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.
Speaker 2: If you dare.
Speaker 1: Today, we're pulling off the road again. We're taking a
Speaker 1: little detour across the pond. I get mail from England.
Speaker 1: I get mail from Australia, and a lot of it,
Speaker 1: which won't surprise anybody who knows what the Yawe's reputation
Speaker 1: is down there. I get mail from Canada and Malaysia
Speaker 1: and Brazil. I've gotten mail from a man in Siberia
Speaker 1: who wrote most of it in Russian and had his
Speaker 1: daughter translate the rest, and I got a letter last
Speaker 1: year from a trekking guide in Bhutan that I've read
Speaker 1: probably twenty times. Because it's not like anything else in
Speaker 1: the pile. What I've picked out for you are five
Speaker 1: accounts from five countries. The places are real. Every forest,
Speaker 1: every mountain, every river, and village and campground you're going
Speaker 1: to hear named over the next hour is a real
Speaker 1: place with a real name that you can pull up
Speaker 1: on a map before you go to bed tonight. That
Speaker 1: matters to me. I want you to be able to check.
Speaker 1: I want you to see that these things happen in
Speaker 1: working forests and national parks and cattle country, in places
Speaker 1: where people go camping with their kids, and not in
Speaker 1: some made up hollow that only exists in a podcast.
Speaker 1: Different countries, different names for it, same shape, walking through
Speaker 1: the trees. First stop, England. The dog wouldn't get out
Speaker 1: of the car. That's where Neil starts, and he starts
Speaker 1: there because it's the part he can't argue his way
Speaker 1: around everything else he spent years explaining to himself. He
Speaker 1: can explain the sounds, he can explain what he thought
Speaker 1: he saw against the skyline. He cannot explain why a
Speaker 1: lurcher that had spent four years dragging him across Cannic
Speaker 1: Chase by the lead planted her feet in the footwell
Speaker 1: of a Vauxhall estate and refused to come out, and
Speaker 1: then started shaking. Neil was thirty one at the time.
Speaker 1: He worked nights at a distribution warehouse in Headinsford in
Speaker 1: Staffordshire in the English Midlands, loading trailers on a shift
Speaker 1: that let him out at eleven o'clock. The dog's name
Speaker 1: was Bess and she was a lurcher, which, for anybody
Speaker 1: who hasn't spent time around them as a running dog
Speaker 1: a sighthound crossed with something workmanlike bread for coursing rabbits
Speaker 1: and hares. She needed miles the way other dogs need dinner,
Speaker 1: So after his shift four or five nights a week,
Speaker 1: Neil would drive fifteen minutes up onto the chase and
Speaker 1: walk her until she'd had enough, which usually meant an
Speaker 1: hour and sometimes meant too. Cannic Chase covers something close
Speaker 1: to twenty six square miles of heathland and forestry in
Speaker 1: the middle of England, which sounds like nothing until you're
Speaker 1: standing in it at midnight. It's mostly conifer plantation now
Speaker 1: planted in long, straight blocks with fire breaks cut between them,
Speaker 1: and in the gaps you've got open heather and bracken
Speaker 1: and boggy ground where the streams run. It's the largest
Speaker 1: surviving lowland heath in the country. There are fallow deer everywhere,
Speaker 1: including a small population of white ones that show up
Speaker 1: on postcards. There are old military scars all through it,
Speaker 1: because during the First World War the Chase held two
Speaker 1: enormous training camps, Lockton and Rugelie, and something like half
Speaker 1: a million men passed through them on the way to France.
Speaker 1: Most of that's gone back to woodland now. What's left
Speaker 1: are concrete pads in the bracken and the outline of
Speaker 1: a rifle range, and a scale model of a Belgian
Speaker 1: battlefield ridge that the New Zealand troops built out of
Speaker 1: concrete and then buried when they left. There's a German
Speaker 1: military cemetery on the Chase at Broadhurst Green, where nearly
Speaker 1: five thousand German war dead were brought and reburied in
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties. There's an iron age hill fort called
Speaker 1: Castle Ring on the high ground at the southern end.
Speaker 1: There's a Victorian curiosity called the glacial Boulder that somebody
Speaker 1: hauled up and stuck on a plinth because the ice
Speaker 1: sheets left it there. And there's a valley called Sherbrook
Speaker 1: that runs down through the middle of the whole thing,
Speaker 1: with a line of stepping stones across the brook at
Speaker 1: the bottom, which is where families take their kids on
Speaker 1: Sunday afternoons. I say all that so you understand the setting.
Speaker 1: This isn't wilderness. Nothing in England is wilderness. This is
Speaker 1: a country park with car parks and waymark trails and
Speaker 1: a visitor center at Birch's Valley that sells ice cream.
Speaker 1: In the summer, on a Saturday, you'll pass one hundred
Speaker 1: people at one in the morning. In November you'll pass
Speaker 1: nobody at all. And the difference between those two experiences
Speaker 1: is bigger than anyone expects. Neil knew the Chase had
Speaker 1: a reputation before any of this started. Locally, it's famous
Speaker 1: for it. There have been reports going back decades of
Speaker 1: a black eyed child seen at the roadside, and there's
Speaker 1: a whole cottage industry around a thing the papers call
Speaker 1: the Canic Chase werewolf, which people have been reporting since
Speaker 1: at least the nineteen seventies. Neil's opinion on all of that,
Speaker 1: in his own words, was that it was rubbish put
Speaker 1: about by people who wanted to be on the telly.
Speaker 1: He'd walked the chase after dark for four years and
Speaker 1: the worst thing that ever happened to him was stepping
Speaker 1: in a bog up to his knee. The first thing
Speaker 1: that changed was the whistle. Neil had a two note
Speaker 1: whistle he used for I then low, and he'd used
Speaker 1: it so long he didn't think about it anymore. One
Speaker 1: night in early October, walking the fire break that runs
Speaker 1: up from the glacial boulder, he whistled for her and
Speaker 1: something whistled back. He didn't panic about it. He assumed
Speaker 1: it was another walker being funny, or a kid, or
Speaker 1: somebody's ringtone carrying. He whistled again, and it came back
Speaker 1: again from a different direction, off to.
Speaker 2: His right, further up the slope.
Speaker 1: He stood there in the dark, on a fire break
Speaker 1: two hundred meters from his car, and had a short
Speaker 1: conversation with whatever it was. And then Bess came trotting
Speaker 1: out of the bracken, and he clipped her lead on
Speaker 1: and walked back and drove home. What bothered him afterward.
Speaker 1: Wasn't that something answered? It's that the answer was accurate,
Speaker 1: not close, not similar, the same two notes at the
Speaker 1: same interval, the second note dropping the same distance, with
Speaker 1: the same little break in the middle where Neil's whistle
Speaker 1: always cracked because of a chipped front tooth he'd had
Speaker 1: since he was nine. He went back the next night.
Speaker 1: He tell you himself that he went back to prove
Speaker 1: to himself it was nothing. He parked at the same place,
Speaker 1: walked the same firebreak, and nothing happened at all. He
Speaker 1: did the same thing the night after that, and the
Speaker 1: same thing the night after that, and by the middle
Speaker 1: of the month he'd stopped thinking about it. But the
Speaker 1: deer told him it wasn't over fallow. Deer on the
Speaker 1: chase are used to people. They graze along the edges
Speaker 1: of the car parks, and they'll stand and look at you.
Speaker 1: What they did on the last week of October, according
Speaker 1: to Neil, was come through the plantation in a body
Speaker 1: at a dead run, crossing the ride. He was standing
Speaker 1: on maybe forty meters ahead of him. He counted eleven
Speaker 1: of them. They weren't spooking away from him because they
Speaker 1: crossed his path and kept going they were leaving something else.
