SO EP:693 Friendly Forest Giants

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.

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.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now one of your pudding. I got a string going
on here, something just because my dog. Something killed your dog,
my dog. We're flying through the air over the tree.
I don't know how it did it, Okay, Damn, I'm
really confused. All I saw was my dog coming over
the fence and he was dead. And once you hit
the ground like, I didn't see any cars. All I
saw was my dog coming over the fence. Sat, what

(00:38):
are you putting? We got some wonder or something crawling
around out here? Did you see what it was or
was it was? Standing enough? I'm out here looking through
the window now and I don't see anything. I don't
want to go outside. Jesus quice, you better hello, get

(01:03):
the body out here? What quen? I'm out there? I
thought of a bit about tex forty nine. I don't
know easy out there, Yeah, I'm walking right head. Listen closely,
and I will tell you something that most people do
not want to believe, something that those of us who
live through it have carried in our hearts for more
than sixty years. You see, when people think of sasquatch,

(01:25):
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 a creek.
They want to believe that if these things exist, they
are benevolent, or at least indifferent to us humans. But

(01:46):
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 I'm about to
share with you happened in the early nineteen sixties in
a small village along the Copper River in Alaska. I

(02:09):
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 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

(02:32):
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 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

(02:55):
remember as you listen to an old woman's memories, that
not all the giants and the fours to friendly. Some
of them are hungry, and some of them have developed
a taste for human flesh. My name is Mary, 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

(03:17):
nineteen sixty two, we had maybe one hundred and twenty
people living there year round. We were Upik people had
been there since time immemorial, since Raven brought light 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

(03:38):
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 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

(03:58):
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 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

(04:19):
ran thick in the river. We listened to our grandmothers
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 three houses
down from ours. Anna was seven, a year younger than me,
and Peter had just turned nine that spring. Peter was brave,

(04:40):
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 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

(05:03):
said he could track a moose through a blizzard. Their mother, Sarah,
made the most beautiful beaded moccasins and mucklucks. They were
a good family, a happy family, 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

(05:24):
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, 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

(05:44):
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 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

(06:05):
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. 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

(06:28):
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,
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.

(06:51):
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
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

(07:13):
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
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

(07:34):
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
over our village like fog rolling in from the sea.
Parents kept their children close, men carried their rifles everywhere,

(07:55):
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
was not just the disappearances that frightened us. There were
other signs, other warnings that something terrible was stalking our village.

(08:19):
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
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,

(08:41):
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
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

(09:02):
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
lines radiating out like sun rays, or like a warning.
My grandmother we called her Appa, which means grandmother in
our language. She knew what it was. She had seen

(09:26):
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
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

(09:48):
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,
and she was quiet for a long, 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. One night, every dog

(10:12):
in the village began howling at exactly the same moment,
a terrible chorus that lasted for nearly an hour. When
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

(10:32):
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
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

(10:55):
the men went to investigate. They found footprints in the mud,
those same hue, huge impossible footprints. And they found something else,
a pile of fish heads, neatly stacked, all facing toward
our village. July came in, hot and heavy with mosquitoes.
The salmon were running strong, and despite our fear, we
had to work. Winter would come whether we were ready

(11:18):
or not, and without enough dried fish we would starve.
So we set up the fish camps along the river,
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

(11:39):
to use the honeybucket. Our little house was dark, just
the faint glow of the midnight sun filtering through the
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

(12:01):
against the windows. I crept to the window and carefully
pulled back the edge of the curtain. At first I
saw nothing unusual, just our yard, 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

(12:23):
was covered in dark hair or fur. But it walked
upright like a man. Its arms were too long, hanging
almost to its knees, and its head. Its head was wrong,
two pointed at the top, two wide at the jaw.
But it was the eyes that froze me in place.
They glowed red in the half light, like coals in

(12:44):
a dying fire, and they were looking right at me,
right through the window, right into my eyes. 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.

(13:07):
I screamed, a high, piercing shriek that woke the entire house.
My father burst from my 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

(13:28):
at us or the thing outside, I did not know.
He fired again, and this time 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

(13:49):
out onto the porch, rifle at his shoulder, scanning the yard.
Other men were emerging from their houses also. 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 window at me.

(14:11):
A search of the yard revealed huge footprints, just like
the ones found where Thomas and Philip had disappeared. 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,

(14:35):
a kushtaka, a sasquatch, whatever you wanted to 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

(14:57):
standing there, watching and stay tuned for more sasquatch ot
to see. We'll be right back after these messages, always
too far away for a clear shot, always disappearing the
moment someone raised a rifle. It was learning our patterns,
our routines. One afternoon, a group of children playing near

(15:19):
the community hall suddenly scattered, screaming. They said the hairy
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

(15:41):
finally did, he would only say that its breath smelled
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.

