Speaker 1: Now one of your pudding. I got a string going
Speaker 1: on here, something just because my dog. Something killed your dog,
Speaker 1: my dog. We're flying through the air over the tree.
Speaker 1: I don't know how it did it, Okay, Damn, I'm
Speaker 1: really confused. All I saw was my dog coming over
Speaker 1: the fence and he was dead. And once you hit
Speaker 1: the ground like, I didn't see any cars. All I
Speaker 1: saw was my dog coming over the fence. Sat, what
Speaker 1: are you putting? We got some wonder or something crawling
Speaker 1: around out here? Did you see what it was or
Speaker 1: was it was? Standing enough? I'm out here looking through
Speaker 1: the window now and I don't see anything. I don't
Speaker 1: want to go outside. Jesus quice, you better hello, get
Speaker 1: the body out here? What quen? I'm out there? I
Speaker 1: thought of a bit about tex forty nine. I don't
Speaker 1: know easy out there, Yeah, I'm walking right head. Listen closely,
Speaker 1: and I will tell you something that most people do
Speaker 1: not want to believe, something that those of us who
Speaker 1: live through it have carried in our hearts for more
Speaker 1: than sixty years. You see, when people think of sasquatch,
Speaker 1: when they imagine these beings that walk between our world
Speaker 1: and the wild places, they picture gentle giants. They imagine
Speaker 1: curious creatures peering from behind trees, maybe stealing a fish
Speaker 1: from a drying rack, or leaving footprints by a creek.
Speaker 1: They want to believe that if these things exist, they
Speaker 1: are benevolent, or at least indifferent to us humans. But
Speaker 1: I'm here to tell you that this is not always true.
Speaker 1: Just as there are humans who turn dark, who prey
Speaker 1: upon their own kind, so too are there those among
Speaker 1: the hairy people who walk a different path, a dangerous path,
Speaker 1: a path of blood and terror. What I'm about to
Speaker 1: share with you happened in the early nineteen sixties in
Speaker 1: a small village along the Copper River in Alaska. I
Speaker 1: was just a little girl then, no more than eight
Speaker 1: years old. But some things, some terrible things, they burn
Speaker 1: themselves into your memory so deeply that even after ninety
Speaker 1: two years on this earth, I can close my eyes
Speaker 1: and be right back there. I can smell the smoke
Speaker 1: from the fish drying racks. I can hear the sound
Speaker 1: of my father loading his rifle in the dark. I
Speaker 1: can see those red eyes glowing outside my window. This
Speaker 1: is not a story for the faint of heart. This
Speaker 1: is not one of those tales where everyone lives happily
Speaker 1: ever after. This is the truth about what happened when
Speaker 1: one of the hairy men, as we called them, went wrong,
Speaker 1: when it began hunting us, when it took our children.
Speaker 1: So settle in, but perhaps leave a light on, and
Speaker 1: remember as you listen to an old woman's memories, that
Speaker 1: not all the giants and the fours to friendly. Some
Speaker 1: of them are hungry, and some of them have developed
Speaker 1: a taste for human flesh. My name is Mary, and
Speaker 1: I was born in a village that sat on a
Speaker 1: bend of the Great Copper River, about two hundred miles
Speaker 1: from what anyone might call civilization. In the summer of
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty two, we had maybe one hundred and twenty
Speaker 1: people living there year round. We were Upik people had
Speaker 1: been there since time immemorial, since Raven brought light to
Speaker 1: the world. The village was a cluster of small wooden
Speaker 1: houses and a few traditional sod houses that the elders
Speaker 1: still preferred. We had a little Orthodox church with its
Speaker 1: onion dome painted blue like the sky, a general store
Speaker 1: run by old Pete, and a one room schoolhouse where
Speaker 1: Missus Thompson, a white woman from Oregon, tried her best
Speaker 1: to teach us English and arithmetic, but most of our learning,
Speaker 1: our real learning, happened out on the land and the river.
Speaker 1: I need you to understand what our life was like
Speaker 1: before everything went wrong. It was hard, yes, but it
Speaker 1: was beautiful. In summer, the sun barely set, and we
Speaker 1: children would play by the river until our mothers called
Speaker 1: us in at what would have been midnight in the
Speaker 1: lower forty eight. We picked berries, clouds of mosquitoes following
Speaker 1: us everywhere. We helped smoke and dry the salmon that
Speaker 1: ran thick in the river. We listened to our grandmothers
Speaker 1: tell stories about raven and wolf and the little people
Speaker 1: who lived under the hills. My best friends were Anna
Speaker 1: and Peter, a brother and sister who lived three houses
Speaker 1: down from ours. Anna was seven, a year younger than me,
Speaker 1: and Peter had just turned nine that spring. Peter was brave,
Speaker 1: always the first to climb the tallest tree or venture
Speaker 1: out onto the river ice in early winter to test
Speaker 1: if it would hold. Anna was quieter, sweeter. She had
Speaker 1: these huge brown eyes, and she could spot berries better
Speaker 1: than anyone in the village. She would see cloud berries
Speaker 1: and blueberries that the rest of us walked right past.
Speaker 1: Their father, Joseph, was one of our best hunters. People
Speaker 1: said he could track a moose through a blizzard. Their mother, Sarah,
Speaker 1: made the most beautiful beaded moccasins and mucklucks. They were
Speaker 1: a good family, a happy family, at least they were
Speaker 1: until that terrible day in late July. But I'm getting
Speaker 1: ahead of myself. First, I need to tell you about
Speaker 1: the disappearances that came before, the ones that should have
Speaker 1: warned us something was terribly wrong. It started in early June,
Speaker 1: right after the ice broke up on the river. Thomas,
Speaker 1: a young man of twenty two, went out to check
Speaker 1: his trap line about ten miles up river. He never
Speaker 1: came back. We searched for five days. My father was
Speaker 1: part of the search party. They found his canoe pulled
Speaker 1: up on shore, his rifle leaning against a tree, unfired.
Speaker 1: They found some of his traps still set, but Thomas
Speaker 1: himself had vanished without a trace. Well that's not entirely true.
Speaker 1: They did find something. My father would not talk about
Speaker 1: it at first, but I overheard him telling my mother
Speaker 1: late one night, when they thought I was asleep. He
Speaker 1: said they found blood, a lot of it splattered on
Speaker 1: the trees about fifteen feet off the ground, and they
Speaker 1: found tracks, huge tracks, human like but too big. The
Speaker 1: toes were too long, and the stride the distance between
Speaker 1: the footprints was impossible. No man could step that far,
Speaker 1: not even running. The elders held a meeting, some of
Speaker 1: them the ones who remembered the old stories. They whispered
Speaker 1: about the hairy men, the kushtaka, the shape shifters. But others,
Speaker 1: especially those who had been to school in Bethel or Anchorage,
Speaker 1: they insisted it must have been a bear, a grizzly
Speaker 1: probably that had dragged poor Thomas away. Bears could climb trees,
Speaker 1: after all, That would explain the blood so high up.
Speaker 1: We wanted to believe it was a bear. Bears We
Speaker 1: understood bears. We could hunt Bears, followed rules, patterns. They
Speaker 1: were dangerous, yes, but they were a danger we knew
Speaker 1: how to face. Two weeks later, Philip disappeared. He was
Speaker 1: an older man, maybe fifty, who lived alone at the
Speaker 1: edge of the village. He had gone out to gather
Speaker 1: wood and never returned. This time the search party found
Speaker 1: even less, just his axe embedded in a tree trunk,
Speaker 1: and more of those impossible footprints. The footprints led away
Speaker 1: into the deepest part of the forest, where the trees
Speaker 1: grew so thick that even at noon it was like twilight.
Speaker 1: The search party followed them for a while, but then
Speaker 1: our tracker, George, stopped dead in his tracks and refused
Speaker 1: to go further. He said something was watching them, something big,
Speaker 1: something wrong. They turned back. After Philip disappeared, fear settled
Speaker 1: over our village like fog rolling in from the sea.
Speaker 1: Parents kept their children close, men carried their rifles everywhere,
Speaker 1: even to the outhouse. Women moved in groups, never alone.
Speaker 1: The dogs, usually so eager to run and play, stayed
Speaker 1: close to the houses, whimpering and cowering whenever the wind
Speaker 1: shifted from the north from the deep forest. But it
Speaker 1: was not just the disappearances that frightened us. There were
Speaker 1: other signs, other warnings that something terrible was stalking our village.