Speaker 1: Best went flat, not barking, not growling, down on her
Speaker 1: belly and the wet grass with her ears back. Neil
Speaker 1: stood there for what he estimates was two or three minutes.
Speaker 1: He heard the deer crash away downhill, and then he
Speaker 1: heard nothing, and he heard something moving in the plantation
Speaker 1: on his left, up the slope, moving parallel to the
Speaker 1: ride he was standing on, not fast, not trying to
Speaker 1: be quiet either. He described the sound as a series
Speaker 1: of individual steps with a long gap between them, and
Speaker 1: the thing about the gap that stuck with him is
Speaker 1: that it was too long. He said, it was the
Speaker 1: rhythm of something with a much longer leg than a
Speaker 1: deer taking its time. Then it whistled at him, two
Speaker 1: notes high, then low, with the crack in the middle.
Speaker 1: Neil ran. He ran downhill with the dog ahead of him,
Speaker 1: and he fell at least once. And he got to
Speaker 1: the car park and got Best in the back and
Speaker 1: sat with the engine running and the doors locked for
Speaker 1: a while before he drove home. And he decided, sitting
Speaker 1: in the car that he'd been listening to a bird.
Speaker 1: There's a bird in Britain called a tawny owl, and
Speaker 1: it does a contact call. That's a sharp rising note,
Speaker 1: and Neil spent the following week convincing himself that's what
Speaker 1: it was. Two weeks later, he took Bess up to
Speaker 1: the Sherbrooke Valley car park at about half past eleven,
Speaker 1: and the dog wouldn't get out of the car. He
Speaker 1: tried for ten minutes. He got the lead on her
Speaker 1: and pulled gently, and she braced against it.
Speaker 2: He picked her up and set.
Speaker 1: Her on the tarmac, and she scrambled straight back in
Speaker 1: through the open door and got down in the footwell
Speaker 1: behind the driver's seat and shook. Neil said she'd never
Speaker 1: done that in her life, and never did it again
Speaker 1: anywhere else. She'd get out at any other car park
Speaker 1: on the chase, just not that one, not that night.
Speaker 1: So Neil did something he now describes as the stupidest
Speaker 1: decision he's ever made. He shut the dog in the
Speaker 1: car and walked down into the valley on his own.
Speaker 1: The Sherbrooke Valley is open at the bottom, Heather and
Speaker 1: Bill Barry and the brook running through it, with the
Speaker 1: plantation edges standing up on both sides. There was enough
Speaker 1: moon that night that he didn't need a torch on
Speaker 1: the open ground. He walked down the path toward the
Speaker 1: stepping stones.
Speaker 2: And stood there.
Speaker 1: And what he heard first was Bess Neil heard his
Speaker 1: dog whining the specific rising wine best made when she
Speaker 1: wanted out of a room. He heard it from the
Speaker 1: tree line on the eastern side of the valley, about
Speaker 1: one hundred meters up the slope, and his car, with
Speaker 1: his dog inside it was four hundred meters behind him
Speaker 1: in the other direction, with the window shut. He turned
Speaker 1: his torch on and put it on the tree line
Speaker 1: and saw nothing but pine trunks. He turned it off.
Speaker 1: The wine came again closer, and this time it was wrong.
Speaker 1: It had too much air in it. He said, it
Speaker 1: sounded like somebody imitating a dog by pushing air through
Speaker 1: a much bigger throat and getting it about eighty percent right.
Speaker 2: Then he smelled it.
Speaker 1: He described it as a wet dog kept in a
Speaker 1: shed with something sour underneath it, like a bend that's
Speaker 1: had meat in it. It came in on the air,
Speaker 1: and then it went away again, and then it came
Speaker 1: back stronger, and then he saw the shape. He didn't
Speaker 1: see a face. He didn't see hair or fingers or eyeshine,
Speaker 1: what he saw was a section of the tree line
Speaker 1: where the vertical lines were in erupted a black column
Speaker 1: standing out from the trunks, wider than the trunks. It
Speaker 1: was there when he looked, and gone when he looked back.
Speaker 1: He went back and measured it.
Speaker 2: Later.
Speaker 1: There's a post and rail fence along part of that slope,
Speaker 1: with posts that come to the top of Neil's hip.
Speaker 1: And he went back in daylight and stood where the
Speaker 1: thing had stood and worked out where the fence.
Speaker 2: Line ran behind it.
Speaker 1: His estimate is that the shape was somewhere around seven
Speaker 1: feet maybe a little more. Then it moved off uphill
Speaker 1: through standing bracken without breaking stride. Neil said that he
Speaker 1: couldn't do that section in daylight without using his hands.
Speaker 1: He walked out of that valley backwards for the first
Speaker 1: fifty meters, then he turned around and ran again. The
Speaker 1: last piece of this happened four days later. He went
Speaker 1: back up in the daytime to walk the same ground
Speaker 1: and proved to himself that it was all ordinary. About
Speaker 1: three hundred meters from where he'd stood at the stepping stones,
Speaker 1: up on the wooded slope, he found a fallow deer
Speaker 1: wedged into the four of a Scot's pine at roughly
Speaker 1: head height, not hung there in a neat way, jammed in,
Speaker 1: with the hind quarters missing and the rib cage largely stripped.
Speaker 2: He reported it.
Speaker 1: To a forestry worker he found at Birch's Valley, who
Speaker 1: told him it was almost certainly dogs, and that they
Speaker 1: get deer killed by dogs on the chase regularly, and
Speaker 1: that the tree was probably a coincidence because the animal
Speaker 1: could have been dragged and dropped. Neil said, he asked
Speaker 1: how a dog gets a deer to head height. He says,
Speaker 1: the man shrugged and said people do daft things, and
Speaker 1: that some lad had probably found it dead and put
Speaker 1: it up there for a laugh. That's not an unreasonable answer.
Speaker 1: That's the answer I'd probably have given as a police officer,
Speaker 1: because the boring explanation is right most of the time,
Speaker 1: and you'd be a fool to lead with anything else.
Speaker 1: But there's a detail Neil noticed that day and didn't
Speaker 1: think about until later, and it's the detail that ended
Speaker 1: his night walking on Cannon Chase for good. In the
Speaker 1: soft ground at the base of that pine, in among
Speaker 1: the churned mess where the deer had bled out, there
Speaker 1: was a single clean impression in the mud that he
Speaker 1: crouched down and looked at for a long time. He
Speaker 1: didn't cast it, he didn't photograph it, and he's annoyed
Speaker 1: with himself about that. He said it was longer than
Speaker 1: his boot by a good margin. It was flat, and
Speaker 1: it had toes Neil kept walking the chase. He'd been
Speaker 1: going up there since he was a boy, and he
Speaker 1: wasn't going to let it be taken off him. He
Speaker 1: just went in daylight from then on with other people
Speaker 1: when he could get them. And Bess lived another five
Speaker 1: years and died old on a rug in his kitchen.
Speaker 1: He hasn't whistled since, not for a dog, not for
Speaker 1: a taxi, not absent mindedly in the house. He told
Speaker 1: me his wife has asked him about it, and he
Speaker 1: changes the subject because he doesn't want to be the
Speaker 1: man who explains to his wife that he stopped whistling
Speaker 1: because something on the chase learned how to do it back.
Speaker 1: That's a small country with a lot of people in it,
Speaker 1: and something on twenty six square miles of pine plantation
Speaker 1: managed to stay out of sight in the middle of it.
