Speaker 1: For decades, people have disappeared in the woods without a trace.
Speaker 1: Some blame wild animals, others whisper of creatures the world
Speaker 1: refuses to believe in. But those who have survived they
Speaker 1: know the truth. Welcome to Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, where we
Speaker 1: share real encounters with the things lurking in the darkness bigfoot,
Speaker 1: dog man, UFOs, and creatures that defy explanation. Some make
Speaker 1: it out, others aren't so lucky. Are you ready, because
Speaker 1: once you hear these stories, you'll never walk in the
Speaker 1: woods alone again. So grab your flashlight, stay close, and
Speaker 1: remember some things in the woods don't want to be found.
Speaker 1: Hit that follow or subscribe button, turn on auto downloads,
Speaker 1: and let's head off into the woods if you dare.
Speaker 1: My name is John, and I've been putting off writing
Speaker 1: this down for a long time. Not because I doubt
Speaker 1: what happened. I stopped doubting it about thirty seconds after
Speaker 1: that first rock put me face down in the snow
Speaker 1: with blood running into my eye. And not because I
Speaker 1: worry much about what people think of me. I'm seventy
Speaker 1: eight years old and I've been past caring about that
Speaker 1: for a good while. Now I've put it off, mostly
Speaker 1: because sitting down and going through all of it from
Speaker 1: the beginning means living it again in a way that
Speaker 1: I don't find comfortable, and because I've never been a
Speaker 1: man who particularly enjoys writing when I could be doing
Speaker 1: something else with my hands. But I keep listening to
Speaker 1: this show. I listen to Backwood's Bigfoot Stories, and I
Speaker 1: listened to Sasquatch Odyssey pretty regularly, and over the last
Speaker 1: couple of years, I've heard Fred from Alaska come on
Speaker 1: and talk about his experiences up in the Northern Bush,
Speaker 1: and every single time that man opens his mouth, I
Speaker 1: find myself sitting forward in my chair because he understands
Speaker 1: something about these animals that a lot of the people
Speaker 1: who study them from a comfortable distance have not yet
Speaker 1: figured out. Or maybe they figured it out and they
Speaker 1: just don't want to say it out loud because it
Speaker 1: doesn't fit the version of this phenomenon that their audience
Speaker 1: wants to believe in.
Speaker 2: I don't know which it is. What I do know
Speaker 2: is that Fred is right, and.
Speaker 1: That what I'm going to tell you lines up with
Speaker 1: what he says in ways that I find both validating
Speaker 1: and deeply unsettling. Even now so here it is. I
Speaker 1: need to give you some background, because the situation I
Speaker 1: was in matters for those who listen to this and
Speaker 1: try to understand why I made the choices I made,
Speaker 1: and why I stayed as long as I did, when
Speaker 1: any outside observer might reasonably have argued I should have
Speaker 1: left sooner. I'd been trapping in the Yukon in the
Speaker 1: Northwest Territories since I was nineteen years old. I grew
Speaker 1: up in northern British Columbia, in a small town that
Speaker 1: doesn't exist anymore, at least not in any form i'd recognize,
Speaker 1: and I learned to trap and hunt and navigate that
Speaker 1: country my father and my uncle, both of whom had
Speaker 1: spent their whole lives working the land in ways that
Speaker 1: most people today can't really imagine. By the time I
Speaker 1: was in my mid twenties, I was running my own line,
Speaker 1: my own operation, and I'd gotten my pilot's license, because
Speaker 1: up in that country, a pilot's license isn't a luxury.
Speaker 1: It's a tool, the same as a good knife or.
Speaker 2: A reliable rifle.
Speaker 1: Without the ability to fly, you're limited to whatever you
Speaker 1: can reach by snowmobile or dog team, and the country
Speaker 1: I wanted to work was well beyond those limits. By
Speaker 1: the fall of seventy eight, I was thirty.
Speaker 2: One years old.
Speaker 1: I had a wife named Carol and two kids, a
Speaker 1: boy of seven and a girl of four, and we
Speaker 1: were living in a small house outside of Whitehorse that
Speaker 1: needed a new roof and a furnace that actually worked consistently.
Speaker 1: We weren't in financial trouble exactly, but we weren't comfortable either,
Speaker 1: and the trapping income was the main thing that kept.
Speaker 2: Us solvent through the winters.
Speaker 1: I want to be clear about that because it explains
Speaker 1: decisions I made later in the season that a man
Speaker 1: without a family to feed might not have made. I
Speaker 1: had a trapping cabin about one hundred and forty miles
Speaker 1: northeast of Dawson City, up in country that sits roughly
Speaker 1: in the watershed between the Stuart River and some of
Speaker 1: its smaller northern tributaries. Its mixed terrain up there, boreal
Speaker 1: spruce and birch in the valley bottoms, open alpine tundra
Speaker 1: on the Ridges Creek drainages choked with willow and alder
Speaker 1: that hold beaver and muskrat in the lower reaches. It's
Speaker 1: exactly the kind of country that produces good fur if
Speaker 1: you know what you're doing, and I'd been working that
Speaker 1: area long enough to know it about as well as
Speaker 1: any man could. I'd built the cabin myself over two summers,
Speaker 1: hauling materials up in the plain a load at a time.
Speaker 1: Eight inch spruce logs chinked with a mix of moss
Speaker 1: and commercial chinking compound, A heavy shake roof with two
Speaker 1: layers of tar paper underneath, a good cast iron box
Speaker 1: stove that I'd pulled out of a derelict roadhouse and rebuilt.
Speaker 1: A plank floor, two bunks, a table, shelves, nothing fancy,
Speaker 1: everything solid. I was proud of that cabin, the way
Speaker 1: you're proud of anything you build with your own hands
Speaker 1: out of nothing. And every fall when I dropped down
Speaker 1: onto my little landing strip in the meadow below it,
Speaker 1: and taxied up to the tie down and cut the
Speaker 1: engine and listen to the silence settle in around me,
Speaker 1: I felt something I can only describe as rightness, Like
Speaker 1: I was exactly where I was supposed to be, doing
Speaker 1: exactly what I was supposed to be doing. My trap
Speaker 1: line covered a rough oval of territory that took me
Speaker 1: about four days to run if I pushed hard from
Speaker 1: before light to last light. It ran northeast along the
Speaker 1: main creek drainage for about eight miles, then curved north
Speaker 1: and west through the heavy timber on the backside of
Speaker 1: a long ridge, then turned south through the open country
Speaker 1: on the far side, before coming around and back to
Speaker 1: the cabin from the west along a series of beaver ponds.
Speaker 1: I had sets throughout that circuit, mostly for Martin because
Speaker 1: the rices were good that season, but also for Lynx
Speaker 1: beaver and Wolverine. I had a few large blind sets
Speaker 1: and strategic locations for wolf, though I wasn't counting on those.
Speaker 1: They were more of a bonus than a plan. My
Speaker 1: Piper Supercub was my lifeline. I want you to understand
Speaker 1: that clearly. Without that plane, I had no way in
Speaker 1: and no way out. I had a handheld radio that
Speaker 1: could reach Byron and Dawson under good conditions, but there
Speaker 1: was no road, no trail that a snowmobile could navigate
Speaker 1: in the terrain between me and the nearest other human being.
Speaker 1: The plane was everything I kept. It tied down on
Speaker 1: a flat meadow about sixty yards from the cabin, chalkeed
Speaker 1: and covered, and I checked it every couple of days,
Speaker 1: the way you check on something you depend on for
Speaker 1: your life. I flew in on the second of October
Speaker 1: seventy eight. The weather was cold and clear, the kind
Speaker 1: of yukon October day that looks like a painting. Everything
Speaker 1: sharp edged and blue and gold and silent. I had
Speaker 1: the plane loaded with enough food for four months, extra fuel,
Speaker 1: trapping supplies, tools, ammunition, medical kit. I'd done this enough
Speaker 1: times that the packing was efficient. Everything had its place,
Speaker 1: and everything was accounted for. The first two days were
Speaker 1: everything I'd hoped for. I ran my near sets, got
Speaker 1: everything freshened and baited. Found good sign throughout the territory.
Speaker 1: Martin tracks in the timber, fresh beaver work on the
Speaker 1: lower ponds, link sign on the ridge. The population was
Speaker 1: looking healthy. I was genuinely optimistic about the season. I
Speaker 1: should have paid more attention to what I didn't see
Speaker 1: in those first few days. No wolves, no moose, not
Speaker 1: even tracks, and moose should have been in the willows
Speaker 1: along the creek at that time of year. The birds
Speaker 1: were strange, too quiet in a way that the birds
Speaker 1: up there usually aren't. I noticed it, but I filed
Speaker 1: it without giving it the weight It deserved. The tracks
Speaker 1: first showed up on the fifth of October, or at
Speaker 1: least that's the first time I noticed them in retrospect.