Speaker 1: About a week after Philip vanished, Missus Nicholas, who lived
Speaker 1: at the north end of the village, said she woke
Speaker 1: in the night to find something massive peering through her window.
Speaker 1: She screamed and it fled, but not before she got
Speaker 1: a good look at its face. She said it was
Speaker 1: almost human, but stretched wrong. Like someone had grabbed a
Speaker 1: person's face and pulled it in all directions. The eyes,
Speaker 1: she said, glowed red in the darkness. Then there was
Speaker 1: the incident with the cash. We kept our dried fish
Speaker 1: and meat in elevated storage sheds raised on stilts to
Speaker 1: keep them safe from animals. One morning we found that
Speaker 1: someone or something had torn the door off Joseph's cash,
Speaker 1: not broken it, not pride it open, but torn it
Speaker 1: completely off its hinges and thrown it twenty feet into
Speaker 1: the yard. The cash had been emptied of meat. But
Speaker 1: the strange thing was that the bones had been arranged
Speaker 1: in a pattern on the ground below a circle, with
Speaker 1: lines radiating out like sun rays, or like a warning.
Speaker 1: My grandmother we called her Appa, which means grandmother in
Speaker 1: our language. She knew what it was. She had seen
Speaker 1: one of the hairy men when she was young. She
Speaker 1: told us it had watched their fish camp for three
Speaker 1: days before her father and uncles drove it away with
Speaker 1: fire and loud noises. But that one, she explained, had
Speaker 1: just been curious. This one, whatever was taking our people,
Speaker 1: this one was different. She told me that sometimes one
Speaker 1: of them goes bad, like a rabid wolf, like a
Speaker 1: man who forgets how to be human. When that happens,
Speaker 1: they become hunters of people. They get the taste for it,
Speaker 1: and they cannot stop. I asked her what could stop them,
Speaker 1: and she was quiet for a long, long moment, before
Speaker 1: answering that bullets could, lots of bullets, and brave men
Speaker 1: who were not afraid to face monsters. The fear grew
Speaker 1: worse as more strange things happened. One night, every dog
Speaker 1: in the village began howling at exactly the same moment,
Speaker 1: a terrible chorus that lasted for nearly an hour. When
Speaker 1: they finally stopped, we could hear something else and answering
Speaker 1: howl from the forest. But it was not quite wolf,
Speaker 1: not quite human. It was something in between, something that
Speaker 1: made the hair on my neck stand up, even though
Speaker 1: I was safe inside our house. Another time, a group
Speaker 1: of women washing clothes by the river saw something moving
Speaker 1: on the opposite bank. It was broad daylight, and at
Speaker 1: first they thought it was a bear standing on its
Speaker 1: hind legs, But then it turned and looked at them,
Speaker 1: and they saw its face. They ran back to the village,
Speaker 1: some of them crying, others too shocked to speak. When
Speaker 1: the men went to investigate. They found footprints in the mud,
Speaker 1: those same hue, huge impossible footprints. And they found something else,
Speaker 1: a pile of fish heads, neatly stacked, all facing toward
Speaker 1: our village. July came in, hot and heavy with mosquitoes.
Speaker 1: The salmon were running strong, and despite our fear, we
Speaker 1: had to work. Winter would come whether we were ready
Speaker 1: or not, and without enough dried fish we would starve.
Speaker 1: So we set up the fish camps along the river,
Speaker 1: though closer to the village than usual. The women and
Speaker 1: children cleaned and fileted the fish, while the men stood
Speaker 1: guard with their rifles. It was during this time, maybe
Speaker 1: the third week of July, that I saw it for
Speaker 1: the first time. I had woken in the night, needing
Speaker 1: to use the honeybucket. Our little house was dark, just
Speaker 1: the faint glow of the midnight sun filtering through the
Speaker 1: flower sack curtains my mother had made. I was patting
Speaker 1: barefoot across the floor when something made me stop. A sound,
Speaker 1: or maybe the absence of sound. The dogs had gone
Speaker 1: completely silent, not even the usual summer buzz of mosquitos
Speaker 1: against the windows. I crept to the window and carefully
Speaker 1: pulled back the edge of the curtain. At first I
Speaker 1: saw nothing unusual, just our yard, the fish rack, the
Speaker 1: trees beyond. Then something moved, something huge. It stepped out
Speaker 1: from behind our cash. Even in the dim light, I
Speaker 1: could see it was massive, maybe eight feet tall. It
Speaker 1: was covered in dark hair or fur. But it walked
Speaker 1: upright like a man. Its arms were too long, hanging
Speaker 1: almost to its knees, and its head. Its head was wrong,
Speaker 1: two pointed at the top, two wide at the jaw.
Speaker 1: But it was the eyes that froze me in place.
Speaker 1: They glowed red in the half light, like coals in
Speaker 1: a dying fire, and they were looking right at me,
Speaker 1: right through the window, right into my eyes. I could
Speaker 1: not move, I could not scream. I could only stand there,
Speaker 1: a little girl in her nightgown, staring at something that
Speaker 1: should not exist. It tilted its head, studying me. Then
Speaker 1: it took a step toward the house that broke the spell.
Speaker 1: I screamed, a high, piercing shriek that woke the entire house.
Speaker 1: My father burst from my parents' room, rifle in hand.
Speaker 1: He did not even ask what was wrong. He threw
Speaker 1: open the door and fired into the night. The boom
Speaker 1: of the thirty ought to six was deafening in our
Speaker 1: small house. He shouted something, though whether he was yelling
Speaker 1: at us or the thing outside, I did not know.
Speaker 1: He fired again, and this time we heard something I
Speaker 1: will never forget. It was like a scream and a
Speaker 1: roar and a howl all mixed together. It was pain
Speaker 1: and rage and something else, something that sounded almost like words,
Speaker 1: though in no language i'd ever heard. My father stepped
Speaker 1: out onto the porch, rifle at his shoulder, scanning the yard.
Speaker 1: Other men were emerging from their houses also. Armed dogs
Speaker 1: were barking now, but from inside houses, too terrified to
Speaker 1: come out. Our neighbor called out, asking what it was.
Speaker 1: My father told him it was the hairy man, that
Speaker 1: it had been right there, looking in the window at me.
Speaker 1: A search of the yard revealed huge footprints, just like
Speaker 1: the ones found where Thomas and Philip had disappeared. There
Speaker 1: was also blood, just a few drops, suggesting my father
Speaker 1: had indeed hit it with at least one shot. But
Speaker 1: the creature was gone, vanished into the forest. That night
Speaker 1: changed everything. Now we knew for certain what we were
Speaker 1: dealing with. Not a bear, not our imagination, a hairy man,
Speaker 1: a kushtaka, a sasquatch, whatever you wanted to call it,
Speaker 1: it was real. It was hunting us, and it had
Speaker 1: been watching our children. But the horror was not done
Speaker 1: with us. Over the next few days, things got worse,
Speaker 1: much worse. The creature became bolder. People would see it
Speaker 1: at the edge of the forest during the day, just
Speaker 1: standing there, watching and stay tuned for more sasquatch ot
Speaker 1: to see. We'll be right back after these messages, always
Speaker 1: too far away for a clear shot, always disappearing the
Speaker 1: moment someone raised a rifle. It was learning our patterns,
Speaker 1: our routines. One afternoon, a group of children playing near
Speaker 1: the community hall suddenly scattered, screaming. They said the hairy
Speaker 1: man had been hiding behind the building, that when Little
Speaker 1: James had run around the corner during their game, he
Speaker 1: had come face to face with it. The creature had
Speaker 1: reached out one massive hand toward the boy before the
Speaker 1: child's screams sent it retreating into the forest. James did
Speaker 1: not speak for three days after that, and when he
Speaker 1: finally did, he would only say that its breath smelled
Speaker 1: like death. The next morning, the elders called a meeting.
Speaker 1: Every adult in the village crowded into the community hall.
Speaker 1: The children were left with the grandmothers, who gathered us
Speaker 1: all in the church, thinking perhaps Holy Ground might offer
Speaker 1: some protection. I learned later what was discussed in that meeting.
Speaker 1: Some wanted to evacuate the village, to go down river
Speaker 1: to Russian Mission or upriver to McGrath. Others said we
Speaker 1: should send for help, maybe get the state troopers involved,
Speaker 1: though the nearest trooper was a three day boat ride away.
Speaker 1: But the majority, led by my father and Joseph, said
Speaker 1: we needed to hunt this thing down and kill it.