(16:01):
Some wanted to evacuate the village, to go down river
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.

(16:22):
Joseph argued that it had our scent, now that it
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

(16:44):
at first light the next day. The women and children
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

(17:06):
at the heart of our village. It was a beautiful morning,
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

(17:29):
they had seen the biggest blueberry patch yesterday, just past
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.

(17:51):
We were not supposed to go anywhere, especially not beyond
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.

(18:11):
I wanted to go. Oh how I wanted to go,
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.

(18:34):
Anna looked back once, waving her little hand, pale against
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

(18:57):
she was annoyed, thinking they were playing some game. Then
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

(19:19):
else was missing. I told them about the barry patch,
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

(19:41):
following the children catching them. There was blood on a
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. Anna's hair
ribbon was caught on a branch ten feet off the ground.

(20:02):
Joseph went mad with grief and rage. He ran ahead
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

(20:23):
children back. They would find them, though his eyes said
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

(20:44):
had rested, depressions in the moss, shaped like a giant body.
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, walking back and forth. Joseph threw
himself into the hunt with a terrible fury, going out

(21:05):
every day, coming back later and later, his eyes wild
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 prayed
in the church. The medicine man, Old Robert, performed ceremonies
that had not been done in decades, calling on the

(21:28):
old spirits for protection. But still at night we could
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

(21:49):
the houses. One morning we woke to find that it
had killed one of the sled dogs, not for food,
but seemingly for sport. The poor animal had been torn
upon 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,

(22:11):
like claws on wood. I was too terrified to look,
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

(22:33):
Joseph's cash. In the morning, my parents found deep gouges
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

(22:56):
had gone to check her fishing ned at dawn and
never returned. We 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

(23:17):
was not just our village. The creature or perhaps creatures,
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

(23:38):
would send runners to every village within fifty miles. They
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.

(24:00):
It became more aggressive, more visible. One evening, just as
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

(24:22):
at her. Her scream brought everyone running. By the 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

(24:43):
palm print clearly visible was blood. We never 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

(25:06):
cross from the altar and held it toward the door,
praying an old church Slavonic at the top of his lungs.
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

(25:30):
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

(25:52):
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 Antiak,
five of them, all excellent shots. From sleep Mute came

(26:15):
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 use guns, so they stayed out of clear sight.

(26:35):
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 hairy man. He made the hairy man come to him.

(26:56):
The hunters spent three days preparing. They checked in, re
checked 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

(27:20):
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.

(27:42):
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
thought I was asleep. I knew they were not certain

(28:02):
the 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 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

(28:23):
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

(28:46):
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. Some 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

(29:09):
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,

(29:31):
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.

(29:53):
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, and stay tuned for
more sasquatch ott to see, We'll be right back. After
these messages they were following the blood trail, relief and

(30:18):
renewed fear washed over us. The men were alive, but
the creature was only wounded. 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,

(30:38):
into terrain that became increasingly difficult. 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

(31:01):
from my father and the other 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 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

(31:23):
hairy man was tough, tougher than 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,

(31:45):
the blood still wet in 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. This moment gone, no sound, no cry
for help, just gone. His brother Sam, standing guard thirty

(32:07):
yards away, saw movement 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

(32:30):
a rag doll, and Mike's head was twisted at an
impossible angle. Sam 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

(32:52):
through their perimeter like a freight train, scattering men and equipment.
Even wounded, it was incredibly strong. He 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,

(33:13):
but not before being badly burned. My father said the
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

(33:34):
and rot. Joseph stood his ground, firing as Thompson gun
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,

(33:56):
lifting him off the ground, but Joseph managed to drive
his knee 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 forward with something none of the
other hunters had seen before. It was an old Russian

(34:19):
bear spear, 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

(34:40):
a step forward, 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
spear had It must have hit something vital, because the

(35:02):
creature stumbled fell to one knee. 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

(35:25):
grabbed burning logs from 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,

(35:48):
sometimes to 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

(36:10):
everyone 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

(36:31):
feet tall, and 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 lights seemed

(36:52):
to disorient it, 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

(37:12):
killed by the sasquatch and six 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 trouvoi 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

(37:36):
with the reverence do a 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

(37:57):
disturbed water. All the features there 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 elders wept not from fear,
but from a kind of recognition. This thing, this monster,

(38:21):
it had once been something else, 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

(38:43):
the thing made 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

(39:06):
wound he had inflicted on the 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

(39:28):
creature was never found. The hunters went out several more
times over the following weeks, but the trail had gone cold.
Some said it had died from its wound 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.

