Bigfoot In The Klondike

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, and let's head off into the woods if you dare. My name is John, and I've been putting off writing this down for a long time. Not because I doubt what happened. I stopped doubting it about thirty seconds after that first rock put me face down in the snow with blood running into my eye. And not because I

worry much about what people think of me. I'm seventy eight years old and I've been past caring about that for a good while. Now I've put it off, mostly because sitting down and going through all of it from the beginning means living it again in a way that I don't find comfortable, and because I've never been a man who particularly enjoys writing when I could be doing something else with my hands. But I keep listening to

this show. I listen to Backwood's Bigfoot Stories, and I listened to Sasquatch Odyssey pretty regularly, and over the last couple of years, I've heard Fred from Alaska come on and talk about his experiences up in the Northern Bush, and every single time that man opens his mouth, I find myself sitting forward in my chair because he understands something about these animals that a lot of the people who study them from a comfortable distance have not yet

figured out. Or maybe they figured it out and they just don't want to say it out loud because it doesn't fit the version of this phenomenon that their audience wants to believe in.

Northwest Territories since I was nineteen years old. I grew up in northern British Columbia, in a small town that doesn't exist anymore, at least not in any form i'd recognize, and I learned to trap and hunt and navigate that country my father and my uncle, both of whom had spent their whole lives working the land in ways that

most people today can't really imagine. By the time I was in my mid twenties, I was running my own line, my own operation, and I'd gotten my pilot's license, because up in that country, a pilot's license isn't a luxury. It's a tool, the same as a good knife or.

that hold beaver and muskrat in the lower reaches. It's exactly the kind of country that produces good fur if you know what you're doing, and I'd been working that area long enough to know it about as well as any man could. I'd built the cabin myself over two summers, hauling materials up in the plain a load at a time.

Eight inch spruce logs chinked with a mix of moss and commercial chinking compound, A heavy shake roof with two layers of tar paper underneath, a good cast iron box stove that I'd pulled out of a derelict roadhouse and rebuilt. A plank floor, two bunks, a table, shelves, nothing fancy, everything solid. I was proud of that cabin, the way you're proud of anything you build with your own hands

out of nothing. And every fall when I dropped down onto my little landing strip in the meadow below it, and taxied up to the tie down and cut the engine and listen to the silence settle in around me, I felt something I can only describe as rightness, Like I was exactly where I was supposed to be, doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing. My trap line covered a rough oval of territory that took me about four days to run if I pushed hard from

before light to last light. It ran northeast along the main creek drainage for about eight miles, then curved north and west through the heavy timber on the backside of a long ridge, then turned south through the open country on the far side, before coming around and back to the cabin from the west along a series of beaver ponds. I had sets throughout that circuit, mostly for Martin because the rices were good that season, but also for Lynx

beaver and Wolverine. I had a few large blind sets and strategic locations for wolf, though I wasn't counting on those. They were more of a bonus than a plan. My Piper Supercub was my lifeline. I want you to understand that clearly. Without that plane, I had no way in and no way out. I had a handheld radio that could reach Byron and Dawson under good conditions, but there was no road, no trail that a snowmobile could navigate in the terrain between me and the nearest other human being.

The plane was everything I kept. It tied down on a flat meadow about sixty yards from the cabin, chalkeed and covered, and I checked it every couple of days, the way you check on something you depend on for your life. I flew in on the second of October seventy eight. The weather was cold and clear, the kind of yukon October day that looks like a painting. Everything sharp edged and blue and gold and silent. I had the plane loaded with enough food for four months, extra fuel,

trapping supplies, tools, ammunition, medical kit. I'd done this enough times that the packing was efficient. Everything had its place, and everything was accounted for. The first two days were everything I'd hoped for. I ran my near sets, got everything freshened and baited. Found good sign throughout the territory. Martin tracks in the timber, fresh beaver work on the lower ponds, link sign on the ridge. The population was

looking healthy. I was genuinely optimistic about the season. I should have paid more attention to what I didn't see in those first few days. No wolves, no moose, not even tracks, and moose should have been in the willows along the creek at that time of year. The birds were strange, too quiet in a way that the birds up there usually aren't. I noticed it, but I filed

it without giving it the weight It deserved. The tracks first showed up on the fifth of October, or at least that's the first time I noticed them in retrospect. I think they may have been around earlier, and I just hadn't been in the right place at the right time to cross them. I was coming back from running the eastern arm of my line late in the afternoon,

following the creek back toward the cabin. The light was going fast, the way it does up there in October, dropping off the edge of the world in what seems like minutes, and I was moving with some purpose to

get back before full dark. I came through a section of open ground near a gravel bar where the creek bent east, an area of maybe half an acre, where the willows thinned out and the ground was relatively flat with snow that had fallen three days earlier, sitting undisturbed and smooth, just enough snow to hold a print, maybe three inches soft on top and firmer underneath. I almost walked past them. My brain ran its standard processing sequence, saw a large track, filed it under bare, and tried

to keep me moving toward the cabin in supper. But something made me stop, some part of me that had been making decisions in wild country for twelve years, overrode the filing and made me look again. They weren't bear tracks. I followed enough bears to know what their tracks looked like. Displayed toes, the claw marks out ahead, the way, the back foot oversteps the front. These were nothing like that.