Speaker 1: Keep that in your head, because we're about to go
Speaker 1: somewhere with an awful lot more room to hide. Next stop,
Speaker 1: Central China. The camera fired eleven times in one night,
Speaker 1: and every single frame came back. Black Lynn was twenty
Speaker 1: six years old and working as a field assistant on
Speaker 1: a primate survey in the Shenongjia Forestry District in Hubei
Speaker 1: Province in central China. Her job was mostly walking. She'd
Speaker 1: hike transects at first light, record what she saw, service
Speaker 1: a string of motion triggered cameras strapped to fur trunks,
Speaker 1: swap out memory cards and batteries, and hike back. The
Speaker 1: target species was the golden snub nosed monkey, which is
Speaker 1: one of the strangest looking animals in Asia, blue faced
Speaker 1: with orange fur, and rare enough that the province takes
Speaker 1: counting them seriously. Shenongjia is a real place, and it's
Speaker 1: worth understanding what kind of place it is. It's a
Speaker 1: mountain massaf in the Daba Range, protected land listed by
Speaker 1: the United Nations as a World Heritage Site for its
Speaker 1: plant diverse Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll
Speaker 1: be back after these messages. The high point, Sheenong Peak,
Speaker 1: stands at a little over ten thousand feet. There are
Speaker 1: stands of virgin fur and hemlock up there, and thickets
Speaker 1: of arrow bamboo that grow so densely you can't push
Speaker 1: through them without a blade. There's a wetland basin called
Speaker 1: Dodju Lake that gets photographed constantly because the fog sits
Speaker 1: on it.
Speaker 2: There's a town called.
Speaker 1: Muyu where the researchers stay, and a town called hong
Speaker 1: Ping on the northern side, and a road that switched
Speaker 1: backs up through cloud forest past a cliff face called Bambayon.
Speaker 1: And there's the Yarn, which translates roughly as wild man,
Speaker 1: in which the Chinese government spent real money looking for.
Speaker 1: In nineteen seventy six, a car carrying six local officials
Speaker 1: was driving a mountain road near Sinonga at night, and
Speaker 1: the people in it reported a large reddish creature in
Speaker 1: the headlights that stood up and moved off the road.
Speaker 1: They reported it to their superior Within a year, the
Speaker 1: Chinese Academy of Sciences had put together an expedition of
Speaker 1: well over one hundred people with soldiers and dogs and cameras,
Speaker 1: and sent it into these mountains for months. They came
Speaker 1: back with hair samples, footprint casts, and no animal. Similar
Speaker 1: efforts have gone in since. The hair has been tested
Speaker 1: at various points by various labs, and the results have
Speaker 1: generally come back as unidentified primate or as degraded and inconclusive.
Speaker 1: Which is the same answer researchers get in North America,
Speaker 1: and which satisfies exactly nobody.
Speaker 2: Lynn knew all of that.
Speaker 1: Everybody working in Shinangjia knows it. And she told me
Speaker 1: the standard attitude among the younger field staff was affectionate mockery.
Speaker 1: There's a year in museum, there are year in statues.
Speaker 1: It's a tourism engine. And if you're a biology graduate
Speaker 1: carrying a data sheet up a mountain at six in
Speaker 1: the morning, the wild man is a joke you make
Speaker 1: when somebody trips over a root. She stopped making that joke.
Speaker 1: In the last week of April, she was working with
Speaker 1: one other assistant, a man named Ping, running a transect
Speaker 1: above the tree line of a valley on the northern flank.
Speaker 1: They were about two hours in when Ping stopped and
Speaker 1: put a hand up. Lynn thought he'd spotted monkeys. What
Speaker 1: he'd heard was a knock. She described it as a
Speaker 1: single hollow impact wood on wood the sound of somebody
Speaker 1: hitting a standing trunk with a branch. It came from
Speaker 1: below and behind them. They waited, and it came twice more,
Speaker 1: spaced out over maybe a minute, and then nothing. Ping
Speaker 1: said it was a woodpecker. Lynn said, woodpecker's drum. They
Speaker 1: don't knock once and wait, and Ping said he knew that.
Speaker 1: And then they both stood there, not looking at each other.
Speaker 1: Twenty minutes further up the transect, something through a rock.
Speaker 1: She's very specific about this, and I'll relay it the
Speaker 1: way she told it. She did not see it thrown.
Speaker 1: She heard it come through the bamboo above them. She
Speaker 1: heard it hit the slope about four meters to her left,
Speaker 1: and she went and looked at it. It was a
Speaker 1: piece of gray rock, roughly the size of a fist,
Speaker 1: sitting on top of the leaf, litter dry on the underside,
Speaker 1: and clean of moss on all faces. There was no
Speaker 1: cliff above them, just a bamboo slope running up at
Speaker 1: maybe thirty degrees. She turned it over in her hands
Speaker 1: and put it in her pack, and she still has it.
Speaker 1: They kept working and finished the transect. Lynn makes the
Speaker 1: point that in daylight with a colleague with work to do.
Speaker 1: The human brain files things away and keeps walking. And
Speaker 1: I've seen that one hundred times in witness statements. People
Speaker 1: don't behave the way they think they'll behave. They finished
Speaker 1: the job. The smell came on the way down, she said.
Speaker 1: It arrived all at once in a valley with no wind,
Speaker 1: and it was strong enough that ping gagged wet fur,
Speaker 1: and under it something sharp and sour that she compared
Speaker 1: to vinegar and to the ammonia stink of an animal
Speaker 1: enclosure that hasn't been cleaned. It hung in one section
Speaker 1: of trail, maybe thirty meters long, and it was gone
Speaker 1: as suddenly as it started. And then in the last
Speaker 1: hour of light, on the switchback above bam Beyond, Lynn
Speaker 1: saw it. It was standing in arrow bamboo on the
Speaker 1: uphill side of the trail, about twenty meters from her,
Speaker 1: and it was already looking at her when she saw it.
Speaker 2: Her description is short.
Speaker 1: She saw a head, shoulders, chest, and one arm. The
Speaker 1: rest was in bamboo. The hair was reddish brown, darker
Speaker 1: at the shoulders, and long enough on the upper arm
Speaker 1: that it moved. The face was flatter than a monkey's
Speaker 1: and darker than the body hair. It didn't have a snout.
Speaker 1: She said the shoulders were the thing that broke her,
Speaker 1: that the width of them across the top made no
Speaker 1: sense next to the bamboo stems she used for scale,
Speaker 1: and she'd been measuring bamboo for two years. Ping was
Speaker 1: fifteen meters ahead of her on the trail and never
Speaker 1: turned around. Lyn didn't call out to him. She stood
Speaker 1: still for a few seconds, and the animal disappeared back
Speaker 1: into the bamboo. She caught up to Ping and told
Speaker 1: him what she'd seen. He didn't say anything for a while,
Speaker 1: then he said they should walk faster. They were staying
Speaker 1: that week in a small field station on the mountain,
Speaker 1: a concrete block building with two rooms, a metal door
Speaker 1: and shuttered windows used by forestry staff and researchers. There
Speaker 1: was no one else up there. That night, they ate,
Speaker 1: They rode up their data sheets. They argued about what
Speaker 1: she'd seen, and Ping went to sleep around ten. At
Speaker 1: some point after midnight, something started walking around the building.
Speaker 1: Lynn was awake for all of it.
Speaker 2: She said.
Speaker 1: The first circuit was slow, and she assumed it was
Speaker 1: a bore because wild boar are everywhere in Chinongja, and
Speaker 1: they'll come to any place that smells of food. The
Speaker 1: second circuit was slower. On the third, it stopped at
Speaker 1: the shuttered window on the north wall, which was about
Speaker 1: a meter from her head, and it stayed there. She
Speaker 1: could hear it breathing, she said.
Speaker 2: The breaths were.