Speaker 1: I think they may have been around earlier, and I
Speaker 1: just hadn't been in the right place at the right
Speaker 1: time to cross them. I was coming back from running
Speaker 1: the eastern arm of my line late in the afternoon,
Speaker 1: following the creek back toward the cabin. The light was
Speaker 1: going fast, the way it does up there in October,
Speaker 1: dropping off the edge of the world in what seems
Speaker 1: like minutes, and I was moving with some purpose to
Speaker 1: get back before full dark. I came through a section
Speaker 1: of open ground near a gravel bar where the creek
Speaker 1: bent east, an area of maybe half an acre, where
Speaker 1: the willows thinned out and the ground was relatively flat
Speaker 1: with snow that had fallen three days earlier, sitting undisturbed
Speaker 1: and smooth, just enough snow to hold a print, maybe
Speaker 1: three inches soft on top and firmer underneath. I almost
Speaker 1: walked past them. My brain ran its standard processing sequence,
Speaker 1: saw a large track, filed it under bare, and tried
Speaker 1: to keep me moving toward the cabin in supper. But
Speaker 1: something made me stop, some part of me that had
Speaker 1: been making decisions in wild country for twelve years, overrode
Speaker 1: the filing and made me look again. They weren't bear tracks.
Speaker 1: I followed enough bears to know what their tracks looked like.
Speaker 1: Displayed toes, the claw marks out ahead, the way, the
Speaker 1: back foot oversteps the front. These were nothing like that.
Speaker 1: These were feet, human feet, or something shaped like human feet,
Speaker 1: but scaled up in a way that didn't make sense.
Speaker 1: Five toes all forward, a broad metatarsal ball, and a
Speaker 1: heel that I could cradle in both my hands put together.
Speaker 2: I stood there for a while, just.
Speaker 1: Looking at them. Then I pulled off my pack and
Speaker 1: found my tape. Twenty two inches tip of the longest
Speaker 1: toe to the back of the heel, eight and a
Speaker 1: quarter inches at the widest point of the ball. The
Speaker 1: heel itself measured just over eight inches across. The depth
Speaker 1: of the impression was shallower than I expected for something
Speaker 1: that size, which meant the weight was being spread efficiently
Speaker 1: across the foot, which meant the anatomy was doing something sophisticated.
Speaker 2: I paced the stride.
Speaker 1: My stride at a normal walk is about thirty inches.
Speaker 1: These strides were closer to sixty five, and the foot
Speaker 1: was angling slightly inward with each step in a way
Speaker 1: that suggested a very upright walking posture. I measured six
Speaker 1: separate prints before the light got too bad to work.
Speaker 1: The measurements were consistent across all six. This wasn't one
Speaker 1: weird track. It was a clear trail of a single
Speaker 1: animal moving on two feet across that gravel bar at
Speaker 1: what I estimated based on the stride and the depth
Speaker 1: was a walking pace. Whatever made these tracks was not rushing,
Speaker 1: It was just walking. I went back to the cabin
Speaker 1: and I sat by the stove with a cup of coffee,
Speaker 1: and I thought about it for a long time. I
Speaker 1: want to be honest about what I was and wasn't
Speaker 1: willing to think at that point. My first actual considered
Speaker 1: thought after the bare hypothesis collapsed, was that there was
Speaker 1: someone out there, some very large person, perhaps a trapper
Speaker 1: I didn't know about working country that I thought was
Speaker 1: mine alone, who had feet the size of a cutting
Speaker 1: board and no snow shoes and still wasn't punching through
Speaker 1: to the gravel. I turned that over for a while.
Speaker 1: I knew it didn't hold together. The nearest other trapper
Speaker 1: I was aware of operated country about forty miles to
Speaker 1: my south and west, and nobody had ever mentioned another
Speaker 1: operation in my area, and no person on Earth has
Speaker 1: feet that size, And there were no boot impressions, no
Speaker 1: tread pattern, just bare skin on the snow. I went
Speaker 1: to sleep, telling myself to pay attention and that i'd
Speaker 1: know more when I knew more. I went back the
Speaker 1: next morning with my tape and my notebook, and I
Speaker 1: spent two hours at that gravel bar, documenting everything I could.
Speaker 1: I drew the outlines of three of the best prints
Speaker 1: in my notebook, measured the toe spacing, noted the heel shape,
Speaker 1: estimated the depth in comparison to my own track beside it.
Speaker 1: I have that notebook still. The pages are brittle now,
Speaker 1: but the drawings are still clear. On the way back
Speaker 1: to the cabin, I found a second set of tracks
Speaker 1: on the north side of the creek, heading west, same dimensions,
Speaker 1: same stride, same shallow depth. They weren't the same individual
Speaker 1: as the first set, or if they were the same individual,
Speaker 1: they'd come back on a different route because the direction
Speaker 1: of travel was different and the right rear track had
Speaker 1: a slight anomaly, a notch in the outer edge of
Speaker 1: the heel that didn't appear in the first set.
Speaker 2: I've thought about whether it was.
Speaker 1: Two different animals or one animal on two different trips,
Speaker 1: and I've never resolved it to my complete satisfaction. What
Speaker 1: I had resolved, to my satisfaction was that I was
Speaker 1: not alone out there. The trap losses started on the
Speaker 1: eighth of October, three days after I found the first tracks.
Speaker 1: I was running my northern sets, a section of line
Speaker 1: that went up through some older spruce stands where the
Speaker 1: martin population was densest, and at the third and fourth sets,
Speaker 1: I found the traps empty in a way I couldn't explain.
Speaker 1: Both had been activated. The mechanisms tripped, bait removed, but
Speaker 1: no animal, no carcass, no drag, no blood from a catch.
Speaker 1: A wolverine will clear a trap and eat a catch
Speaker 1: right there, or drag it off a short distance. A
Speaker 1: wolverine leaves a mess. What I found at those two
Speaker 1: sets was almost neat by comparison. The trap was open,
Speaker 1: the bait was gone, the drag steak was where it
Speaker 1: should be, but the chain lay slack. I crouched down
Speaker 1: and looked at the ground around the first set for
Speaker 1: a long time. Those same track impressions were there two
Speaker 1: of them pressed into the soft ground on either side
Speaker 1: of the trap. Whatever had cleared it had stood over it,
Speaker 1: one foot on each side and reached down. The trap
Speaker 1: had been sprung based on the mechanism by downward pressure,
Speaker 1: rather than by something triggering the pan from the side,
Speaker 1: which is what a martin does downward pressure like a
Speaker 1: thumb or a finger, depressing the pan deliberately, the way
Speaker 1: a person might a mouse trap before deciding how to
Speaker 1: deal with it. That detail bothered me more than anything
Speaker 1: else I'd seen so far. Not the size, not the tracks,
Speaker 1: not even the missing animals. That one detail, the trap
Speaker 1: sprung from above by intentional downward pressure, put something in
Speaker 1: a different category for me. It's one thing to encounter
Speaker 1: an animal you don't have a name for. It's another thing,
Speaker 1: entirely to encounter an animal that's figuring out your equipment.
Speaker 1: Over the following week I lost two more martin, a
Speaker 1: beaver from one of my lower sets, and then on
Speaker 1: or about the fifteenth of October, a Lynx links are
Speaker 1: wary animals, and they're not easy to trap, even if
Speaker 1: you know what you're doing. I'd had a good set
Speaker 1: working a game trail on the south side of the ridge,
Speaker 1: a trail I'd been watching for two seasons, and I'd
Speaker 1: made my catch. I could tell from the sign the
Speaker 1: ground was disturbed, the way it gets when a lynx
Speaker 1: is in a trap and fighting it. But the lynx
Speaker 1: was gone. The trap was sprung over open, and those
Speaker 1: tracks were around the set again. And there was a
Speaker 1: single partial impression in the dirt at the edge of
Speaker 1: the trail that showed the outside edge of a foot
Speaker 1: and two toes, and it was enormous. Stay tuned for
Speaker 1: more Backwoods Bigfoot stories.
Speaker 2: We'll be back.
Speaker 1: After these messages, I reset everything and kept going because
Speaker 1: what else was I going to do. But I started
Speaker 1: keeping a running tally in my notebook of what I
Speaker 1: was losing, and the numbers were adding up in a
Speaker 1: direction I didn't like. My family's winter depended on what
Speaker 1: I brought home out of that country. I couldn't afford
Speaker 1: to lose a third or a half of my catch
Speaker 1: to something I couldn't trap, couldn't shoot, and couldn't reliably locate.