These were feet, human feet, or something shaped like human feet, but scaled up in a way that didn't make sense. Five toes all forward, a broad metatarsal ball, and a heel that I could cradle in both my hands put together.

was a walking pace. Whatever made these tracks was not rushing, It was just walking. I went back to the cabin and I sat by the stove with a cup of coffee, and I thought about it for a long time. I want to be honest about what I was and wasn't

willing to think at that point. My first actual considered thought after the bare hypothesis collapsed, was that there was someone out there, some very large person, perhaps a trapper I didn't know about working country that I thought was mine alone, who had feet the size of a cutting board and no snow shoes and still wasn't punching through to the gravel. I turned that over for a while.

I knew it didn't hold together. The nearest other trapper I was aware of operated country about forty miles to my south and west, and nobody had ever mentioned another operation in my area, and no person on Earth has feet that size, And there were no boot impressions, no tread pattern, just bare skin on the snow. I went to sleep, telling myself to pay attention and that i'd

know more when I knew more. I went back the next morning with my tape and my notebook, and I spent two hours at that gravel bar, documenting everything I could. I drew the outlines of three of the best prints in my notebook, measured the toe spacing, noted the heel shape, estimated the depth in comparison to my own track beside it. I have that notebook still. The pages are brittle now,

but the drawings are still clear. On the way back to the cabin, I found a second set of tracks on the north side of the creek, heading west, same dimensions, same stride, same shallow depth. They weren't the same individual as the first set, or if they were the same individual, they'd come back on a different route because the direction of travel was different and the right rear track had a slight anomaly, a notch in the outer edge of the heel that didn't appear in the first set.

I was running my northern sets, a section of line that went up through some older spruce stands where the martin population was densest, and at the third and fourth sets, I found the traps empty in a way I couldn't explain. Both had been activated. The mechanisms tripped, bait removed, but no animal, no carcass, no drag, no blood from a catch. A wolverine will clear a trap and eat a catch right there, or drag it off a short distance. A wolverine leaves a mess. What I found at those two

sets was almost neat by comparison. The trap was open, the bait was gone, the drag steak was where it should be, but the chain lay slack. I crouched down and looked at the ground around the first set for a long time. Those same track impressions were there two of them pressed into the soft ground on either side of the trap. Whatever had cleared it had stood over it,

one foot on each side and reached down. The trap had been sprung based on the mechanism by downward pressure, rather than by something triggering the pan from the side, which is what a martin does downward pressure like a thumb or a finger, depressing the pan deliberately, the way a person might a mouse trap before deciding how to deal with it. That detail bothered me more than anything else I'd seen so far. Not the size, not the tracks,

not even the missing animals. That one detail, the trap sprung from above by intentional downward pressure, put something in a different category for me. It's one thing to encounter an animal you don't have a name for. It's another thing, entirely to encounter an animal that's figuring out your equipment.

Over the following week I lost two more martin, a beaver from one of my lower sets, and then on or about the fifteenth of October, a Lynx links are wary animals, and they're not easy to trap, even if you know what you're doing. I'd had a good set working a game trail on the south side of the ridge, a trail I'd been watching for two seasons, and I'd made my catch. I could tell from the sign the ground was disturbed, the way it gets when a lynx is in a trap and fighting it. But the lynx

was gone. The trap was sprung over open, and those tracks were around the set again. And there was a single partial impression in the dirt at the edge of the trail that showed the outside edge of a foot and two toes, and it was enormous. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories.

I started thinking about whether I needed to move some of my sets, put them in areas that were harder to access, put more distance between the sets, and whatever patterns these things were following, which raises the question what

patterns were they following. They seemed to know my line, not just generally, as in they'd blundered into a trap by chance, but specifically, as if they'd walked my line and identified the sets I had set spread over eight or more miles of territory, and they were hitting them in multiple locations across that whole range. Either there were several of them working different parts of my line simultaneously, or one or two of them had a mental map

of my operation that was uncomfortably detailed. I moved four sets on the seventeenth and eighteenth of October, pushed them off my established trail system and into less accessible terrain. The losses at those four locations stopped immediately, which told me they weren't just wandering my area randomly. They were tracking my established roots. When I put sets somewhere new off the pattern, they didn't find them right away. That

