In the fall of 1978, a thirty-one-year-old fur trapper named John flew his Piper Super Cub into a remote stretch of the Yukon Territory about a hundred and forty miles northeast of Dawson City to begin what he planned as a four-month trapping season. He had a solid cabin he'd built himself, a well-established trap line running forty-some miles through prime marten, lynx, beaver, and wolverine country, and enough experience in the northern bush to know that country about as well as any man alive.
What he didn't have was any way of knowing that something else was already out there, and that it had already been watching him. Within days of his arrival John began finding enormous bipedal tracks pressed into the creek gravel and early snow, measuring over twenty inches long and more than eight inches wide at the heel, with a stride that a tall man at a full trot couldn't match. The tracks were only the beginning.
Something started systematically clearing his traps, not randomly, but with a working knowledge of his entire line, springing sets from above with deliberate downward pressure and removing the catch without a trace. Then came the vocalizations, deep and structured sounds in the dark timber that had a quality John had no name for at the time, sounds that decades later would stop him cold when he heard the Sierra Sounds recordings made by Ron Morehead and Al Berry in the Sierra Nevada. That same organized, back-and-forth exchange.
That same sense of language underneath something no human throat is built to produce.Then the rocks started. And then one of them put John face-down in the snow with a three-inch gash in the side of his head that he had to stitch himself, alone, a hundred and forty miles from the nearest town.John stayed because his family needed what that trap line could produce. He stayed through the night visits, through the sound of something breathing against his door in the dark, through the feeling of large hands running slowly along his log walls. He stayed until the night something hit his cabin with enough force to crack the chinking and move a ten-inch spruce log in its notch.
He went outside with his Marlin 45/70 rifle and he shot it, and he followed the blood trail the next morning until the ground went too hard to hold sign. And when he came back from that blood trail he found both tundra tires on his Super Cub torn apart by hand.
That's when he called his friend Byron. What happened the night Byron arrived is the kind of account that's hard to sit with, a coordinated assault on that cabin from multiple directions that lasted for hours, with John and Byron shooting through the walls and ceiling while something worked at the logs from outside trying to find a way in. They made it to morning. They packed their gear. They flew out and John never went back.
He sold the cabin, went to work on a crab boat in the Bering Sea, and spent eleven years deciding that thirty-foot seas and a crab pot winch were considerably safer than whatever was in that Yukon timber. He's probably right.
John listens to this show and to my other podcast Sasquatch Odyssey, and he says that hearing Fred from Alaska talk about the temperament of these animals in the northern bush is the closest he's come to feeling like someone else understands what he encountered. He wants people to know that what's out there in the deep country doesn't match the friendly-giant narrative, and he wants them to be careful. After everything he went through to deliver that message, the least we can do is pass it along.
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