Speaker 1: I started thinking about whether I needed to move some
Speaker 1: of my sets, put them in areas that were harder
Speaker 1: to access, put more distance between the sets, and whatever
Speaker 1: patterns these things were following, which raises the question what
Speaker 1: patterns were they following. They seemed to know my line,
Speaker 1: not just generally, as in they'd blundered into a trap
Speaker 1: by chance, but specifically, as if they'd walked my line
Speaker 1: and identified the sets I had set spread over eight
Speaker 1: or more miles of territory, and they were hitting them
Speaker 1: in multiple locations across that whole range. Either there were
Speaker 1: several of them working different parts of my line simultaneously,
Speaker 1: or one or two of them had a mental map
Speaker 1: of my operation that was uncomfortably detailed. I moved four
Speaker 1: sets on the seventeenth and eighteenth of October, pushed them
Speaker 1: off my established trail system and into less accessible terrain.
Speaker 1: The losses at those four locations stopped immediately, which told
Speaker 1: me they weren't just wandering my area randomly. They were
Speaker 1: tracking my established roots. When I put sets somewhere new
Speaker 1: off the pattern, they didn't find them right away. That
Speaker 1: was useful information. It was all so deeply unpleasant information.
Speaker 1: The vocalization started on the eleventh of October, four days
Speaker 1: before I lost the links, so they'd been active for
Speaker 1: a while wile before things escalated into confrontation. I was
Speaker 1: inside the cabin working on some equipment after supper, A
Speaker 1: good fire going lamp lit comfortable enough, and then something
Speaker 1: outside opened up with a sound that had me on
Speaker 1: my feet with the marlin in my hands before i'd
Speaker 1: consciously decided to move. That's the thing about a sound
Speaker 1: that doesn't fit any category you have a name for.
Speaker 1: Your body responds to it before your mind has finished processing.
Speaker 1: It wasn't a wolf howl. I've heard wolves my entire life,
Speaker 1: and I know that sound in all its variations. It
Speaker 1: was deeper, for one thing, well below the register a
Speaker 1: wolf works in, with a resonance to it that suggested
Speaker 1: a chest cavity much larger than any wolf. It was
Speaker 1: also longer, more sustained, and it had a quality that
Speaker 1: I've struggled to describe accurately ever since intentional is the
Speaker 1: word I keep coming back to. It sounded intentional, like
Speaker 1: the sound was being shaped, modulated, controlled, the way a
Speaker 1: person modulates their voice when they're projecting it. An animal
Speaker 1: making noise out of instinct doesn't sound like that. This
Speaker 1: sounded like something that knew it was making a sound
Speaker 1: and was making it on purpose. It went on for
Speaker 1: maybe eight seconds, dropped off, and then it came again
Speaker 1: from a slightly different angle, maybe thirty degrees to the
Speaker 1: right of the first, which meant either it had moved
Speaker 1: very quickly in the seconds between, or there were two
Speaker 1: of them calling back and forth. In either case, I
Speaker 1: stood at the door with my hand on the latch
Speaker 1: and my rifle up, and there was no way I
Speaker 1: was going outside. I'm not embarrassed to say it. Going
Speaker 1: out into the dark after a sound you can't identify
Speaker 1: as how you end a story badly. Over the following
Speaker 1: two weeks, the sounds became more frequent and more varied,
Speaker 1: and I started to get a sense of the geography
Speaker 1: of where they were. They seemed to be based, if
Speaker 1: that's the right word, in the heavy timber to the
Speaker 1: east and northeast of the cabin, in a section of
Speaker 1: old growth spruce that I didn't run any sets through
Speaker 1: because the dead fall made it nearly impenetrable on foot.
Speaker 1: They moved around a lot, covering ground between vocalizations at
Speaker 1: a rate that was hard to account for. I'd hear
Speaker 1: something from the northeast, and twenty minutes later here a
Speaker 1: response from the northwest, and there was no reasonable way
Speaker 1: for one animal to have covered that distance in that time.
Speaker 2: Through that terrain.
Speaker 1: There were nights I'd hear this low rhythmic knocking, something
Speaker 1: striking a tree trunk or a log, over and over,
Speaker 1: about every five seconds, going on for ten or fifteen
Speaker 1: minutes at a stretch. There were whistles too, the kind
Speaker 1: that sit in a range I've always associated with a
Speaker 1: person whistling, not any bird I know. One morning, real early,
Speaker 1: still dark out, I heard something directly overhead that I
Speaker 1: couldn't place at all, this resonant kind of exhalation, almost
Speaker 1: like something standing up on the roof taking a long,
Speaker 1: slow breath. I laid in my bunk with the rifle
Speaker 1: and didn't move until full light. But the night that
Speaker 1: sticks with me most from that stretch before where things
Speaker 1: got physical, the one I've replayed more times than I
Speaker 1: can count in the years since, was around the seventeenth
Speaker 1: or eighteenth of October. That's the night I heard the exchange.
Speaker 1: I was awake. I was awake a lot by then,
Speaker 1: laying in the bunk, stove burned down to coals. It
Speaker 1: started with that deep call from the eastern timber, same
Speaker 1: one I'd been hearing then an answer came back from
Speaker 1: a different direction, with a different quality to it, a
Speaker 1: little higher, a little faster than the first one. Again,
Speaker 1: then the second, back and forth, back and forth. I
Speaker 1: timed it forty three minutes on the watch on my wrist.
Speaker 1: Now I want to try and tell you what it
Speaker 1: actually sounded like, because I think it matters. It wasn't
Speaker 1: just two animals calling back and forth the way wolves
Speaker 1: do or coyotes. There was a texture to it, a
Speaker 1: rhythm that kept changing, phrases that seemed to vary in
Speaker 1: length and content the way.
Speaker 2: Real speed does.
Speaker 1: There'd be moments where one of them would go on
Speaker 1: for twenty or thirty seconds at a stretch, something that
Speaker 1: felt like a long string of organized sounds, and then
Speaker 1: the other one would answer with something short, three or
Speaker 1: four seconds, and then there'd be a pause, and then
Speaker 1: the first one would start up again, like one of
Speaker 1: them was talking and the other one was listening, responding,
Speaker 1: maybe asking something, and then the first one was picking
Speaker 1: back up to elaborate. That's the only framework I've got
Speaker 1: for it. It sounded like a conversation. I had nothing
Speaker 1: to compare it to. In October of seventy eight, no
Speaker 1: reference point, no prior experience. Nothing in my mental library
Speaker 1: that matched what I was hearing out there in the dark.
Speaker 1: I just sat up in the bunk and listened to
Speaker 1: the whole thing with the hair standing on my arms,
Speaker 1: and then I sat there a long time after it quit,
Speaker 1: and then eventually I went back to sleep because there
Speaker 1: wasn't anything.
Speaker 2: Else to do.
Speaker 1: Now, let me tell you what happened just a few
Speaker 1: years ago that brought all of that crashing back. I'd
Speaker 1: been doing research, the kind you do when you're retired
Speaker 1: and you've got time and you've never really let go
Speaker 1: of something that happened to you forty years earlier, reading
Speaker 1: accounts online, listening to podcasts, Your Show among them, and
Speaker 1: I came across a recording made by two men, Ron
Speaker 1: Moorhead and Al Berry, who'd spent time in the Sierra
Speaker 1: Nevada back country in California starting in the late nineteen
Speaker 1: sixties and going on through the seventies. They captured audio
Speaker 1: of what they believed were Sasquatch vocalizations out in a
Speaker 1: remote area, and that audio has been analyzed by linguists
Speaker 1: and acoustic people over the years. I found a version
Speaker 1: online and I sat down at my kitchen table with
Speaker 1: headphones on and pressed play. I had to stop it
Speaker 1: after about thirty seconds. I had to get up from
Speaker 1: the table and walk around the room. My wife came
Speaker 1: in and asked what was wrong that recording. The texture
Speaker 1: of it, the rhythm, the way it moves between registers,
Speaker 1: that quality underneath, the strangeness of it, of something organized,
Speaker 1: something purposeful. That was the same type of sound I
Speaker 1: heard in the dark outside my cabin in the Yukon
Speaker 1: on that October night in nineteen seventy eight.
Speaker 2: Not similar to.
Speaker 1: Not reminiscent, of the same fundamental quality, that same sense
Speaker 1: of structure and communication underneath sounds no human.
Speaker 2: Throat is built to make.
Speaker 1: I've listened to it many times since, and every time
Speaker 1: it takes me right back to that night in the bunk,
Speaker 1: listening to forty three minutes of something I didn't have
Speaker 1: a name for. What that recording told me looking back
Speaker 1: is that whatever I was dealing with up there wasn't
Speaker 1: some isolated thing. It wasn't a regional quirk. Whatever makes
Speaker 1: that type of sound is doing it across thousands of
Speaker 1: miles of territory from California to the Yukon, and it's
Speaker 1: been doing it for at least as long as humans
Speaker 1: have been paying close enough attention to record it. That's
Speaker 1: not comforting information, but I think it's important. On the
Speaker 1: twenty third of October, the dynamic shifted from passive to active,
Speaker 1: and it went in a direction I hadn't who i'd expected.