was useful information. It was all so deeply unpleasant information. The vocalization started on the eleventh of October, four days before I lost the links, so they'd been active for a while wile before things escalated into confrontation. I was inside the cabin working on some equipment after supper, A good fire going lamp lit comfortable enough, and then something outside opened up with a sound that had me on my feet with the marlin in my hands before i'd

consciously decided to move. That's the thing about a sound that doesn't fit any category you have a name for. Your body responds to it before your mind has finished processing. It wasn't a wolf howl. I've heard wolves my entire life, and I know that sound in all its variations. It was deeper, for one thing, well below the register a wolf works in, with a resonance to it that suggested

a chest cavity much larger than any wolf. It was also longer, more sustained, and it had a quality that I've struggled to describe accurately ever since intentional is the word I keep coming back to. It sounded intentional, like the sound was being shaped, modulated, controlled, the way a person modulates their voice when they're projecting it. An animal making noise out of instinct doesn't sound like that. This sounded like something that knew it was making a sound

and was making it on purpose. It went on for maybe eight seconds, dropped off, and then it came again from a slightly different angle, maybe thirty degrees to the right of the first, which meant either it had moved very quickly in the seconds between, or there were two of them calling back and forth. In either case, I stood at the door with my hand on the latch and my rifle up, and there was no way I

was going outside. I'm not embarrassed to say it. Going out into the dark after a sound you can't identify as how you end a story badly. Over the following two weeks, the sounds became more frequent and more varied, and I started to get a sense of the geography

of where they were. They seemed to be based, if that's the right word, in the heavy timber to the east and northeast of the cabin, in a section of old growth spruce that I didn't run any sets through because the dead fall made it nearly impenetrable on foot. They moved around a lot, covering ground between vocalizations at

a rate that was hard to account for. I'd hear something from the northeast, and twenty minutes later here a response from the northwest, and there was no reasonable way for one animal to have covered that distance in that time.

person whistling, not any bird I know. One morning, real early, still dark out, I heard something directly overhead that I couldn't place at all, this resonant kind of exhalation, almost like something standing up on the roof taking a long, slow breath. I laid in my bunk with the rifle

and didn't move until full light. But the night that sticks with me most from that stretch before where things got physical, the one I've replayed more times than I can count in the years since, was around the seventeenth or eighteenth of October. That's the night I heard the exchange. I was awake. I was awake a lot by then,

laying in the bunk, stove burned down to coals. It started with that deep call from the eastern timber, same one I'd been hearing then an answer came back from a different direction, with a different quality to it, a little higher, a little faster than the first one. Again, then the second, back and forth, back and forth. I timed it forty three minutes on the watch on my wrist. Now I want to try and tell you what it

actually sounded like, because I think it matters. It wasn't just two animals calling back and forth the way wolves do or coyotes. There was a texture to it, a rhythm that kept changing, phrases that seemed to vary in length and content the way.

for it. It sounded like a conversation. I had nothing to compare it to. In October of seventy eight, no reference point, no prior experience. Nothing in my mental library that matched what I was hearing out there in the dark. I just sat up in the bunk and listened to the whole thing with the hair standing on my arms, and then I sat there a long time after it quit, and then eventually I went back to sleep because there wasn't anything.

years ago that brought all of that crashing back. I'd been doing research, the kind you do when you're retired and you've got time and you've never really let go of something that happened to you forty years earlier, reading accounts online, listening to podcasts, Your Show among them, and I came across a recording made by two men, Ron Moorhead and Al Berry, who'd spent time in the Sierra Nevada back country in California starting in the late nineteen

sixties and going on through the seventies. They captured audio of what they believed were Sasquatch vocalizations out in a remote area, and that audio has been analyzed by linguists and acoustic people over the years. I found a version online and I sat down at my kitchen table with headphones on and pressed play. I had to stop it after about thirty seconds. I had to get up from the table and walk around the room. My wife came

in and asked what was wrong that recording. The texture of it, the rhythm, the way it moves between registers, that quality underneath, the strangeness of it, of something organized, something purposeful. That was the same type of sound I heard in the dark outside my cabin in the Yukon on that October night in nineteen seventy eight.

have been paying close enough attention to record it. That's not comforting information, but I think it's important. On the twenty third of October, the dynamic shifted from passive to active, and it went in a direction I hadn't who i'd expected. I was running my southeast sets through some older spruce with serious deadfall on both sides of the trail. Good Martin country, that kind of messy layered terrain they prefer.