Speaker 1: Joseph argued that it had our scent, now that it
Speaker 1: knew where we were and knew we were weak. If
Speaker 1: we ran, it would follow. If we waited, it would
Speaker 1: pick us off one by one. We needed to take
Speaker 1: the fight to it. They decided to organize hunting parties,
Speaker 1: groups of four or five men who would go out
Speaker 1: each day trying to track the creature. They would start
Speaker 1: at first light the next day. The women and children
Speaker 1: would stay in the village, never venturing beyond the last house,
Speaker 1: never alone. It was a good plan, a reasonable plan,
Speaker 1: but the hairyman had plans of its own. The very
Speaker 1: next day, before the men could even organize their first
Speaker 1: hunting party. Tragedy struck again, and this time it struck
Speaker 1: at the heart of our village. It was a beautiful morning,
Speaker 1: one of those perfect Alaskan summer days where the sky
Speaker 1: is so blue it hurts to look at. The men
Speaker 1: were gathered at the community hall, checking their rifles, organizing
Speaker 1: into groups. The women were working on the fish, and
Speaker 1: we children were supposed to be helping. But Anna and
Speaker 1: Peter had a different idea. Peter whispered to me that
Speaker 1: they had seen the biggest blueberry patch yesterday, just past
Speaker 1: the old lightning Struck tree. He said the berries were
Speaker 1: as big as thumbnails and they wanted me to come
Speaker 1: with them to pick them. He said it was not far,
Speaker 1: just a few hundred yards, and we could see the
Speaker 1: houses from there. He thought our mothers would be so
Speaker 1: happy when we brought back buckets full of berries. I hesitated.
Speaker 1: We were not supposed to go anywhere, especially not beyond
Speaker 1: the village. But Peter laughed at my fear, that careless
Speaker 1: laugh of a nine year old boy who thinks he
Speaker 1: is invincible. He said, it was daylight, the men were
Speaker 1: all around, and it was just right there, pointing toward
Speaker 1: the forest edge. They would be back before anyone noticed.
Speaker 1: I wanted to go. Oh how I wanted to go,
Speaker 1: to be brave like Peter, to find berries with Anna,
Speaker 1: to do something normal instead of cowering in fear. But something,
Speaker 1: maybe my grandmother's warnings, Maybe the memory of those red
Speaker 1: eyes made me shake my head and tell them we
Speaker 1: should not go, that it was dangerous. They went without me.
Speaker 1: Anna looked back once, waving her little hand, pale against
Speaker 1: the green of the forest. That image Anna waving goodbye,
Speaker 1: her smile bright in the morning sun, that has burned
Speaker 1: into my memory forever. It was the last time I
Speaker 1: saw her. An hour passed before anyone noticed they were gone.
Speaker 1: Sarah came looking for them, calling their names. At first
Speaker 1: she was annoyed, thinking they were playing some game. Then
Speaker 1: she became worried, then frantic. She screamed their names, running
Speaker 1: from house to house, asking if anyone had seen her children.
Speaker 1: The entire village mobilized. In minutes. The men abandoned their
Speaker 1: planning and rushed toward the forest. The women gathered the
Speaker 1: other children, counting and recounting to make sure no one
Speaker 1: else was missing. I told them about the barry patch,
Speaker 1: about Peter's plan, and a group of men headed directly there.
Speaker 1: They found the berry buckets first, scattered on the ground,
Speaker 1: berry spilled everywhere. They found small footprints, children's footprints running,
Speaker 1: and they found the other tracks, the huge, impossible tracks
Speaker 1: following the children catching them. There was blood on a
Speaker 1: tree trunk, small handprints in red where one of the
Speaker 1: children had reached out, trying to steady themselves or trying
Speaker 1: to hold on as they were dragged away. Peter's shoe
Speaker 1: was found twenty yards further, torn and mangled. Anna's hair
Speaker 1: ribbon was caught on a branch ten feet off the ground.
Speaker 1: Joseph went mad with grief and rage. He ran ahead
Speaker 1: of the other men, screaming his children's names, screaming challenges
Speaker 1: at the forest. The other men had to physically restrain
Speaker 1: him when the tracks led into a part of the
Speaker 1: forest where the trees grew so close together that they
Speaker 1: would have to go single file, where an ambush would
Speaker 1: be easy. My father promised Joseph they would get the
Speaker 1: children back. They would find them, though his eyes said
Speaker 1: he knew it was already too late. But we did
Speaker 1: not find them, not that day, not the next. The
Speaker 1: men searched for three days, going deeper into the forest
Speaker 1: than anyone had gone in years. They found more tracks,
Speaker 1: more signs of the creature. They found places where it
Speaker 1: had rested, depressions in the moss, shaped like a giant body.
Speaker 1: They found trees with claw marks fifteen feet up. But
Speaker 1: of Anna and Peter they found nothing more. Sarah did
Speaker 1: not speak for a week. She just sat by her window,
Speaker 1: staring at the forest, walking back and forth. Joseph threw
Speaker 1: himself into the hunt with a terrible fury, going out
Speaker 1: every day, coming back later and later, his eyes wild
Speaker 1: with exhaustion and grief. The loss of the children changed
Speaker 1: our village. The laughter died even in the endless daylight
Speaker 1: of summer. Darkness had fallen on us. The elders prayed
Speaker 1: in the church. The medicine man, Old Robert, performed ceremonies
Speaker 1: that had not been done in decades, calling on the
Speaker 1: old spirits for protection. But still at night we could
Speaker 1: sometimes hear it, a howl that was not quite wolf,
Speaker 1: not quite human, the sound of something huge moving through
Speaker 1: the forest, circling our village. The creature grew even bolder
Speaker 1: after taking the children. It would come right up to
Speaker 1: the edge of the village at night, leaving footprints between
Speaker 1: the houses. One morning we woke to find that it
Speaker 1: had killed one of the sled dogs, not for food,
Speaker 1: but seemingly for sport. The poor animal had been torn
Speaker 1: upon and arranged in pieces, almost like a message. Three
Speaker 1: nights after Anna and Peter disappeared, I woke to a
Speaker 1: sound at our window, not a tapping, but a scraping,
Speaker 1: like claws on wood. I was too terrified to look,
Speaker 1: too terrified to scream. I just lay there, tears streaming
Speaker 1: down my face as something huge breathed against the glass.
Speaker 1: The window fogged up from its breath, and in that
Speaker 1: fog I saw something being drawn, a circle with lines
Speaker 1: radiating out, just like the pattern of bones left at
Speaker 1: Joseph's cash. In the morning, my parents found deep gouges
Speaker 1: in the wood around our window frame, and the glass
Speaker 1: was cracked from the pressure of something pressing against it.
Speaker 1: Two days after Anna and Peter disappeared, we heard from
Speaker 1: downriver a runner arrived from Nepaskiak, a village about thirty
Speaker 1: miles away. They too had lost someone, a grandmother who
Speaker 1: had gone to check her fishing ned at dawn and
Speaker 1: never returned. We found the same massive tracks, the same
Speaker 1: signs of violence. The next day, word came from upriver.
Speaker 1: The village of Nikolai had lost two men, brothers, who
Speaker 1: had been moose hunting. Their boat was found drifting blood
Speaker 1: on the seats, deep claw marks in the wood. It
Speaker 1: was not just our village. The creature or perhaps creatures,
Speaker 1: were hunting along the entire middle section of the Copper River.
Speaker 1: We were under siege by something ancient, something that had
Speaker 1: decided humans were prey. That is when my father and
Speaker 1: Joseph came up with the plan. If one village could
Speaker 1: not stop this thing, perhaps many villages together could. They
Speaker 1: would send runners to every village within fifty miles. They
Speaker 1: would gather the best hunters, the bravest men. They would
Speaker 1: form a war party, like in the old days when
Speaker 1: the Yupik fought against invaders, But this time the invader
Speaker 1: was not human. While we waited for help to arrive,
Speaker 1: the terror continued. The creature seemed to know something was happening.
Speaker 1: It became more aggressive, more visible. One evening, just as
Speaker 1: the sun was finally dipping toward the horizon, casting long shadows.
