The Importance of Hunting

Jane writes "I am a 29 year old mother from eastern Kentucky, and I had an incredibly strange encounter while deer hunting with our oldest daughter last year. I am skeptical about telling this experience, just because I am skeptical myself, but here goes nothin'….

Last year I had promised our oldest daughter, who was 6 at the time, that I would take her deer hunting on our property opening day of modern gun season. My husband and father I own around 40 acres on the Montgomery/ Menifee line, the entirety of which is almost completely wooded, and goes all the way to the top of Turkey Knob, which then backs up to hundreds of acres of uninhabited forest. We woke up that morning and we're running a little behind because I had to feed our baby, and make sure our little boy and husband were set for breakfast.

Once we headed into the woods the sky was starting to get lighter and I made to decision to find a good spot to sit on the ground because by the time we made it to our stand it would have already been daylight. Ended up at a tree that backed up to the top of Turkey knob, and we could see over the ravine into the ridge line where a big game trail was. We sat there for prob 30 mins or so and my little girl fell asleep in my lap, I was watching some gray squirrels play on a log down the hill in front of us when I heard a baby cry.

The squirrels ran off and everything got really quiet. I thought maybe I was just hearing things, (our baby was only 4 months old at the time and I was still breastfeeding) but then I heard it again and again. I felt really disoriented, like I couldn't figure out where the cry was coming from. While I was trying to figure out where the cry was coming from, I heard something BARRELING down the side of the mountain behind me. We have horses and it was every bit as loud as a horse would be galloping full force through the woods. My little girl was still asleep in my lap so I couldn't jump up without waking her up and her making noise so I just sat as still as possible and grabbed my knife on my side (my rifle was leaned up against the tree). Out the side of my eye I saw something huge with long black hair coming down the ledge right behind me to the left of my tree. I thought it was a bear spooked from all the gunshots until I saw it's face out the side of my eye. It was no bear.

It was looking behind it, and when it looked forward it was like it was surprised that it saw me there, furrowed it's brow, grunted and acted like it was going to charge me, but then, and I truly believe this, either saw I was a woman, or was holding a sleeping child, and it's expression immediately softened and hunkered down, held both its huge hands out like to say "it's ok, it's ok" slowly backed away about three steps and turned And bounded back up the cliff completely out sight. I was fully prepared to fight that thing to the death to protect my girl, but thankfully it didn't come to that. Wasn't even that worried waking her up and walking back out of the woods.

Felt like an unspoken thing between mothers to be honest. I have no idea what I saw, but I am almost certain she was female. When she stood all the way up she was probably six foot tall or so. She had a gray skin on her hands and face, human eyes. The whole thing had me dazed and confused. I haven't told anyone this for fear of sounding like an absolute crack job. There's been multiple odd things happen on this property prior to this, and a weird occurrence that has happened since then. I'd be happy to tell the whole story."