But your visibilities cut way down out there, thirty or forty feet on either side, and anything could be close without announcing itself. I'd been on edge for a couple weeks by then, watching the margins more than I usually would, and that's when I noticed it. Something was in the timber to my left, moving on a line roughly parallel

to mine. I could hear it the way you hear large animals moving through spruce, periodic disturbances in the snow, shaking off branches, the occasional soft compression of dead fall underfoot. But there was a quality to it that was different from the bears or moose I was used to tracking by sound. It was deliberate, It was pacing me. I'd stop,

and it would stop. I'd wait until I thought maybe I'd imagined it start moving again, and within ten or fifteen seconds, i'd hear it pick back up, same distance, same angle. I kept walking and thinking about what to do. Stopping and turning back meant four miles to the cabin with this thing behind me pushing on meant finishing my sets and having those same four miles back either way. I decided to continue and stay aware. The first rock

hit the ground about six feet to my right. I didn't hear it thrown, just that last split second before impact, a faint whisper of displacement in the cold air, and then the sharp crack of it hitting frozen ground and breaking in two. It was the size of my closed fist, a rough chunk of quartzight. I spun with the rifle up and there was nothing, both sides of that timber absolutely still.

the opposite side. The throw had come through timber, through a stand of spruce that should have broken up any throw significantly. It didn't seem to matter. The rock went where it was aimed. I turned around and I yelled at the timber. I'm not going to pretend it was my finest moment. I yelled something about shooting whatever was out there, stood there while the timber did absolutely nothing back at me, then turned around, finished my sets and

went home. I felt angry and foolish and about equal measure. That night at the stove, I had a long, hard conversation with myself about what was happening and what I was going to do about it. I decided to keep doing what I was doing, or rather, I decided to carry the rifle in my hands instead of on my back and keep my eyes moving in the margins more

than before. What I was not going to do was cut my season short over rocks that would have felt like letting something push me around, and I wasn't the kind of man who let things push him around. I should have been smarter than that. Pride is dangerous company in wilderness country. The wilderness doesn't care about your pride.

should have been. I heard it coming, not long, half a second, maybe a little less, just enough of a sound through the still cold air, A slight hiss of something moving fast that my head had started to turn. The rock caught me on the left side of my skull, just above and slightly in front of my ear, and the next thing I knew, I was face down in the snow, with my rifle somewhere ahead of me, and this ringing sound filling my head like I was inside a bell. I laid there for what might have been

a minute, might have been three. The cold snow against my face was actually useful, pulling me back toward awareness, and I focused on that, on breathing, on not doing anything sudden, until I had a sense of what was working and what wasn't. When I finally got up, I did it slow, and when I stood, I put my hand to my head and.

to me, It had not fallen from a tree. It had been selected for its size and weight, carried to a position with a clear sight line to the trail, and thrown with enough accuracy to hit me in the head from what I estimated was forty to fifty yards through cold air on a moving target, and it hit exactly where it was aimed. Think about what that means.

The animal that through that rock watched me walk that trail, judged my position in speed, picked out a throwing object of the right size and weight, and put it in my head from distance with enough force to cut me to the bone through my hat. That isn't random aggression. That isn't an animal throwing a tantrum. It describes a targeting decision, and I don't have a softer way to say it. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll

be back after these messages. I got back to the cabin and cleaned the wound as best I could see it in the small mirror over the wash basin, just under three inches long, running at an angle above my ear, and deep enough in two spots that I knew it needed closing. I've done backcountry medicine on myself before, set a broken finger, dug out an infected cut, dealt with a gash on my shin from an axe that slipped. It's not something you enjoy, but when the choice is

sepsis or needlework, you do the needlework. I got the kid out, sterilize the needle, and thread with the whiskey I kept for exactly these situations, and cleaned the wound with the same, which I don't recommend unless you're out of iodine and out of options. Seven stitches, twenty minutes of work. The concentration that took actually helped with the fear that was building underneath the anger. When I was done, I put a clean dressing over it, tied it in place,

made supper, and sat by the stove to think. I'd been in that country twenty six days. I'd lost significant fur from my sets. I'd been hit hard enough in the head to need stitches. Sleep was getting harder every night. The temperature was going to drop seriously in another two or three weeks, which would work in my favor for fur quality and against me in terms of the physical demands of the work. I had roughly ten more weeks of planned season ahead of me. I wasn't ready to leave.

My family needed what that season could produce. And underneath the practical math was something harder to admit, something that had more to do with the man I was at thirty one than with any rational assessment. I wasn't going to be run off my own trap line. I'd built that cabin, I'd built that line, I'd worked that country for years. I was not going to leave because something was throwing rocks at me. I held that position for

several more weeks before a vents made it impossible. I'm still not sure whether to call that stubbornness or stupidity, or just the limited perspective of a man who didn't yet understand what he was dealing with. In the second week of November, the encounters moved from the trap line to the cabin itself, and that change in proximity changed everything about the nature of the situation. The first visit

was the night of the twelfth. I was asleep, genuinely asleep for the first time in several nights, when something woke me. Not a sharp sound, nothing that made me grab the rifle and sit straight up. Just a quality of wrongness that my sleeping brain registered and handed forward to the waking part. I laid still and listened. Something was walking around outside the cabin bipedal two point contact, the kind of walking pattern a person makes, moving deliberately,

without hurrying. I could follow it around the perimeter, each footfall,

compressing the frozen snow, pausing at the corner, continuing. It went around once, maybe twice, and then it stopped at the door, and then I heard it breathing, long, slow inhalations against the door seam, against that gap at the bottom where the cold air comes in, deep enough that I could hear the quality change as the lungs filled, and then the release and then fill again, slow and deliberate and patient, the breathing of something that was in

absolutely no hurry. I've thought about that breathing more times than I care to count in the years, since there was nothing overtly threatening in it.