Speaker 1: Missus Thompson, the school teacher, saw it. She had been
Speaker 1: in the schoolhouse preparing lessons for whenever we might feel
Speaker 1: safe enough to resume classes. She looked up from her desk,
Speaker 1: and there it was, pressed against the window, staring in
Speaker 1: at her. Her scream brought everyone running. By the time
Speaker 1: the men arrived, it was gone, but it had left
Speaker 1: something behind. Pressed into the glass of the window so
Speaker 1: hard that the glass had cracked. Was a handprint, A
Speaker 1: huge human like handprint, but wrong. The fingers were too long,
Speaker 1: the palm too wide, and in the center of the
Speaker 1: palm print clearly visible was blood. We never found out
Speaker 1: whose blood it was. That same night, something tried to
Speaker 1: break into the church. Father Dmitri, the Orthodox priest, was
Speaker 1: keeping vigil, praying for our protection. He heard something massive
Speaker 1: slam against the door again and again. The wooden door,
Speaker 1: thick and sturdy, began to splinter. Father Dmitri grabbed the
Speaker 1: cross from the altar and held it toward the door,
Speaker 1: praying an old church Slavonic at the top of his lungs.
Speaker 1: The battering stopped. There was a moment of silence, then
Speaker 1: that terrible howl scream, so loud that it shook dust
Speaker 1: from the rafters. When the men arrived, they found the
Speaker 1: door nearly destroyed and more of those huge footprints leading
Speaker 1: away into the forest. But also strangely, they found burns
Speaker 1: on the door, as if something very hot had touched it.
Speaker 1: Father Dmitri swore he had not used any flame, only
Speaker 1: held up the cross and prayed. By early August, men
Speaker 1: had arrived from twelve different villages. Some came by boat,
Speaker 1: others walked through the forest, and groups rifles at the ready.
Speaker 1: In total, forty three hunters gathered in our village. It
Speaker 1: was the largest gathering anyone could remember, at least for
Speaker 1: such a grim purpose. Among them was Thomas from Russian Mission,
Speaker 1: known as the best tracker on the Lower River. There
Speaker 1: was Paul from Holy Cross, who had hunted brown bears
Speaker 1: since he was fourteen. The Alexei brothers came from Antiak,
Speaker 1: five of them, all excellent shots. From sleep Mute came
Speaker 1: an old man named Moses, who claimed his grandfather had
Speaker 1: killed a hairy man back in the eighteen nineties and
Speaker 1: knew their weaknesses. Moses told them what his grandfather had
Speaker 1: passed down. He said they were smart, smarter than bears,
Speaker 1: smarter than wolves, maybe as smart as us. They knew
Speaker 1: we use guns, so they stayed out of clear sight.
Speaker 1: They knew we were weaker at night, so that is
Speaker 1: when they preferred to hunt. But they had weaknesses too.
Speaker 1: They were curious and could not help but investigate new things,
Speaker 1: and they were proud. If you challenge them, insulted them,
Speaker 1: they would respond. His grandfather, he explained, did not hunt
Speaker 1: the hairy man. He made the hairy man come to him.
Speaker 1: The hunters spent three days preparing. They checked in, re
Speaker 1: checked their weapons. Some had brought military surplus rifles from
Speaker 1: World War II, others had hunting rifles passed down through generations.
Speaker 1: Joseph had somehow acquired an old Thompson submachine gun, probably
Speaker 1: through questionable means, but no one was going to question
Speaker 1: him about it. Not with his children gone. They divided
Speaker 1: into five groups of eight or nine men each. The
Speaker 1: plan was to spread out in a wide net and
Speaker 1: slowly sweep through the forest, driving the creature toward the river,
Speaker 1: where it would have nowhere to run. Each group had
Speaker 1: a tracker, a radio man with one of the few
Speaker 1: walkie talkies in the region, and at least one man
Speaker 1: who knew the old prayers, the old ways of protection.
Speaker 1: My father was in the group with Joseph and Thomas,
Speaker 1: the tracker. Before he left, he knelt down to my
Speaker 1: level and held my shoulders. He promised me he would
Speaker 1: come back, that when he did, this would all be over,
Speaker 1: that I would be safe again. I wanted to believe him,
Speaker 1: but I had heard my parents talking when they thought
Speaker 1: thought I was asleep. I knew they were not certain
Speaker 1: the hunting party would succeed. This thing had already killed
Speaker 1: at least six people that we knew of, maybe more.
Speaker 1: It was huge, strong, and it knew the forest better
Speaker 1: than we did. The morning the hunters left, the entire
Speaker 1: village gathered to see them off. Father Dmitri blessed them
Speaker 1: in old church Slavonic. Moses sang a war song in
Speaker 1: the old language, a song that had not been heard
Speaker 1: in fifty years. The women pressed packages of dried fish
Speaker 1: and meat into the men's hands, along with bullets they
Speaker 1: had been hoarding. Sarah came out of her house for
Speaker 1: the first time since her children disappeared. She walked up
Speaker 1: to her husband, looked him in the eyes, and told
Speaker 1: him simply to kill it. To kill it slowly. The
Speaker 1: hunters filed out of the village in their groups, spacing
Speaker 1: themselves about a quarter mile apart. The plan was to
Speaker 1: make camp about five miles into the forest the first night,
Speaker 1: then begin the real hunt the next day. Some of
Speaker 1: us left in the village, the women, children and old
Speaker 1: men watched until they disappeared into the trees. Then we
Speaker 1: went into the church and prayed. That first night without
Speaker 1: most of our men was terrifying. Every sound made us jump.
Speaker 1: Every shadow could be the creature. The old men who
Speaker 1: had stayed behind those two elderly or infirmed to join
Speaker 1: the hunt, sat with their rifles on the porches, trying
Speaker 1: to look brave for us children, but I could see
Speaker 1: their hands shaking. Around midnight, we heard gunfire in the distance,
Speaker 1: not just one or two shots, but a sustained battle.
Speaker 1: Rifles cracking, the rapid fire of what had to be
Speaker 1: Joseph's Thompson gun, and men shouting. It went on for
Speaker 1: maybe three minutes, then silence. We waited clustered in the church,
Speaker 1: praying for word. Finally, around dawn, the radio crackled to life.
Speaker 1: It was Paul's voice, shaky but alive. He reported that
Speaker 1: Group three had found it, that it had attacked their
Speaker 1: camp about midnight. Two men were injured but alive. The
Speaker 1: creature was wounded but had escaped, and stay tuned for
Speaker 1: more sasquatch ott to see, We'll be right back. After
Speaker 1: these messages they were following the blood trail, relief and
Speaker 1: renewed fear washed over us. The men were alive, but
Speaker 1: the creature was only wounded. A wounded animal is the
Speaker 1: most dangerous kind. For two more days, the hunters tracked
Speaker 1: the hairy man through the forest. The blood trail led
Speaker 1: them in circles at first, as if the creature was
Speaker 1: trying to confuse them. Then it led toward the mountains,
Speaker 1: into terrain that became increasingly difficult. They found places where
Speaker 1: it had stopped to rest, pools of blood, suggesting it
Speaker 1: was badly hurt, but it kept moving, kept staying just
Speaker 1: ahead of them. On the third night, it doubled back,
Speaker 1: but there was something else, something the hunters had not expected.
Speaker 1: There were two of them. I learned what happened next
Speaker 1: from my father and the other hunters who survived. They
Speaker 1: told the story many times over the years, and each
Speaker 1: time new details emerged, as if the horror of it
Speaker 1: could only be absorbed in small doses. The creature had
Speaker 1: indeed been badly wounded in that first encounter, Joseph's Thompson
Speaker 1: gun had put at least a dozen rounds into it,
Speaker 1: and other hunters had hit it as well, But the
Speaker 1: hairy man was tough, tougher than anything they had ever encountered,
Speaker 1: and it was angry. On the third night, the hunters
Speaker 1: had made camp on a small rise, thinking the elevation
Speaker 1: would give them an advantage. They posted guards, built fires
Speaker 1: in a circle around their camp, and settled in for
Speaker 1: another nervous night. The wounded creature's trail had been getting fresher,
Speaker 1: the blood still wet in some places. They knew they
Speaker 1: were close. The first anyone knew of the second creature
Speaker 1: was when Mike, standing guard at the north end of
Speaker 1: the camp, simply disappeared. One moment. He was there, leaning
Speaker 1: against a tree. This moment gone, no sound, no cry
Speaker 1: for help, just gone. His brother Sam, standing guard thirty
Speaker 1: yards away, saw movement in the trees. He called out,
Speaker 1: asking if it was Mike. The response was Mike's rifle
Speaker 1: flying out of the darkness, hitting Sam in the chest
Speaker 1: and knocking him down. As he struggled to get up,
Speaker 1: gasping for breath, he saw it a second hairy man,
Speaker 1: this one even bigger than the first standing at the
Speaker 1: edge of the firelight. It was holding Mike's body like
Speaker 1: a rag doll, and Mike's head was twisted at an
Speaker 1: impossible angle. Sam scream woke the entire camp. Rifles fired
Speaker 1: in every direction as men scrambled for cover. The second
Speaker 1: creature dropped Mike's body and melted back into the darkness,
Speaker 1: moving faster than something that size should be able to move.