Speaker 1: I was running my southeast sets through some older spruce
Speaker 1: with serious deadfall on both sides of the trail. Good
Speaker 1: Martin country, that kind of messy layered terrain they prefer.
Speaker 1: But your visibilities cut way down out there, thirty or
Speaker 1: forty feet on either side, and anything could be close
Speaker 1: without announcing itself. I'd been on edge for a couple
Speaker 1: weeks by then, watching the margins more than I usually would,
Speaker 1: and that's when I noticed it. Something was in the
Speaker 1: timber to my left, moving on a line roughly parallel
Speaker 1: to mine. I could hear it the way you hear
Speaker 1: large animals moving through spruce, periodic disturbances in the snow,
Speaker 1: shaking off branches, the occasional soft compression of dead fall underfoot.
Speaker 1: But there was a quality to it that was different
Speaker 1: from the bears or moose I was used to tracking
Speaker 1: by sound. It was deliberate, It was pacing me. I'd stop,
Speaker 1: and it would stop. I'd wait until I thought maybe
Speaker 1: I'd imagined it start moving again, and within ten or
Speaker 1: fifteen seconds, i'd hear it pick back up, same distance,
Speaker 1: same angle. I kept walking and thinking about what to do.
Speaker 1: Stopping and turning back meant four miles to the cabin
Speaker 1: with this thing behind me pushing on meant finishing my
Speaker 1: sets and having those same four miles back either way.
Speaker 1: I decided to continue and stay aware. The first rock
Speaker 1: hit the ground about six feet to my right. I
Speaker 1: didn't hear it thrown, just that last split second before impact,
Speaker 1: a faint whisper of displacement in the cold air, and
Speaker 1: then the sharp crack of it hitting frozen ground and
Speaker 1: breaking in two. It was the size of my closed fist,
Speaker 1: a rough chunk of quartzight. I spun with the rifle
Speaker 1: up and there was nothing, both sides of that timber
Speaker 1: absolutely still.
Speaker 2: I stood in the trail.
Speaker 1: A long time, with my heart going and my breath smoking,
Speaker 1: and the rifle pointed at nothing, and eventually I lowered
Speaker 1: it and moved on. The second rock came about two
Speaker 1: hundred yards further along. This one hit my pack enough
Speaker 1: impact to push forward a step and knock me off balance.
Speaker 1: It had come from the right side. This time, something
Speaker 1: had crossed either behind me or ahead of me without
Speaker 1: me hearing it at all, and was now working from
Speaker 1: the opposite side. The throw had come through timber, through
Speaker 1: a stand of spruce that should have broken up any
Speaker 1: throw significantly. It didn't seem to matter. The rock went
Speaker 1: where it was aimed. I turned around and I yelled
Speaker 1: at the timber. I'm not going to pretend it was
Speaker 1: my finest moment. I yelled something about shooting whatever was
Speaker 1: out there, stood there while the timber did absolutely nothing
Speaker 1: back at me, then turned around, finished my sets and
Speaker 1: went home. I felt angry and foolish and about equal measure.
Speaker 1: That night at the stove, I had a long, hard
Speaker 1: conversation with myself about what was happening and what I
Speaker 1: was going to do about it. I decided to keep
Speaker 1: doing what I was doing, or rather, I decided to
Speaker 1: carry the rifle in my hands instead of on my
Speaker 1: back and keep my eyes moving in the margins more
Speaker 1: than before. What I was not going to do was
Speaker 1: cut my season short over rocks that would have felt
Speaker 1: like letting something push me around, and I wasn't the
Speaker 1: kind of man who let things push him around. I
Speaker 1: should have been smarter than that. Pride is dangerous company
Speaker 1: in wilderness country. The wilderness doesn't care about your pride.
Speaker 2: There were two more.
Speaker 1: Rock throwing incidents the following week, both on the northern
Speaker 1: section of my line, both following the same pattern, something
Speaker 1: moving parallel in the timber rocks, landing near me, not
Speaker 1: hitting me. I made the mistake of thinking of it
Speaker 1: as harassment rather than genuine attack.
Speaker 2: I revised that.
Speaker 1: On the twenty eighth of October, I was coming around
Speaker 1: a bend in the main creek drainage about a mile
Speaker 1: and a half from the cabin. Terrain opens up, there
Speaker 1: willows thinning out on both sides, a flat stretch of
Speaker 1: maybe two hundred yards before the creek bends south again.
Speaker 1: I was moving at a normal walk, rifle slum. I'd
Speaker 1: had a good morning on the traps, and I was
Speaker 1: doing the math on what the week's catch was going
Speaker 1: to look like. My guard was further down than it
Speaker 1: should have been. I heard it coming, not long, half
Speaker 1: a second, maybe a little less, just enough of a
Speaker 1: sound through the still cold air, A slight hiss of
Speaker 1: something moving fast that my head had started to turn.
Speaker 1: The rock caught me on the left side of my skull,
Speaker 1: just above and slightly in front of my ear, and
Speaker 1: the next thing I knew, I was face down in
Speaker 1: the snow, with my rifle somewhere ahead of me, and
Speaker 1: this ringing sound filling my head like I was inside
Speaker 1: a bell. I laid there for what might have been
Speaker 1: a minute, might have been three. The cold snow against
Speaker 1: my face was actually useful, pulling me back toward awareness,
Speaker 1: and I focused on that, on breathing, on not doing
Speaker 1: anything sudden, until I had a sense of what was
Speaker 1: working and what wasn't. When I finally got up, I
Speaker 1: did it slow, and when I stood, I put my
Speaker 1: hand to my head and.
Speaker 2: Brought it back red.
Speaker 1: The cold was slowing the bleeding, but not stopping it,
Speaker 1: and when I explored the woman with my fingers, I
Speaker 1: knew I was going to have to deal with it.
Speaker 1: I found the rock in the snow, about three feet
Speaker 1: from where I'd gone down, nearly perfectly spherical, the kind
Speaker 1: of smooth, rounded river rock you find in creek gravel,
Speaker 1: about the diameter of a golf ball, but heavier than
Speaker 1: it looked good, dense quartzite. That rock had not rolled
Speaker 1: to me, It had not fallen from a tree. It
Speaker 1: had been selected for its size and weight, carried to
Speaker 1: a position with a clear sight line to the trail,
Speaker 1: and thrown with enough accuracy to hit me in the
Speaker 1: head from what I estimated was forty to fifty yards
Speaker 1: through cold air on a moving target, and it hit
Speaker 1: exactly where it was aimed. Think about what that means.
Speaker 1: The animal that through that rock watched me walk that trail,
Speaker 1: judged my position in speed, picked out a throwing object
Speaker 1: of the right size and weight, and put it in
Speaker 1: my head from distance with enough force to cut me
Speaker 1: to the bone through my hat. That isn't random aggression.
Speaker 1: That isn't an animal throwing a tantrum. It describes a
Speaker 1: targeting decision, and I don't have a softer way to
Speaker 1: say it. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll
Speaker 1: be back after these messages. I got back to the
Speaker 1: cabin and cleaned the wound as best I could see
Speaker 1: it in the small mirror over the wash basin, just
Speaker 1: under three inches long, running at an angle above my ear,
Speaker 1: and deep enough in two spots that I knew it
Speaker 1: needed closing. I've done backcountry medicine on myself before, set
Speaker 1: a broken finger, dug out an infected cut, dealt with
Speaker 1: a gash on my shin from an axe that slipped.
Speaker 1: It's not something you enjoy, but when the choice is
Speaker 1: sepsis or needlework, you do the needlework. I got the
Speaker 1: kid out, sterilize the needle, and thread with the whiskey
Speaker 1: I kept for exactly these situations, and cleaned the wound
Speaker 1: with the same, which I don't recommend unless you're out
Speaker 1: of iodine and out of options. Seven stitches, twenty minutes
Speaker 1: of work. The concentration that took actually helped with the
Speaker 1: fear that was building underneath the anger. When I was done,
Speaker 1: I put a clean dressing over it, tied it in place,
Speaker 1: made supper, and sat by the stove to think. I'd
Speaker 1: been in that country twenty six days. I'd lost significant
Speaker 1: fur from my sets. I'd been hit hard enough in
Speaker 1: the head to need stitches. Sleep was getting harder every night.
Speaker 1: The temperature was going to drop seriously in another two
Speaker 1: or three weeks, which would work in my favor for
Speaker 1: fur quality and against me in terms of the physical
Speaker 1: demands of the work. I had roughly ten more weeks
Speaker 1: of planned season ahead of me. I wasn't ready to leave.