them anymore. I didn't sleep again that night. This happened three more times over the following ten days, each visit following roughly the same pattern, with small variations. The second time it stopped at the window rather than the door. I laid in the bunk and watched the frost on the glass go slightly opaque for a moment, then clear again. Something close enough to the outside surface of that window

to put warmth against it. The third time, there were two sets of footsteps, one at the door and one moving along the east wall, and I could hear both of them breathing at different points around the cabin, separate rhythms. The fourth visit introduced something new. I woke to footsteps and then to a sound I couldn't immediately classify, a slow dragging contact along the log wall, the way a branch sounds when wind pushes it along a surface, but

much slower, much more deliberate. I crept to the window and looked out sideway into the dark and couldn't see a thing. But the sound was coming from the north wall, about four feet up, and it was moving inch by inch from the corner toward the window. When it reached the window frame, it stopped. I heard the wood creak very slightly under a pressure being applied from outside. Then

it released and the footsteps moved away. It had been feeling the construction running something a hand I assumed along the logs and then testing the frame. I don't know what it was trying to learn. I've speculated over the years that it was mapping the structure, figuring out where the solid points and the weak points were. I don't know if that's right, but the behavior was not random, and it was not the behavior of an animal working

by smell and sound alone. On the eighteenth of November, six weeks and two days into my season, everything changed. I'd been asleep maybe two hours when the first impact hit. No warning, no sound of something approaching, just a single enormous concussive blow against the front wall that shook the cabin hard enough to knock my lamp off its shelf and send my coffee pot sliding off the stove. I was out of the bunk with the rifle before the

echo had finished bouncing around inside. The lamp was broken on the floor, but the stove still gave enough light to see that nothing structural had given way. Then the second hit came at the rear wall, and I heard the chinking crack, Not the way dried chinking cracks in the cold, which is gradual and minor, the way it cracks when the log behind it deflects. That told me the force had actually moved the log, a ten inch

spruce log notched into a corner. It had moved. I went to the window and could see nothing outside.

Then a pause of twenty or thirty seconds hit pause, like something working to a rhythm, like something that understood. The waiting was its own kind of message. I've thought about that a lot over the years, and I still believe that's the right read. The pausing was intentional. It was designed to keep me from settling into it. After about fifteen minutes of this, I made a decision I can't fully explain even now.

real animal. It was very dark, darker than the surrounding timber, and it had a physical mass that I noticed, the way you notice something that's taking up more space than it should, moving on two legs and moving with a kind of easy deliberateness, not threatening, not retreating, just repositioning itself, the way something does when it's figuring out where it wants to be. The head was there, and it was large, but it wasn't sitting on a neck the way a

human head sits on a human neck. It was more forward, more continuous with the upper body, the way the great apes carry their heads. Though this wasn't an ape, it walked to nothing like an ape. It walked like something that had been walking upright for a very long time

and had evolved to do it efficiently. The shoulders were wide in a way I'm not going to put a number two, because any number I say, you're going to think I've exaggerated, and I haven't wide enough that the silhouette of this animal against the lighter sky above the

tree line was unmistakably different from any human silhouette. And the smell came to me on the wind wet animal mixed with something else underneath, something acrid and faintly organic, like the inside of an old den, like the residue of something that had been living wild for a very long time without ever washing. It turned toward me, not quickly, not aggressively, just turned the way something turns when it decides to look at what's in front of it.

was gone. The last sound I heard from it was something low and hard, not a scream, not a howl, something that had structure to it, the way language has structure. I couldn't interpret it. I went back inside and reloaded and stayed up all night. At first light, I went out with the rifle and found.

a wounded animal of unknown capability. I've done enough hunting to know that a wounded animal and terrain that favors it over you is going to determine the outcome of that encounter, not you.

I'm not able to describe adequately the sidewalls were torn in several places, not cut, torn with that jagged, irregular edge you get when something is pulled apart rather than cut through. I got close and looked all over those tires, and there was no blade mark anywhere. This was done by hand, by something that grabbed the rubber and pulled until it came apart, and the implication of that was inescapable.