Speaker 1: Then the wounded one attacked from the south. It burst
Speaker 1: through their perimeter like a freight train, scattering men and equipment.
Speaker 1: Even wounded, it was incredibly strong. He grabbed Peter, the
Speaker 1: store owner's son, and threw him into a tree so
Speaker 1: hard they heard his bones break. It backhanded Thomas, the tracker,
Speaker 1: sending him flying into the fire. The tracker rolled out quickly,
Speaker 1: but not before being badly burned. My father said the
Speaker 1: creature was a nightmare, made of flesh, eight and a
Speaker 1: half feet tall, covered in dark brown hair matted with blood.
Speaker 1: Its face was almost human, but stretched and distorted, with
Speaker 1: a jaw that could open wider than any humans. Its
Speaker 1: eyes reflected the firelight red, and it smelled like death
Speaker 1: and rot. Joseph stood his ground, firing as Thompson gun
Speaker 1: point blank into the creature's chest. The impacts drove it
Speaker 1: back step by step, but it would not go down.
Speaker 1: When the gun clicked empty, Joseph did something insane. He
Speaker 1: charged the creature with his hunting knife, screaming for his
Speaker 1: children in u pick. The creature caught him by the throat,
Speaker 1: lifting him off the ground, but Joseph managed to drive
Speaker 1: his knee deep into its neck, twisting the blade. Blood
Speaker 1: sprayed across the camp site. The creature roared a sound
Speaker 1: that my father said he would hear in his nightmares
Speaker 1: for the rest of his life, and threw Joseph aside.
Speaker 1: That's when Moses stepped forward with something none of the
Speaker 1: other hunters had seen before. It was an old Russian
Speaker 1: bear spear, the kind the Cossacks had used two hundred
Speaker 1: years ago. The head was silver, blessed by a shaman
Speaker 1: before Moses was even born. Moses shouted at the creature
Speaker 1: to face him, to face him like its grandfather had
Speaker 1: faced his. The wounded creature turned toward him, blood pouring
Speaker 1: from its neck from dozens of bullet wounds. It took
Speaker 1: a step forward, then another. Moses stood his ground spear
Speaker 1: braced the creature charged. Moses was seventy three years old,
Speaker 1: but in that moment he moved like a young warrior.
Speaker 1: He sidestepped the charge and drove the spear deep into
Speaker 1: the creature's side, finding the gap between ribs the silver
Speaker 1: spear had It must have hit something vital, because the
Speaker 1: creature stumbled fell to one knee. That's when my father
Speaker 1: and five other men opened fire, pouring every round they
Speaker 1: had into the kneeling hairy man. The creature tried to rise,
Speaker 1: reached out with one massive hand toward Moses, then finally collapsed,
Speaker 1: but the battle was not over. The second creature, the
Speaker 1: larger one, attacked again. This time it was smart. It
Speaker 1: grabbed burning logs from the fire and threw them at
Speaker 1: the men, scattering hot coals everywhere. In the confusion and smoke,
Speaker 1: it managed to grab two more hunters, killing one instantly
Speaker 1: and badly mauling the other. The survivors regrouped, forming a
Speaker 1: tight circle, rifles pointing outward. They could hear the second
Speaker 1: creature moving around them in the darkness, just beyond the firelight,
Speaker 1: sometimes to the left, sometimes to the right. It was
Speaker 1: testing them, looking for weakness. Then Paul had an idea
Speaker 1: He grabbed the radio and turned it on, cranking the
Speaker 1: volume as high as it would go. The static and
Speaker 1: feedback created an awful, shrieking noise. The creature roared in response,
Speaker 1: apparently hurt or confused by the sound. Paul shouted for
Speaker 1: everyone to make noise, all the noise they could. The
Speaker 1: hunters began firing into the air, shouting, banging their mess
Speaker 1: kits together. Someone had brought a flare gun and fired
Speaker 1: it straight up, the red light illuminating the forest. Briefly,
Speaker 1: in that moment of brightness, they saw the second creature
Speaker 1: clearly for the first time. It was massive, maybe nine
Speaker 1: feet tall, and unlike the first one, its hair was
Speaker 1: almost black. But what terrified the most was its face.
Speaker 1: It was too human. The intelligence in its eyes was clear,
Speaker 1: calculating this was not just an animal, This was something
Speaker 1: that could think, plan hate. The noise and lights seemed
Speaker 1: to disorient it, and it retreated further into the forest.
Speaker 1: The hunters kept up the racket for hours until dawn
Speaker 1: finally came. When the sun rose, they found the second
Speaker 1: creature had gone, leaving only massive footprints and the smell
Speaker 1: of death. The hunters carried their dead and wounded back
Speaker 1: to the village. They had lost four men that were
Speaker 1: killed by the sasquatch and six badly injured, but they
Speaker 1: had also killed one of the creatures and driven off
Speaker 1: the other. The body of the dead hairy man was
Speaker 1: dragged back on a makeshift trouvoi covered with the tarp.
Speaker 1: The entire village gathered as they arrived. There were tears
Speaker 1: for the dead, relief for the living, and a terrible
Speaker 1: curiosity about what lay under that tarp. Moses, now treated
Speaker 1: with the reverence do a true warrior, despite his age,
Speaker 1: pulled back the covering. In death, the creature was no
Speaker 1: less terrifying. Its body was humanoid, but wrong in every proportion.
Speaker 1: Arms too long, legs too thick, hands that ended in
Speaker 1: claws rather than nails. Its face was the worst part.
Speaker 1: It was like looking at a human face reflected in
Speaker 1: disturbed water. All the features there but distorted. The mouth,
Speaker 1: frozen open in death, showed teeth that were mostly human
Speaker 1: except for the canines, which were as long as a
Speaker 1: wolf's father. Dmitri crossed himself and began praying in old
Speaker 1: church Slavonic. Some of the elders wept not from fear,
Speaker 1: but from a kind of recognition. This thing, this monster,
Speaker 1: it had once been something else, something more like us perhaps,
Speaker 1: or we had once been more like it. The old stories,
Speaker 1: the ones about the first people, the ones that the
Speaker 1: missionaries had tried to make us forget, suddenly seemed very real.
Speaker 1: They burned the body that night. The entire village watched
Speaker 1: as the flames consumed it. The smell was horrible, and
Speaker 1: the thing made sounds as it burned, probably just air
Speaker 1: escaping from the lungs, but it sounded like screaming. Some
Speaker 1: people said they saw shapes in the smoke, faces of
Speaker 1: the people it had killed. I do not know if
Speaker 1: that was true. I kept my eyes closed for most
Speaker 1: of it. Joseph survived his injuries, though he walked with
Speaker 1: a limp for the rest of his life. The knife
Speaker 1: wound he had inflicted on the creature had indeed been mortal.
Speaker 1: When they examined the body, they found he had managed
Speaker 1: to sever something important in its neck. His children were avenged,
Speaker 1: but it brought him no peace. Sarah never recovered from
Speaker 1: the loss. She died that winter, people said from a
Speaker 1: broken heart, though the official cause was pneumonia. The second
Speaker 1: creature was never found. The hunters went out several more
Speaker 1: times over the following weeks, but the trail had gone cold.
Speaker 1: Some said it had died from its wound somewhere deep
Speaker 1: in the forest. Others believed it had retreated further into
Speaker 1: the mountains, nursing its grief and hatred. I think the
Speaker 1: second theory was correct, because the encounters did not entirely stop.
Speaker 1: Over the years, people would occasionally report seeing something huge
Speaker 1: moving through the forest, always at a distance. Tracks would
Speaker 1: be found, Sometimes a dog would disappear, or a cash
Speaker 1: would be broken into, but it never again came close
Speaker 1: to the villages. It had learned to fear us, just
Speaker 1: as we had learned to fear it. The state troopers
Speaker 1: finally arrived two weeks after the battle, flying in on
Speaker 1: a floatplane. They took statements, looked at the evidence, and
Speaker 1: then filed a report that blamed the deaths on a
Speaker 1: rogue bear, possibly rabid. Officially, that's still what happened. A
Speaker 1: bear attack, the worst in Alaska's recorded history, But just
Speaker 1: a bear. Those of us who were there, we knew better.