Speaker 1: My family needed what that season could produce. And underneath
Speaker 1: the practical math was something harder to admit, something that
Speaker 1: had more to do with the man I was at
Speaker 1: thirty one than with any rational assessment. I wasn't going
Speaker 1: to be run off my own trap line. I'd built
Speaker 1: that cabin, I'd built that line, I'd worked that country
Speaker 1: for years. I was not going to leave because something
Speaker 1: was throwing rocks at me. I held that position for
Speaker 1: several more weeks before a vents made it impossible. I'm
Speaker 1: still not sure whether to call that stubbornness or stupidity,
Speaker 1: or just the limited perspective of a man who didn't
Speaker 1: yet understand what he was dealing with. In the second
Speaker 1: week of November, the encounters moved from the trap line
Speaker 1: to the cabin itself, and that change in proximity changed
Speaker 1: everything about the nature of the situation. The first visit
Speaker 1: was the night of the twelfth. I was asleep, genuinely
Speaker 1: asleep for the first time in several nights, when something
Speaker 1: woke me. Not a sharp sound, nothing that made me
Speaker 1: grab the rifle and sit straight up. Just a quality
Speaker 1: of wrongness that my sleeping brain registered and handed forward
Speaker 1: to the waking part. I laid still and listened. Something
Speaker 1: was walking around outside the cabin bipedal two point contact,
Speaker 1: the kind of walking pattern a person makes, moving deliberately,
Speaker 1: without hurrying. I could follow it around the perimeter, each footfall,
Speaker 1: compressing the frozen snow, pausing at the corner, continuing. It
Speaker 1: went around once, maybe twice, and then it stopped at
Speaker 1: the door, and then I heard it breathing, long, slow
Speaker 1: inhalations against the door seam, against that gap at the
Speaker 1: bottom where the cold air comes in, deep enough that
Speaker 1: I could hear the quality change as the lungs filled,
Speaker 1: and then the release and then fill again, slow and
Speaker 1: deliberate and patient, the breathing of something that was in
Speaker 1: absolutely no hurry. I've thought about that breathing more times
Speaker 1: than I care to count in the years, since there
Speaker 1: was nothing overtly threatening in it.
Speaker 2: It was just breathing.
Speaker 1: But the fact of it, whatever was outside that door,
Speaker 1: crouching against it in the dark, methodically smelling the interior
Speaker 1: of the space I was sleeping in. That was the
Speaker 1: most unsettling thing I'd experienced up to that point. I
Speaker 1: sat up in the bunk with the marlin across my lap,
Speaker 1: lamp off, and I waited. The breathing went on for
Speaker 1: what felt like five minutes, might have been less. Then
Speaker 1: it stopped. The footsteps resumed, moved away north and then
Speaker 1: east and into the timber, and eventually I couldn't hear
Speaker 1: them anymore. I didn't sleep again that night. This happened
Speaker 1: three more times over the following ten days, each visit
Speaker 1: following roughly the same pattern, with small variations. The second
Speaker 1: time it stopped at the window rather than the door.
Speaker 1: I laid in the bunk and watched the frost on
Speaker 1: the glass go slightly opaque for a moment, then clear again.
Speaker 1: Something close enough to the outside surface of that window
Speaker 1: to put warmth against it. The third time, there were
Speaker 1: two sets of footsteps, one at the door and one
Speaker 1: moving along the east wall, and I could hear both
Speaker 1: of them breathing at different points around the cabin, separate rhythms.
Speaker 1: The fourth visit introduced something new. I woke to footsteps
Speaker 1: and then to a sound I couldn't immediately classify, a
Speaker 1: slow dragging contact along the log wall, the way a
Speaker 1: branch sounds when wind pushes it along a surface, but
Speaker 1: much slower, much more deliberate. I crept to the window
Speaker 1: and looked out sideway into the dark and couldn't see
Speaker 1: a thing. But the sound was coming from the north wall,
Speaker 1: about four feet up, and it was moving inch by
Speaker 1: inch from the corner toward the window. When it reached
Speaker 1: the window frame, it stopped. I heard the wood creak
Speaker 1: very slightly under a pressure being applied from outside. Then
Speaker 1: it released and the footsteps moved away. It had been
Speaker 1: feeling the construction running something a hand I assumed along
Speaker 1: the logs and then testing the frame. I don't know
Speaker 1: what it was trying to learn. I've speculated over the
Speaker 1: years that it was mapping the structure, figuring out where
Speaker 1: the solid points and the weak points were. I don't
Speaker 1: know if that's right, but the behavior was not random,
Speaker 1: and it was not the behavior of an animal working
Speaker 1: by smell and sound alone. On the eighteenth of November,
Speaker 1: six weeks and two days into my season, everything changed.
Speaker 1: I'd been asleep maybe two hours when the first impact hit.
Speaker 1: No warning, no sound of something approaching, just a single
Speaker 1: enormous concussive blow against the front wall that shook the
Speaker 1: cabin hard enough to knock my lamp off its shelf
Speaker 1: and send my coffee pot sliding off the stove. I
Speaker 1: was out of the bunk with the rifle before the
Speaker 1: echo had finished bouncing around inside. The lamp was broken
Speaker 1: on the floor, but the stove still gave enough light
Speaker 1: to see that nothing structural had given way. Then the
Speaker 1: second hit came at the rear wall, and I heard
Speaker 1: the chinking crack, Not the way dried chinking cracks in
Speaker 1: the cold, which is gradual and minor, the way it
Speaker 1: cracks when the log behind it deflects. That told me
Speaker 1: the force had actually moved the log, a ten inch
Speaker 1: spruce log notched into a corner. It had moved. I
Speaker 1: went to the window and could see nothing outside.
Speaker 2: The moon was.
Speaker 1: Up, but with enough cloud cover that the yard was
Speaker 1: nearly black. I could hear something circling out there, a
Speaker 1: sound too heavy for the snow to muffle the way
Speaker 1: it muffled other things. Then the third hit west wall,
Speaker 1: and the structure rang under like a drum. My coffee
Speaker 1: cup fell off the shelf. The stovepipe rattled in its collar.
Speaker 1: This went on, not constant, not a continuous assault, measured hit.
Speaker 1: Then a pause of twenty or thirty seconds hit pause,
Speaker 1: like something working to a rhythm, like something that understood.
Speaker 1: The waiting was its own kind of message. I've thought
Speaker 1: about that a lot over the years, and I still
Speaker 1: believe that's the right read. The pausing was intentional. It
Speaker 1: was designed to keep me from settling into it. After
Speaker 1: about fifteen minutes of this, I made a decision I
Speaker 1: can't fully explain even now.
Speaker 2: I got dressed.
Speaker 1: I loaded my Marlin forty five seventy rifle, five rounds
Speaker 1: in the rifle, five more in my right coat pocket,
Speaker 1: and I opened the door. I stood in the doorway
Speaker 1: and let my eyes adjust. The cold hit immediately fifteen
Speaker 1: or twenty below by then, and my breath fogged out
Speaker 1: in front of me. I couldn't hear a thing. The
Speaker 1: yard was still, The timber beyond was a black wall.
Speaker 1: Then something moved at the far right corner of the cabin,
Speaker 1: coming around from the east side, and I tracked it
Speaker 1: with the rifle.
Speaker 2: I want to.
Speaker 1: Describe what I saw without the vocabulary the movies and
Speaker 1: television shows have embedded in everybody's head, because what I
Speaker 1: saw didn't look like a movie. It looked like a
Speaker 1: real animal. It was very dark, darker than the surrounding timber,
Speaker 1: and it had a physical mass that I noticed, the
Speaker 1: way you notice something that's taking up more space than
Speaker 1: it should, moving on two legs and moving with a
Speaker 1: kind of easy deliberateness, not threatening, not retreating, just repositioning itself,
Speaker 1: the way something does when it's figuring out where it
Speaker 1: wants to be. The head was there, and it was large,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't sitting on a neck the way a
Speaker 1: human head sits on a human neck. It was more forward,
Speaker 1: more continuous with the upper body, the way the great
Speaker 1: apes carry their heads. Though this wasn't an ape, it
Speaker 1: walked to nothing like an ape. It walked like something
Speaker 1: that had been walking upright for a very long time
Speaker 1: and had evolved to do it efficiently. The shoulders were
Speaker 1: wide in a way I'm not going to put a
Speaker 1: number two, because any number I say, you're going to
Speaker 1: think I've exaggerated, and I haven't wide enough that the
Speaker 1: silhouette of this animal against the lighter sky above the
Speaker 1: tree line was unmistakably different from any human silhouette. And
Speaker 1: the smell came to me on the wind wet animal
Speaker 1: mixed with something else underneath, something acrid and faintly organic,
Speaker 1: like the inside of an old den, like the residue
Speaker 1: of something that had been living wild for a very
Speaker 1: long time without ever washing. It turned toward me, not quickly,
Speaker 1: not aggressively, just turned the way something turns when it
Speaker 1: decides to look at what's in front of it.
Speaker 2: And I fired.