While I was following the blood trail to the northeast, something else had been at the plane, something that knew what the plane was, or at least knew it was important to me, because that's the only explanation for why the tires specifically. It wasn't incidental damage. It was specific damage to the thing I needed to leave. I stood there in the cold, looking at my destroyed tires, and ran through my situation with complete clarity. I had enough food for six or seven more weeks. The weather was

going to close hard within three or four weeks. I had a wounded animal somewhere in the timber to the northeast that had already shown it was willing to escalate, and had just shown it understood something about my relationship to that airplane. I had no way out without new tires. I had a handheld radio that could reach my friend Byron in Dawson on a good day. I went inside

and got on the radio. Byron was ten years older than me, a bush pilot out of Dawson City who'd been flying the Yukon since before I was old enough to be out there. He was the kind of man wild country producers over time. If it doesn't kill you, first, calm in a way that isn't performed direct, in a way that doesn't bother with softening things. I'd known him eight years by then, and he'd pulled me out of two situations I'd rather not get into. Here, he was

exactly the right person to call. I reached him on my third try, which meant conditions were decent. I told him I'd had wildlife trouble with the plane and needed two tundra tires. He asked me what kind of wildlife. I said I'd explain in person. He was quiet a moment, and then told me he'd be there in two days. Depending on whether that was the whole conversation, that's Byron. Those two days waiting for him were the quietest I'd had since arriving in October and out there quiet in

that context wasn't reassuring. Nothing came near the cabin, no sounds from the tim no rocks, no footsteps in the night, just an absence that had a waiting quality to it, the way the air feels before a front moves through a pressure without a visible source.

then went neutral again. I told him everything right there on the strip, in the cold, my breath smoking. I started with the tracks on the fifth of October and went through all of it in order. The trap losses, the sounds, the rock throwing, my stitches, the nights it had come to the cabin the night I'd shot it, the blood trail, the tires stay tuned for more backwoods

bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. I talked for probably fifteen minutes, and Byron stood with his hands in his pockets and listened to every bit of it without saying a word. When I finished, he was quiet a moment. Then he said, I've seen tracks like that twice in twenty years of flying this country. And I've heard something in the bush at night twice that I couldn't put a name to, and I've never talked about

either one because I figured nobody needed to know. Then he looked at the tires again and said, let's get these changed, and then you'd better show me the blood trail before the snow covers it. We got the tires on by late afternoon. I showed Byron the blood trail, or what was left of it, and he crouched down at that first pooling of blood in the snow and looked at it for a long time without saying anything. Then he stood up and looked at the timber to

the northeast. He said, you hit whatever this thing is, and then it or another one came back and tore your tires off. I said, yes, that's pretty much what happened. He said, all right. That was about as deep as a conversation could get with Byron. That night, we ate and I told him the fuller version of some things I'd only summarized on the strip. Byron sat across the table in the lamplight and listened to all of it, asking the kind of questions a man asks when he's

trying to understand something, rather than dismiss it. He wasn't skeptical in a way that was going to be a problem. He was a practical man, and what I was telling him was a practical problem. By the time we turned in, we'd agreed we'd reassess in a few days and decide whether I should continue the season. Neither of us knew that the decision was going to be made for us that very night. I've never used the word siege lightly,

and I'm not going to use it lightly here. What happened on the night of the twenty first of November nineteen seventy eight was a coordinated assault on that cabin by multiple animals, and it lasted for hours. Byron and I came out of it alive because we were both experienced with firearms and willing to use them through walls, which is not something most people have in their experience or in their willingness. It started around ten in the evening,

about two hours after we turned in. Byron was on the opposite bunk, and I don't think either of us was fully asleep. I'd been laying there aware of the silence in a way that made the silence itself feel active, like it was something happening rather than an absence of action. And then from the eastern timber, that deep, sustained call, the one I'd been hearing for six weeks. Then an immediate answer from the northwest, different voice. Then a third

from somewhere south, closer than the other. Two three directions, three voices. Byron sat up in the dim light from the stove grate. I could see him reaching for his rifle, already leaning against the bunk frame. I was already holding mine.

the mass behind it was enormous. I felt it through the floor before that sound had finished moving through the structure. Something hit the roof, a running impact, not a throw or a fall, something that had launched itself from the cash poles and landed running on the roofboards. Two of those boards cracked. I heard them go, and the weight of whatever was up there moved from the east edge toward the center ridge, and then back toward the east. Whatever was on that roof weight enough to crack two

inch spruce planks, and it was moving. Working to find a weak point. Byron said a word I won't put in print. Something hit the back wall lower near the base, and I felt the floor joists communicate the shock upward through the soles of my feet. Then the door. Not an impact. This time pressure sustained and building pressure against the door and the bar I had set across it was a four inch piece of hardwood, and I watched