Speaker 1: Long and low, and she could hear the moisture in them,
Speaker 1: and that it wasn't panting the way a stressed animal pants.
Speaker 1: That it was just standing there, breathing, like a man
Speaker 1: resting after a climb. Then something pressed against the shutter,
Speaker 1: not a blow, a steady push that made the metal
Speaker 1: bow inward and creak, held for several seconds, then released.
Speaker 1: She woke Pin He sat up and heard it, and
Speaker 1: neither of them moved or spoke. The pushing happened twice more,
Speaker 1: once on the shutter and once on the door, and
Speaker 1: the door test was worse because the door had a latch,
Speaker 1: and the latch was under load and made a small sound.
Speaker 1: Then there was a long stretch of nothing, and then
Speaker 1: something struck the outside wall hard enough that Lynn felt
Speaker 1: it through the frame of the bunk once, and after
Speaker 1: that the sound of it moving away downhill. They stayed
Speaker 1: inside until the light was properly up. When they went out,
Speaker 1: the ground around the station was compacted mud and gravel,
Speaker 1: and it held no prints. They could make out. What
Speaker 1: they found on the metal door at a height lind
Speaker 1: measured against herself and put it roughly two hundred and
Speaker 1: twenty centimeters, which is over seven feet was a smear
Speaker 1: mud mostly hair in it, coarse hair reddish up to
Speaker 1: about eight centimeters long, and enough of it that she
Speaker 1: collected a good sample into two sterile tubes from the
Speaker 1: sampling kit she was carrying for the monkey work. Which
Speaker 1: brings me to the cameras and the eleven photographs. The
Speaker 1: nearest camera trap to that station was about four hundred
Speaker 1: meters down the trail, strapped to a fur at chest
Speaker 1: height and aimed across a game path. Linn swapped its
Speaker 1: car the next morning out of routine, not expectation. When
Speaker 1: they got the images off it, the camera had triggered
Speaker 1: eleven times between roughly one and two in the morning.
Speaker 1: Every frame was black, not dark black, with the infrared
Speaker 1: flash reflecting off something immediately in front of the lens
Speaker 1: at a distance of a few centimeters, so that the
Speaker 1: only thing in eleven exposures is a wash of white
Speaker 1: glare and a dark surface with no detail in it whatsoever.
Speaker 1: Something stood in front of that camera close enough to
Speaker 1: touch it for the better part of an hour and
Speaker 1: moved just enough to keep setting it off. Lynn sent
Speaker 1: the hair samples through her supervisor to a laboratory. What
Speaker 1: came back months later was that the samples were degraded,
Speaker 1: showed primate characteristics, and could not be assigned to a
Speaker 1: species with confidence. One tube was reported as consistent with
Speaker 1: possible human contamination. She was told politely that this is
Speaker 1: what always happens with samples from Shinongjia, and that she
Speaker 1: should be careful about her reputation. Ping is a separate problem.
Speaker 1: He finished the season. He and Lynn never talked about
Speaker 1: that night in any detail afterward, and when Lynn brought
Speaker 1: it up once over dinner and mouyu, he told her
Speaker 1: that he'd heard a bore and that bors stand up
Speaker 1: on their hind legs sometimes, which is definitely not true.
Speaker 1: Lynn said she watched him say it and let it go.
Speaker 1: Two months later, he transferred off the survey and took
Speaker 1: a position on a different project in a different province,
Speaker 1: and the last message she got from him was a
Speaker 1: photograph of an office window with no mountains in it.
Speaker 1: She also went back to look for the animal, which
Speaker 1: surprises people. She spent the following six weeks working her
Speaker 1: transects and paying attention. She never smelled it again. She
Speaker 1: never heard another knock. What she noticed instead was an absence.
Speaker 1: The monkey group that had been using that valley for
Speaker 1: the two years she'd been counting them shifted their range
Speaker 1: that spring by roughly four kilometers to the south and
Speaker 1: did not come back for the rest of her time there.
Speaker 1: She wrote it up in her data because she had to,
Speaker 1: she didn't write down what she thought it meant. She
Speaker 1: talked to one other person about it. There's an old
Speaker 1: man in Hongping who ran a guest house where the
Speaker 1: survey teams sometimes ate, and Lynn asked him directly. She
Speaker 1: said he didn't laugh and he didn't get excited, which
Speaker 1: surprised her more than anything. He asked which valley she
Speaker 1: told him. He said that people used to leave a
Speaker 1: little food out at the top of the fields, and
Speaker 1: that his grandmother had done it, and that the rule
Speaker 1: she gave him as a child was that you don't
Speaker 1: say the name out loud after dark, and you don't
Speaker 1: look back at it once you've turned away, because looking
Speaker 1: back is an invitation. Lynn left the project the following year.
Speaker 1: She works in Wuhan now in a job that has
Speaker 1: nothing to do with mountains. She still has the rock
Speaker 1: in a drawer and the second sample tube, the one
Speaker 1: she never sent, sealed in an envelope behind it. She
Speaker 1: told me she doesn't want to know what's in it.
Speaker 1: She told me that as long as it's unopened, it's
Speaker 1: still a question, and she's found she can live with
Speaker 1: a question. From bamboo and cloud forest to dry eucalypt
Speaker 1: country and cattle yards, different hemisphere, different climate, different name
Speaker 1: for it, and a completely different temperament.
Speaker 2: Nothing in England or.
Speaker 1: China in those two accounts came at anybody what you're
Speaker 1: about to hear. Did next stop Queensland, Australia. The rock
Speaker 1: landed in the fire and threw sparks over both of them,
Speaker 1: and Wade's first thought was that his brother in law
Speaker 1: had kicked a log. They were camped at Bolomba and
Speaker 1: the Connondale Range, about two and a half hours north
Speaker 1: of Brisbane, in the hinterland behind the Sunshine Coast. If
Speaker 1: you've never been to that part of Queensland, it's steep country, rainforest,
Speaker 1: gullies running down between ridges of dry eucalypt hoop pine
Speaker 1: plantation on the ridge lines and a creek at the
Speaker 1: bottom running over granite slabs into swimming holes. There are
Speaker 1: camping areas along Boulumba Creek that you need a four
Speaker 1: wheel drive to reach because you cross the creek to
Speaker 1: get in. There's a fire tower up on Mount Allen.
Speaker 1: There's a walking track to a place called the bread
Speaker 1: Knife and another one to the artists Cascades. Families go there.
Speaker 1: It's a national park with numbered sites and a self
Speaker 1: registration station. Wade was thirty eight and ran a fencing
Speaker 1: contracting business out of Kilcoy. Dean was married to Wade's
Speaker 1: sister and worked in earth moving. They've been going up
Speaker 1: to Boulomba together for years, two or three weekends a season,
Speaker 1: fishing and drinking beer and not much else. I want
Speaker 1: to say something about kill Koy before we go on,
Speaker 1: because it's relevant and because it's checkable. In December of
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy nine, two teenage boys near Kilcoy reported that
Speaker 1: they'd shot at a large hair covered creature standing in
Speaker 1: scrub near the town. It made the papers, it was
Speaker 1: investigated and the story never went away. The town eventually
Speaker 1: leaned into it. There's a park in Kilcoy called Yowie
Speaker 1: Park with a carved wooden Yowie statue in it. There's
Speaker 1: a picnic area and a playground and local kids climb
Speaker 1: on the thing. Wade grew up half a mile from
Speaker 1: that statue and had climbed on it himself, and he'd
Speaker 1: have told you the whole business was a joke that
Speaker 1: the town made money from. The rock came in about
Speaker 1: a quarter past nine at night. Dean hadn't kicked a log.
