Chapter Four: Field Note, page 6

About a week ago, I made a two hour hike in Osceola Forest, a vast swamp most years. I found a trail that was open to vehicles and then a little way off that trail another trail took me to a big food plot. I was very surprised to find one in a national forest and guess that it is the work of the Osceola Stillhunters Association. Years ago, I talked with the founder of the association and attended one of its meetings. I was impressed with how closely the members tried to work with the national forest staff. I walked along part of the food plot and saw no tracks of any kind.This must have been due to the lack of rain as there appears to be very little to eat in these pine flatlands. I was pleased with my new Ecco hiking boots though as they were very comfortable on my pancake-flat feet. There were only a few mosquitoes which will soon change as the rains come and the weather warms. Then there will be hordes of them.
If you have any questions or comments or sightings of Bigfoot or have seen signs, please call me at 352-359-0850. If I don't answer, please leave a message.

Possible Tracks Of Gorilla or Baby Bigfoot, page 5

After talking to the hunter who had the creature suddenly appear under the tree he was perched in, Ida Rae Snyder and I drove to a place on the Santa Fe River near where the New River joins it to see if I could find any tracks. I found one and a half tracks (the second one had been partially obliterated by a vehicle track). Foolishly, I did not measure them, but they seemed to be about five inches long and a couple of inches wide. There was a gap in the track in the very middle, extending all the way across as if there was an indentation, possibly for grasping branches. I caution you about this because I suspect that at this stage my interpretation of tracks may be like explaining Rorscharch figures: it is what I am thinking about that creates the reality. It also seemed that the toe imprints consisted of one circle for each toe. I found a barefoot cracker's track and that was decidely different. For one thing, I could clearly see the imprint of toes. They did not appear as circles. Ida Rae agreed the tracks were diffferent. I questioned her on this, and she assured me she was not saying that just to agree with me. I then went home and came back with bananas and an apple. However, they stayed on the ground for weeks before they disappeared. I saw no more tracks. I did take two pictures of the one complete track with Ida Rae's camera and hope I can secure them when they are developed. If it is possible to put them on this blog, I will try to get help to make that possible. I have not heard of any more sightings or pictures. Big game season has ended, and hunters are probably bringing in their trail cameras.
Comments or questions? Please call me at 352-359-0849. Peter "Two-Guns" Nickerson

Chapter Two: Hunter In Tree; Someone On Ground Below, page 1

Last week, I found a middle-aged hunter at Wayne Cox's C&S Sports and asked him if he had not seen the gorilla or baby bigfoot. He had and related the story to me in careful detail. Like every conversation I relate, I am paraphrasing unless I specifically note that I am recording conversation verbatim. "I was up in my tree stand and had seven deer come by.The leaves were so dry you could hear them coming from a long ways off. It was almost dark when suddenly he was there, on the ground just under me. I had not heard a sound. It was so dark all I could see was a form. He continued walking around the tree until he hit the scent trail I made walking up to the tree. Then he ran about ten feet. Again, he was absolutely silent. At this point Ida Rae walked into the store. She was obviously tired of waiting for me in the car and ready to go so I did not ask him if he had been afraid to come down from the tree, what the creature did when he did come down, and if he could see if the person was standing or on all fours. This hunter is a regular at Wayne's store so I will try to ask him these questions next time.
Do gorillas know to walk silently in the jungle-woods? If not, they could probably learn very quickly. Don't they share about ninety percent of the same genes we humans have? One would expect Bigfoot to be very woods-wise. I guess the first question to ask is if it is even possible to walk and run in the woods without making a sound. If you say no, then the hunter was either mistaken or we obviously have an animal with that ability. Where did he come from? To be complete, I knew an excellent hunter in Newport News, Kenny Something. He would set his decoys up and sleep in his boat with his Chesapeake all night to be there when the ducks came in the next morning. Kenny told me that many times he had deer walk right up to him, and he never heard them. I can remember one time that happened to me: I was on a stand waiting for the dogs and drivers to push a buck my way when suddenly there was a buck and his small harem of does in the leaves about fifty yards away staring at me. It was like God had placed them there. I had not heard a thing. But for an animal to run ten feet without making a sound?
If anyone has any comments or sightings, please call me, Two-Guns, at 352-359-0850.

