My wife and I are originally from Cincinnati. However, for the past thirty
years we've traveled all over North America with our camper and boat and enjoyed the
beauty and the bounty of this beautiful continent. We always make it back to
Cincinnati for the holidays with our children and grandchildren, but the rest of the
year we spend on the road. In nineteen ninety nine, we were in
a community in Alaska where we liked a salmon fish and to hunt cariboo.
We always gave ninety nine percent of our cats, along with two cariboo that
we took there once to the locals. The meat was more than we could
eat, and the indigenous people appreciated the extra food. It earned us some
lifelong friendships. You couldn't imagine our joy when on this year one of the
young tribe members offered to take us to one of his spots to fish,
a place where few outsiders have ever been. It demonstrated his trust in us,
which was a great honor. The sight was nothing short of amazing.
It was everything our young friend had promised, and the wide stream, nestled
between two small mountains and surrounded by woods, was no deeper than our knees.
The water was crystal clear with a sandy bottom, and it was teeming
with salmon. Two other members of the tribe were there when we arrived.
They recognized us and offered a friendly wave. The eight large bears were also
enjoying the abundant salmon. But our friend told us not to panic. Don't
bother them, and they'll leave you alone, he said. He explained that
they too were fishing for salmon and chasing us off would require too much energy.
And then he said, but if they grab one of our fish,
just cut the line and start over, or they will go after our catch.
Just let them have it. There's plenty more fish out there. We'd
been fishing for two hours and everyone was catching enormous kings. The bears were
having a good day as well. We were all having a great time when
we heard a roar from across the creek. Two of the other fishermen left.
They didn't even gather their catch. The bears all stopped fishing and ran
into the woods away from the sound. Our guide said, we have to
go now. I must have given him a defiant look, because he added,
we need to leave now and leave the catch. We sensed the urgency
in his voice and we knew there was danger present, so we followed him
back to his truck. He didn't speak a word until we were back on
the main road, and I noticed that he kept checking his rear view mirror.
What's going on? I kept asking, was it a bear? What
made that noise? And why did the other bears run off? The suspense
was killing me, but he would never answer. Finally, once we were
on the main road, he said, Kushtaka. What in the world is
Kushtaka? I asked. I could see that he was clearly upset to even
speak of it. He paused for a minute and gathered his words before saying,
you do not live in this land, and you should not know all
of its secrets. But Kushtaka is he who rules over all the land.
He paused for a minute, and then he continued, He lays claim to
all and requires tributes from us to hunt and fish his land. That is
why we left our catch. If we hadn't done that, it would have
brought bad luck to our people and we would have faced his anger. He
refused to speak any more about it, and when he dropped us off at
the small campground outside of town where we had made camp. He told us
to be ready to go by eight am tomorrow, and then he left.
We spent the night trying to envision exactly what Kushtaka was. Was it a
bear or some sort of monster. Years later we learned that Kushtaka is called
the otterman. At the time, we never would have come up with that
in any way, shape or form or fashion. Over the next four days,
our guide took us to more commonly fished and therefore more crowded areas.
He refused to take us back to his honey hole, but on the fifth
day we told him we were going to go out on our own. We
found our way back up to the secret spot where the bear had returned and
were feasting on the fatty fish. There were no other fishermen around. Jesse
and I concealed ourselves in the thick brush along the creek and waited as the
bears walked within feet of us, not even giving us a second look.
At four pm, the roar bellowed again, sending the bears fleeing into the
bush and leaving the stream for Kushtaka. Once the bears were gone and everything
settled down. Three enormous creatures, a huge male, a female with sagging
breasts, and a younger male walked into the creek and began to grab fish.
They'd shoved the belly of one fish into their mouths and eat the eggs
with one hand while reaching down into the water to grab another fish with the
other. Their mouths seemed to stretch from ear to ear. The bodies were
completely covered in hair except for their faces and the palms of their hands,
and their large black eyes were set further apart than a human's. Their noses
gave the appearance of being smashed into their faces. Their foreheads sloped back to
conical heads. We couldn't see their ears for all the hair. They stood
in the middle of the creek, knees bent and scooped up the salmon with
large hands that were attached to arms that extended below their knees. Eventually,
they squatted or sat down in the creek and used their arms to guide the
fish into their lips, and after they took one large bite from the fish's
bellies, they'd cast them aside and grabbed the next one. More fish bodies
floated past us than we could count The male stood nine feet tall, and
it was at least five feet across. His hair was black. Gray was
mixed in throughout his hair, but mostly concentrated on his chin and chest.
The female was more of a reddish brown. She stood two feet shorter than
the male, and the hair on her breast was much more sparse than on
the rest of her body. She wasn't nearly as broad as the male.
The juvenile was quite a bit smaller than either of the adults. He was
the same size as our young Indian guide and covered in deep brown hair.
Remained focused on the salmon for quite some time. They only stopped eating to
defecate or urinate. Even then, they didn't get out of the water,
which might be the reason their stool is never found. I brought my thirty
five millimeter camera and I managed to snap off two whole thirty six exposure rolls
of film unnoticed. The rushing water masked the clicking sound of the camera shutter.
A storm was approaching, and when the wind kicked up we retreated.
We were unobserved. I couldn't wait to see how our pictures turned out.