Speaker 1: They established that inside about three seconds, because Dean was
Speaker 1: sitting in a camp chair on the far side of
Speaker 1: the fire with a beer in his hand and both
Speaker 1: boots on the ground. The rock was about the size
Speaker 1: of a cricket ball. It had come in on a
Speaker 1: flat trajectory from the direction of the creek, and it
Speaker 1: had landed in the coals. They stood up and put
Speaker 1: their torches on the creek line and got nothing but
Speaker 1: wet granite and shadow. Wade shouted in the direction the
Speaker 1: rock came from. There was no answer. They sat back down,
Speaker 1: and the second rock came about ten minutes later and.
Speaker 2: Hit the roof of Wade's toyota.
Speaker 1: That's when they got properly angry, because at that point
Speaker 1: they both assumed it was people.
Speaker 2: There was another group.
Speaker 1: Camped several hundred meters downstream, and Wade walked down there
Speaker 1: with a torch, ready to have words, and found four
Speaker 1: people in their twenties sitting around a fire with a guitar,
Speaker 1: who had it moved in an hour and who were
Speaker 1: very obviously not throwing rocks upstream through one hundred meters
Speaker 1: of standing timber in the dark. Wade walked back up
Speaker 1: about halfway in the dark, and something screamed. Wade compared
Speaker 1: it to a woman screaming, to a large cat, to
Speaker 1: a dying bull, and to two of those at once.
Speaker 1: What he's consistent about is the volume and the duration.
Speaker 1: He said it was loud enough that he felt it,
Speaker 1: that it went on for something between five and eight
Speaker 1: seconds without a break for breath, and that it came
Speaker 1: from up the slope on the eastern side, maybe eighty
Speaker 1: meters above the camp, and that when it stopped there
Speaker 1: was no echo because the sound just got swallowed by
Speaker 1: the gully. Every dog in every camp along that creek
Speaker 1: went off at once. Then they all stopped together, which
Speaker 1: Wade said was worse. Nothing else happened that night. Dean
Speaker 1: slept in the passenger seat and Wade slept sitting up.
Speaker 1: In the morning, they walked the eastern slope and found
Speaker 1: nothing except that a section of wattle scrub about the
Speaker 1: size of a garden shed had been pushed flat, and
Speaker 1: a young hoop pine of maybe fifteen centimeters diameter had
Speaker 1: been snapped off at about chest height and left hanging
Speaker 1: by the bark. Wade's a fencing contractor. He works with
Speaker 1: timber all day. He said, you don't snap a green
Speaker 1: sapling like that by leaning on it, and you don't
Speaker 1: do it with your hands, and there wasn't a saw
Speaker 1: cut or an axe mark anywhere on it. Stay the
Speaker 1: tune for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after
Speaker 1: these messages. They went home. They told the story. People laughed.
Speaker 1: Dean stopped coming up to Bolomba after that, and Wade
Speaker 1: told me Dean has never once in the years since,
Speaker 1: agreed to talk about the noise on the slope. Wade
Speaker 1: did one sensible thing that weekend that most people wouldn't.
Speaker 1: He rang the park's office on the Monday and reported
Speaker 1: it not as a yowie. He reported it as an
Speaker 1: incident rocks thrown at a camp and an animal making
Speaker 1: a large noise. He was told they'd note it. He
Speaker 1: asked whether anybody else had reported anything from Bolomba and
Speaker 1: was told they don't discuss other reports. He also went
Speaker 1: back to the young couple's camp downstream, or tried to,
Speaker 1: because he'd taken a phone number off one of them.
Speaker 1: He got hold of a bloke called Sam, who confirmed
Speaker 1: on the phone that they'd heard the scream, that it
Speaker 1: had woken all four of them, and that they'd packed
Speaker 1: up at first light and driven out a day early.
Speaker 1: Sam's own theory was that it was a big cat.
Speaker 1: Wade said he didn't argue with him. Wade also pointed
Speaker 1: out that no cat throws rocks. Now Here's why Wade's
Speaker 1: story matters more than a rock throwing weekend, and why
Speaker 1: he wrote to me. Fourteen months later, Wade was running
Speaker 1: a boundary fence for a grazier on a property backing
Speaker 1: onto state forest near Gymnah, which is up the range
Speaker 1: from Kilcoy, higher and drier and a lot emptier hoop
Speaker 1: pine plantation country. The job was five days of post
Speaker 1: holes and strainer assemblies along a boundary that hadn't been
Speaker 1: touched since the eighties. He was working alone with his
Speaker 1: two dogs, Ruby and Cass. Day three, the dogs quit
Speaker 1: on him.
Speaker 2: He said.
Speaker 1: They came in off the fence line and got under
Speaker 1: his toyota and wouldn't come out. Ruby had worked cattle
Speaker 1: in forty degree heat and never quit anything in her life.
Speaker 2: Wade said.
Speaker 1: He spent twenty minutes trying to get them out and
Speaker 1: eventually gave up and worked the afternoon on his own.
Speaker 1: Around four o'clock he found the tracks. There's a creek
Speaker 1: crossing on that boundary where the cattle come down, and
Speaker 1: the bank is soft gray clay. Wade had walked through
Speaker 1: it that morning. When he came back through in the afternoon,
Speaker 1: there were impressions in the clay that hadn't been there
Speaker 1: running up the near bank at an angle. Four of
Speaker 1: them clear enough to be useful. He put his own
Speaker 1: boot down beside one and photographed it. And he wears
Speaker 1: a size eleven, and the print was longer than his
Speaker 1: boot by roughly the width of a hand. Flat no
Speaker 1: arch five toes, with the big toe clearly separated in
Speaker 1: the other's tapering deep at the ball shallow at the heel,
Speaker 1: which is the pattern you get from something moving uphill
Speaker 1: under weight. The stride between them, which he paced out
Speaker 1: was over a meter and a half. He finished the fence.
Speaker 1: He'll tell you that's the part people find hardest to believe.
Speaker 1: That he stayed two more days, and his answer is
Speaker 1: that he had a contract and a mortgage, and that
Speaker 1: whatever it was hadn't done anything to him. On the
Speaker 1: fourth night, he slept in the bed of his truck
Speaker 1: rather than on the ground, which he says was the
Speaker 1: only concession he made. He woke up because his truck moved,
Speaker 1: not rocked, moved. He described the sensation as the suspension
Speaker 1: compressing on the driver's side, the way it does when
Speaker 1: a big man sits down in the seat. He lay
Speaker 1: in the bed of the truck about a meter and
Speaker 1: a half from whatever was doing it, and didn't move
Speaker 1: or make a sound. He said he could smell it.
Speaker 1: He described it as a mix of a dead animal
Speaker 1: and wet dog, but that there was something else to it.
Speaker 1: He had no word for. The weight came off the
Speaker 1: truck and it moved again. He heard three or four
Speaker 1: steps on the gravel going away, and then nothing he
Speaker 1: didn't get up. He lay in the bed of his
Speaker 1: truck until it was light enough to see the fence posts.
Speaker 1: When he sat up, he looked at the gravel, but
Speaker 1: he saw no prints. What he could see was something
Speaker 1: on the top wire of the fence he'd placed the
Speaker 1: day before. There was hair on the barbs, a wad
Speaker 1: of it caught on a barb at the top wire,
Speaker 1: which on that fence sits at about one hundred and
Speaker 1: twenty centimeters, and a second smaller bit on a barb
Speaker 1: three panels down, coarse, dark reddish brown, longer than his hand.
Speaker 1: He bagged it in a sandwich bag out of his
Speaker 1: lunch box, which he'd be the first to tell you
Speaker 1: is not exactly laboratory procedure. He gave it to a
Speaker 1: bloke he knew through a mate who worked at a
Speaker 1: university in Brisbane. What came back third hand and informally
Speaker 1: and never in riding was that it looked like animal hair,
Speaker 1: that it wasn't dog and probably wasn't cattle or horse,
Speaker 1: and that without a follicle, nobody was going to get
Speaker 1: anything useful out of it, and that he should stop asking.
