Now one of your putting. I got a string going on here. Something just kids, my dog. Something killed your dog, my dog. We're flying through the or over the tree. I don't know how it did it, Okay, damn, and I'm really confused. All I saw was my dog coming over the fence and me was dead once you hit the ground, like. I didn't see any cars. All I saw was my dog coming over the fence. Say, what are you putting? We got some wonder or something crawling around out here? Did you see what it was?
It was?
It was staying enough. I'm out here looking through the window now and I don't see anything. I don't want to go outside. Jesus, quiet you better or hello? Hit the boddy out here? What went on out there? I thought of a bit of about sixty nine. I don't know him out there.
Yeah right, Oh, Readings is Fred and Alaska.
Thanks for joining me.
What I wanted to share with you today comes from Edwin. Edwin had originally come up about a decade ago, and he was working a cannery, and then he worked a fishing boat. He worked his way around in the industry. He ended up in my neck of the woods back over in Dillingham. He was working for Peter Pan and Seafoods. This was approximately four years ago, the year before the COVID crap, So four or five years ago. Edwin along with a couple of Filipino canry workers that he worked with.
One of them had a car that he was borrowing from another friend or what have you. So they decided they're gonna take a trip out and see what you know Alaska is about. So even though Edwin had been around the industry, he was always out in the water or stuck in a canary. So having the tunity to go somewhere like Snake Lake, they were all over it. So from what Edwin said, which there's a little bit of a language barrier, he was from Poland. His real
name isn't Edwin. I can't pronounce it. It's above my pay grade. So what ends up happening to him and his Filipino friends. They jet out up to Snake Lake Road. They passed China Cap he said, they stopped at those gravel pits. They're on the right hand side as you're going back up in there, he said. When they got up on the mountain, they stopped to overlook the vast valley and just the beauty of it. And he said
one of the Filipino guys he had a pistol. So what they decided they were going to do is try to shoot a pond is probably two miles away. They were just dicking around with a pistol and busting shots, and of course they're not hitting anything because it just sheer distance.
They weren't going to hit nothing. But after they were.
Done dumping some mags, Edwin said that they heard a weird shrill, like a child screaming. It gives me the chills, is thinking about behind them, up above them. He said he wasn't sure how far, but it sounded real close because it sounded like the kid was standing behind them, shrieking squeal kind of a It shocked all of them. They turned around. They were like, oh, we didn't even know kid was there. They thought they startled a kid by firing, so they were turning around to say sorry or whatever.
Nothing was there. Edwin said.
One of the Filipino guys start pointing up in the woods and started saying something in his home tongue, and he couldn't make up what he say he was telling him because the guy was getting real worked up, and finally Edwin said he calmed him down enough to figure out he was saying, they're the monster up there, right. They were thinking, oh, bear, Oh, this monster is a bear.
Edwin thought it would be a good idea if he walked up a little ways to flesh it out, because the other guy didn't see it and wanted to see the bear. One guy that initially saw this thing was like, no, let's go, Let's get in the Carlos go. Because he wasn't explaining to them what had happened. Edwin, for whatever reason, he took the pistol, reloaded it, figured, Okay, I'm gonna scare the bear out. My buddy will get a look at it, we'll get out of here. He wasn't scared
of bears, teaches on. I'm not scared of bears. I'd just rather be prepared for him with something better than a nine milimeters pistol.
But anyway, teaches on.
So he goes up in there and he's got the pistol and he's going to do all the alders and stuff in the willows, and he's not making any headway. Man. He said that he got in there and it was a tangle. It was just try to push through like a humongous, very strong spider web, and so he backed out, tried to go up a little further and try to make a way through one of the game trails, but he would ended up down on his knees and was like, screw this. He felt very vulnerable, so he backs up.
He comes back down the hill and his friends are in the car. The one guy was started blaring on the horn because they didn't see him come down to the backside of the car, and he banged on the trunk to get him to stop honking the horn, and they turn around and startled, and it was shocked, and He's like they were yelling, get in I'm not laughing at the guy. I'm just mentally picturing these two freaked out dudes in the car saying get the hell in here,
and Edwin's oblivi to what they're doing. He figured, oh, they must saw the bear. So he's not actually listening to these guys, which he later regrets. He walks in front of the car a little ways and is looking up the hill. What he didn't realize is this thing had come down the hill, crossed in front of these two guys within twenty five feet and just dropped barely
down off this side of the road. So he's looking up and he's basically walking up and turning his back at the very spot where this thing just went down over their rise right, and so horn blaring again, and he's holding the pistol still, and he's looking back. He's telling him to stop. He's trying to get a look, and he wants to see this bear, and he figured it had to be big if they're scared, and for whatever reason edwin it didn't FaZe him. For whatever reason,
he still doesn't understand it. So he walks a little further to see if there's a trail up better than the one he had just tried. And again he freely admits he was making one mistake after another. So he sees the spot and then he notices where there's a footstep, and then he notices he looks down, he sees another footstep, and so he's like, oh, and he looks at it and he looks like a big human footprint. And as he's looking down at it, that shrieked, shrill, childlike screen
came from right behind him. It startled the crap out him so much he dropped the gun out of just shock. Dropped gun, turns around and only sees just the top of the head and the eyes from about right here, just off the road down going down, because it's the spot they were at, was just before it dropped into the sheer drop offs, a little further up on Snake Lake Road. And so this thing is down looking up at him, and he's looking across at it, and he's maybe fifteen feet away.
