BWBS Ep:152 The Rogue

In this powerful and haunting episode, we share the life-changing testimony of Mary, a ninety-two-year-old Yup'ik woman who survived one of the most frightening Sasquatch encounters ever recorded. This isn’t a tale of footprints or shadows in the trees—this is the story of what happened when an Alaskan village along the Copper River faced something ancient, intelligent, and deadly during the summer of 1962.Mary was only eight when her peaceful village became a hunting ground.

What began with one trapper disappearing quickly turned into a terrifying ordeal that claimed several lives, including two of Mary’s closest childhood friends. Through her memories, we experience the fear that grew as massive footprints appeared around homes, red eyes watched from the twilight, and the villagers realized this was no bear.Her account connects deeply to Yup'ik traditions and the old stories of the kushta’ka—the hairymen who walked the land long before outsiders arrived.

Mary’s grandmother recognized the danger immediately, explaining that sometimes one of these beings “goes bad,” much like a rabid wolf, and develops a deadly hunger for humans. As children vanished and attacks intensified, twelve villages came together in a desperate attempt to fight back. Forty-three hunters formed a war party armed with everything from WWII rifles to a centuries-old Russian bear spear blessed by a shaman. 

Their battle in the deep forest was brutal, courageous, and left lasting scars on everyone involved.But Mary’s story goes far beyond violence. Sixty years later, she revealed a secret second encounter—this time with a female Sasquatch who returned something precious to Mary. Whether it was grief, remorse, or understanding, the moment changed how Mary saw these beings forever. Throughout her life, Mary witnessed other encounters that suggested a fragile, uneasy coexistence.

Children returned unharmed, travelers rescued from storms, strange shelters appearing when needed, and tracks that came and went without harm. It painted a picture of two species living side by side, connected by an ancient boundary neither fully understood. Mary never called this a victory. She saw it as a tragedy where both sides lost something irreplaceable. The creature that attacked may have been sick—poisoned near a mining camp and driven mad. 

The female that fought so fiercely was defending her mate, just as the villagers were defending their families. As Mary reached ninety-three, she shared her final thoughts about the visits she believed she still received from the surviving creature—now old, quiet, and watchful. She spoke of dreams where she saw the story through the creature’s eyes and understood that what happened wasn’t evil—it was two worlds colliding in a place both called home.

Her final message is a warning: as the wilderness shrinks, the fragile peace between humans and these ancient beings may not hold. She shares this story not to encourage people to seek Sasquatch, but to remind us of the respect and boundaries forged at such a terrible cost.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
For decades, people have disappeared in the woods without a trace.
Some blame wild animals, others whisper of creatures the world
refuses to believe in. But those who have survived they
know the truth. Welcome to Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, where we
share real encounters with the things lurking in the darkness bigfoot,

(00:23):
dog man UFOs, and creatures that defy explanation. Some make
it out, others aren't so lucky. Are you ready, because
once you hear these stories, you'll never walk in the
woods alone again. So grab your flashlight, stay close and
remember some things in the woods don't want to be found.
Hit that follow or subscribe button, turn on auto downloads,

(00:46):
and let's head off into the woods. If you dare,
listen closely, and I will tell you something that most
people do not want to believe, something that those of

(01:08):
us who live through it have carried in our hearts
for more than sixty years. You see, when people think
of sasquatch, when they imagine these beings that walk between
our world and the wild places, they picture gentle giants.
They imagine curious creatures peering from behind trees, maybe stealing
a fish from a drying rack, or leaving footprints by

(01:29):
a creek. They want to believe that if these things exist,
they are benevolent, or at least indifferent to us humans.
But I'm here to tell you that this is not
always true. Just as there are humans who turn dark,
who prey upon their own kind, so too are there
those among the hairy people who walk a different path,
a dangerous path, a path of blood and terror. What

(01:53):
I'm about to share with you happened in the early
nineteen sixties in a small village along the Copper River
in Alaska. It was just a little girl then, no
more than eight years old. But some things, some terrible things,
they burn themselves into your memory so deeply that, even
after ninety two years on this earth, I can close

(02:13):
my eyes and be right back there. I can smell
the smoke from the fish drying racks. I can hear
the sound of my father loading his rifle in the dark.
I can see those red eyes glowing outside my window.
This is not a story for the faint of heart.
This is not one of those tales where everyone lives
happily ever after. This is the truth about what happened

(02:34):
when one of the hairy men as we called them,
went wrong when it began hunting us, when it took
our children. So settle in, but perhaps leave a light on,
and remember, as you listen to an old woman's memories,
that not all the giants in the forest are friendly.
Some of them are hungry, and some of them have
developed a taste for human flesh. My name is Mary,

(02:57):
and I was born in a village that sat on
a bend of the Great Copper River, about two hundred
miles from what anyone might call civilization. In the summer
of nineteen sixty two, we had maybe one hundred and
twenty people living there year round. We were upick. People
had been there since time immemorial, since Raven brought light

(03:17):
to the world. The village was a cluster of small
wooden houses and a few traditional sod houses that the
elders still preferred. We had a little Orthodox church with
its onion dome painted blue like the sky, a general
store run by old Pete, and a one room schoolhouse
where Missus Thompson, a white woman from Oregon, tried her

(03:38):
best to teach us English and arithmetic. But most of
our learning, our real learning, happened out on the land
and the river. I need you to understand what our
life was like before everything went wrong. It was hard, yes,
but it was beautiful. In summer, the sun barely set,
and we children would play by the river until our

(03:58):
mothers called us in at what would have been midnight.
In the lower forty eight. We picked berries, clouds of
mosquitoes following us everywhere. We helped smoke and dry the
salmon that ran thick in the river. We listened to
our grandmother's tell stories about raven and wolf and the
little people who lived under the hills. My best friends
were Anna and Peter, a brother and sister who lived

(04:21):
three houses down from ours. Anna was seven, a year
younger than me, and Peter had just turned nine that spring.
Peter was brave, always the first to climb the tallest
tree or venture out onto the river ice in early
winter to test if it would hold. Anna was quieter, sweeter.
She had these huge brown eyes, and she could spot

(04:42):
berries better than anyone in the village. She would see
cloud berries and blueberries that the rest of us walked
right past. Their father, Joseph, was one of our best hunters.
People said he could track a moose through a blizzard.
Their mother Sarah made the most beautiful beaded moccasins and
muckluck ucks. They were a good family, a happy family,

(05:03):
at least they were until that terrible day in late July.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. First, I need to
tell you about the disappearances that came before, the ones
that should have warned us something was terribly wrong. It
started in early June, right after the ice broke up
on the river. Thomas, a young man of twenty two,

(05:24):
went out to check his trap line about ten miles
up river. He never came back. We searched for five days.
My father was part of the search party. They found
his canoe pulled up on shore, his rifle leaning against
a tree, unfired. They found some of his traps still set,
but Thomas himself had vanished without a trace. Well that's

(05:46):
not entirely true. They did find something. My father would
not talk about it at first, but I overheard him
telling my mother late one night when they thought I
was asleep. He said they found blood, a lot of it,
splattered on the trees about fifteen feet off the ground.
And they found tracks, huge tracks, human like but too big.