Speaker 1: Wade still runs fences, He still works properties that back
Speaker 1: onto state forest, all through that range, and he'll tell
Speaker 1: you the country up there is beautiful and that he's
Speaker 1: not frightened of it. What he doesn't do anymore is
Speaker 1: stay overnight. He drives home. It costs him two hours
Speaker 1: a day in fuel and time on jobs up the range,
Speaker 1: and he does it anyway, And when his clients ask
Speaker 1: him why, he tells them he sleeps better in his
Speaker 1: own bed. What's left of the wad of hair is
Speaker 1: in his shed, in the same sandwich bag, in a
Speaker 1: coffee ten on a shelf above the welder. And every
Speaker 1: couple of weeks he drives past a carved wooden statue
Speaker 1: in a park in Kilcoy that he used to climb
Speaker 1: on when he was six years old, and he says
Speaker 1: he doesn't look at it. The next one is quieter,
Speaker 1: and it takes place somewhere that gets cold enough to
Speaker 1: kill you if you make one bad decision, which changes
Speaker 1: the shape of everything that happens in it. Next stop,
Speaker 1: Southern Siberia. The tracks came out of the trees, crossed
Speaker 1: four hundred meters of open river ice, and went up
Speaker 1: the far bank without once breaking rhythm. Pavel was forty
Speaker 1: four he'd worked underground at the iron ore operation at
Speaker 1: tosh Toggl in the Kmarovo region of southern Siberia, in
Speaker 1: the mountainous corner of it that people call mountain Shoria.
Speaker 1: It's a real district with a real economy. There's a
Speaker 1: ski resort at Chigish that fills up with Russians every winter.
Speaker 1: There are logging roads and mining towns, and in between
Speaker 1: them a very large amount of tiga, which is spruce
Speaker 1: and fir and birch, running over low mountains and rivers
Speaker 1: like the Marasu cutting through it. The shore people are
Speaker 1: the indigenous population there, and they have their own name
Speaker 1: for the thing in these stories and their own long
Speaker 1: history of it. In more recent years, the local administration
Speaker 1: has publicly encouraged the subject in a way that made
Speaker 1: a lot of serious people roll their eyes. Around two
Speaker 1: thousand and nine, there was a good deal of noise
Speaker 1: about a cave called Azaskaya and about hair and tracks
Speaker 1: found near it, and expeditions were organized and journalists were
Speaker 1: flown in. Pavel's opinion of that entire episode, which he
Speaker 1: stated in his letter without much decoration, was that it
Speaker 1: was for money and for television. His own experience happened
Speaker 1: years before any of that in February, and he has
Speaker 1: told almost nobody about it in his own country. Because
Speaker 1: of what he says, people would assume about a middle
Speaker 1: aged miner who was alone in the woods in winter
Speaker 1: with a bottle. He was checking his uncle's hunting hut.
Speaker 1: In that part of the world, you'll hear it called
Speaker 1: a zimavia, which is a small log cabin, usually one room,
Speaker 1: with a stove, a bunk, a stock of firewood, and
Speaker 1: a supply of food left inside by whoever used it last.
Speaker 1: It's a system that works on trust, and it exists
Speaker 1: because getting caught out in that country at forty below
Speaker 1: is fatal. His uncle had died the previous spring, and
Speaker 1: the hut was povels now, and he'd gone up on
Speaker 1: a snowmobile to check the roof and the stove and
Speaker 1: to fish through the ice. The tracks were the first thing.
Speaker 1: He came down onto the Marasu about two kilometers below
Speaker 1: the hut and found a line of impressions crossing the
Speaker 1: river ice. Snow on river ice in February is wind
Speaker 1: packed and hard, and Pavel said that's what made him stop,
Speaker 1: because he was standing on it and leaving nothing, and
Speaker 1: whatever had crossed had sunk in. He measured them against
Speaker 1: the length of his ski pole, and he counted impressions
Speaker 1: were long and narrow, and mostly collapsed.
Speaker 2: At the edges.
Speaker 1: He said he could see toes on two of them,
Speaker 1: and no claw marks on any. The stride he paced
Speaker 1: at a little over a meter and a half, and
Speaker 1: it was even. He's hunted since he was a boy.
Speaker 1: He's tracked elk and boar and bear. And the pattern
Speaker 1: of an animal crossing open ground in deep cold is
Speaker 1: not even animals. Hurry bunch wander stopped to look whatever
Speaker 1: this was. It had come out of the tree line
Speaker 1: on the north bank and gone in a straight line
Speaker 1: to the trees on the south bank, without a single
Speaker 1: break in the interval. He followed it up the far
Speaker 1: bank one hundred meters and lost it and scoured snow
Speaker 1: under the spruce. And he told himself it was a
Speaker 1: man on snowshoes, and he knew as he was telling
Speaker 1: himself that it wasn't, because snowshoes leave a wide, flat oval,
Speaker 1: and these were not that shape. He got to the
Speaker 1: hut in the afternoon. The roof was fine. He cut wood,
Speaker 1: lit the stove, drilled to holes in the ice on
Speaker 1: the pool below the hut, and caught four fish, and
Speaker 1: by the time the light started going he had begun,
Speaker 1: in his words, to be a man who was enjoying
Speaker 1: his day. Then he found the elk. It was uphill
Speaker 1: and behind the hut, maybe two hundred meters into the trees,
Speaker 1: and he found it because a raven took him there,
Speaker 1: a young elk, not long dead, mostly buried in snow
Speaker 1: that had been pushed over it. He said, the term
Speaker 1: is cashing a kill. Bears do it, but bears in
Speaker 1: February in that country are in dens, and this was
Speaker 1: not done the way a bear does it. The animal's
Speaker 1: neck was broken, there was very little of it eat,
Speaker 1: and it was uphill of a game trail where he
Speaker 1: could see the drag marks, which meant something had taken
Speaker 1: a dead elk, and moved it up aslope through deep
Speaker 1: snow rather than down. He went back to the hut,
Speaker 1: and he put a chair against the door. The animal
Speaker 1: came at some point in the middle of the night,
Speaker 1: and Pavel's account of what happened inside that cabin is
Speaker 1: the reason I put this story in this episode.
Speaker 2: The first thing was the woodpile.
Speaker 1: It stacked against the outside of the wall under the eve,
Speaker 1: and something went through it. He said, it wasn't a collapse.
Speaker 1: It was a series of individual sounds, pieces being moved
Speaker 1: and dropped, and it went on for a minute or two.
Speaker 1: The second thing was the smell coming down the stovepipe.
Speaker 1: That's a detail I've never heard in any other account,
Speaker 1: and it's the one that made me want.
Speaker 2: To talk to him.
Speaker 1: The stove was burning and drawing, and when he opened
Speaker 1: the firebox to put wood in, the draft reversed for
Speaker 1: a moment, the way it does when something blocks the flu.
Speaker 1: And what came back down into the room with the
Speaker 1: smoke was, in his description, the stink of a wet
Speaker 1: animal and rot thick enough that he covered his face
Speaker 1: with his sleeve, which means something was standing over that
Speaker 1: pipe or leaning on the roof beside it, close enough
Speaker 1: to put its own air into the chimney. He heard
Speaker 1: it on the roof, not scrabbling, weight moving, and then
Speaker 1: it knocked on the door three times, evenly spaced hard.
