1994 Camcorder Footage: Trapper Rescues Infant Bigfoots in BC

There's a video that dropped recently from the Bigfoot's Trail channel that I haven't been able to stop thinking about, and if you haven't seen it yet, you're going to want to carve out some time for this one. The story centers on a 76-year-old trapper named Hamish Linkfist, who worked the same country outside Dease Lake in the far north of British Columbia for nearly 50 years. For 33 of those years, he kept a secret that nobody in that valley would have believed. In the winter of 1994, he pulled two freezing infant Sasquatch out of a collapsed snow shelter at the edge of his beaver pond and carried them into his cabin to keep them alive by the wood stove. The reason this story exists at all is because his 19-year-old granddaughter was there that week with a borrowed camcorder. She'd been sent up to film the property before it sold, and she has been honest about the fact that she didn't want to be there. Her grandfather, she thought, was cold. Said maybe 40 words a day. Wouldn't look you in the eye. She figured she'd count the days and leave. But then the storm came. Three feet of snow. The power line went down. The road behind her ceased to exist. And on the morning of the sixth day, Hamish came up out of the treeline moving faster than his hips should have allowed and told her, in the first full sentence he'd spoken to her all week, that there was something down by the pond and she needed to bring the camera. What she filmed on that trail, and what she saw at the collapsed deadfall where a big spruce had made a low shelter over the ice, was two young Sasquatch curled around each other, freezing to death. The larger one might have come up to her knee. They were covered in dark, shaggy hair, brown going almost black where the snow had wet it. The smaller one was barely moving, tucked underneath the way a body curls to keep the last of its heat. And it was the faces that undid her. Not animal faces. Wide and flat, with dark eyes set forward, and a look in them she has said she still doesn't have a word for. A look that was asking. Hamish's theory, which he only spoke once and never wrote down, was that the mother had been caught out in the open when the storm came down too far from the timber to make it back with two young ones. She'd tucked them into the best shelter she could find and gone for help, and the three feet of snow that fell after had buried the way back and erased every track. He thought she'd been out there in it the whole time the two infants sat by his fire. The next morning, the whole group came out of the timber and stood in his yard. The granddaughter filmed the treeline. She has never fully believed what she saw, though she was standing in the snow when it happened. The tape stayed sealed in a cedar chest for 31 years. The reason it stayed sealed is the same reason it was finally let out, and that's where the story takes a turn that hits differently. Hamish had been a faller for the logging outfits before he became a trapper. He'd cut more timber in his life than he could count. He knew exactly what a cut block looks like when the machines are done. And when the machines finally came for the trees in that valley, the old man stood between them and the timber, and he fought. His granddaughter has said she thinks that's part of why he fought the way he did at the end, because he was not guessing at what was coming for those trees. He had done it himself. He knew the sound and the smell and the after of it. The closest thing to proof that exists is a plain school exercise book, the kind a child carries to a rural school, its cover soft with handling. It's not a diary. There are no feelings in it. It's a record, one line per entry, the way a man logs a trap line or a rain gauge. It runs from the winter of 1961 to three weeks before the old man died. The dogs wouldn't go to the pond that week. They stopped at a certain birch on the trail and sat and whined and would not follow. On the third night, Hamish came in from the woodshed and stood at the kitchen window a long time in the dark, not moving, looking out at the treeline. His granddaughter filmed the back of him. A big old man in the dark watching the trees. She has said that at the time it read as nothing, and that only later did she understand he had not been watching the way a man watches for something he fears. He had been watching the way a man looks in on someone. Every morning that week there was a fresh stack of split spruce on the porch rail, neat, the pieces laid the same direction. Her grandfather told her he did it in the evenings. But she had watched what it cost his hips to swing a maul even once, and some corner of her mind knew the old man had not stacked that wood. The Dease Lake area and the surrounding Cassiar country have long been considered prime Sasquatch habitat by researchers and longtime witnesses. The dense, remote old-growth forest, the harsh winters, and the network of beaver ponds and creek systems make it exactly the kind of country where a family group could live for generations without ever being seen by the wrong person. Stories like Hamish's are part of why so many old-timers in that part of British Columbia simply do not log certain drainages, and part of why the timber in those valleys has stayed standing as long as it has. The video tells the whole account in the old man's own words from the ledger, and in his granddaughter's words from what she saw and what he told her over the 31 years after. The two sources agree on the shape of it, even where memory has softened the edges. Go watch it. It's one of those stories that sits with you after, and it raises a lot more questions than it answers.