(06:07):
The toes were too long, and the stride. The distance
between the footprints was impossible. No man could step that far,
not even running. The elders held a meeting, some of
them the ones who remembered the old stories. They whispered
about the hairy men, the kushtaka, the shape shifters. But others,
especially those who had been to school in Bethel or Anchorage,

(06:30):
they insisted it must have been a bear, a grizzly probably,
that had dragged poor Thomas away. Bears could climb trees,
after all, that would explain the blood so high up.
We wanted to believe it was a bear. Bears We
understood bears. We could hunt Bears followed rules, patterns. They
were dangerous, yes, but they were a danger we knew

(06:53):
how to face. Two weeks later, Philip disappeared. He was
an older man, maybe fifty, who lived alone at the
edge of the village. He had gone out to gather
wood and never returned. This time the search party found
even less, just his axe embedded in a tree trunk,
and more of those impossible footprints. The footprints led away

(07:16):
into the deepest part of the forest, where the trees
grew so thick that even at noon it was like twilight.
The search party followed them for a while, but then
our tracker, George, stopped dead in his tracks and refused
to go further. He said something was watching them, something big,
something wrong. They turned back. After Philip disappeared, fear settled

(07:38):
over our village like fog rolling in from the sea.
Parents kept their children close, men carried their rifles everywhere,
even to the outhouse. Women moved in groups, never alone.
The dogs, usually so eager to run and play, stayed
close to the houses, whimpering and cowering whenever the wind
shifted from the north from the deep forest. But it

(08:01):
was not just the disappearances that frightened us. There were
other signs, other warnings that something terrible was stalking our village.
About a week after Philip vanished, Missus Nicholas, who lived
at the north end of the village, said she woke
in the night to find something massive peering through her window.
She screamed and it fled, but not before she got

(08:22):
a good look at its face. She said it was
almost human, but stretched wrong, like someone had grabbed a
person's face and pulled it in all directions. The eyes,
she said, glowed red in the darkness. Then there was
the incident with the cash. We kept our dried fish
and meat in elevated storage sheds raised on stilts to

(08:42):
keep them safe from animals. One morning we found that
someone or something had torn the door off Joseph's cash,
not broken it, not pride it open, but torn it
completely off its hinges and thrown it twenty feet into
the yard. The cash had been emptied of meat, but
the strange thing was that the bones had been arranged
in a pattern on the ground below a circle, with

(09:05):
lines radiating out like sun rays, or like a warning.
My grandmother we called her Apa, which means grandmother in
our language. She knew what it was. She had seen
one of the hairy men when she was young. She
told us it had watched their fish camp for three
days before her father and uncles drove it away with
fire and loud noises. But that one, she explained, had

(09:27):
just been curious. This one, whatever was taking our people,
this one was different. She told me that sometimes one
of them goes bad, like a rabid wolf, like a
man who forgets how to be human. When that happens,
they become hunters of people. They get the taste for it,
and they cannot stop. I asked her what could stop them,

(09:49):
and she was quiet for a long moment before answering
that bullets could, lots of bullets, and brave men who
were not afraid to face monsters. The fear grew worse
as more strange things happened, and one night every dog
in the village began howling at exactly the same moment,
a terrible chorus that lasted for nearly an hour. When

(10:09):
they finally stopped, we could hear something else, and answering
howl from the forest. But it was not quite wolf,
not quite human. It was something in between, something that
made the hair on my neck stand up, even though
I was safe inside our house. Another time, a group
of women washing clothes by the river saw something moving
on the opposite bank. It was broad daylight, and at

(10:32):
first they thought it was a bear standing on its
hind legs, But then it turned and looked at them,
and they saw its face. They ran back to the village,
some of them crying, others too shocked to speak. When
the men went to investigate, they found footprints in the mud,
those same huge, impossible footprints, And they found something else,

(10:54):
a pile of fish heads, neatly stacked, all facing toward
our village. July came in, high and heavy with mosquitos.
The salmon were running strong, and despite our fear, we
had to work. Winter would come whether we were ready
or not, and without enough dried fish we would starve.
So we set up the fish camps along the river,

(11:14):
though closer to the village than usual. The women and
children cleaned and fileted the fish, while the men stood
guard with their rifles. It was during this time, maybe
the third week of July, that I saw it for
the first time. I had woken in the night, needing
to use the honeybucket. Our little house was dark, just
the faint glow of the midnight sun filtering through the

(11:36):
flower sack curtains my mother had made. I was patting
barefoot across the floor when something made me stop. A sound,
or maybe the absence of sound. The dogs had gone
completely silent, not even the usual summer buzz of mosquitos
against the windows. I crept to the window and carefully
pulled back the edge of the curtain. At first I

(11:57):
saw nothing unusual, just our yawn card, the fish rack,
the trees beyond. Then something moved, something huge, it stepped
out from behind our cash. Even in the dim light,
I could see it was massive, maybe eight feet tall.
It was covered in dark hair or fur. But it
walked upright like a man. Its arms were too long,

(12:20):
hanging almost to its knees, and its head. Its head
was wrong, two pointed at the top, too wide at
the jaw. But it was the eyes that froze me
in place. They glowed red in the half light, like
coals in a dying fire, and they were looking right
at me, right through the window, right into my eyes.

(12:41):
I could not move, I could not scream. I could
only stand there, a little girl in her nightgown, staring
at something that should not exist. It tilted its head,
studying me. Then it took a step toward the house.
That broke the spell. I screamed, a high, piercing sh
that woke the entire house. My father burst from my

(13:03):
parents' room, rifle in hand. He did not even ask
what was wrong. He threw open the door and fired
into the night. The boom of the thirty ought to
six was deafening in our small house. He shouted something,
though whether he was yelling at us or the thing outside,
I did not know. He fired again, and this time

(13:23):
we heard something I will never forget. It was like
a scream and a roar and a howl, all mixed together.
It was pain and rage and something else, something that
sounded almost like words, though in no language i'd ever heard.
My father stepped out onto the porch, rifle at his shoulder,
scanning the yard. Other men were emerging from their houses also.

(13:46):
Armed dogs were barking now, but from inside houses, too
terrified to come out. Our neighbor called out, asking what
it was. My father told him it was the hairy man,
that it had been right there, looking in the wind
at me. A search of the yard revealed huge footprints,
just like the ones found where Thomas and Philip had disappeared.