Reports So Far, p.2

The third report came from a man who had been hunting with his buddy in Lulu, Florida, which is not far from the Osceola Forest (swamp) which is connected to Pinhook Swamp which is in turn connected to Okefenokee Swamp. All that makes it the biggest wildland left east of the Mississippi. This is what he said (unless I tell you differently, these quotes are paraphrases, not exact recordings of what anyone says) : "My buddy and I were hunting up in Lulu when we smelled the awful smell and heard something growling in the thick brush. Since we only had muzzleloaders, we decided to back out of there."
While writing these three sightings, I have thought of a fourth one. Ida Rae Snyder and I went up to the Okeefenokee Swamp, and I asked around for sightings. I hear of two: a man who worked at a campgrounds claimed to have seen them and another man at Wal-Mart told me a gentleman had reported a sighting of one on the St. Mary River. We drove to the campground, and I asked around for the man who had supposedly seen the bigfoots. A female staff member said he had gone home. She was very reticent, and I learned nothing from her beyond that. A male staff member was more loquacious, saying that the man who claimed to have seen bigfoots saw all kinds of strange things. He was very dismissive of the man's reliability.
For several months, the local hunters have been seeing what appears to be a gorilla going up and down the New River and the Santa Fe Rivers in Baker, Bradford, and Union counties here in north central Florida. In October, I listened to several archers at C&S Sports in Lake Butler discuss their sightings. Even Wayne Cox, the owner of the store, had heard him moving about. Another bowman had seen a shape that did not resemble anything he had ever seen in the jungle-woods here. Wayne had talked to a man who had seen the creature walking. Since he claimed to have killed fifty bears in West Virginia, he knew it was not a bear by the walk he walked. The creature was walking on two feet then and was about four feet tall. Someone in Baker County ran the creature up a tree and called state fish and wildlife. Game wardens came out and said he was too high up in the tree for their dart gun, identified him as an "orange" variety of the fox squirrel, most probably, and left him a box of doughnuts. Surely, game wardens know that squirrels don't eat doughnuts. When they came back the next day, he was gone. I have heard from a black panther colleague, Mikus Singleton, in Georgetown, South Carolina that it is standard fish and wildlife practice to kill any monkeys or other simians found in the wild. I hope fellow hunters will not do such a cruel thing, but leave the gorilla alone for all of us to enjoy. More importantly, he has a right to his life just as you have a right to yours. Don't tell me you need to kill him for meat because with the high cost of hunting licenses, club dues, rifles and other gear, including all kinds of four wheel drive vehicles, you could stay home and eat porterhouse all year and still save money. One idiot out there makes all of us look bad. It's not fair, but that's the way it goes with people who operate on an emotional level instead of a rational one. Woods 'N Water , a magazine out of Perry, Florida, which is loaded each month with pictures and interesting articles about hunting and fishing and other outdoor matters, ran a little story about the creature asking if he were a gorilla or a baby bigfoot.

Bigfoot Reports So Far:10/30/07

So far, I have collected only three more reports of Bigfoot sightings, as I can recollect. The first one happened several years ago as I was asking a man in his twenties if he had ever seen a panther. He mentioned that his father swore that he saw a Bigfoot swimming in the Santa Fe River at the Worthington Springs Bridge in Union County, Florida. About a year ago, Ida Rae Snyder and I were talking to Wayne Cox, owner of C&S Sports in Lake Butler, Florida. Wayne is a five-time Florida State Champion Turkeycaller and owns an outfitting company for hunting wild hogs and the Osceola turkey, which is only found in parts of Florida. As an aside, I would like to encourage people to patronize sporting goods stores that are run by outdoorsmen. It is extremely difficult to make a living from the outdoors without destroying it as in "development". I know that the prices are higher, and I myself sometimes have to shop at Wal-Mart instead of at Wayne's because the money is too tight. But if you can support these little businesses. These people love the outdoors, they have time and motivation to talk to you, and they are a wealth of information. In addition, if you have an outgoing personality, you can often strike up a conversation with other customers in the store. You would probably not do that at Wal-Mart.As we talked about Bigfoot, Wayne suddenly suddenly remembered an incident that he had related only to his father and had forgotten. One summer when he was a teenager, which would be about eighteen years ago, he and some buddies drove into the family's lease on the Santa Fe River near Worthington Springs in Union County, Florida. There had been a lot of rain recently so they parked the truck before they got down the river bottom and walked to the river. They planned to spend the weekend fishing and camping. Everything seemed okay so they walked back to the truck. There in the dirt road were huge footprints, about size fifteen. The footprints went right to the bed of the pickup and walked into the bed. He did not use the bumper; he simply walked into the back of the pickup. He then opened the cooler and rummaged through it. I do not remember if I asked what he took, if anything. I will have to do that. But Wayne was adamant that none of their camping gear was touched. He seemed only interested in food.

Preface, page 1

When I was a boy, my nightly prayers included praying for Bigfoot and asking God to allow me to hunt for him on my honeymoon. At that age, I knew people went on trips for their honeymoons so I guess that it why I made that request. But as I grew older, my interests changed, and the bigfoot fever only cropped up twice. The first happened as a diversion from some traumatic events in my life, and my sister, Susan, generously sent me several books on the subject. The other time occurred when a ranger at a park in Suffolk, Virginia reported that he saw he smelled the skunk ape. Eventually, my family and another family ventured south to the park and spent the night camping. Except for the rain driving us out of our tent and having to spend the rest of the night in the car, the trip was uneventful. I met the ranger who had reported smelling bigfoot, and it was obvious he wished he had never said anything. The other rangers were still chuckling about his reports, and he had a big streak of white in his hair that I thought probably came from the stress of the ridicule. I did not dare to ask if it had.
This online book will be in the form of a journal which is the way I like to document my undertakings beginning with a project when I was a boy to make bantam chickens wild to create a game bird for archers. After I left for college, my brothers would report that they had seen my chickens coming out of the woods to the paved road probably to pick up grit. However, the flock did not become self-sustaining. There were simply too many predators. I think a journal is practically apt for a subject like bigfoot because it is more believable as it is presented incrementally. At this point, I have not seen a bigfoot or any signs of him. However, I live close to Osceola Forest (actually a swamp) and the Okeefenokee Swamp. Both areas have had numerous bigfoot sightings, and the Okeefenokee Swamp is the biggest piece of wild land east of the Mississippi. Plus, it has been closed to human use, except in very controlled ways, since it was acquired by the federal government in the early 1900s. In addition, nearby Camp Blanding, a military base by Starke, Florida has had sightings. I hope to increase my travel to these places and report positive evidence for the existence of bigfoot.