He said.
The top of the head looked very round, and the eyes looked almost too small for its head, but in context, the head was huge and the eyes were beady and pitch black. He saw it blank, and he's trying to figure out what the hell he's seeing because it's not a bear, and it's still making these weird but cooling noise and the different types of sounds he ain't never heard before. It didn't relate to any animal he could pick out, just strange whistles and all sorts of stuff.
Edwin said, as he's staring, horn starts blaring again, and that's what snapped him out of his staring, and he looks over is they're literally crawling out of their skin trying to get Edwin get the hell back in that car. Edwin reaches down and as soon as he's grabbing the pistol, he feels dump and this thing is less than four feet away, because when he looks back, he sees it
and he looks up. Edwin is six foot two, he said he had to look up at it, and he's guessing it had to have been between ten and eleven foot tall. He said the head was very big and round, the jaw was very wide set, black hair, very greasy, almost pitch black skin, but it looked great because of the greasy kind of complexion to it. Beat the eyes, he couldn't make out any ears, and he's in a compromised position. He's bent over to grab this pistol. The
Filipinos in the car lost, they have lost it. They are both in the back seat, hunkered down low. They want no parts of this. Right the horn blaring had stopped. Edwin said that part of him wanted to grab the pistol and tell it to get back, and the other part of him, he sensed that he was in serious danger if he did so. He just turned around and faced it, not looking in his eye. He was trying to examine it. He said the torso was abnormally longer
than the legs. It seemed like the legs didn't match what should be there for torso. The black hair and everything obscured everything. He had twigs and stuff in the hair, and he said the smell was putrid, like dead meat with a heavy body odor and urine smell, very heavy, he says, very pungent. He said the clothes he was wearing. It didn't touch him anything, but he was about four
feet away. The clothes he was wearing stunk like that even after washing, so it had to been pretty futrid for that kind of a holdover as far as the smell, so he doesn't know what to do. He's standing there and he's not wanting to make eye contact, but the thing isn't moving. It's breathing heavy.
He said.
He was making a gurgling sound as it breathed. It really struck him to his core. He said that he was having an odd out of body experience, but all he could see in his out of body experience was looking down over his shoulders, basically just above himself. Still wasn't looking to sing in the eye, which is what do you do with that? He said, he was so scared.
He felt like he was having heart palpitations or whatever. He thought he's going to have a heart attack.
He was healthy, young guy, mid thirties, strong, active, worked hard his whole life, so he never had a heart problem. But he was so panic stricken and worked up. And he said, as he's standing there, he said no. He screamed no, and it startled, this creature, and it took a half step back, turned and walked about ten feet away, and then turned back around and squatted down off the side of the road. When it came up, he initially turned towards it and then his out of body thing.
And then as he starts yelling no, he's turning himself, and this thing turned and walked over into his field of view, turned and squatted down and was looking right back at him. He said it was very inquisitive looking. And then at that point, because it was further away, he decided to grab the pistol from the ground. He grabbed the pistol and he held it, and he said, the thing just looked at him. Was just kind of the expression in his face changed. I went from curious
to okay, what now. This is a feeling he got. Then Edwin said, as soon as he felt confident holding the pistol, he lost it. He lost all confidence and dropped the guy. He said, he doesn't know what came over him, but he felt that if he continued to hold that pistol, he was dead. Once he dropped the gun, he bent down and sat Indian style and was looking back at this thing that was squatted down like fifteen
feet away, and he said it was massive. He was taking in its size because once he sat Indian style and this thing was squatted down, he could see its girth, its mass, and even though it seemed skinny, when it was standing up, he said, you could see every muscle, ripple everything. He said, it's hand, the thumb was offset further this way. And this thing started not pawing at the ground but reaching on the ground and doing something right. And he couldn't make out what it was doing, but
it was doing something specific to it. He couldn't tell if it was trying to write something on the ground. He couldn't tell if it was just like we doodle on paper or something. He couldn't figure it out. Because this thing stopped paying attention to him and was doing that thing on the ground, and he said, as it was doing that, he was trying to figure out what the hell. And then that's when he snapped out of
it again because his Filipino friends in the car. The car started and the horn blared with the car starting and the horn in unison because Edwin turned around and the cars coming at him right so he didn't watch this thing. He didn't watch the creature, but he turned around and basically eased up onto the hood as his friends came at him, and then as soon as he
was on the hood, they gunned it. And this thing is as he looked back, he could already see it going over the edge of the road and dropping down off the side. They went down a little ways and Edwin was banging him up because he was sliding off. He wasn't going to last much longer. They stop, He got off and he ran back to where he had dropped the gun. They're backing up. They're doing a twenty five point turnaround, which on that road is just absurd.