(14:07):
There was also blood, just a few drops, suggesting my
father had indeed hit it with at least one shot.
But the creature was gone, vanished into the forest. That
night changed everything. Now we knew for certain what we
were dealing with. Not a bear, not our imagination, a
hairy man, a kushtaka, a sasquatch, whatever you wanted to

(14:30):
call it. It was real. It was hunting us, and
it had been watching our children. But the horror was
not done with us. Over the next few days, things
got worse, much worse. The creature became bolder. People would
see it at the edge of the forest during the day,
just standing there, watching, always too far away for a

(14:51):
clear shot, always disappearing the moment someone raised a rifle.
It was learning our patterns, our routines. Stay tuned for
more backwoods It's big foot stories. We'll be back after
these messages. One afternoon, a group of children playing near
the community hall suddenly scattered, screaming. They said the hairy

(15:11):
man had been hiding behind the building, that when Little
James had run around the corner during their game, he
had come face to face with it. The creature had
reached out one massive hand toward the boy before the
child's screams sent it retreating into the forest. James did
not speak for three days after that, and when he
finally did, he would only say that its breath smelled

(15:32):
like death. The next morning, the elders called a meeting.
Every adult in the village crowded into the community hall.
The children were left with the grandmothers, who gathered us
all in the church, thinking perhaps holy ground might offer
some protection. I learned later what was discussed in that meeting.
Some wanted to evacuate the village, to go down river

(15:53):
to Russian mission or upriver to McGrath. Others said we
should send for help, maybe get the state troopers involved,
though the nearest trooper was a three day boat ride away.
But the majority, led by my father and Joseph, said
we needed to hunt this thing down and kill it.
Joseph argued that it had our scent, now that it

(16:13):
knew where we were and knew we were weak. If
we ran, it would follow. If we waited, it would
pick us off one by one. We needed to take
the fight to it. They decided to organize hunting parties,
groups of four or five men who would go out
each day trying to track the creature. They would start
at first light the next day. The women and children

(16:35):
would stay in the village, never venturing beyond the last house,
never alone. It was a good plan, a reasonable plan,
but the hairyman had plans of its own. The very
next day, before the men could even organize their first
hunting party, tragedy struck again, and this time it struck
at the heart of our village. It was a beautiful morning,

(16:57):
one of those perfect Alaskan summer days where the sky
is so blue it hurts to look at. The men
were gathered at the community hall, checking their rifles, organizing
into groups. The women were working on the fish, and
we children were supposed to be helping. But Anna and
Peter had a different idea. Peter whispered to me that
they had seen the biggest blueberry patch yesterday, just past

(17:20):
the old lightning struck tree. He said the berries were
as big as thumbnails and they wanted me to come
with them to pick them. He said it was not far,
just a few hundred yards, and we could see the
houses from there. He thought our mothers would be so
happy when we brought back buckets full of berries. I hesitated.
We were not supposed to go anywhere, especially not beyond

(17:42):
the village. But Peter laughed at my fear, that careless
laugh of a nine year old boy who thinks he
is invincible. He said it was daylight, the men were
all around, and it was just right there, pointing toward
the forest edge. They would be back before anyone noticed.
I wanted to go, Oh, oh, how I wanted to go,

(18:03):
to be brave like Peter, to find berries with Anna
to do something normal instead of cowering in fear. But something,
maybe my grandmother's warnings, maybe the memory of those red eyes,
made me shake my head and tell them we should
not go, that it was dangerous. They went without me.
Anna looked back once, waving her little hand, pale against

(18:26):
the green of the forest. That image Anna waving goodbye,
her smile bright in the morning sun, that has burned
into my memory forever. It was the last time I
saw her. An hour passed before anyone noticed they were gone.
Sarah came looking for them, calling their names. At first
she was annoyed, thinking they were playing some game. Then

(18:49):
she became worried, then frantic. She screamed their names, running
from house to house, asking if anyone had seen her children.
The entire village mobilized in minutes. The men abandoned their
planning and rushed toward the forest. The women gathered the
other children, counting and recounting to make sure no one
else was missing. I told them about the barry patch,

(19:10):
about Peter's plan, and a group of men headed directly there.
They found the berry buckets first, scattered on the ground,
berry spilled everywhere. They found small footprints children's footprints running,
and they found the other tracks, the huge, impossible tracks,
following the children, catching them. There was blood on a

(19:32):
tree trunk, small handprints in red where one of the
children had reached out, trying to steady themselves or trying
to hold on as they were dragged away. Peter's shoe
was found twenty yards further, torn and mangled. Anda's hair
ribbon was caught on a branch ten feet off the ground.
Joseph went mad with grief and rage. He ran ahead

(19:53):
of the other men, screaming his children's names, screaming challenges
at the forest. The other men had to physically restrain
him when the tracks led into a part of the
forest where the trees grew so close together that they
would have to go single file, where an ambush would
be easy. My father promised Joseph they would get the
children back. They would find them, though his eyes said

(20:14):
he knew it was already too late. But we did
not find them, not that day, not the next. The
men searched for three days, going deeper into the forest
than anyone had gone in years. They found more tracks,
more signs of the creature. They found places where it
had rested depressions in the moss, shaped like a giant body.

(20:36):
They found trees with claw marks fifteen feet up, But
of Anna and Peter they found nothing more. Sarah did
not speak for a week. She just sat by her window,
staring at the forest, rocking back and forth. Joseph threw
himself into the hunt with a terrible fury, going out
every day, coming back later and later, his eyes wild

(20:57):
with exhaustion and grief. The loss of the children changed
our village. The laughter died even in the endless daylight
of summer. Darkness had fallen on us. The elders preyed
in the church. The medicine man, Old Robert, performed ceremonies
that had not been done in decades, calling on the
old spirits for protection. But still at night we could

(21:20):
sometimes hear it, a howl that was not quite wolf,
not quite human, the sound of something huge moving through
the forest, circling our village. The creature grew even bolder
after taking the children. It would come right up to
the edge of the village at night, leaving footprints between
the houses. One morning we woke to find that it

(21:40):
had killed one of the sled dogs, not for food,
but seemingly for sport. The poor animal had been torn
apart and arranged in pieces, almost like a message. Three
nights after Anna and Peter disappeared, I woke to a
sound at our window, not a tapping, but a scraping,
like claws on wood. I was too terrified to look,

(22:03):
too terrified to scream. I just lay there, tears streaming
down my face as something huge breathed against the glass.
The window fogged up from its breath, and in that
fog I saw something being drawn, a circle with lines
radiating out, just like the pattern of bones left at
Joseph's cash. In the morning, my parents found deep gouges

