow, deliberate pacing that comes from a man who has been carrying something for forty-three years and finally set it down. The full account — including what the baby looked like, what the family did around his fire, and what happened in the days after — is worth your time. Find it on YouTube and give it a listen. And when you're done, ask yourself the same question Yates has been asking himself since 1982: *What would you have done?*