If you're curious, what kind of car is an old Chevrolet Chavette little ford or he said it was an early eighties model or something like that, eighty two or eighty three. But anyway, so he runs back and grabs the pistol. The pistol had been run over. It wasn't compromise, it wasn't.
Broke, say, but it was a bit out of operation. And so he's got it.
He's trying to work the action and when he jumped up on the hood, they end up running over the pistol. And so what that did was packed a bunch of dirt in between the slide and the frame, and so it's a lot of extra friction. And so finally he gets it, pops the round out of it, and took the magazine out. The bottom plate of the magazine was torn off a little bit, but it was still functional, and he's working the slide to get the dirt out
of it and stuff. Puts the magazine back in, and as he goes to racket, the base plate of the mag let go and all of it just fell out the bottom. So he had one round in this nine millimeter. His friends are behind him still doing this twenty point turnaround right and they're yelling out the window out of all sorts of curse words and idiot, what are you
doing all this kind of stuff? And so he said, as he's standing there just trying to take in everything that just happened, because he said it was so surreal. He could not believe that this was actually happening. And he said, as he was working the action, because at this point it was just like a nervous tick, He's just working hell out of that action. As he's doing so,
he had emptied the round. The round was on the ground, the other bullets were on the ground, and he was just basically in shock working this action.
And I asked him, I was like, how long were you like that? What drew you out of it? Did they come back up in the car?
So he goes, no, what had happened is as he's facing off that edge basically where he initially sought, just its head and its eyes, he was basically at the same spot, maybe a little further away, and he's just working that action. And as he's doing so, he said, this thing was right back almost at the same spot, looking at him from the same kind of point of view, right, and so he froze, And as he froze, he said, he felt the bumper of the car bump into his leg and that's what snapped him out of it.
And the guys are looking at when it was get in.
The guy on the passenger side, he crawled into the back and he was pointing off the edge, and of course Edwin was still looking at this thing, so he understood. He jumps in, and as they take off back down the road, Edwin's trying to look back and get a glance. This thing came back up onto the road and then went right up the mountain, just right on up.
And stay tuned for more sasquatch out to see. We'll be right back after these messages, he said.
The initial alders and willis he tried to crawl through were a maze of holy shit trying to get through there. He said, this thing just went like it was nothing, just right on up the mountain and disappeared out of you. Because of the vantage point on the road and the turns and stuff, they ended up getting a flat tire because once they got back down by the gravel pit area, the guy driving got a little squirrely and the old tires on there once it kicked sideways, that popped one
of the rear tires. They did not care, not even a little bit. They continued on down with the flat tire, and all they got to China Cap, which we called um up the mountain, which and I'll leave that alone anyway. So they get down to China Cap only because it's shaped like an old Chinese type style hat. So when they get there, they stop and they're taking a breather, and they start talking to each other, what the hell, why were you doing that? And Edwin didn't have an answer.
But he doesn't know why he was possessed to not flee. He said it was the weirdest thing. He said, it almost felt like this thing was drawing him in to its curiosity, not Edwin's, and asked him, can you flesh that out a little bit? Can you explain that a little better? And he didn't have an explanation. He said, he just had the feeling that this thing was drawing him into this thing's curiosity. When it went and sat squatted down, he said, he had the strangest feeling like
it was trying to tell him something. But he's freaked out. He's worried about pistol grabbing the gun. All the stuff is happening. He was expecting it to be a bear, and so it was just a conundrum. And he said, but to this day, four or five years later, to this day, he feels like this thing was trying to communicate something to him on the ground, right, he said, the way it was very It wasn't random just swirling around of the hand. It was like it was doing
something with its hand. Whether it was writing with its hand or trying to draw something.
He didn't know.
Because there's this monster in front of him and this weird shit's happening.