(22:25):
in the wood around our window frame, and the glass
was cracked from the pressure of something pressing against it.
Two days after Anna and Peter disappeared, we heard from
downriver a runner arrived from Nepaskiak, a village about thirty
miles away. They too had lost someone, a grandmother who
had gone to check her fishing net at dawn and

(22:46):
never returned. They had found the same massive tracks, the
same signs of violence. The next day, word came from upriver.
The village of Nikolai had lost two men, brothers who
had been moose hunting. Their boat was found drifting blood
on the seats, deep claw marks in the wood. It
was not just our village. The creature or perhaps creatures,

(23:09):
were hunting along the entire middle section of the Copper River.
We were under siege by something ancient, something that had
decided humans were prey. That is when my father and
Joseph came up with the plan. If one village could
not stop this thing, perhaps many villages together could. They
would send runners to every village within fifty miles. They

(23:30):
would gather the best hunters, the bravest men. They would
form a war party, like in the old days when
the Yupik fought against invaders, But this time the invader
was not human. While we waited for help to arrive,
the terror continued. The creature seemed to know something was happening.
It became more aggressive, more visible. One evening, just as

(23:52):
the sun was finally dipping toward the horizon, casting long shadows.
Missus Thompson, the school teacher, saw it. She had been
in the schoolhouse preparing lessons for whenever we might feel
safe enough to resume classes. She looked up from her
desk and there it was. Pressed against the window, staring
in at her. Her scream brought everyone running. By the

(24:13):
time the men arrived, it was gone, but it had
left something behind. Pressed into the glass of the window
so hard that the glass had cracked. Was a handprint,
a huge human like handprint, but wrong. The fingers were
too long, the palm too wide, and in the center
of the palm print clearly visible was blood. We never

(24:34):
found out whose blood it was. That same night, something
tried to break into the church. Father Dmitri, the Orthodox priest,
was keeping vigil, praying for our protection. He heard something
massive slam against the door again and again. The wooden door,
thick and sturdy, began to splinter. Father Dmitri grabbed the

(24:54):
cross from the altar and held it toward the door,
praying an old church Slavonic at the top of his lung.
The battering stopped. There was a moment of silence, then
that terrible howl scream, so loud that it shook dust
from the rafters. When the men arrived, they found the
door nearly destroyed, and more of those huge footprints leading
away into the forest. But also, strangely, they found burns

(25:18):
on the door, as if something very hot had touched it.
Father Dmitri swore he had not used any flame, only
held up the cross and prayed. By early August, men
had arrived from twelve different villages. Some came by boat,
others walked through the forest and groups rifles at the ready.
In total, forty three hunters gathered in our village. It

(25:40):
was the largest gathering anyone could remember, at least for
such a grim purpose. Among them was Thomas from Russian Mission,
known as the best tracker on the lower River. There
was Paul from Holy Cross, who had hunted brown bears
since he was fourteen. The Alexei brothers came from Antiac,
five of them, all excellent shots. From sleep Mute came

(26:02):
an old man named Moses, who claimed his grandfather had
killed a hairy man back in the eighteen nineties and
knew their weaknesses. Moses told them what his grandfather had
passed down. He said they were smart, smarter than bears,
smarter than wolves, maybe as smart as us. They knew
we used guns, so they stayed out of clear sight.

(26:23):
They knew we were weaker at night, so that is
when they preferred to hunt. But they had weaknesses too.
They were curious and could not help but investigate new things.
And they were proud. If you challenge them, insulted them,
they would respond. His grandfather, he explained, did not hunt
the hairyman. He made the hairy man come to him.

(26:44):
The hunters spent three days preparing. They checked and rechecked
their weapons. Some had brought military surplus rifles from World
War II, others had hunting rifles passed down through generations.
Joseph had somehow acquired an old Thompson submachine gun, probably
through questionable means, but no one was going to question
him about it. Not with his children gone. They divided

(27:08):
into five groups of eight or nine men each. The
plan was to spread out in a wide net and
slowly sweep through the forest, driving the creature toward the river,
where it would have nowhere to run. Each group had
a tracker, a radio man with one of the few
walkie talkies in the region, and at least one man
who knew the old prayers, the old ways of protection.

(27:30):
My father was in the group with Joseph and Thomas
the tracker. Before he left, he knelt down to my
level and held my shoulders. He promised me he would
come back that when he did this would all be over,
that I would be safe again. I wanted to believe him,
but I had heard my parents talking when they thought
I was asleep. I knew they were not certain the

(27:50):
hunting party would succeed. This thing had already killed at
least six people that we knew of, maybe more. It
was huge, strong, and it knew the forest better than
than we did. The morning the hunters left, the entire
village gathered to see them off. Father Dmitri blessed them
in old church Slavonic. Moses sang a war song in

(28:11):
the old language, a song that had not been heard
in fifty years. The women pressed packages of dried fish
and meat into the men's hands, along with bullets they
had been hoarding. Sarah came out of her house for
the first time since her children disappeared. She walked up
to her husband, looked him in the eyes, and told
him simply to kill it. To kill it slowly. The

(28:34):
hunters filed out of the village in their groups, spacing
themselves about a quarter mile apart. The plan was to
make camp about five miles into the forest the first night,
then begin the real hunt the next day. Those of
us left in the village. The women, children and old
men watched until they disappeared into the trees. Then we
went into the church and prayed. That first night without

(28:57):
most of our men was terrifying. Every sound made us jump.
Every shadow could be the creature. The old men who
had stayed behind those two elderly or infirmed to join
the hunt, sat with their rifles on the porches, trying
to look brave for us children, but I could see
their hands shaking. Around midnight we heard gunfire in the distance,

(29:19):
not just one or two shots, but a sustained battle.
Rifles cracking, the rapid fire of what had to be
Joseph's Thompson gun, and men shouting. It went on for
maybe three minutes, then silence. We waited clustered in the church,
praying for word. Finally, around dawn, the radio crackled to life.

(29:40):
It was Paul's voice, shaky but alive. He reported that
Group three had found it, that it had attacked their
camp about midnight. Two men were injured but alive. The
creature was wounded but had escaped. They were following the
blood trail. Relief and renewed fear washed over us. They
were alive, but the creature was only wounded. Stay tuned

(30:03):
for more Backwoods bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages.
A wounded animal is the most dangerous kind. For two
more days, the hunters tracked the hairy man through the forest.
The blood trail led them in circles at first, as
if the creature was trying to confuse them. Then it
led toward the mountains, into terrain that became increasingly difficult.