Speaker 1: Pavel had his uncle's rifle. He sat on the bunk
Speaker 1: facing the door, with the rifle across his knees, and
Speaker 1: he waited, he said. The knocking came again some time
Speaker 1: later twice, and then that was all. In the morning,
Speaker 1: the woodpile was scattered across a five meter spread. There
Speaker 1: was a gouge in the outside of the door, low
Speaker 1: down that he described as being like a shallow scoop
Speaker 1: taken out of the wood. He also found a line
Speaker 1: of impressions coming up to the door and going away.
Speaker 1: It had stood in one place long enough that the
Speaker 1: snow had melted and refrozen underneath it into a solid,
Speaker 1: glazed patch about the size of a dinner plate. He
Speaker 1: rode out that morning, and he did not go back
Speaker 1: to that hut for two years. There's a piece of
Speaker 1: this that came later. Pavel talked about it once to
Speaker 1: a man in Tashtegol who'd worked with his uncle in
Speaker 1: the mine and who was sure on his mother's side.
Speaker 1: He didn't tell him the whole thing. He asked him
Speaker 1: a narrow question, which was whether anybody hunting in that
Speaker 1: part of the river had ever had trouble at a hut,
Speaker 1: he said. The old man didn't ask him what happened,
Speaker 1: which he found unnerving. What the man told him was
Speaker 1: that his mother's people had a word for it, and
Speaker 1: that the rule he grew up with was about food
Speaker 1: and noise. You don't leave meat hanging outside overnight. You
Speaker 1: don't shout in the woods after dark. And if it
Speaker 1: comes to a hut, you stay in the hut, because
Speaker 1: as far as anyone can remember, it's never come through
Speaker 1: a door. The men who died were the ones who
Speaker 1: went outside to look. Pavel said he thought about the
Speaker 1: chair he'd put against that door and felt like a
Speaker 1: fool twice over, once for putting it there and once
Speaker 1: for thinking it would have mattered. There's one more piece,
Speaker 1: and it's the piece I keep thinking about. On the
Speaker 1: right out following the river, he came around a bend
Speaker 1: and there was something standing at the tree line on
Speaker 1: the north bank, maybe one hundred and fifty meters off,
Speaker 1: dark against the snow. He said it was standing upright,
Speaker 1: and it was tall, and the top of it was
Speaker 1: above the lower branches of the spruce behind it, and
Speaker 1: that it did not move at all in the seven
Speaker 1: or eight seconds he could see it, and that it
Speaker 1: was still standing there when the bank cut it off
Speaker 1: from view. He rode the rest of the way at
Speaker 1: a speed he described as stupid. And he put the
Speaker 1: machine into a drift and nearly ended his own life
Speaker 1: doing it. He said afterward that the drift was the
Speaker 1: part that frightened him the most, because a snow machine
Speaker 1: on its side in that country with the light going
Speaker 1: is a real problem. And for about two minutes while
Speaker 1: he was digging it out, he was more afraid of
Speaker 1: the cold than he was of whatever was behind him.
Speaker 1: He got it upright, started it up, and continued on.
Speaker 1: He didn't look back up the river. Pavel eventually went
Speaker 1: back to using the hut. He fixed the roof properly,
Speaker 1: he replaced the door. He takes his son now and
Speaker 1: they fish the same pool. He's never had anything happen
Speaker 1: there again. What he does have is a habit he
Speaker 1: picked up from his uncle and used to think was foolishness.
Speaker 1: There's a flat top stump about thirty meters from the
Speaker 1: hut where his uncle all always used to leave something
Speaker 1: before he went to bed, usually bread, sometimes a piece
Speaker 1: of fish, and Pavel used to give him a hard
Speaker 1: time about it and call it superstition for old women.
Speaker 1: His uncle's answer, apparently, was that it costs nothing. Pavel
Speaker 1: leaves bread on the stump now every night he.
Speaker 2: Stays up there.
Speaker 1: He said in his letter that he doesn't believe it
Speaker 1: does anything, and he also said that he has never
Speaker 1: once left without doing it. And I'll let those two
Speaker 1: sentences sit next to each other exactly the.
Speaker 2: Way he wrote them.
Speaker 1: Everything you've heard so far has come from people who
Speaker 1: were surprised. Nobody in those four accounts grew up expecting
Speaker 1: to meet anything. The last one comes from a place
Speaker 1: where people have been living alongside the idea of this
Speaker 1: animal for a very long time, and where it's not
Speaker 1: a curiosity, it's a set of rules. Last stop, Eastern Bhutan.
Speaker 1: They found the yak on a rock shelf above the trail,
Speaker 1: thirty meters higher than the place it had been grazing,
Speaker 1: with its neck broken and nothing eaten. Stay tuned from
Speaker 1: four back woods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages.
Speaker 1: Sonem was born in trasha Gang District in the far
Speaker 1: east of Bhutan and has worked as a trekking guide
Speaker 1: since his twenties, mostly on the route that runs between
Speaker 1: the villages of Merrock and Soaktang. They sit at high
Speaker 1: altitude in the eastern Himalaya, and the people there are
Speaker 1: called the Brokpa. Semi nomadic Yak herders with their own
Speaker 1: dress and their own dialect, and until relatively recently, the
Speaker 1: area was closed to foreigners entirely. When it opened, the
Speaker 1: trek between the two villages became one of the things
Speaker 1: people fly into Bhutan to do. The land around them
Speaker 1: is a protected area called Saktang Wildlife Sanctuary. It was
Speaker 1: established in two thousand and three, and the reason I
Speaker 1: want you to know the name is this. In the
Speaker 1: official descriptions of why that sanctuary exists, alongside the red
Speaker 1: panda and the snow leopard and the rhododendron forest, the
Speaker 1: Bhutanese government listed the Magoi mcgoy is the local name.
Speaker 1: In English, it usually gets translated as wild man, and
Speaker 1: outside Bhuton it gets lumped in with the yetti, which
Speaker 1: annoys people there because the descriptions are different. The mcgoy
Speaker 1: in Eastern Bhutan is described as large, hair, covered upright,
Speaker 1: and unpleasant tempered. Two traits come up again and again
Speaker 1: in the traditional accounts. One is that it can make
Speaker 1: itself unseen. The other is that its feet are turned
Speaker 1: backwards so that its tracks lead away from where it
Speaker 1: actually went. I want to be clear that I'm reporting
Speaker 1: a belief there, not endorsing one. But I'll also say
Speaker 1: that a country putting a folk creature into the founding
Speaker 1: documents of a national wildlife sanctuary is not a thing
Speaker 1: that happens very often anywhere on Earth. Sonem grew up
Speaker 1: with the rules. He listed some of them. You don't
Speaker 1: say the name after dark. If you have to refer
Speaker 1: to it at night, you call it the uncle, or
Speaker 1: you say the one from up there. You don't whistle
Speaker 1: at night in the high pastures. If you hear whistling,
Speaker 1: you don't answer it, and you don't go and look.
Speaker 1: And if you find its tracks, you don't follow them,
Speaker 1: partly because of the backwards feet and partly because the
Speaker 1: point of finding them is to go the other way.