Speaker 1: I aimed for the left shoulder mass and fired, and
Speaker 1: it reacted the way living things react when something has
Speaker 1: just torn through their body, that sudden pulling in rotation
Speaker 1: away from the impact, A sharp exhalation I heard clearly
Speaker 1: across the yard in the cold air. Then it moved
Speaker 1: faster than I would have believed something that size could
Speaker 1: move into the timber east of the cabin, and it
Speaker 1: was gone. The last sound I heard from it was
Speaker 1: something low and hard, not a scream, not a howl,
Speaker 1: something that had structure to it, the way language has structure.
Speaker 1: I couldn't interpret it. I went back inside and reloaded
Speaker 1: and stayed up all night. At first light, I went
Speaker 1: out with the rifle and found.
Speaker 2: The blood trail.
Speaker 1: The blood was pooled, not just spattered, dark and substantial
Speaker 1: in the snow, and the first pool of it was
Speaker 1: right around where I'd been aiming near the east corner
Speaker 1: of the cabin. The trail led northeast in a line
Speaker 1: of spots and smears for about four hundred yards into
Speaker 1: the heavy timber. I followed it carefully, and when the
Speaker 1: ground got too hard and rocky to hold blood sign
Speaker 1: and I'd lost the trail, I stopped and thought about it,
Speaker 1: and decided not to push further into that timber after
Speaker 1: a wounded animal of unknown capability. I've done enough hunting
Speaker 1: to know that a wounded animal and terrain that favors
Speaker 1: it over you is going to determine the outcome of
Speaker 1: that encounter, not you.
Speaker 2: I came back.
Speaker 1: When I came around the corner back to the cabin
Speaker 1: and looked across the yard at the plane, I stopped walking.
Speaker 1: Both of my Tundra tires on the front of the
Speaker 1: plane had been destroyed. I want to be precise about
Speaker 1: that word. Not deflated, not punctured, destroyed. The rubber had
Speaker 1: been torn away from the rims in large sections, peeled
Speaker 1: back the way you'd peel an orange, except that rubber
Speaker 1: bonded to a steel rim doesn't peel, not without forces.
Speaker 1: I'm not able to describe adequately the sidewalls were torn
Speaker 1: in several places, not cut, torn with that jagged, irregular
Speaker 1: edge you get when something is pulled apart rather than
Speaker 1: cut through. I got close and looked all over those tires,
Speaker 1: and there was no blade mark anywhere. This was done
Speaker 1: by hand, by something that grabbed the rubber and pulled
Speaker 1: until it came apart, and the implication of that was inescapable.
Speaker 1: While I was following the blood trail to the northeast,
Speaker 1: something else had been at the plane, something that knew
Speaker 1: what the plane was, or at least knew it was
Speaker 1: important to me, because that's the only explanation for why
Speaker 1: the tires specifically. It wasn't incidental damage. It was specific
Speaker 1: damage to the thing I needed to leave. I stood
Speaker 1: there in the cold, looking at my destroyed tires, and
Speaker 1: ran through my situation with complete clarity. I had enough
Speaker 1: food for six or seven more weeks. The weather was
Speaker 1: going to close hard within three or four weeks. I
Speaker 1: had a wounded animal somewhere in the timber to the
Speaker 1: northeast that had already shown it was willing to escalate,
Speaker 1: and had just shown it understood something about my relationship
Speaker 1: to that airplane. I had no way out without new tires.
Speaker 1: I had a handheld radio that could reach my friend
Speaker 1: Byron in Dawson on a good day. I went inside
Speaker 1: and got on the radio. Byron was ten years older
Speaker 1: than me, a bush pilot out of Dawson City who'd
Speaker 1: been flying the Yukon since before I was old enough
Speaker 1: to be out there. He was the kind of man
Speaker 1: wild country producers over time. If it doesn't kill you, first,
Speaker 1: calm in a way that isn't performed direct, in a
Speaker 1: way that doesn't bother with softening things. I'd known him
Speaker 1: eight years by then, and he'd pulled me out of
Speaker 1: two situations I'd rather not get into. Here, he was
Speaker 1: exactly the right person to call. I reached him on
Speaker 1: my third try, which meant conditions were decent. I told
Speaker 1: him I'd had wildlife trouble with the plane and needed
Speaker 1: two tundra tires. He asked me what kind of wildlife.
Speaker 1: I said I'd explain in person. He was quiet a moment,
Speaker 1: and then told me he'd be there in two days.
Speaker 1: Depending on whether that was the whole conversation, that's Byron.
Speaker 1: Those two days waiting for him were the quietest I'd
Speaker 1: had since arriving in October and out there quiet in
Speaker 1: that context wasn't reassuring. Nothing came near the cabin, no
Speaker 1: sounds from the tim no rocks, no footsteps in the night,
Speaker 1: just an absence that had a waiting quality to it,
Speaker 1: the way the air feels before a front moves through
Speaker 1: a pressure without a visible source.
Speaker 2: I kept the.
Speaker 1: Stove going and the marlin within arm's reach at all times,
Speaker 1: including the outhouse, which I want you to know I
Speaker 1: found deeply undignified, but not negotiable. Byron put a Cessna
Speaker 1: down the morning of the twenty first, in clear, cold conditions,
Speaker 1: good visibility, the kind of yukon morning that looks like
Speaker 1: it couldn't possibly contain anything threatening. He taxied up to
Speaker 1: where my supercub was tied down, got out, saw the tires,
Speaker 1: looked at me, and his face did something complicated, and
Speaker 1: then went neutral again. I told him everything right there
Speaker 1: on the strip, in the cold, my breath smoking. I
Speaker 1: started with the tracks on the fifth of October and
Speaker 1: went through all of it in order. The trap losses,
Speaker 1: the sounds, the rock throwing, my stitches, the nights it
Speaker 1: had come to the cabin the night I'd shot it,
Speaker 1: the blood trail, the tires stay tuned for more backwoods
Speaker 1: bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. I talked
Speaker 1: for probably fifteen minutes, and Byron stood with his hands
Speaker 1: in his pockets and listened to every bit of it
Speaker 1: without saying a word. When I finished, he was quiet
Speaker 1: a moment. Then he said, I've seen tracks like that
Speaker 1: twice in twenty years of flying this country. And I've
Speaker 1: heard something in the bush at night twice that I
Speaker 1: couldn't put a name to, and I've never talked about
Speaker 1: either one because I figured nobody needed to know. Then
Speaker 1: he looked at the tires again and said, let's get
Speaker 1: these changed, and then you'd better show me the blood
Speaker 1: trail before the snow covers it. We got the tires
Speaker 1: on by late afternoon. I showed Byron the blood trail,
Speaker 1: or what was left of it, and he crouched down
Speaker 1: at that first pooling of blood in the snow and
Speaker 1: looked at it for a long time without saying anything.
Speaker 1: Then he stood up and looked at the timber to
Speaker 1: the northeast. He said, you hit whatever this thing is,
Speaker 1: and then it or another one came back and tore
Speaker 1: your tires off. I said, yes, that's pretty much what happened.
Speaker 1: He said, all right. That was about as deep as
Speaker 1: a conversation could get with Byron. That night, we ate
Speaker 1: and I told him the fuller version of some things
Speaker 1: I'd only summarized on the strip. Byron sat across the
Speaker 1: table in the lamplight and listened to all of it,
Speaker 1: asking the kind of questions a man asks when he's
Speaker 1: trying to understand something, rather than dismiss it. He wasn't
Speaker 1: skeptical in a way that was going to be a problem.
Speaker 1: He was a practical man, and what I was telling
Speaker 1: him was a practical problem. By the time we turned in,
Speaker 1: we'd agreed we'd reassess in a few days and decide
Speaker 1: whether I should continue the season. Neither of us knew
Speaker 1: that the decision was going to be made for us
Speaker 1: that very night. I've never used the word siege lightly,
Speaker 1: and I'm not going to use it lightly here. What
Speaker 1: happened on the night of the twenty first of November
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy eight was a coordinated assault on that cabin
Speaker 1: by multiple animals, and it lasted for hours. Byron and
Speaker 1: I came out of it alive because we were both
Speaker 1: experienced with firearms and willing to use them through walls,
Speaker 1: which is not something most people have in their experience
Speaker 1: or in their willingness. It started around ten in the evening,
Speaker 1: about two hours after we turned in. Byron was on
Speaker 1: the opposite bunk, and I don't think either of us
Speaker 1: was fully asleep. I'd been laying there aware of the
Speaker 1: silence in a way that made the silence itself feel active,
Speaker 1: like it was something happening rather than an absence of action.
Speaker 1: And then from the eastern timber, that deep, sustained call,
Speaker 1: the one I'd been hearing for six weeks. Then an
Speaker 1: immediate answer from the northwest, different voice. Then a third
Speaker 1: from somewhere south, closer than the other. Two three directions,
Speaker 1: three voices. Byron sat up in the dim light from
Speaker 1: the stove grate. I could see him reaching for his rifle,
Speaker 1: already leaning against the bunk frame. I was already holding mine.