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They found places where it had stopped to rest, pools
of blood, suggesting it was badly hurt, but it kept moving,
kept staying just ahead of them. On the third night,
it doubled back. But there was something else, something the
hunters had not expected. There were two of them. I
learned what happened next from my father and the other

(30:47):
hunters who survived. They told the story many times over
the years, and each time new details emerged, as if
the horror of it could only be absorbed in small doses.
The creature had indeed, he'd been badly wounded in that
first encounter. Joseph's Thompson gun had put at least a
dozen rounds into it, and other hunters had hit it
as well, But the hairy man was tough, tougher than

(31:10):
anything they had ever encountered, and it was angry. On
the third night, the hunters had made camp on a
small rise, thinking the elevation would give them an advantage.
They posted guards, built fires in a circle around their camp,
and settled in for another nervous night. The wounded creature's
trail had been getting fresher, the blood still wet in

(31:31):
some places. They knew they were close. The first anyone
knew of the second creature was when Mike, standing guard
at the north end of the camp, simply disappeared. One
moment he was there, leaning against a tree. The next
moment gone, no sound, no cry for help, just gone.
His brother, Sam, standing guard thirty yards away, saw movement

(31:54):
in the trees. He called out, asking if it was Mike.
The response was Mike's rifle flying out of the darkness,
hitting Sam in the chest and knocking him down. As
he struggled to get up, gasping for breath, he saw
it a second hairy man, this one even bigger than
the first. Standing at the edge of the firelight, it
was holding Mike's body like a rag doll, and Mike's

(32:17):
head was twisted at an impossible angle. Sam's scream woke
the entire camp. Rifles fired in every direction as men
scrambled for cover. The second creature dropped Mike's body and
melted back into the darkness, moving faster than something that
size should be able to move. Then the wounded one
attacked from the south. It burst through their perimeter like

(32:38):
a freight train, scattering men and equipment. Even wounded, it
was incredibly strong. It grabbed Peter, the store owner's son,
and threw him into a tree so hard they heard
his bones break. It backhanded Thomas the tracker, sending him
flying into the fire. The tracker rolled out quickly, but
not before being badly burned. Earned my father said the

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creature was a nightmare, made of flesh, eight and a
half feet tall, covered in dark brown hair matted with blood.
Its face was almost human, but stretched and distorted, with
a jaw that could open wider than any humans. Its
eyes reflected the firelight red, and it smelled like death
and rot. Joseph stood his ground, firing as Thompson gun

(33:24):
point blank into the creature's chest. The impacts drove it
back step by step, but it would not go down.
When the gun clicked empty, Joseph did something insane. He
charged the creature with his hunting knife, screaming for his
children in u pick. The creature caught him by the throat,
lifting him off the ground, but Joseph managed to drive

(33:45):
his knife deep into its neck, twisting the blade. Blood
sprayed across the camp site. The creature roared a sound
that my father said he would hear in his nightmares
for the rest of his life, and threw Joseph aside.
That's when Moses stepped with something none of the other
hunters had seen before. It was an old Russian bear spear,

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the kind the Cossacks had used two hundred years ago.
The head was silver, blessed by a shaman before Moses
was even born. Moses shouted at the creature to face him,
to face him like its grandfather had faced his. The
wounded creature turned toward him, blood pouring from its neck
from dozens of bullet wounds. It took a step forward,

(34:27):
then another. Moses stood his ground, spear braced the creature charged.
Moses was seventy three years old, but in that moment
he moved like a young warrior. He sidestepped the charge
and drove the spear deep into the creature's side, finding
the gap between ribs. The silver spearhead must have hit
something vital because the creature stumbled fell to one knee.

(34:50):
That's when my father and five other men opened fire,
pouring every round they had into the kneeling hairy man.
The creature tried to rise, reached out with one massive
hand toward Moses, then finally collapsed, but the battle was
not over. The second creature, the larger one, attacked again.
This time it was smart. It grabbed burning logs from

(35:12):
the fire and threw them at the men, scattering hot
coals everywhere. In the confusion and smoke, it managed to
grab two more hunters, killing one instantly and badly mauling
the other. The survivors regrouped, forming a tight circle, rifles
pointing outward. They could hear the second creature moving around
them in the darkness, just beyond the firelight, sometimes to

(35:34):
the left, sometimes to the right. It was testing them,
looking for weakness. Then Paul had an idea. He grabbed
the radio and turned it on, cranking the volume as
high as it would go. The static and feedback created
an awful shrieking noise The creature roared in response, apparently
hurt or confused by the sound. Paul shouted for everyone

(35:56):
to make noise, all the noise they could. The hunters
began firing into the air, shouting, banging their mess kits together.
Someone had brought a flare gun and fired it straight up,
the red light illuminating the forest. Briefly, in that moment
of brightness, they saw the second creature clearly for the
first time. It was massive, maybe nine feet tall, and

(36:18):
unlike the first one, its hair was almost black. But
what terrified the most was its face. It was too human.
The intelligence in its eyes was clear, calculating this was
not just an animal, this was something that could think,
plan hate. The noise and light seemed to disorient it,

(36:39):
and it retreated further into the forest. The hunters kept
up the racket for hours until dawn finally came. When
the sun rose, they found the second creature had gone,
leaving only massive footprints and the smell of death. The
hunters carried their dead and wounded back to the village.
They had lost four men that were killed by the sasquatch,

(37:00):
Dick badly injured, but they had also killed one of
the creatures and driven off the other The body of
the dead hairy man was dragged back on a makeshift
travois covered with the tarp. The entire village gathered as
they arrived. There were tears for the dead, relief for
the living, and a terrible curiosity about what lay under
that tarp. Moses, now treated with the reverence do a

(37:22):
true warrior, despite his age, pulled back the covering. In death,
the creature was no less terrifying. Its body was humanoid,
but wrong in every proportion. Arms too long, legs too thick,
hands that ended in claws rather than nails. Its face
was the worst part. It was like looking at a
human face reflected in disturbed water. All the features there

(37:45):
but distorted. The mouth, frozen open in death, showed teeth
that were mostly human, except for the canines, which were
as long as a wolf's father. Dmitri crossed himself and
began praying in old church Slavonic. Some of the el
wept not from fear, but from a kind of recognition.
This thing, this monster, it had once been something else,

(38:08):
something more like us perhaps, or we had once been
more like it. The old stories, the ones about the
first people, the ones that the missionaries had tried to
make us forget suddenly seemed very real. They burned the
body that night. The entire village watched as the flames
consumed it. The smell was horrible, and the thing made

(38:30):
sounds as it burned, probably just air escaping from the lungs,
but it sounded like screaming. Some people said they saw
shapes in the smoke, faces of the people it had killed.
I do not know if that was true. I kept
my eyes closed for most of it. Joseph survived his injuries,
though he walked with a limp for the rest of
his life. The knife wound he had inflicted on the

(38:53):
creature had indeed been mortal. When they examined the body,
they found he had managed to sever something important in
its neck. His children were avenged, but it brought him
no peace. Sarah never recovered from the loss. She died
that winter, people said from a broken heart, though the
official cause was pneumonia. The second creature was never found.