Speaker 1: He'd guided that route dozens of times without incident. The
Speaker 1: trip he wrote to me about had five clients on it,
Speaker 1: foreign trekkers, plus Sonum, a cook, and two horsemen with
Speaker 1: pack animals. They'd come up from the Morok side and
Speaker 1: camped in a high pasture below the pass, in the
Speaker 1: grazing ground of a herder. Sonum knew, with the herder's
Speaker 1: yak scattered on the slope and his stone hut a
Speaker 1: few hundred meters away. The herder had a dog with him,
Speaker 1: the kind of mastiff they keep in those pastures, thick
Speaker 1: coated and serious and not a pet. Sonam mentions it
Speaker 1: early because of what it did later, and because anybody
Speaker 1: who spent time in the eastern Himalaya will tell you
Speaker 1: those dogs will go at a wild dog pack and
Speaker 1: go at a leopard, and generally have no reverse gear
Speaker 1: at all. The first night, the horses wouldn't settle. Sonam
Speaker 1: said the horsemen were up twice moving them, and that
Speaker 1: one of the horsemen came to him and said something
Speaker 1: was walking on the ridge. Sonam went out with him
Speaker 1: and listened and heard nothing, and told him it was
Speaker 1: probably a wild dog. The horseman said that a wild
Speaker 1: dog doesn't make a horse do that. Sometime in the
Speaker 1: small hours, there was whistling.
Speaker 2: He says.
Speaker 1: Whistling at high altitude in that country is not unusual,
Speaker 1: because herders whistled to their animals and to each other
Speaker 1: across valleys, and it carries enormous distances. What was unusual
Speaker 1: was that it was after two in the morning, and
Speaker 1: it was above the camp on the slope where nothing
Speaker 1: was grazing, and it was answered from a second place
Speaker 1: further along the ridge. He heard it three or four times.
Speaker 1: He did not get out of his tent, he said,
Speaker 1: he lay there and did what he'd been taught to do,
Speaker 1: which is nothing. In the morning, one of the clients
Speaker 1: came to him upset. She said that during the night
Speaker 1: someone had been standing outside her tent, not walking past,
Speaker 1: standing close for long enough that she'd had time to
Speaker 1: wake up, properly, listen and decide not to open the door.
Speaker 1: She said she could hear breathing, and that she'd assumed
Speaker 1: it was one of the horsemen until it went on
Speaker 1: too long. She'd smelled something and the word she used,
Speaker 1: which Sonam repeated to me because it stuck with him,
Speaker 1: was farmyard. They looked at the ground by her tent.
Speaker 1: It was frozen at that hour, and it held nothing.
Speaker 1: The dog is the other half of that morning. It
Speaker 1: had spent the night under the herder's hut, which is
Speaker 1: not where that dog slept, and it would not come out.
Speaker 1: The herder had to drag it out by the collar
Speaker 1: in front of everybody, and Snom said the man was
Speaker 1: embarrassed about it, in the way you'd be embarrassed about
Speaker 1: a member of your family behaving badly at a wedding.
Speaker 1: The dog wouldn't go more than a few meters from
Speaker 1: the hut all morning. It wasn't hurt. Nobody could find
Speaker 1: a mark on it. The tracks turned up further along
Speaker 1: in a boggy spot below the camp, where a spring
Speaker 1: came out of the hillside. And this is the part
Speaker 1: of Sonam's count that I've thought about more than any
Speaker 1: other part of any of.
Speaker 2: These five stories.
Speaker 1: There were four clear impressions in the mud, long flat,
Speaker 1: five toed with the toes deeply printed, and they were
Speaker 1: pointing toward the camp. Sonam looked at them and said
Speaker 1: that something had come up out of the valley toward
Speaker 1: them in the night. One of the horsemen, who was
Speaker 1: Brakpa and older than Sonam, disagreed. He said the animal
Speaker 1: had gone the other way down into the valley. Sonim
Speaker 1: didn't argue with him, because the practical outcome was the
Speaker 1: same either way. What he did do is look at
Speaker 1: the mud very closely. And what he says, and he
Speaker 1: says he can't explain it and doesn't try to, is
Speaker 1: that the deep part of each impression was at the
Speaker 1: toe end and the shallow part was at the heel end.
Speaker 1: In everyone, if you're walking towards something, you push off
Speaker 1: with your toes and your weight goes forward. That's what
Speaker 1: he saw. That's also exactly what the older man was describing,
Speaker 1: and it's the opposite of what it looked like at
Speaker 1: a glance. The cook, who was from the west of
Speaker 1: the country and had no particular investment in any of it,
Speaker 1: told Snem quietly while they were breaking camp that he'd
Speaker 1: been up at four to start the fire and there
Speaker 1: had been a smell around the kitchen tint, and that
Speaker 1: he'd checked the food boxes twice because he assumed something
Speaker 1: had got into them. Nothing had. The boxes were closed
Speaker 1: and strapped the way he'd left them. They went over
Speaker 1: the pass that day. Nothing happened on the pass. The
Speaker 1: yak was found the following week after Snum's group had
Speaker 1: flown home, and he heard about it from the herder
Speaker 1: himself when he came back through the following season. A
Speaker 1: female yak from the herd that had been on that
Speaker 1: slope was found up on a rock shelf above the trail.
Speaker 1: The animal had been grazing on the flat below. It
Speaker 1: was found roughly thirty meters higher on a shelf you
Speaker 1: have to scramble to reach with its neck broken and
Speaker 1: not one bite taken out of it. A snow leopard
Speaker 1: can kill a yak calf. This wasn't a calf, and
Speaker 1: a snow leopard that goes to the trouble of killing
Speaker 1: some that size, eats it and stays with it and
Speaker 1: comes back to it for days. The herder moved his
Speaker 1: animals to a different pasture and did not go back
Speaker 1: to that one for the rest of the season. I
Speaker 1: asked Sonam the obvious question, which is whether anybody photographed
Speaker 1: the yak.
Speaker 2: He said no.
Speaker 1: He said that isn't how it works there, that a
Speaker 1: herder who loses an animal is dealing with a financial
Speaker 1: loss and a practical problem, and not with evidence. The
Speaker 1: carcass was left where it was because getting it down
Speaker 1: off that shelf would have taken four men and a
Speaker 1: rope for meat that nobody was going to eat anyway.
Speaker 1: He also said that yaks die on that mountain all
Speaker 1: the time. They fall, they get sick, they eat something
Speaker 1: they shouldn't In the spring. He's seen dead yacks in
Speaker 1: that sanctuary in every one of his twenty two seasons,
Speaker 1: and thought nothing at all about any of them. What
Speaker 1: made this one different was the geography. And if the
Speaker 1: herder had found her in the flat below where she'd
Speaker 1: been grazing, Sonam would never have written to me, and
Speaker 1: none of us would have heard about it. Sawn them
Speaker 1: still guides. He's taken groups over that past since, and
Speaker 1: he'll take groups over it again. What he changed is
Speaker 1: smaller than you'd expect. He doesn't camp in that particular
Speaker 1: pasture anymore. He pushes on an extra hour and a
Speaker 1: half to a site closer to the next village, which
Speaker 1: makes for a longer day, in which his clients occasionally
Speaker 1: complain about. And when they complain, he tells them the
Speaker 1: water is better at the other place. And he carries
Speaker 1: a bell on his pack, now not a prayer bell,
Speaker 1: not anything ceremonial, a brass animal bell of the kind
Speaker 1: that goes around a yak's neck, tied to the outside
Speaker 1: of his pack, where it knocks against the frame and
Speaker 1: makes noise the whole time he's walking. He said that
Speaker 1: when he was a boy, the herders told him the
Speaker 1: uncle doesn't like to become upon that It isn't the
Speaker 1: meeting that goes badly it's the surprise, so he makes
Speaker 1: noise every step all day, for the whole of the
Speaker 1: walk in and the hole of the walkout. He wrote
Speaker 1: at the end of his letter that in twenty two
Speaker 1: years of guiding, he has never seen it, and hopes
Speaker 1: he never does. That's five countries and five people. We'll
Speaker 1: be back on the road soon. The map is still
Speaker 1: on the dash, the next states already marked, and the backwoods,
Speaker 1: cryptied road trip picks right back up where we left it.
Speaker 1: Until then, keep your emails and letters coming. Never play