Speaker 2: I told him.
Speaker 1: Quietly to stay low and stay away from the windows.
Speaker 1: The first body impact hit the front wall so hard
Speaker 1: that the lamp Byron had brought in from the cessna
Speaker 1: and set on the table actually bounced off the table surface,
Speaker 1: not the flame guttering the whole lamp. The sound was extraordinary,
Speaker 1: not like a log being struck with another log, or
Speaker 1: a ram or a tool, but a biological impact. The
Speaker 1: sound of mass and motion meeting a solid object and
Speaker 1: the mass behind it was enormous. I felt it through
Speaker 1: the floor before that sound had finished moving through the structure.
Speaker 1: Something hit the roof, a running impact, not a throw
Speaker 1: or a fall, something that had launched itself from the
Speaker 1: cash poles and landed running on the roofboards. Two of
Speaker 1: those boards cracked. I heard them go, and the weight
Speaker 1: of whatever was up there moved from the east edge
Speaker 1: toward the center ridge, and then back toward the east.
Speaker 1: Whatever was on that roof weight enough to crack two
Speaker 1: inch spruce planks, and it was moving. Working to find
Speaker 1: a weak point. Byron said a word I won't put
Speaker 1: in print. Something hit the back wall lower near the base,
Speaker 1: and I felt the floor joists communicate the shock upward
Speaker 1: through the soles of my feet. Then the door. Not
Speaker 1: an impact. This time pressure sustained and building pressure against
Speaker 1: the door and the bar I had set across it
Speaker 1: was a four inch piece of hardwood, and I watched
Speaker 1: it flex in the bracket. I went to the door
Speaker 1: and put my shoulder against it, feet braced against the floor,
Speaker 1: and the force pushing from outside was significant enough that
Speaker 1: I had to really dig in to hold my position.
Speaker 1: I yelled at Byron to shoot through the east wall,
Speaker 1: low about two feet off the floor. He fired twice.
Speaker 1: The sound inside the cabin was tremendous. The wall held
Speaker 1: and the pressure on the door released. What came back
Speaker 1: through that wall from outside was not a scream. I
Speaker 1: want to be careful here because I don't want to
Speaker 1: misrepresent it. It was a sound at high vault, and
Speaker 1: it had pain in it, or what I interpreted as pain,
Speaker 1: a sharpness and a duration that doesn't exist in a
Speaker 1: sound an animal makes willingly. But it had that same
Speaker 1: organized quality all their sounds had. Even in what sounded
Speaker 1: like pain, there was direction to it. It was aimed
Speaker 1: at something, communicating something. Within three or four seconds of
Speaker 1: byron shots, the thing on the roof shifted its weight dramatically.
Speaker 1: The roof shook as it launched off the east edge,
Speaker 1: and the landing shook the cabin almost as much as
Speaker 1: the body blows had. Then they backed off, not far.
Speaker 1: They didn't leave for the next three hours. I can
Speaker 1: tell you where they were almost continuously, because they weren't quiet.
Speaker 2: About it.
Speaker 1: They moved through the timber around the cabin in a
Speaker 1: radius of roughly one hundred to one hundred and fifty yards,
Speaker 1: calling back and forth in those organized exchanges. I've spent
Speaker 1: years trying to understand. They threw things at the cabin
Speaker 1: periodically through the night. Not body blows. These were lighter
Speaker 1: in the rocks, and what sounded like pieces of wood
Speaker 1: hitting and clattering off into the snow. Each time the
Speaker 1: impacts got closer or more frequent, Byron and I would
Speaker 1: fire through the walls in the direction of the sounds,
Speaker 1: and each time the movement would back off and then
Speaker 1: gradually work its way back. Around midnight, something picked up
Speaker 1: my empty five gallon fuel can from outside the south
Speaker 1: wall and threw it against the cabin from what I
Speaker 1: estimated was thirty or thirty five yards. I could hear
Speaker 1: it arc through the air and hit the wall and
Speaker 1: clatter off. I want you to think about what that
Speaker 1: tells you. Something had been standing in the dark thirty
Speaker 1: yards from the cabin holding that fuel can. We hadn't
Speaker 1: heard it there, We hadn't known it was there at
Speaker 1: all until it threw the can. In three hours of
Speaker 1: active shooting and listening and tracking their movements by sound.
Speaker 1: This one had been close enough to pick up and
Speaker 1: throw something without ever revealing itself. That's not animal behavior,
Speaker 1: that's something far more deliberate. We fired through the south
Speaker 1: wall twice. The movement stopped, and we could hear the
Speaker 1: creature retreating. At approximately one in the morning, everything stopped.
Speaker 1: I mean that, with no elaboration needed. One moment the
Speaker 1: timber was alive with movement and sound, and we were
Speaker 1: in the middle of something, and the next moment there
Speaker 1: was nothing. Complete silence, the kind that has actual weight
Speaker 1: to it that you can almost press against. Byron and
Speaker 1: I looked at each other across the cabin, and neither
Speaker 1: of us said anything. For a long time, we didn't sleep.
Speaker 1: We sat up until first light with our rifles, and
Speaker 1: the stove rebuilt, and when the gray finally came in
Speaker 1: through the windows, we both stood up at the same time,
Speaker 1: the way people do when they've been waiting for permission
Speaker 1: to move, and we went outside together. The blood in
Speaker 1: the snow was in two separate areas, one on the
Speaker 1: east side, where Byron had shot through the wall, a
Speaker 1: meaningful amount, not a killing wound based on volume, but
Speaker 1: enough to tell me the round had gone through and
Speaker 1: into something on the other side. The second site was
Speaker 1: on the roof edge, a dark smear on the frost
Speaker 1: that I could see from the ground, either from impact
Speaker 1: when whatever was up there landed badly on the boards,
Speaker 1: or from a wound received before it got up there,
Speaker 1: I don't know which. The track impressions were extraordinary, overlapping
Speaker 1: sets in the snow around the entire cabin perimeter, so
Speaker 1: many that counting individual tracks was impossible. In places on
Speaker 1: the east wall there was structural damage I hadn't been
Speaker 1: able to see in the dark. Three courses of chinking
Speaker 1: dug completely out, and in the exposed log surfaces behind
Speaker 1: them there were gouge marks, not scrapes, gouges, the kind
Speaker 1: of mark you get from something with concentrated force pressing
Speaker 1: into soft wood, running in parallel sets of four spaced
Speaker 1: in a way that was consistent with large fingers. Something
Speaker 1: had worked at that wall with its hands, trying to
Speaker 1: get purchase, trying to work into the gap. I don't
Speaker 1: know if it would have eventually gotten through. I'm glad
Speaker 1: glad I don't know. Byron stood in the yard and
Speaker 1: looked at all of it for a long time, turning slowly,
Speaker 1: taking in the full picture of what the night had produced.
Speaker 1: Then he looked at me. He said, let's pack your gear.
Speaker 1: I didn't argue. I want you to know I didn't argue,
Speaker 1: because it would have been dishonest if I had. There
Speaker 1: was no rational case for staying. I'd planned four months
Speaker 1: and made it just under two. The season's take was compromised,
Speaker 1: the cabin was damaged, my plane had already been attacked once.
Speaker 1: I had a healing wound in my head, and I'd
Speaker 1: just spent a night that neither of us was fully
Speaker 1: equipped to process. Yet the argument for staying didn't exist.
Speaker 1: We loaded what we could carry in the two planes,
Speaker 1: my personal kit, my furs, my tools, my notebooks. I
Speaker 1: left the stove and the bunks and the shelves because
Speaker 1: there wasn't room, and because I already knew on some
Speaker 1: level that I wasn't coming back. We checked both aircraft carefully,
Speaker 1: every square inch of both planes before we got in them.
Speaker 1: We took no chances. Byron took off first because a
Speaker 1: Cessna needed a longer run, and I taxied behind him
Speaker 1: and held at the end of the strip and looked
Speaker 1: down at the meadow and the cabin for a moment
Speaker 1: before I pushed the throttle, everything still, smoke still rising
Speaker 1: from the stove. I'd banked it but not killed it.