(39:15):
The hunters went out several more times over the following weeks,
but the trail had gone cold. Some said it had
died from its wounds somewhere deep in the forest. Others
believed it had retreated further into the mountains, nursing its
grief and hatred. I think the second theory was correct
because the encounters did not entirely stop. Over the years,

(39:36):
people would occasionally report seeing something huge moving through the forest,
always at a distance. Tracks would be found, Sometimes a
dog would disappear, or a cash would be broken into,
but it never again came close to the villages. It
had learned to fear us, just as we had learned
to fear it. The state troopers finally arrived two weeks

(39:58):
after the battle, fly in on a floatplane. They took statements,
looked at the evidence, and then filed a report that
blamed the deaths on a rogue bear, possibly rabid. Officially,
that's still what happened. A bear attack, the worst in
Alaska's recorded history, but just a bear. Those of us
who were there, we knew better. We knew what we

(40:20):
had seen, what we had fought, what we had lost.
The hairy Man, the sasquatch, the kushtaka, whatever you want
to call it. It was real. It had hunted us,
we had hunted it, and in the end we had
both lost. Life in the village slowly returned to something
resembling normal, though normal was forever changed. We children went

(40:44):
back to school, but there were two empty desks that
Missus Thompson never filled. She left them there all year,
as if Anna and Peter might walk in any day,
apologizing for being late, ready to learn their letters and numbers.
The fish came that fall, and we smoked and dried
them as always. Winter arrived with its long darkness, and

(41:05):
we told stories around the stoves. But now the old stories,
the ones about creatures in the forest, were told in whispers,
and no one questioned whether they were true. My father
never spoke much about that night in the forest, the
night they killed the creature, but sometimes I would catch
him staring out the window at the tree line, his
hand unconsciously moving to his rifle. He had seen something

(41:29):
out there that had changed his understanding of the world,
and that knowledge weighed on him. The following spring, something
strange happened. I never told anyone about this, not even
my parents, because I was not sure they would believe me,
or worse, they would believe me and be terrified. It
was late spring, the ice just gone from the river.

(41:51):
I had walked to my favorite sitting spot a big
flat rock that overlooked the water, about a half mile
from the village. I knew I should not be alone,
but I was tired of being afraid, tired of being
watched every moment. I needed to be by myself, to think,
to remember my friends, without everyone looking at me with pity.

(42:12):
I was throwing small stones into the water, watching the
ripples spread when I realized I was not alone. The
birds had gone quiet. The air felt heavy, charged, like
before a storm. I turned around slowly, my heart already
knowing what I would see. It stood at the edge
of the forest, maybe thirty feet away. The female, the

(42:33):
one that had escaped. Moses had been right. It was
different from the male they had killed, taller, leaner, Its
hair more black than brown, and its face, while still
distorted and inhuman, had a quality I can only describe
as feminine. We stared at each other for a few seconds.
I was too terrified to scream, too terrified to run.

(42:57):
I just sat there, a little girl on a facing
a creature that had killed grown men. It took a
step forward and I saw what it was carrying, A
small bundle wrapped in what looked like woven grass. It
placed the bundle carefully on the ground, then looked at
me again. Its eyes, which I had expected to be
red with rage, were dark brown, almost black, and they

(43:21):
were sad, so terribly deeply sad. It made a sound
low in its throat, not a growl, not a roar,
almost like speech, though no words I could understand. Then
it turned and walked back into the forest, not rushed,
not aggressive, just walking away. I sat frozen for another

(43:43):
minute before my curiosity overcame my fear. I crept forward
and looked at the bundle. Inside were Anna's doll, the
one she had loved more than anything, made from seal
skin and cariboo hair, and Peter's knife, the small folding
knife his father had given him for his eighth birth day.
Both items were clean, carefully wrapped, preserved. They had not

(44:05):
been eaten, They had not been torn apart by some
mindless beast. They had been taken, yes, killed certainly, but
their things had been kept, saved, returned why remorse and apology,
an acknowledgment that both sides had lost children that summer.
I took the bundle and ran back to the village.

(44:26):
I gave the items to Joseph and Sarah telling them
I had found them by the river, washed up on shore.
They held their children's possessions and wept, finding some small
comfort and having something, anything returned to them. I never
told them the truth. How could I? How could I
explain that the monster that had killed their children had
also in some way warned them. I grew up as

(44:50):
children do, even after trauma. I went to high school
in Bethel, then to college and Anchorage. I became a
teacher like Missus Thompson, stay tuned from more back woods
bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages, and eventually
came back to teach in the villages along the river.
I married a good man, had children and grandchildren of

(45:12):
my own. But I never forgot that summer of nineteen
sixty two. Over the years, there were other encounters, other
signs that the female was still out there. A hunter
named William came back from a week long trip, claiming
something had followed him the entire time, always staying just
out of sight. He found huge footprints circling his camp

(45:32):
each morning, and once he woke to find all his
supplies had been reorganized sorted by type while he slept.
Nothing was taken, just rearranged as if the creature was
curious about our things. Another time, a family camping upriver
reported that their youngest daughter, a girl of about five,
had wandered off while they were setting up camp. They

(45:55):
searched frantically for hours, calling her name, fearing the worst. Then,
just as the sun was setting, she walked out of
the forest, completely unharmed, carrying a handful of perfect berries.
She said a big, hairy lady had shown her where
the best berries grew, and then pointed her back toward camp.
The parents wanted to believe she had imagined it, but

(46:16):
the berries she carried were from a type of bush
that did not grow anywhere near their camp site. The
most significant encounter happened about fifteen years after that terrible summer.
A group of geologists mapping mineral deposits in the mountains
got lost in an unexpected blizzard. They were sure they
were going to freeze to death when they stumbled upon
a cave. Inside, they found a fire already burning in

(46:40):
a pile of dried fish. They stayed there for three
days until the storm passed. On the last night, one
of them woke to see a massive figure silhouetted in
the cave entrance watching them. It never came closer, never
threatened them. When the storm cleared and they left, they
tried to find the cave again, with proper equipment and maps.