Speaker 1: We knew what we had seen, what we had fought,
Speaker 1: what we had lost. The hairy Man, the Sasquatch, the kushtaka,
Speaker 1: whatever you want to call it, it was real. It
Speaker 1: had hunted us, we had hunted it, and in the
Speaker 1: end we had both lost. Life in the village slowly
Speaker 1: returned to something resembling normal, though normal was forever changed.
Speaker 1: We children went back to school, but there were two
Speaker 1: empty desks that Missus Thompson never filled. She left them
Speaker 1: there all year, as if Anna and Peter might walk
Speaker 1: in any day, apologizing for being late, ready to learn
Speaker 1: their letters and numbers. The fish came that fall, and
Speaker 1: we smoked and dried them as always. Winter arrived with
Speaker 1: its long darkness, and we told stories around the stoves.
Speaker 1: But now the old stories, the ones about creatures in
Speaker 1: the forest, were told in whispers, and no one questioned
Speaker 1: whether they were true. My father never spoke much about
Speaker 1: that night in the forest, the night they killed the creature,
Speaker 1: but sometimes I would catch him staring out the window
Speaker 1: at the tree line, his hand unconsciously moving to his rifle.
Speaker 1: He had seen something out there that had changed his
Speaker 1: understanding of the world, and that knowledge weighed on him.
Speaker 1: The following spring, something strange happened. I never told anyone
Speaker 1: about this, not even my parents, because I was not
Speaker 1: sure they would believe me, or worse, they would believe
Speaker 1: me and be terrified. It was late spring, the ice
Speaker 1: just gone from the river. I had walked to my
Speaker 1: favorite sitting spot, a big flat rock that overlooked the water,
Speaker 1: about a half mile from the village. I knew I
Speaker 1: should not be alone, but I was tired of being afraid,
Speaker 1: tired of being watched every moment. I needed to be
Speaker 1: by myself, to think, to remember my friends, without everyone
Speaker 1: looking at me with pity. I was throwing small stones
Speaker 1: into the water, watching the ripples spread when I realized
Speaker 1: I was not alone. The birds had gone quiet. The
Speaker 1: air felt heavy, charged, like before a storm. I turned
Speaker 1: around slowly, my heart already knowing what I would see.
Speaker 1: It stood at the edge of the forest, maybe thirty
Speaker 1: feet away. The female, the one that had escaped. Moses
Speaker 1: had been right. It was different from the male they
Speaker 1: had killed, Taller, leaner, its hair more black than brown,
Speaker 1: and its face, while still distorted and inhuman, had a
Speaker 1: quality I can only describe as feminine. We stared at
Speaker 1: each other for a few seconds. I was too terrified
Speaker 1: to scream, too terrified to run. I just sat there,
Speaker 1: a little girl on a rock, facing a creature that
Speaker 1: had killed grown men. It took a step forward, and
Speaker 1: I saw what it was carrying, a small bundle wrapped
Speaker 1: in what looked like woven grass. It placed the bundle
Speaker 1: carefully on the ground, then looked at me again. Its eyes,
Speaker 1: which I had expected to be red with rage, were
Speaker 1: dark brown, almost black, and they were sad, so terribly
Speaker 1: deeply sad. It made a sound low in its throat,
Speaker 1: not a growl, not a roar, almost like speech, though
Speaker 1: no words I could understand. Then it turned and walked
Speaker 1: back into the forest, not rushed, not aggressive, just walking away.
Speaker 1: I sat frozen for another minute before my curiosity overcame
Speaker 1: my f I crept forward and looked at the bundle.
Speaker 1: Inside were Anna's doll, the one she had loved more
Speaker 1: than anything, made from seal skin and cariboo hair, and
Speaker 1: Peter's knife, the small folding knife his father had given
Speaker 1: him for his eighth birthday. Both items were clean, carefully wrapped, preserved.
Speaker 1: They had not been eaten, They had not been torn
Speaker 1: apart by some mindless beast. They had been taken, yes,
Speaker 1: killed certainly, but their things had been kept, saved, returned.
Speaker 1: Why remorse and apology an acknowledgment that both sides had
Speaker 1: lost children that summer. I took the bundle and ran
Speaker 1: back to the village. I gave the items to Joseph
Speaker 1: and Sarah, telling them I'd found them by the river,
Speaker 1: washed up on shore. They held their children's possessions and wept,
Speaker 1: finding some small comfort and having something anything returned to them.
Speaker 1: I never told them the truth. How could I How
Speaker 1: could I explain that the monster that had killed their
Speaker 1: children had also in some way morendo and stay tuned
Speaker 1: for more sasquatch ot to see, We'll be right back.
Speaker 1: After these messages, I grew up as children do, even
Speaker 1: after trauma. I went to high school in Bethel, then
Speaker 1: to college and Anchorage. I became a teacher like Missus Thompson,
Speaker 1: and eventually came back to teach in the villages along
Speaker 1: the river. I married a good man, had children and
Speaker 1: grandchildren of my own. But I never forgot that summer
Speaker 1: of nineteen sixty two. Over the years, there were other encounters,
Speaker 1: other signs that the female was still out there. A
Speaker 1: hunter named William came back from a week long trip,
Speaker 1: claiming something had followed him the entire time, always staying
Speaker 1: just out of sight. He found huge footprints circling his
Speaker 1: camp each morning, and once he woke to find all
Speaker 1: his supplies had been reorganized sorted by type while he slept.
Speaker 1: Nothing was taken, just rearranged, as if the creature was
Speaker 1: curious about our things. Another time, a family camping upriver
Speaker 1: reported that their youngest daughter, a girl of about five,
Speaker 1: had wandered off while they were setting up camp. They
Speaker 1: searched frantically for hours, calling her name, fearing the worst. Then,
Speaker 1: just as the sun was setting, she walked out of
Speaker 1: the forest, completely unharmed, carrying a handful of perfect berries.
Speaker 1: She said a big, hairy lady had shown her where
Speaker 1: the best berries grew, and then pointed her back toward camp.
Speaker 1: The parents wanted to believe she had imagined it, but
Speaker 1: the berries she carried were from a type of bush
Speaker 1: that did not grow anywhere near their camp site. The
Speaker 1: most significant encounter happened about fifteen years after that terrible summer.
Speaker 1: A group of geologists mapping mineral deposits in the mountains
Speaker 1: got lost in an unexpected blizzard. They were sure they
Speaker 1: were going to freeze to death when they stumbled upon
Speaker 1: a cave. Inside, they found a fire, already burning in
Speaker 1: a pile of dried fish. They stayed there for three
Speaker 1: days until the storm passed. On the last night, one
Speaker 1: of them woke to see a massive figure silhouetted in
Speaker 1: the cave entrance watching them. It never came closer, never
Speaker 1: threatened them. When the storm cleared and they left, they
Speaker 1: tried to find the cave again, with proper equipment and maps.
Speaker 1: They never could locate it. It was as if it
Speaker 1: had never existed. These stories accumulated over the years, painting
Speaker 1: a picture of a creature that was neither wholly hostile
Speaker 1: nor wholly benign. It was something that lived parallel to us,
Speaker 1: occasionally intersecting our world, bound by the same strange treaty
Speaker 1: that had been written in blood that summer. When I
Speaker 1: was in my forties, I tried to research what had happened.
Speaker 1: I went to newspaper archives, government records, even tracked down
Speaker 1: some of the survivors who had moved away. Everyone remembered
Speaker 1: it differently, or claimed not to remember it at all.
Speaker 1: The official records just mentioned the bear attacks and the
Speaker 1: temporary evacuation of several villages. History had papered over the truth,
Speaker 1: But the land remembers if you go to that spot
Speaker 1: in the forest where they burned the creature's body. Nothing
Speaker 1: grows there still. The ground is black and barren, a
Speaker 1: perfect circle about ten feet across. The elders say it
Speaker 1: is cursed ground, that the earth itself rejects what happened there.
Speaker 1: Moses lived another fifteen years after that summer, treated as
Speaker 1: a hero in every village along the river. Before he died,
Speaker 1: he told me something I have never shared until now.
Speaker 1: He said, the second creature, the one that got away,
Speaker 1: was female. He could tell by the shape the way
Speaker 1: it moved, and he thought it was the male's mate.
Speaker 1: That is why it fought so fierce. It was not
Speaker 1: just hunting, it was avenging. The thought that these creatures
Speaker 1: could feel grief and lost just as we did made
Speaker 1: everything more complicated. Were they monsters or were they just
Speaker 1: protecting their own Had we stumbled into their territory pushed
Speaker 1: them to desperate measures, or had one truly gone rogue
Speaker 1: developed a taste for human flesh that could not be satisfied.