it flex in the bracket. I went to the door and put my shoulder against it, feet braced against the floor, and the force pushing from outside was significant enough that I had to really dig in to hold my position. I yelled at Byron to shoot through the east wall, low about two feet off the floor. He fired twice. The sound inside the cabin was tremendous. The wall held and the pressure on the door released. What came back

through that wall from outside was not a scream. I want to be careful here because I don't want to misrepresent it. It was a sound at high vault, and it had pain in it, or what I interpreted as pain, a sharpness and a duration that doesn't exist in a sound an animal makes willingly. But it had that same organized quality all their sounds had. Even in what sounded like pain, there was direction to it. It was aimed

at something, communicating something. Within three or four seconds of byron shots, the thing on the roof shifted its weight dramatically. The roof shook as it launched off the east edge, and the landing shook the cabin almost as much as the body blows had. Then they backed off, not far. They didn't leave for the next three hours. I can tell you where they were almost continuously, because they weren't quiet.

hitting and clattering off into the snow. Each time the impacts got closer or more frequent, Byron and I would fire through the walls in the direction of the sounds, and each time the movement would back off and then gradually work its way back. Around midnight, something picked up my empty five gallon fuel can from outside the south wall and threw it against the cabin from what I estimated was thirty or thirty five yards. I could hear it arc through the air and hit the wall and

clatter off. I want you to think about what that tells you. Something had been standing in the dark thirty yards from the cabin holding that fuel can. We hadn't heard it there, We hadn't known it was there at all until it threw the can. In three hours of active shooting and listening and tracking their movements by sound. This one had been close enough to pick up and throw something without ever revealing itself. That's not animal behavior,

that's something far more deliberate. We fired through the south wall twice. The movement stopped, and we could hear the creature retreating. At approximately one in the morning, everything stopped. I mean that, with no elaboration needed. One moment the timber was alive with movement and sound, and we were in the middle of something, and the next moment there was nothing. Complete silence, the kind that has actual weight

to it that you can almost press against. Byron and I looked at each other across the cabin, and neither of us said anything. For a long time, we didn't sleep. We sat up until first light with our rifles, and the stove rebuilt, and when the gray finally came in through the windows, we both stood up at the same time, the way people do when they've been waiting for permission

to move, and we went outside together. The blood in the snow was in two separate areas, one on the east side, where Byron had shot through the wall, a meaningful amount, not a killing wound based on volume, but enough to tell me the round had gone through and

into something on the other side. The second site was on the roof edge, a dark smear on the frost that I could see from the ground, either from impact when whatever was up there landed badly on the boards, or from a wound received before it got up there, I don't know which. The track impressions were extraordinary, overlapping sets in the snow around the entire cabin perimeter, so

many that counting individual tracks was impossible. In places on the east wall there was structural damage I hadn't been able to see in the dark. Three courses of chinking dug completely out, and in the exposed log surfaces behind them there were gouge marks, not scrapes, gouges, the kind of mark you get from something with concentrated force pressing into soft wood, running in parallel sets of four spaced

in a way that was consistent with large fingers. Something had worked at that wall with its hands, trying to get purchase, trying to work into the gap. I don't know if it would have eventually gotten through. I'm glad glad I don't know. Byron stood in the yard and looked at all of it for a long time, turning slowly, taking in the full picture of what the night had produced. Then he looked at me. He said, let's pack your gear. I didn't argue. I want you to know I didn't argue,

because it would have been dishonest if I had. There was no rational case for staying. I'd planned four months and made it just under two. The season's take was compromised, the cabin was damaged, my plane had already been attacked once. I had a healing wound in my head, and I'd just spent a night that neither of us was fully equipped to process. Yet the argument for staying didn't exist. We loaded what we could carry in the two planes,

my personal kit, my furs, my tools, my notebooks. I left the stove and the bunks and the shelves because there wasn't room, and because I already knew on some level that I wasn't coming back. We checked both aircraft carefully, every square inch of both planes before we got in them.

We took no chances. Byron took off first because a Cessna needed a longer run, and I taxied behind him and held at the end of the strip and looked down at the meadow and the cabin for a moment before I pushed the throttle, everything still, smoke still rising from the stove. I'd banked it but not killed it. The marks in the snow around the cabin visible even from the ground, that ring of disturbance that told the whole story of the night to anyone who knew how

to read it. I pushed the throttle and lifted off and climbed out to the southeast. Once I had altitude, I banked left and came back over the cabin once before turning south for Dawson. I looked down at it getting small beneath me, the rectangle of the cabin in the clearing, the strip of the meadow, the black timber on all sides, and I felt something I've tried to describe to my wife more than once, without ever quite

finding the right words. Grief for something i'd built and was leaving, relief so profound it felt phizzic, and underneath both of those something harder and colder, a knowledge about the world that I hadn't had when I'd flown in five weeks and some days earlier, about what's out there in the deep wild country, about what it's capable of about what it's willing to do when it decides something needs to be done. I sold the cabin that winter, found a buyer through a man I knew in Dawson,

who brokeered that kind of deal. I disclosed what had happened, told him about the tracks, the damage to the walls, all of it. He bought it anyway because he'd been drinking when I told him and decided I was embellishing, which was his choice to make. I hope whatever he found up there was easier than what I found. I genuinely do. The following spring, I went to work on a crab boat out of Dutch Harbor in the Bearing Sea,

and I worked that job for eleven years. People who've never done it always want to talk about how dangerous it is, and they're right it is.

