Hunting Bigfoot: 4 Things You Learn Chasing Fiction

4 Drinking Outdoors Is Fun

My new friend Dan isn't the sort of man who appreciates small talk, pop culture, or me. But I bought road beers and we were pretty much set to have an adventure. We drove about 20 minutes out of town to a massive swath of forest that Dan told me had a big lake somewhere in the middle of it and was the place some people said Bigfoot had been spotted. Already it had grown from maybe one guy to some people. I was super psyched.

In preparation for our journey, we packed not just beers but several snacks, an emergency flare (lest Bigfoot abduct us while a helicopter is flying overhead), and outdoorsy crap like a compass, a small hatchet, some matches, and a mickey of whiskey.

I'm not much for hiking but luckily neither is Dan, so we were in the woods for a solid 15 minutes before we stopped to have a drink. Our brew of choice was a fine Canadian ale known as Flying Monkeys Smashbomb Atomic IPA. I bought it solely based on the silly name, but it was actually pretty fantastic and I solidly recommend it for all your Bigfoot-hunting needs.

Dan and I had a good sit in the woods, during which Dan proceeded to tell me about his younger days in a biker gang and a variety of related activities I won't relate here, because I'm dumb but not that dumb. This was some secret-keeping beer we were having, and Dan may not have been the best tour guide in retrospect, but here we were, in the woods, with a gun. A gun and stories of Dan using a pool cue to destroy an entire room full of men in the most brutal, Deadpool ways possible. I'm glad I met this strange fellow.

Several beers later and Dan and I were having a pretty decent time, still within sight of the road. But alas, this was no joke expedition ... or, well, it was, but I was still looking for Bigfoot. We had work to do.

3 Losing Yourself Is Easier Than Finding Bigfoot

We set out in a direction I will call straight ahead. I know we packed a compass, but it was packed and, honestly, would it have made a difference to know if we were headed north or east? How could it have? We were looking for a legendary man-ape.

Dan told me as we walked that coyote activity in this area has been very much on the rise lately. There's just a huge population of them. I've never seen a coyote outside of a Warner Bros. cartoon and was having a hard time reconciling my image of a cartoon wielding an anvil with an actual wild dog that probably has rabies tearing open my scrotum. Dan assured me they rarely attack humans unless they're starving or in large groups, then, without missing a beat, added, "Or maybe not." I almost forgot Dan is not a woodsman, merely a fellow drunk I met at a bar, and I am about as much an expert on what we're doing as he is.

We stumbled upon a number of tracks that could have belonged to Foot, but definitely not Bigfoot, unless I have been grossly misled regarding sizing in this matter. Most were probably squirrels and assorted other woodland turds, but there were definitely some deer tracks as well, and in my mind that was close. The bigger the animal, the closer to Bigfoot. If we found moose tracks we'd be pretty much where we needed to be.

We trudged on through snow-covered underbrush, slightly tipsy and with no clear direction. Dan had brought with him a 20 gauge shotgun, which he said would probably work for taking out Bigfoot if we got him to stand still long enough. I'm no gunsmith and assumed any shotgun was probably good for blowing a Bigfoot's leg off, until Dan told me this was his rabbit-hunting gun. He had a license only for small game this year, and he wasn't going to get fined by bringing a higher-powered rifle into the woods when it wasn't season for hunting something like elk. Dan had no faith in our expedition. Although he did point out that, if we shot Bigfoot with the 20 gauge it'd probably slow him down enough for some photos, so I should be fast with my phone and snap a pic or two. Maybe see if he's down for a selfie.

2 Winter Is Stupid

The worst time to do anything is winter time. According to my phone, it was about 4 below zero. For you Celsius types, that's 20 below. Why the hell would Bigfoot be out in this silly-ass weather? Even bears have the intelligence to hibernate. Bigfoot should be snoozing under a pile of tarps in an old fishing cabin.

There was a brief moment when I encountered a smell that could be best described as unwashed skunk vagina somewhere out in the woods. I heard a rustling in the underbrush, and I thought we might be on to something. For those who doubt the veracity of my claims, I have photo evidence:

Like all good photos of Bigfoot, this one mostly requires you to be as drunk as I was when I took it and to have a lot of faith that I know the sight/smell of Bigfoot's dick when I see it. But for real, do you see that in there? I know it looks like a twig, but I ask you, what do you think Bigfoot's dick would look like? Probably a big, veiny twig, right?