Speaker 1: As I got older, I began collecting the stories, not
Speaker 1: just from our village, but from all along the river.
Speaker 1: Stories of the hairy men went back generations centuries. Even
Speaker 1: the Russians had encountered them when they first came to Alaska.
Speaker 1: The Yupik and Athabaskan peoples had stories that went back
Speaker 1: to the beginning of time. Most of the stories were
Speaker 1: about peaceful encounters or mere sightings, a figure watching from
Speaker 1: a ridge, footprints by a stream. Sometimes food would go
Speaker 1: missing from a cash, replaced by fresh meat or beautiful stones.
Speaker 1: The hairy men were part of the landscape, like the
Speaker 1: bears and the wolves, dangerous if provoked, but generally content
Speaker 1: to live and let live. But every few generations the
Speaker 1: stories would turn dark. A hairy man would go bad
Speaker 1: start hunting people. When that happened, the villages would ban together,
Speaker 1: just as we had and drive it off or kill it.
Speaker 1: It was a pattern as old as memory. As the
Speaker 1: decades passed, our village changed. Young people moved to the
Speaker 1: cities for education and jobs. Satellite dishes appeared on roofs.
Speaker 1: The Internet came, bringing the outside world into our homes.
Speaker 1: The old ways began to fade, and with them the
Speaker 1: memories of what had happened, but some of us remembered.
Speaker 1: We became the keepers of the story. Though fewer and
Speaker 1: fewer people wanted to hear it. The young ones preferred
Speaker 1: their horror movies and video games to our tales of
Speaker 1: real terror. They thought we were just old people telling
Speaker 1: tall tales to scare children. When I was seventy, I
Speaker 1: received a visit from a man claiming to be a
Speaker 1: professor of anthropology from some university in California. He had
Speaker 1: heard rumors about the nineteen sixty two incident and wanted
Speaker 1: to document it for his research. He had a recorder,
Speaker 1: a camera, and a notebook full of questions. I told
Speaker 1: him it was just a bear attack, like the official
Speaker 1: record said. He did not believe me, kept pressing for details,
Speaker 1: showing me blurry photographs of footprints from other places, asking
Speaker 1: if they looked familiar. I sent him away. Some stories
Speaker 1: are not meant for outsiders. Some truths are too dangerous
Speaker 1: to share with the world. Because I knew what would
Speaker 1: happen if the world believed scientists would come, hunters tourists.
Speaker 1: The forest would be overrun with people trying to find them,
Speaker 1: capture them, study them. And what would the harry men do? Then?
Speaker 1: Where would they go? They were here first, after all,
Speaker 1: this was their land. Before it was hours, the female
Speaker 1: was still out there. I was certain of it. Every
Speaker 1: few years there would be a siding, always at a distance,
Speaker 1: always brief. In nineteen ninety eight, a bush pilot reported
Speaker 1: seeing something massive moving through a valley where no human
Speaker 1: could survive without equipment. In two thousand and five, a
Speaker 1: group of hikers found footprints so fresh the mud was
Speaker 1: still settling, and they all reported feeling watched for the
Speaker 1: rest of their trip. The most recent encounter I know
Speaker 1: of happened just five years ago. A young man from
Speaker 1: Nikolai went missing while checking his trap line. They found
Speaker 1: him three days later, alive but in shock, unable or
Speaker 1: unwilling to say what had happened. But he had scratches
Speaker 1: on his back, four parallel lines too wide to be
Speaker 1: from any bear, and he would not will not go
Speaker 1: into the forest anymore. When pressed, he would only say
Speaker 1: that he had been warned to stay away, though he
Speaker 1: could not or would not say by whom or what.
Speaker 1: My own children think. I am getting senile when I
Speaker 1: tell this story. My grandchildren humor me, but do not believe.
Speaker 1: Only my great grandchildren listen with wide eyes, the way
Speaker 1: children should when hearing about monsters and heroes. Last year,
Speaker 1: my youngest great grandson, little Johnny asked me if I
Speaker 1: was sure it was real, that maybe it was just
Speaker 1: a bear, like the police said. I took him to
Speaker 1: my bedroom and showed him something I'd kept hidden for
Speaker 1: sixty years. It was a tuft of hair, dark brown
Speaker 1: and coarse, that my father had pulled from the creature's
Speaker 1: body before they burned it. I had stolen it from
Speaker 1: his jacket pocket, knowing even as a child that someday
Speaker 1: people would doubt and that I would need proof. Johnny
Speaker 1: held it up to the light, his eight year old
Speaker 1: face serious with concentration. He said it did not look
Speaker 1: like bear fur, and I agreed. He asked if they
Speaker 1: were still out there, and I thought carefully about how
Speaker 1: to answer. The truth was, I knew they were still
Speaker 1: out there. Every few years, someone would see something, tracks
Speaker 1: would be found, a hunter would come back from the
Speaker 1: deep forest with a story about eyes watching him from
Speaker 1: the shadows, about feeling like prey. I told Johnny, Yes,
Speaker 1: they are still out there, but they know now to
Speaker 1: stay away from us, and we know to stay away
Speaker 1: from them. That is the bargain our blood bought that summer.
Speaker 1: He nodded, solemnly, understanding in the way children do that
Speaker 1: some truths are too important to question. Now, as I
Speaker 1: near the end of my days at ninety two, I
Speaker 1: find myself thinking more and more about that summer, About
Speaker 1: Anna and Peter, frozen forever in my memory, as laughing children,
Speaker 1: About the men who died fighting to protect us, About
Speaker 1: the creatures, both the one we killed and the one
Speaker 1: that survived. There is something else I need to tell,
Speaker 1: something that happened just last winter that makes me believe
Speaker 1: the story is not over, may never be over. My
Speaker 1: granddaughter Jennifer had come to visit me with her two
Speaker 1: young children. We were sitting in my living room, the
Speaker 1: children playing on the floor, when Jennifer's five year old daughter, Maria,
Speaker 1: suddenly looked up and pointed at the window. She asked
Speaker 1: who the hairy lady was. We all turned to look,
Speaker 1: but saw nothing, just the snow covered yard the trees beyond.
Speaker 1: But Maria insisted someone had been there, a very tall
Speaker 1: lady covered in black hair, watching through the wind. Children
Speaker 1: see things adults miss, or perhaps they see things adults
Speaker 1: have learned to ignore. Either way, I knew what Maria
Speaker 1: had seen. That night, after everyone was asleep, I went
Speaker 1: to the window and looked out there in the fresh
Speaker 1: snow were footprints, huge footprints, leading from the forest to
Speaker 1: my window, then back again. The stride was impossible for
Speaker 1: any human, the toes were too long. She had come
Speaker 1: to check on me, the female. After all these years,
Speaker 1: she still remembered. Perhaps she was as old as I
Speaker 1: was now, in whatever way her kind measured age. Perhaps
Speaker 1: she too was nearing the end of her time. Perhaps
Speaker 1: she wanted to see if any of us who had
Speaker 1: been there that summer were still alive. I opened the
Speaker 1: window despite the cold, and spoke to the darkness. I
Speaker 1: told her I remembered. I told her about returning Anna's
Speaker 1: doll and Peter's knife to their parents. I told her
Speaker 1: I had never told anyone about our encounter by the river.
Speaker 1: I told her I was sorry for what had happened,
Speaker 1: for all the death on both sides. There was no response,
Speaker 1: of course, But the next morning I found something on
Speaker 1: my doorstep, a stone, smooth and round, with natural markings
Speaker 1: that looked almost like a face. It was the kind
Speaker 1: of stone that could only be found high in the mountains,
Speaker 1: in places no elderly woman could reach. I keep that
Speaker 1: stone on my nightstand now. Sometimes I hold it and
Speaker 1: think about the strange threads that connect all living things,
Speaker 1: even ones as different as humans and hairy men. We
Speaker 1: are all part of the same ancient story, all struggling
Speaker 1: to survive in a world that is often harsh and unforgiving.
Speaker 1: The young people today they think they know everything. They
Speaker 1: have their satellites and their DNA tests and their scientific
Speaker 1: explanations for everything. But they do not understand that some
Speaker 1: mysteries are meant to remain mysteries. Some boundaries are drawn
Speaker 1: not on maps, but in memory and mutual fear and respect.
Speaker 1: The hairy man, the sasquatch, whatever you want to call them,
Speaker 1: they are the last guardians of the truly wild places.