Speaker 1: The marks in the snow around the cabin visible even
Speaker 1: from the ground, that ring of disturbance that told the
Speaker 1: whole story of the night to anyone who knew how
Speaker 1: to read it. I pushed the throttle and lifted off
Speaker 1: and climbed out to the southeast. Once I had altitude,
Speaker 1: I banked left and came back over the cabin once
Speaker 1: before turning south for Dawson. I looked down at it
Speaker 1: getting small beneath me, the rectangle of the cabin in
Speaker 1: the clearing, the strip of the meadow, the black timber
Speaker 1: on all sides, and I felt something I've tried to
Speaker 1: describe to my wife more than once, without ever quite
Speaker 1: finding the right words. Grief for something i'd built and
Speaker 1: was leaving, relief so profound it felt phizzic, and underneath
Speaker 1: both of those something harder and colder, a knowledge about
Speaker 1: the world that I hadn't had when I'd flown in
Speaker 1: five weeks and some days earlier, about what's out there
Speaker 1: in the deep wild country, about what it's capable of
Speaker 1: about what it's willing to do when it decides something
Speaker 1: needs to be done. I sold the cabin that winter,
Speaker 1: found a buyer through a man I knew in Dawson,
Speaker 1: who brokeered that kind of deal. I disclosed what had happened,
Speaker 1: told him about the tracks, the damage to the walls,
Speaker 1: all of it. He bought it anyway because he'd been
Speaker 1: drinking when I told him and decided I was embellishing,
Speaker 1: which was his choice to make. I hope whatever he
Speaker 1: found up there was easier than what I found. I
Speaker 1: genuinely do. The following spring, I went to work on
Speaker 1: a crab boat out of Dutch Harbor in the Bearing Sea,
Speaker 1: and I worked that job for eleven years. People who've
Speaker 1: never done it always want to talk about how dangerous
Speaker 1: it is, and they're right it is.
Speaker 2: It's one of the.
Speaker 1: Most genuinely dangerous ways to make a living that exists
Speaker 1: in the modern world. I've seen men hurt badly out there,
Speaker 1: and I've been present when men went into the water
Speaker 1: and didn't come back. I'm not dismissing that danger, but
Speaker 1: I'll tell you what I told my wife when she
Speaker 1: asked me why I was going from trapping in the
Speaker 1: Yukon to crabbing in the bearing sea, which seemed to
Speaker 1: her like a lateral move at best. I said, the
Speaker 1: sea doesn't think. The sea doesn't follow you through the timber.
Speaker 1: The sea doesn't stand outside your door in the dark
Speaker 1: and breathe against the gap at the bottom learning you.
Speaker 1: The sea doesn't coordinate. The sea doesn't take your tires
Speaker 1: apart while you're following a blood trail into the woods.
Speaker 1: The sea is dangerous the way gravity is dangerous. It
Speaker 1: doesn't have a position on you. It's just the sea.
Speaker 1: What was in that Yukon timber had a position on me.
Speaker 1: I don't know what that position was or why it started,
Speaker 1: whether I'd set my first trap in the wrong place,
Speaker 1: or made camp in the wrong drainage, or done something
Speaker 1: in those first days that set off a sequence I
Speaker 1: never fully understood. But it had a position on me,
Speaker 1: and it escalated that position in a consistent and logical direction,
Speaker 1: and when I shot at it, it came back and
Speaker 1: destroyed my exit. That's not gravity. That's something else entirely,
Speaker 1: And whatever that something else is, I'd rather take my
Speaker 1: chances with thirty foot seas and a crab pot Wench
Speaker 1: than go back to it. I've been listening to your
Speaker 1: show for a few years now, and I listened to
Speaker 1: Backwood's big Foot stories too, and when Fred from Alaska talks,
Speaker 1: I always pay close attention. He said things on your
Speaker 1: show that line up exactly with what I experienced about
Speaker 1: the temperament of these things in the northern Bush, about
Speaker 1: the way they escalate, about the intelligence behind it.
Speaker 2: He's right.
Speaker 1: I want to put my name, or at least my
Speaker 1: first name, on that confirmation, because I think it matters
Speaker 1: that more than one person is saying it. I hear
Speaker 1: some researchers talk about Sasquatch as if they're fundamentally benign,
Speaker 1: as if any danger is overstated or is a reaction
Speaker 1: to avocation that could have been avoided with better behavior
Speaker 1: on the part of the human. Maybe in some cases
Speaker 1: that's true. I can't speak to what happens in the
Speaker 1: Cascades or the Blue Mountains or the Ozarks. I can
Speaker 1: only speak to what happened to me in the Yukon,
Speaker 1: And what happened to me wasn't a matter of provocation.
Speaker 1: I hadn't done anything to these animals before that first
Speaker 1: rock landed six feet from me on the twenty third
Speaker 1: of October. I'd been in that country three weeks, running
Speaker 1: my line, staying in my cabin, doing what I'd been
Speaker 1: doing out there for years, without any indication anything like
Speaker 1: this was present. They were there when I arrived. The
Speaker 1: tracks on the fifth of October were from something that
Speaker 1: had already been watching long enough to know my route.
Speaker 1: They came to me. That's what I need people to understand.
Speaker 1: I didn't go looking for them, and I didn't push
Speaker 1: into their territory in any new way. They assessed me.
Speaker 1: They tested me with the rock throwing, and when I stayed,
Speaker 1: they escalated.
Speaker 2: There was a logic to it. Whatever that logic was.
Speaker 1: It wasn't one I I could negotiate with, and it
Speaker 1: wasn't one that had any interest in my preferences or
Speaker 1: my needs or my family's winter income. And I want
Speaker 1: to say something about the intelligence, because that's the part
Speaker 1: I think gets soft pedaled the most in the popular
Speaker 1: discussion of these animals. What I encountered in the Yukon
Speaker 1: was not smart the way a dog is smart or
Speaker 1: a bear is smart. It was in a different category entirely.
Speaker 1: It worked my trap line in a way that suggested
Speaker 1: familiarity with the whole system, not just the traps. It
Speaker 1: had already found. It figured out how to depress a
Speaker 1: trappan without getting caught. It coordinated a multi point assault
Speaker 1: on my cabin with at least three animals working in concert,
Speaker 1: and it identified my plane as the critical point of
Speaker 1: my access to the outside world and targeted it specifically
Speaker 1: while I was otherwise occupied. That last one, especially, is
Speaker 1: what I keep coming back to. It waited until I
Speaker 1: was following the blood trail to the northeast, and while
Speaker 1: I was doing that, something else else was at the plane.
Speaker 1: That's not coincidence, and it's not instinct. That's planning. I've
Speaker 1: heard the Sierra Sounds recording many times now, and every
Speaker 1: time it takes me back to that October night when
Speaker 1: I laid in my bunk and listened to forty three
Speaker 1: minutes of two of them talking in the timber east
Speaker 1: of the cabin. I don't know what they were saying.
Speaker 1: I don't think anyone does yet, or if someone does,
Speaker 1: they haven't said so in a way that's reached me.
Speaker 1: But they were saying something. The structure is there, the
Speaker 1: organization is there, the back and forth of it is there.
Speaker 1: Whatever is making those sounds is doing it deliberately and
Speaker 1: doing it with content. That's something I believe as firmly
Speaker 1: as I believe anything. If you're going to spend time
Speaker 1: in remote country in the Northern Rockies, in the Yukon,
Speaker 1: in Alaska, in the deep timber, anywhere in the Pacific Northwest,
Speaker 1: I want you to take this seriously. Not in a
Speaker 1: way that paralyzes you, because wild country is worth going into,
Speaker 1: and I'd never tell someone to stay home out of fear,
Speaker 1: but in a way that makes you honest with yourself
Speaker 1: about what might be out there and what it might
Speaker 1: decide about you. Pay attention to the things that aren't there,
Speaker 1: the birds that go quiet, the game that moves out
Speaker 1: of an area for no visible reason, that sense of
Speaker 1: being watched that your body registers before your mind does.
Speaker 1: Pay attention to large tracks on creep gravel bars, Pay
Speaker 1: attention to your animals if you're trapping or working stock
Speaker 1: in remote areas. Pay attention to sounds you don't have
Speaker 1: a name for. And if a rock the size of
Speaker 1: a golf ball lands six feet from you in the
Speaker 1: timber with no visible source, think carefully about what that
Speaker 1: means before you decide to stay. I'm seventy eight years old,
Speaker 1: and I live in a proper town now, and I'm
Speaker 1: as far from the Yukon as I've been at any
Speaker 1: point in my adult life. I don't miss the Klondike trapping.
Speaker 1: Not because I don't love that country, because I do
Speaker 1: and I always will, but because that particular chapter closed
Speaker 1: in a way I haven't been able to reopen in
Speaker 1: my mind. It belonged longs to what happened to it,
Speaker 1: to those two months and what they produced. Some things
Speaker 1: close and don't reopen, and that's all right. But I'm
Speaker 1: glad I found your shows, and I'm glad Fred from
Speaker 1: Alaska keeps talking, and I'm glad some people out there
Speaker 1: are taking this seriously and saying out loud what needs
Speaker 1: to be said. These things are real, they are in
Speaker 1: places where people go. They're not what the friendly Giant
Speaker 1: narrative says they are, or at least they aren't only that,
Speaker 1: and the version that lives in the deep northern Bush
Speaker 1: deserves to be understood on its own terms, without the
Speaker 1: softening that makes the topic more comfortable for polite company.
Speaker 1: Be careful out there, all of you who go into
Speaker 1: the deep country. I mean that with everything I've got.
Speaker 3: John di
Speaker 1: Usha Pat