(47:00):
They never could locate it. It was as if it
had never existed. These stories accumulated over the years, painting
a picture of a creature that was neither wholly hostile
nor wholly benign. It was something that lived parallel to us,
occasionally intersecting our world, bound by the same strange treaty
that had been written in blood. That summer. When I

(47:21):
was in my forties, I tried to research what had happened.
I went to newspaper archives, government records, even tracked down
some of the survivors who had moved away. Everyone remembered
it differently, or claimed not to remember it at all.
The official records just mentioned the bear attacks and the
temporary evacuation of several villages. History had papered over the truth,

(47:43):
But the land remembers. If you go to that spot
in the forest where they burned the creature's body, nothing
grows there still. The ground is black and barren, a
perfect circle about ten feet across. The elders say it
is cursed ground that the earth itself rejects what happened there.
Moses lived another fifteen years after that summer, treated as

(48:05):
a hero in every village along the river. Before he died,
he told me something I have never shared until now.
He said, the second creature, the one that got away,
was female. He could tell by the shape the way
it moved, and he thought it was the male's mate.
That is why it fought so fierce. It was not
just hunting, it was avenging. The thought that these creatures

(48:28):
could feel grief and lost just as we did made
everything more complicated. Were they monsters or were they just
protecting their own? Had we stumbled into their territory pushed
them to desperate measures, or had one truly gone rogue
developed a taste for human flesh that could not be satisfied.
As I got older, I began collecting the stories, not

(48:51):
just from our village, but from all along the river.
Stories of the hairy men went back generations centuries. Even
the Russians had encountered them when they first came to Alaska.
The Yupik and Athabaskan peoples had stories that went back
to the beginning of time. Most of the stories were
about peaceful encounters or mere sightings, a figure watching from

(49:12):
a ridge, footprints by a stream. Sometimes food would go
missing from a cash, replaced by fresh meat or beautiful stones.
The hairy men were part of the landscape, like the
bears and the wolves, dangerous if provoked, but generally content
to live and let live. But every few generations the
stories would turn dark. A hairyman would go bad, start

(49:35):
hunting people. When that happened, the villages would ban together,
just as we had and drive it off or kill it.
It was a pattern as old as memory. As the
decades passed, our village changed. Young people moved to the
cities for education and jobs. Satellite dishes appeared on roofs.
The Internet came, bringing the outside world into our homes.

(49:59):
The old way began to fade, and with them the
memories of what had happened. But some of us remembered.
We became the keepers of the story, though fewer and
fewer people wanted to hear it. The young ones preferred
their horror movies and video games to our tales of
real terror. They thought we were just old people telling
tall tales to scare children. When I was seventy, I

(50:22):
received a visit from a man claiming to be a
professor of anthropology from some university in California. He had
heard rumors about the nineteen sixty two incident and wanted
to document it for his research. He had a recorder,
a camera, and a notebook full of questions. I told
him it was just a bear attack, like the official
record said. He did not believe me, kept pressing for details,

(50:45):
showing me blurry photographs of footprints from other places, asking
if they looked familiar. I sent him away. Some stories
are not meant for outsiders. Some truths are too dangerous
to share with the world. Because I knew what would
happen if the world believed scientists would come, hunters, tourists.
The forest would be overrun with people trying to find them,

(51:08):
capture them, study them. And what would the harry men do? Then?
Where would they go? They were here first, after all,
this was their land. Before it was hours, the female
was still out there. I was certain of it. Every
few years there would be a siding, always at a distance,
always brief. In nineteen ninety eight, a bush pilot reported

(51:30):
seeing something massive moving through a valley where no human
could survive without equipment. In two thousand and five, a
group of hikers found footprints so fresh the mud was
still settling, and they all reported feeling watched for the
rest of their trip. The most recent encounter I know
of happened just five years ago. A young man from
Nikolai went missing while checking his trap line. They found

(51:54):
him three days later, alive but in shock, unable or
unwilling to say what had happened. But he had scratches
on his back, four parallel lines too wide to be
from any bear, and he would not will not go
into the forest anymore. When pressed, he would only say
that he had been warned to stay away, though he

(52:14):
could not or would not say by whom or what.
My own children think. I am getting senile when I
tell this story. My grandchildren humor me, but do not believe.
Only my great grandchildren listen with wide eyes, the way
children should when hearing about monsters and heroes. Last year,
my youngest great grandson, little Johnny, asked me if I

(52:37):
was sure it was real, that maybe it was just
a bear like the police said. I took him to
my bedroom and showed him something I had kept hidden
for sixty years. It was a tuft of hair, dark
brown and coarse, that my father had pulled from the
creature's body before they burned it. I had stolen it
from his jacket pocket, knowing even as a child that
someday people would doubt and that I would need proof.

(53:00):
Johnny held it up to the light, his eight year
old face serious with concentration. He said it did not
look like bear fur, and I agreed. He asked if
they were still out there, and I thought carefully about
how to answer. The truth was I knew they were
still out there. Every few years someone would see something,
tracks would be found, a hunter would come back from

(53:23):
the deep forest with a story about eyes watching him
from the shadows, about feeling like prey. I told Johnny, Yes,
they are still out there, but they know now to
stay away from us, and we know to stay away
from them. That is the bargain our blood bought that summer.
He nodded, solemnly, understanding in the way children do that

(53:44):
some truths are too important to question. Now, as I
near the end of my days at ninety two, I
find myself thinking more and more about that summer, about
Anna and Peter, frozen forever in my memory as laughing
children about the men who died fighting to protect us,
about the creatures, both the one we killed and the

(54:05):
one that survived. There is something else I need to tell,
something that happened just last winter that makes me believe
the story is not over, may never be over. My
granddaughter Jennifer had come to visit me with her two
young children. We were sitting in my living room, the
children playing on the floor, when Jennifer's five year old daughter, Maria,

(54:25):
suddenly looked up and pointed at the window. She asked
who the hairy lady was. We all turned to look,
but saw nothing, just the snow covered yard the trees beyond.
But Maria insisted someone had been there, a very tall
lady covered in black hair, watching through the window. Children
see things adults miss, or perhaps they see things adults

(54:48):
have learned to ignore. Either way, I knew what Maria
had seen. That night, after everyone was asleep, I went
to the window and looked out. There in the fresh
snow were footprints, huge footprints leading from the forest to
my window, then back again. The stride was impossible for
any human, the toes were too long. She had come

(55:10):
to check on me the female. After all these years,
she still remembered. Perhaps she was as old as I
was now, in whatever way her kind measured age. Perhaps
she too was nearing the end of her time. Perhaps
she wanted to see if any of us who had
been there that summer were still alive. I opened the
window despite the cold, and spoke to the darkness. I

(55:34):
told her I remembered. I told her about returning Anna's
doll and Peter's knife to their parents. I told her
I had never told anyone about our encounter by the river.
I told her I was sorry for what had happened,
for all the death on both sides. There was no response,
of course, But the next morning I found something on
my doorstep, a stone, smooth and round, with natural markings

(55:57):
that looked almost like a face. It was the kind
of stone that could only be found high in the mountains,
in places no elderly woman could reach. I keep that
stone on my nightstand now. Sometimes I hold it and
think about the strange threads that connect all living things,
even ones as different as humans and hairy men. We
are all part of the same ancient story, all struggling

(56:20):
to survive in a world that is often harsh and unforgiving.
The young people today they think they know everything. They
have their satellites and their DNA tests and their scientific
explanations for everything. But they do not understand that some
mysteries are meant to remain mysteries. Some boundaries are drawn
not on maps, but in memory and mutual fear and respect.