The sea doesn't stand outside your door in the dark and breathe against the gap at the bottom learning you. The sea doesn't coordinate. The sea doesn't take your tires apart while you're following a blood trail into the woods. The sea is dangerous the way gravity is dangerous. It doesn't have a position on you. It's just the sea. What was in that Yukon timber had a position on me.

I don't know what that position was or why it started, whether I'd set my first trap in the wrong place, or made camp in the wrong drainage, or done something in those first days that set off a sequence I never fully understood. But it had a position on me, and it escalated that position in a consistent and logical direction, and when I shot at it, it came back and

destroyed my exit. That's not gravity. That's something else entirely, And whatever that something else is, I'd rather take my chances with thirty foot seas and a crab pot Wench than go back to it. I've been listening to your show for a few years now, and I listened to Backwood's big Foot stories too, and when Fred from Alaska talks,

I always pay close attention. He said things on your show that line up exactly with what I experienced about the temperament of these things in the northern Bush, about the way they escalate, about the intelligence behind it.

Cascades or the Blue Mountains or the Ozarks. I can only speak to what happened to me in the Yukon, And what happened to me wasn't a matter of provocation. I hadn't done anything to these animals before that first rock landed six feet from me on the twenty third of October. I'd been in that country three weeks, running my line, staying in my cabin, doing what I'd been doing out there for years, without any indication anything like

this was present. They were there when I arrived. The tracks on the fifth of October were from something that had already been watching long enough to know my route. They came to me. That's what I need people to understand. I didn't go looking for them, and I didn't push into their territory in any new way. They assessed me. They tested me with the rock throwing, and when I stayed, they escalated.

familiarity with the whole system, not just the traps. It had already found. It figured out how to depress a trappan without getting caught. It coordinated a multi point assault on my cabin with at least three animals working in concert, and it identified my plane as the critical point of my access to the outside world and targeted it specifically while I was otherwise occupied. That last one, especially, is

what I keep coming back to. It waited until I was following the blood trail to the northeast, and while I was doing that, something else else was at the plane. That's not coincidence, and it's not instinct. That's planning. I've heard the Sierra Sounds recording many times now, and every time it takes me back to that October night when I laid in my bunk and listened to forty three minutes of two of them talking in the timber east of the cabin. I don't know what they were saying.

I don't think anyone does yet, or if someone does, they haven't said so in a way that's reached me. But they were saying something. The structure is there, the organization is there, the back and forth of it is there. Whatever is making those sounds is doing it deliberately and doing it with content. That's something I believe as firmly

as I believe anything. If you're going to spend time in remote country in the Northern Rockies, in the Yukon, in Alaska, in the deep timber, anywhere in the Pacific Northwest, I want you to take this seriously. Not in a way that paralyzes you, because wild country is worth going into, and I'd never tell someone to stay home out of fear, but in a way that makes you honest with yourself about what might be out there and what it might

decide about you. Pay attention to the things that aren't there, the birds that go quiet, the game that moves out of an area for no visible reason, that sense of being watched that your body registers before your mind does. Pay attention to large tracks on creep gravel bars, Pay attention to your animals if you're trapping or working stock in remote areas. Pay attention to sounds you don't have

a name for. And if a rock the size of a golf ball lands six feet from you in the timber with no visible source, think carefully about what that means before you decide to stay. I'm seventy eight years old, and I live in a proper town now, and I'm as far from the Yukon as I've been at any point in my adult life. I don't miss the Klondike trapping.

Not because I don't love that country, because I do and I always will, but because that particular chapter closed in a way I haven't been able to reopen in my mind. It belonged longs to what happened to it, to those two months and what they produced. Some things close and don't reopen, and that's all right. But I'm glad I found your shows, and I'm glad Fred from Alaska keeps talking, and I'm glad some people out there are taking this seriously and saying out loud what needs

to be said. These things are real, they are in places where people go. They're not what the friendly Giant narrative says they are, or at least they aren't only that, and the version that lives in the deep northern Bush deserves to be understood on its own terms, without the softening that makes the topic more comfortable for polite company. Be careful out there, all of you who go into the deep country. I mean that with everything I've got.