Colorado Warden: Bigfoot Mother Sought My Help For Injured Child

There's something about a story like this that just stops you in your tracks. A wildlife officer with 22 years on the job, a mother holding out her injured child in the glow of his headlights, and a choice made in the dark that he says was never an accident. The Deep Forest Tales channel recently shared an account that has that rare quality of making you lean in closer to the screen. The story comes from a man named Rufus Bllye, who served as a district wildlife manager for the Colorado Division of Wildlife from 1971 until his retirement in 2006. His territory covered Ouray County and the surrounding San Juan Mountains in southwestern Colorado, some of the most rugged and beautiful country in the country. The kind of place where 10,000 square miles of vertical terrain can knock the certainty out of a young man inside two winters. The night in question was October 1993, and Rufus was driving Owl Creek Pass Road, a gravel route that climbs east out of the valley north of Ridgway, up through ranch country and aspen groves, over the pass at better than 10,000 feet, and down toward Silver Jack. By mid-October, the leaf-peepers are gone, the cattle have come down, and the pass is a week or two from closing under snow. A man can drive that road at night and meet nothing but his own headlights. That's exactly what Rufus was doing around 11 p.m. when his headlights caught something that stopped him cold. Standing beside the road was a Bigfoot, eight feet of dark hair and shoulders, calm as a fence post where the road cut through the timber. And in its arms, held the way a mother holds a hurt child, was a smaller one. Its leg was wrong. Its face was pressed into the big one's chest. Rufus had spent his entire career responding to animals in trouble. Hawks with broken wings, deer clipped on the highway, bear cubs whose mothers had been shot. He had learned more about how animals carry pain and how they decide whether to trust a man than any book could have taught him. And he says that mother did not run when his truck stopped. She had been waiting for the truck to stop. She had picked the road, the hour, and he believes, she had picked him. What happened over the next hour on that road, and in the nights that followed at his own home, Rufus describes as something that grew directly out of his decades of working with frightened and injured creatures. He talks about trust as a procedure, not a gift. You move at half the speed your body wants. You never look a frightened thing in the eye until it has looked you over first. You announce your hands. You give the animal the decision at every step that can possibly be its decision. He says everything he did that night came out of that long apprenticeship, and he believes to his soul that the mother recognized the craft when she saw it. This was not Rufus's first hint that something unknown lived in those mountains. Five years earlier, in the fall of 1988, he was camped alone above timberline on a poaching case when the basin below him filled with a call he had never heard in 17 years of mountain work. It started lower than any elk bugle, rose and held, and ended in a series of flat wooden knocks evenly spaced, like a man swinging a bat against a dead snag. Every horse he had picketed stood stone still with their ears locked on that timber for half an hour after it stopped. He knew elk, lion, bear, every owl in the state, and what men sound like when they are drunk in the woods at night. It was none of those. What makes this account stand out is the weight Rufus places on protecting the location. He will not name the drainage. He says the ones this story is about are still in that country, and he has every reason to believe the young one he helped on that October night is alive in it tonight, grown with young of its own. The patrol logs from those years were paper, boxed and purged on a schedule long ago, and he wrote nothing in them anyway. The only man who could walk you from Owl Creek Pass Road to the mouth of that drainage is Rufus Bllye, and when he is gone, the door goes with him. There is a line in the story that captures something a lot of researchers have tried to put into words for decades. Rufus says that by 1993, he knew the way a man knows his own diagnosis that everything truly wild in his district was living on borrowed country and running out of dark. He says the mother was not asking a stranger. She was asking the one man in the county who had spent 22 years grieving in advance for everything like her. That is the kind of detail that stays with you. A mother choosing a particular man, at a particular hour, on a particular road, because she recognized something in him that the rest of the world rarely sees. The full account is worth sitting down with, and the channel tells it in Rufus's own voice, which gives it a gravity that a summary can only hint at. If you have not come across this one yet, it is well worth your evening.