(39:50):
Over the years, 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

(40:11):
finally arrived two weeks after the battle, flying 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.

(40:34):
We knew what we 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.

(40:58):
We children went 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 we told stories around the stoves.

(41:22):
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.

(41:42):
He had seen something 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

(42:04):
just gone from the river. 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

(42:24):
looking at me with pity. 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

(42:45):
feet away. The female, the 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

(43:06):
each other for a few seconds. I was too terrified
to scream, too terrified to run. I just sat there,
a little girl on a rock, 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,

(43:30):
which I had expected to be red with rage, were
dark brown, almost black, and they 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

(43:50):
back into the forest, not rushed, not aggressive, just walking away.
I sat frozen for another minute before my curiosity overcame
my f 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

(44:13):
him for his eighth birthday. Both items were clean, carefully wrapped, preserved.
They had not 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

(44:36):
lost children that summer. I took the bundle and ran
back to the village. I gave the items to Joseph
and Sarah, telling them I'd 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

(44:57):
could I explain that the monster that had killed their
children had also in some way morendo and stay tuned
for more sasquatch ot to see, We'll be right back.
After these messages, I grew up as children do, even
after trauma. I went to high school in Bethel, then

(45:18):
to college and Anchorage. I became a teacher like Missus Thompson,
and eventually came back to teach in the villages along
the river. I married a good man, had children and
grandchildren of 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

(45:39):
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 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

(46:00):
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
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.

(46:24):
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
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

(46:47):
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
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

(47:10):
threatened them. When the storm cleared and they left, they
tried to find the cave again, with proper equipment and maps.
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,

(47:31):
occasionally intersecting our world, bound by the same strange treaty
that had been written in blood that summer. When I
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.

(47:52):
The official records just mentioned the bear attacks and the
temporary evacuation of several villages. History had papered over the truth,
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

(48:14):
is cursed ground, that the earth itself rejects what happened there.
Moses lived another fifteen years after that summer, treated as
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

(48:35):
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
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

(48:56):
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
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.

(49:19):
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
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

(49:41):
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 hairy man would go bad
start 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

(50:03):
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.
The old ways 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

(50:26):
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
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

(50:48):
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,
showing me blurry photographs of footprints from other places, asking
if they looked familiar. I sent him away. Some stories

(51:10):
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,
capture them, study them. And what would the harry men do? Then?
Where would they go? They were here first, after all,

(51:33):
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
seeing something massive moving through a valley where no human
could survive without equipment. In two thousand and five, a

(51:54):
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
him three days later, alive but in shock, unable or

(52:14):
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
could not or would not say by whom or what.

(52:35):
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
was sure it was real, that maybe it was just

(52:56):
a bear, like the police said. I took him to
my bedroom and showed him something I'd 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. Johnny

(53:18):
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 the

(53:40):
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

(54:01):
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 one

(54:22):
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,

(54:42):
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 wind. Children
see things adults miss, or perhaps they see things adults

(55:05):
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

(55:27):
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

(55:51):
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

(56:13):
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

(56:37):
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.

(57:00):
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,

(57:21):
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

(57:44):
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.

(58:06):
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, eight 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,

(58:29):
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

(58:50):
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,

(59:11):
they were telling stories not in words, but in sounds
and gestures that somehow I could understand. 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, made

(59:33):
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

(59:54):
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

(01:00:15):
story is bigger than just our village's tragedy. 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, 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.

(01:00:38):
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 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

(01:01:02):
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, 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

(01:01:25):
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 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,

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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 happen when and there's nowhere left
for them to retreat to? What will happen when the
careful distance we maintain is no longer possible. I will

(01:02:07):
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. 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

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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 a female creature showed
mercy by returning the belongings of the children her mate
had killed, When a little girl and an ancient being

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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, back to the forest,
back to the moment when everything changed. In my final dream,

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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 young and strong again.
Even the male hairy man is there, no longer violent,

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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, and we nod. The
dead is settled. The story is told the boundary will hold.

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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 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

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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, Guard it well,
share it carefully, and always always respect the boundary. We

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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. Children, both human
and otherwise, play safely in their separate worlds. May the

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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 make with them. Remember us, remember them,
remember the boundary, and stay out of the deep forest.

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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 memory and mutual understanding. Don't break it.

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For all our sakes, do not break it. Didn't in

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a pass to Pas