Un-Explained Siting

This has been several years ago some time around 1996 or 1997, I can’t remember the year not. It was in September and very warm. A friend of mine and I decided we would take our mountain bikes for a ride down through what is called the basin in Poplar, North Carolina which is in Mitchell Co. This is about a 7 mile trip from the top of the mountain down and back out. We left my truck at the bottom and hauled the bikes up in my friends truck. After we made it down off the steep part of the mountain trail, the old road had some steep parts and we were pushing our bikes. We came around a bend in the road where there was a small hollow with some type of bushes that has little red berry’s. We heard a noise and looked, probably 35 yards away, I saw the back of something tall jump through the bushes. It looked maybe 8 or 10 feet tall.. All I saw was it’s back. It has long shaggy brown hair. I couldn’t see it’s head as it appeared in a leaping position going away from us. All I saw was the back of something large and hairy. I asked my friend what was that, he said I don’t know.. we knew it wasn’t a bear or a deer. The bear around here are back bear and they don’t have long hair, and neither do the white tail deer we have around here. What was so strange was we went over to the thicket to investigate. We stood silent for a minute or so and it got so quite. This is a very wooded place with leaves on the ground. We thought we could hear something run off. There was nothing. Just quite. We couldn’t find any track. None of the leaves on the other side of the thicket were disturbed as would have been natural if something had run up through the woods. The total quiet in the woods was kinda eerie, not even a bird sound. We are both experienced hunters and neither of us had ever seen anything like that.