We drove straight to a little store to have them developed. That is how
it was before digital cameras, laptops in the Internet. Jesse and I had
just spent two hours observing three animals that were thought to exist only in myth
or at best, rarely seen from the Patterson Gimlin film. Most evidence was
footprints. But now we had solid proof that these animals exist and we could
give them the protection they need. As we watched, we'd heard them vocalizing
with each other. There was a mix of clacking and popping sounds made by
their lips and teeth, combined with purring and cooing. They even had a
language that sounded like Chinese or Japanese. Three days later, when we went
to pick up our pictures, we were heartbroken when we were handed an empty
envelope. We decided it didn't matter, though we were already planning our next
trip to the creek. We would get more pictures. Two elders were standing
by our truck when we walked outside. They asked us to join them for
a ride in their beat up suburban, and we excitedly jumped into the back
seat. When a ride was off, it usually meant that they were going
to show us something special, and in the past they'd taken us to see
several secret tribal areas, including burial grounds, totem poles, and some drawings
on cliffs and rocks. That day, there wasn't much conversation on the trip
other than a little small talk. We drove for half an hour along dirt
trails and creek crossings until we arrived in an old log cabin that looked like
it had been abandoned. The roof was peeled back, the windows were knocked
out, the door was missing. A few outbuildings looked like they had been
bulldozed over. It had been left to nature, and nature was greedily taking
it back. We pulled up to the cabin and the two elders got out
and went to sit on a couple of big rocks, and they waited for
us to approach them. Before the chief began to speak. We know of
your curiosity, and we worry about your lives as well as the lives of
our people when you leave. Your photos were destroyed, but we cannot stop
you from going back to take more. I want you to know everything that
will occur if you do. This cabin belonged to a family from the Lower
States, he said, gesturing with his hand. They wanted to live off
the grid, as they put it, to teach their children how to live
off the land. They lived here for a couple of years, and they
were well liked by our people. We shared many of our traditions with them
to help make their lives easier. To continue. The story was becoming difficult
for the chief, and the other elder took over. The father had constructed
a smokehouse for the salmon he had taken that year, and the bears toward
apart, stealing most of their catch. This led to concerns that there would
not be enough food to get through the winter. They drove to town and
bought several boxes of ammo for the hunting rifle. The next week, he
returned to town to buy more salt to cure the meat from a huge moose
he had harvested. He told us then that he was afraid the bear would
return. The old man lowered his head and thought for a moment before he
continued. We listened to his story about his moose hunt and about all of
his concerns, and we realized that this might be kushtaka. We advised him
to leave a quarter of the meat out further away from the house, but
he said they had taken enough and he wasn't giving up any more. That
night, he had strung cans with rocks in them to alert him of the
meat thieves, and sure enough, that night he heard something and ran out
to chase it offer to shoot it. We know he hit something from the
blood that trailed into the bush and the large footprints we found along the trail.
By this time, the chief regained his composure and continued the story.
We grew concerned a couple of days later when we did not see him or
his family back in town. They never came back. Several of our tribe
drove up there to find his cabin torn open like you see it now.
All the other buildings had been beat down to the ground, and there were
kushtaka footprints all over their home site. We found the father curled up right
over there. He pointed to an old mountain hemlock tree. He was clinging
to life, but twisted and beaten. His body was covered in blood and
his legs were broken, and we later learned that he'd suffered internal damage.
We rushed him to town, where he was taken by helicopter to anchorage for
treatment. He kept muttering they came, They came, and they took my
wife and daughter. He never said anything else, just those same words.
Over and over. State troopers came to investigate, and they questioned us.
They asked us if he could have killed his family, and we didn't believe
that he could have. The troopers concluded that it must have been a bear
that did all that damage. Again, the chief stopped and shook his head.
But we knew better. We are of the land and of the water.
We could see the tracks and the claw marks on the building. We
followed the blood trail before the troopers destroyed the evidence. We saw where the
injured kushtaka ran toward the river. We saw where it had fallen several times
before it was picked up and carried by other Kushtaka. We did not venture
further. We did not want to risk the consequences of trespassing on kushtaka land.
The chief's eyes filled with tears as he said the wife was nowhere to
be found, nor was the daughter. Our stories tell of many times when
kushtaka would come to our villages and take women and children. The chief told
us that he had driven to the hospital to visit the man, and he
found him curled up in his bed, repeating. They came. Over the
next five years, the chief made that same trip every year, and then
some of his family from the Lower forty eight came and took the father home.
The chief told us that he felt responsible for what happened because he knew
that it was Kushtaka when the father first came to town for the AMMO,
but he didn't tell him about the beast, and he said he should have.
Several hunters from our village came up missing that year, and half of
our dogs disappeared. He said they were dragged away in the middle of the
night. Koshtaka came to take his revenge, and just like he took his
revenge on the father for shooting one of his own. He let him live,
but he broke his legs so he couldn't walk. He could only lie
there and watch. Hearing this story, Jesse and I began to think about
what would happen if we had taken those photos and then showed them to the
wrong people. This peaceful slice of heaven would be overrun with people trying to
kill or capture one and the people who would pay dearly for it would be
the local tribe. We decided to leave the Kushtak up beat. We made
a few more trips up there and tried to earn the tribes trust again,
but it was never the same. The community never showed the trust that they
once had. They were always nice to us and respectful, they just didn't
share stories or traditions with us ever again. We never returned to the God's
honey Hole after that. We saw the Guide a few times, but he
always turned and walked the other way. He never spoke to us again.
Jesse and I eventually decided never to return to the village. We'd lost the
joy we once felt by being there, and there was a costly lesson and
trust mmm.