Speaker 1: They are living reminders that we are not the only
Speaker 1: intelligence on this earth, not the only beings capable of
Speaker 1: love and loss and terrible violence when pushed too far.
Speaker 1: I will die soon. I can feel it in my bones,
Speaker 1: that particular tiredness that comes at the end of a
Speaker 1: very long journey. When I go, I will take with
Speaker 1: me the full truth of what happened that summer. Others
Speaker 1: no pieces of the story. But only I know about
Speaker 1: the female returning, the children's belongings. Only I know about
Speaker 1: the understanding we reached. She and I two females who
Speaker 1: had witnessed too much death. But the story will not
Speaker 1: die with me. It will live on in the whispers
Speaker 1: of wind through the trees, in the footprints that appear
Speaker 1: and disappear in places they should not be, in the
Speaker 1: feeling of being watched that makes hunters hurry back to safety.
Speaker 1: It will live on in the careful distance. Both species
Speaker 1: maintain the unspoken treaty written that summer in blood and grief.
Speaker 1: Before I end this, I must tell you about the dreams.
Speaker 1: They started about five years ago, and they come more
Speaker 1: frequently now. In these dreams, I'm young again, eight years old,
Speaker 1: standing in the forest. Anna and Peter are there, but
Speaker 1: they are different wild Their clothes are made of fur
Speaker 1: and grass, their hair long and tangled. They do not speak,
Speaker 1: but they smile at me. Behind them stands the female
Speaker 1: hairy man, protective maternal. In the dream, I understand that
Speaker 1: she saved them, somehow raised them as her own after
Speaker 1: her mate was killed. It is impossible, of course, we
Speaker 1: found blood evidence of violence, but in dreams, impossible things
Speaker 1: can be true. In the most recent dream, Anna took
Speaker 1: my hand and led me deeper into the forest to
Speaker 1: a clearing I had never seen. There were others there,
Speaker 1: hairy men of all sizes, from elderly giants to small children,
Speaker 1: covered in soft hair. They were gathered in a circle,
Speaker 1: and in the center was a fire. Around the fire,
Speaker 1: they were telling stories not in words, but in sounds
Speaker 1: and gestures that somehow I could understand. They were telling
Speaker 1: the story of the summer of nineteen sixty two, but
Speaker 1: from their perspective. In their version, the male had been sick,
Speaker 1: poisoned by something he had eaten near a mining camp.
Speaker 1: The poison had driven him mad, made him aggressive, made
Speaker 1: him break the ancient laws that kept our species apart.
Speaker 1: The female had tried to stop him, tried to lead
Speaker 1: him away from the human villages, but the sickness had
Speaker 1: made him too strong, too violent. When we killed him,
Speaker 1: she grieved, but she also felt relief the sickness would
Speaker 1: not spread to others of her kind. I woke from
Speaker 1: that dream with tears on my face and a certainty
Speaker 1: that it was more than just my aging mind trying
Speaker 1: to make sense of old trauma. Somehow, across the years
Speaker 1: and the species divide, she had been sharing her side
Speaker 1: of the story with me. That is why I am
Speaker 1: telling you all of this now, writing it down for
Speaker 1: the first time in all its terrible detail, because the
Speaker 1: story is bigger than just our village's tragedy. It is
Speaker 1: about two intelligent species trying to coexist in a world
Speaker 1: that is shrinking, where the wild places are disappearing, where
Speaker 1: the ancient boundaries are being crossed, not by choice but
Speaker 1: by necessity. What happened in nineteen sixty two was a
Speaker 1: collision of worlds, a moment when the careful balance was lost.
Speaker 1: We restored it through violence, but also, I believe through
Speaker 1: mutual recognition of each other's humanity or whatever quality it
Speaker 1: is that makes a being capable of grief and remorse
Speaker 1: and careful coexistence. The female is still alive. I'm certain
Speaker 1: she is ancient now like me, but still watching, still
Speaker 1: maintaining her side of the bargain. When I die, someone
Speaker 1: else will need to remember to understand, to respect the boundary.
Speaker 1: That is why I am passing this story to you,
Speaker 1: not to frighten you, though fear is appropriate, not to
Speaker 1: convince you to search for them, because they should be
Speaker 1: left alone, but to make you understand that we share
Speaker 1: this world with others who are not so different from us.
Speaker 1: Who love their children, mourn they're dead, and will fight
Speaker 1: viciously when cornered. The world wants simple stories, monsters or myths,
Speaker 1: real or fake, good or evil, but the truth is
Speaker 1: always more complex. The hairy men are real, but they
Speaker 1: are not monsters. They are not gentle giants either. They
Speaker 1: are beings like us, capable of great violence and great restraint,
Speaker 1: trying to survive in a world that no longer has
Speaker 1: room for mysteries. Every year the forest shrinks. Every year,
Speaker 1: more roads are built, more areas are mapped, more wilderness
Speaker 1: is tamed. What will happen when and there's nowhere left
Speaker 1: for them to retreat to? What will happen when the
Speaker 1: careful distance we maintain is no longer possible. I will
Speaker 1: not live to see that day, but you might when
Speaker 1: it comes. Remember this story. Remember that we have coexisted before,
Speaker 1: terribly violently, but ultimately successfully. Remember that they are not
Speaker 1: animals to be hunted or specimens to be studied. They
Speaker 1: are an ancient people, with their own ways, their own
Speaker 1: rights to exist. Remember most of all, that summer of
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty two, when our two species went to war
Speaker 1: and both lost. When children died, when parents grieved when
Speaker 1: heroes emerged from unexpected places, When a female creature showed
Speaker 1: mercy by returning the belongings of the children her mate
Speaker 1: had killed, When a little girl and an ancient being
Speaker 1: reached an understanding that is held for sixty years. I
Speaker 1: am dying now. I can feel it the way you
Speaker 1: can feel winter coming in the changing light. My family
Speaker 1: has gathered around me, thinking I am sleeping, But I
Speaker 1: am traveling back to that summer, back to the forest,
Speaker 1: back to the moment when everything changed. In my final dream,
Speaker 1: I see them all, Anna and Peter forever young, picking
Speaker 1: berries in eternal sunshine. The hunters who died, standing proud
Speaker 1: with their weapons, Moses with his blessed spear, Joseph and
Speaker 1: Sarah reunited with their children, my father young and strong again.
Speaker 1: Even the male hairy man is there, no longer violent,
Speaker 1: the sickness gone from his eyes. And she is there too,
Speaker 1: the female, not as the terrifying giant who stalked our nightmares,
Speaker 1: but as another mother who lost everything and somehow found
Speaker 1: the strength to continue. We look at each other across
Speaker 1: the divide of species and understanding, and we nod. The
Speaker 1: dead is settled. The story is told the boundary will hold.
Speaker 1: When you walk in the forest and feel eyes upon you,
Speaker 1: remember us, remember that summer of blood and courage. Remember
Speaker 1: that monsters and heroes can wear unexpected faces. Remember that
Speaker 1: some treaties are written not in words, but in mutual
Speaker 1: fear and respect. The hairy Man is real. It has
Speaker 1: always been real. It lives in the spaces between what
Speaker 1: we know and what we fear, in the shadows of
Speaker 1: the great trees, in the footprints that appear and disappear,
Speaker 1: like questions we should not ask. I leave you with
Speaker 1: this truth, this burden, this sacred knowledge, Guard it well,
Speaker 1: share it carefully, and always always respect the boundary. We
Speaker 1: are not alone in this world. We never have been,
Speaker 1: and if we are wise, if we remember the lessons
Speaker 1: written in blood that summer of nineteen sixty two, we
Speaker 1: never will be. The female still watches, still remembers, still
Speaker 1: maintains the peace. May it hold forever. Children, both human
Speaker 1: and otherwise, play safely in their separate worlds. May the
Speaker 1: forest keep its secrets, and may you never ever need
Speaker 1: to use this knowledge. This is my testimony. I am Mary,
Speaker 1: born in a village by the river, survivor of the summer.
Speaker 1: When we learned that monsters are real, and so are
Speaker 1: the agreements we make with them. Remember us, remember them,
Speaker 1: remember the boundary, and stay out of the deep forest.
Speaker 1: When the moon is dark and the wind carries the
Speaker 1: scent of something wild and ancient and intelligent, the story
Speaker 1: ends where it began, with a warning and a promise.
Speaker 1: We share this world we always have. The piece is fragile,
Speaker 1: held together by memory and mutual understanding. Don't break it.
Speaker 1: For all our sakes, do not break it. Didn't in
Speaker 1: a pass to Pas