Before I string you along anymore, I'll let you know that was a twig. Bigfoot's dick, even if it is twig-like, is probably attached to a Bigfoot and not a tree like this one was. But did you feel the suspense there for a second? Now you're living in my world. The world of a Bigfoot hunter!

1 Bigfoot Is Not Real

Let's assume for a moment Bigfoot is real, the title of this section notwithstanding. He's generally considered a "he" right? Not to point out the sex so much as the singular. There's just one. Bigfoot's a lone wolf, him and his veiny twig-dick, wandering the woods and stealing forest brides and whatnot. Most Bigfoot sightings have been in Washington state, California, and Oregon. He's basically a West Coast kind of guy. I'm on the East Coast, so right away my chances are pretty pathetic. Sure, New York and Ohio have some sightings, but so does Russia. Point is, I'm in the wrong neighborhood, and I'm looking for one guy. One big, hairy guy who makes a point of never being found, because no one's ever found him. Do you know what the odds are of me finding him?

I actually calculated the odds on this for you, in case you're not good at these complex, veiny equations. Keeping in mind the time of year Bigfoot is most often sighted in these various locations, as well as the time of day and methods used for tracking Bigfoot and the actual odds of me finding him here, at this time, were fuck no. Fuck no I can't find Bigfoot, because he's not real.

Consider that humankind has found the coldest natural object in the entire universe, fossils from the first living veiny beasts on Earth, that stupid affluenza kid, and numerous missing plane crashes. If there were a race of hairy man-beasts populating the Pacific Northwest or anywhere else in North America, there would have been some kind of definitive evidence proposed by people who are not named Bubba or Cooter.

Dan and I finished our beers in the woods. We found one track that was probably mine.

I also found a frozen turd that really made me laugh but the picture turned out pretty blurry due to my laughing as I took the photo. It wasn't a Bigfoot turd, probably a raccoon or something. Still, that's hilarious to me.

Dan decided he'd had enough of being in the woods with me, and I couldn't blame him. I'd mostly wasted our day and provided little to no purpose for our journey other than the laziest attempt ever to discover a cryptozoological legend. Fortunately, that made my attempt just as relevant as anyone else's, because come on. What would be a "serious" attempt at finding Bigfoot in 2016? Some kind of thermal-imaging drone and satellite tracking? That seems like an expensive prospect for a big fatty waste of time.

Dan called his wife to pick him up once we got back to the road. She seemed like a nice lady who could fight me and win with little effort. Neither of them offered me a ride. As I watched them drive off, I wondered if perhaps Bigfoot was now watching me from the trees and feeling a kinship with me as I, too, was now alone. But of course he wasn't, because remember, he doesn't exist. He and that veiny dick I've been asked to keep writing about are full-on fiction. No, the only stranger watching me from the woods was a friendly serial killer or public wanker.

I wondered why it is that so many people seem enamored with the idea of Bigfoot. Is it the mystery? The idea that, in a world of smartphones and WiFi and driverless cars, we could have somehow overlooked a man-beast living right under our noses? Possibly. Mostly, I think, it's what I like to call Dorf Contrarianism. This is the idea that a stupid person will dig in like a tick when confronted with something they feel threatened by, in an intellectual fashion, telling them they're wrong. The person doing it may not be trying to intimidate our Dorf, or even patronize them or talk down to them in any way, but that is how Dorf perceives it, because Dorf is not smart enough to know why it's happening but is smart enough to know they're being corrected. And they don't like it. So they outwardly refuse it so thoroughly they must embrace the very opposite. They must hunt Bigfoot, simply because he is not real. They must drink that moonshine because it could make them go blind. They must fuck that cousin even if the baby's going to always be leaning a little to the left. Such is the contrarian nature of Dorf. And that's what keeps Bigfoot alive.

Check out other mythical monsters of lore and bull crap in 5 Myths That People Don't Realize Are Admitted Hoaxes, and fear the shelled back of The Beast of Busco in 7 Monsters That Bigfoot Hunters Are Too Scared To Believe In.

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