(56:43):
The hairy man, the sasquatch, whatever you want to call them,
they are the last guardians of the truly wild places.
They are living reminders that we are not the only
intelligence on this earth, not the only beings capable of
love and loss and terrible violence when pushed too far.
I will die soon. I can feel it in my bones,

(57:04):
that particular tiredness that comes at the end of a
very long journey. When I go, I will take with
me the full truth of what happened that summer. Others
no pieces of the story. But only I know about
the female returning, the children's belongings. Only I know about
the understanding we reached. She and I two females who
had witnessed too much death. But the story will not

(57:27):
die with me. It will live on in the whispers
of wind, through the trees, in the footprints that appear
and disappear in places they should not be. In the
feeling of being watched that makes hunters hurry back to safety,
It will live on in the careful distance. Both species
maintain the unspoken treaty written that summer in blood and grief.

(57:49):
Before I end this, I must tell you about the dreams.
They started about five years ago, and they come more
frequently now. In these dreams, I'm young again, years old,
standing in the forest. Anna and Peter are there, but
they are different wild Their clothes are made of fur
and grass, their hair long and tangled. They do not speak,

(58:13):
but they smile at me. Behind them stands the female
hairy man, protective maternal. In the dream, I understand that
she saved them, somehow raised them as her own after
her mate was killed. It is impossible, of course, we
found blood evidence of violence, but in dreams, impossible things

(58:34):
can be true. In the most recent dream, Anna took
my hand and led me deeper into the forest to
a clearing I had never seen. There were others there,
hairy men of all sizes, from elderly giants to small children,
covered in soft hair. They were gathered in a circle,
and in the center was a fire. Around the fire,

(58:54):
they were telling stories not in words, but in sounds
and gestures that somehow I could understand. And they were
telling the story of the summer of nineteen sixty two,
but from their perspective. In their version, the male had
been sick, poisoned by something he had eaten near a
mining camp. The poison had driven him mad, made him aggressive,

(59:16):
made him break the ancient laws that kept our species apart.
The female had tried to stop him, tried to lead
him away from the human villages, but the sickness had
made him too strong, too violent. When we killed him,
she grieved, but she also felt relief the sickness would
not spread to others of her kind. I woke from

(59:37):
that dream with tears on my face and a certainty
that it was more than just my aging mind trying
to make sense of old trauma. Somehow, across the years
and the species divide, she had been sharing her side
of the story with me. That is why I am
telling you all of this now, writing it down for
the first time in all its terrible detail, because the

(59:58):
story is bigger than just our village just tragedy. Stay
tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after
these messages. It is about two intelligent species trying to
coexist in a world that is shrinking, where the wild
places are disappearing, where the ancient boundaries are being crossed,

(01:00:18):
not by choice but by necessity. What happened in nineteen
sixty two was a collision of worlds, a moment when
the careful balance was lost. We restored it through violence,
but also, I believe through mutual recognition of each other's
humanity or whatever quality it is that makes a being
capable of grief and remorse and careful coexistence. The female

(01:00:41):
is still alive. I'm certain she is ancient now like me,
but still watching, still maintaining her side of the bargain.
When I die, someone else will need to remember to understand,
to respect the boundary. That is why I am passing
this story to you, not to frighten you, though fear
is appropriate, not to convince you to search for them

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because they should be left alone, but to make you
understand that we share this world with others who are
not so different from us, who love their children, mourn
they're dead, and will fight viciously when cornered. The world
wants simple stories. Monsters or myths, real or fake, good
or evil, But the truth is always more complex. The

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hairy men are real, but they are not monsters. They
are not gentle giants either. They are beings like us,
capable of great violence and great restraint, trying to survive
in a world that no longer has room for mysteries.
Every year the forest shrinks. Every year, more roads are built,
more areas are mapped, more wilderness is tamed. What will

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happen when there's nowhere left for them to retreat to?
What will happen when the careful distance we maintain is
no longer possible. I will not live to see that day,
but you might when it comes. Remember this story. Remember
that we have coexisted before, terribly violently, but ultimately successfully.

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Remember that they are not animals to be hunted or
specimens to be studied. They are an ancient people, with
their own ways, their own rights to exist. Remember most
of all, that summer of nineteen sixty two, when our
two species went to war and both lost. When children died,
when parents grieved, when heroes emerged from unexpected places, when

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a female creature showed mercy by returning the belongings of
the children her mate had killed, when a little girl
and an ancient being reached an understanding that is held
for sixty years. I am dying now. I can feel
it the way you can feel winter coming in the
changing light. My family has gathered around me, thinking I
am sleeping, But I am traveling back to that summer,

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back to the forest, back to the moment when everything changed.
In my final dream, I see them all, Anna and
Peter forever young, picking berries in eternal sunshine. The hunters
who died, standing proud with their weapons, Moses with his
blessed spear, Joseph and Sarah reunited with their children, My father,

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young and strong again. Even the male hairy man is there,
no longer violent, the sickness gone from his eyes. And
she is there too, the female, not as the terrifying
giant who stalked our nightmares, but as another mother who
lost everything and somehow found the strength to continue. We
look at each other across the divide of species and understanding,

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and we nod. The dead is settled, The story is told.
The boundary will hold. When you walk in the forest
and feel eyes upon you, remember us, Remember that summer
of blood and courage. Remember that monsters and heroes can
wear unexpected faces. Remember that some treaties are written not

(01:04:01):
in words, but in mutual fear and respect. The hairy
Man is real. It has always been real. It lives
in the spaces between what we know and what we fear,
in the shadows of the great trees, in the footprints
that appear and disappear, like questions we should not ask.
I leave you with this truth, this burden, this sacred knowledge.

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Guard it well, share it carefully, and always always respect
the boundary. We are not alone in this world. We
never have been, and if we are wise, if we
remember the lessons written in blood that summer of nineteen
sixty two, we never will be. The female still watches,
still remembers, still maintains the peace. May it hold forever.

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May the children, both human and otherwise, play safely in
their separate worlds. May the forest keep its secrets. And
may you never ever need to use this knowledge. This
is my testimony. I am Mary, born in a village
by the river, survivor of the summer when we learned
that monsters are real, and so are the agreements we

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make with them, Remember us, remember them, remember the boundary,
and stay out of the deep forest when the moon
is dark and the wind carries the scent of something
wild and ancient and intelligent. The story ends where it began,
with a warning and a promise. We share this world,
we always have. The piece is fragile, held together by

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memory and mutual understanding. Don't break it. For all our sakes,
do not break it from the p