Untitled Sighting

We were in Orleans, Ca., which is close to the Hoopa Indian Reservation.  I was visiting Joe and his Mom, because I have known them since I was about five or six years old.  My friend and I took a horse back ride in Humboldt county, up the Salmon River, with a guide that has cabins there.  He takes care of these cabins, and they are about a three-hour horse back ride, up the river.  I met James, the guide, through Joe’s Mom, because he was staying with her when I got to California. I can’t remember James’s last name. We stopped after about an hour and a half of riding, to water the horses, which was the Salmon River.  One of the horses got spooked, and was very jumpy, we thought maybe there was a mountain lion around or something like that.  All three of us saw this large ape looking thing walking along, like he was following us, so James jumps off his horse and threw a rock at the thing, but it wasn’t startled.  It just kind of backed off into the woods. We started to ride again, and we were following the river upstream to his cabins, and the river was way below us when we saw a large black ape looking creature down by the river again.  My friend Joe and I were kind of freaked out by the thing, but James said it had happened before and not to worry about it.   We got to the cabins later on in the afternoon, about one thirty or so.  We grabbed our rods to go to the river, because James said, “there is pretty good fly-fishing down there”.  Joe and I were down at the river, when we saw this thing again.  We took off and told James that it was on the other side of the river, up the embankment, and in the trees.  So, he grabbed his rifle and went to where we were fishing, but it was gone. So, that night we were sitting on his porch telling stories about what we thought this thing was, when James said “that what we had seen was a bigfoot, and he had encountered him several times before”. James continued, saying “that it goes up into the mountains several times during the summer”.  Then we heard something by the tree line, and his horses were jumpy again. So, we just sat there and waited to see or hear anything again. All we saw was a black outline in the trees, which startled us again. The next day, James's water supply, from the river, was clogged up somewhere up the river.  He has this thing where the water from the river drains into, and he can get running water to his cabin. So, we all took a walk to see if we could find the problem, and when we found it, the thing that the water drained into was busted up.  It was stepped on by something, and we blamed bigfoot, and that’s pretty much it for the story. James said “That it wasn’t uncommon to see a bigfoot this time of the year, a lot of people have seen it”.  Well, that is pretty much a common thing around there, I guess? When I got back to North Dakota, I was watching this program on the discovery channel where they were talking about bigfoot, and I saw this same store in Orleans.