What do you do with that? So his mind wasn't on everything this creature was doing. It was just happening.
And to this day, he said, he still thinks that this thing was trying to communicate something. He asked me if I would go back there and check their I was like, I'm gonna be there at some point, but I don't know a boy that it's gonna be hard enough to film in the woods back home. But I want to thank Edwin for sharing. He'll be back to Alaska next year doing some more fisheries work or canary work, whichever it may be. Edwin had a message for everyone,
don't assume they're out to hurt you immediately. They could be trying to communicate with you and you just don't recognize their form of communication. So that's fair me personally, I'm biased, so I'll just leave that alone.
But teach his own.
He says he feels he really missed out on something that could have been groundbreaking because of what was going on and everything and them starting up the car and coming at him. One of his comments was, Dillingham's a hell of a place. I can't agree more. Dillingham is one hell of a place outside of the small town village that you get with the social ILKs in general. It's a beautiful place and it's definitely different. I wanted to share with you today. Is a small family and
Dealingham just a few years back. We'll name him Keith and Danielle. Keith and Danielle have their two daughters and their son. Their oldest daughter at the time was twelve, the next daughter was like nine.
And the little boy was five.
So what they did was is that they had a subsistence site for king salmon on the Lusk River where they had they're sitting at side at they weren't getting king salmon that they wanted.
They got a few.
Keith it talk to a relative of his who had a setet site on the Wood River side. And if you look at the map, becomes in the Nushigak Bay goy Dillingham. Then the Nushigak branches off to your it would be the right and then the Wood River cuts up to Electing Gig.
So his plan was to take the wife and family go get his king net.
He brought his red gear for subsistence and basically it's just different shackle size for the smaller salmon gill net anyway, so they get out there, they pull his gear, they stack it up, and everyone uses a sign saying it's basically for fishing game and whoever else this is set net site for subsistence whatever with a number on it. So he grabs his sign, grabs his gear, and they
go up to the Wood River. Now when they get to his friend's site, his friend's gear was out, and he agreed that he would pick the fish and stack the gear up on the bank, just temporarily take his sign down and put his up and so on. So he had it worked out. So he gets up to his buddy side or his relative site. Typically what we do is one end is achored out into the river or the water wherever it's at, and the other end is.
Attached to the bank.
And so what we'll do is we'll pull up with the bow of the skiff and pull the gear up on top and go through and pick the fish out. He used the net to pull yourselves towards shore or out or however you work it out, but typically to pick the fish right into the boat. So he goes through, he picks a few fish out and whatever, and they pull his gear and as he stacks the shackle and he takes the sign down, his twelve year old daughter says, Dad, Dad, that man is waving at us.
So he's up on the bank, so he's looking around. He turns back. He's what man, and she goes, he's in the woods. It wasn't necessarily woods.
There's a bunch of willows and alders at that point on the river hadn't got into the timbers quite yet, and so he goes, there's no one up here, sweetheart.
And he continued doing what he was doing.
So he shoves the sign in and he grabs the one lead line and anchors it end of the ground where his friend had an anchor, so he could toe his line out and drop it and be set. So he comes back down and he's unloading his red gear, his shackles, and he notices there's a good sized tear in one of them, so he asks for his mending twine. So he's sitting there and he's mending up this net this small hole, and as he's patching it up, his daughter and his wife say, hey, there's something in the willows.
So he's a little frustrated because he's trying to work. He wants to get things set out before the next tide comes in and potentially fill up the net. So he goes over and he brought a shotgun for ducks or whatever he may come across, and he also had his four P forty four rifle in a case towards the.
Back of the skiff for bear protection. So he just grabs a shotgun.
He figured, I'll go up on the bank and see if I see anything and just make some noise with some bird shot in the air.
So he gets up there, he looks around, he doesn't see nine.
He just bam shoots one off, pumps the shotgun, puts it on safety, goes back, sets it into the skiff. That says it's scared off. It's scared off, and he heard nothing. He just sho any bear would have took off and whatever. So he goes back, he finishes minding
the net. They get it all set up to go, and so what ends up happening is you take your bully line and an anchor and you have it off your bow, and whoever's operating the skiff will drag that net offshore, out into the water until it's nice and taunt and then you drop the anchor and let it set and then you got a nice set. So they're in the process of doing that. He has his wife operating the skiff. She's backing it up. She's following his
commands with his hands or whatever. This way that way, and just as it's getting taunt and he's like a little more, and they just get it out of the way and he drops the anchor in the bully. They back away from it so it doesn't get caught up, and they're propeller or whatever.
They go up just above it. They beach the skiff.
They want to see if any fish hit the net, because the kids like to watch the salmon splashing the net and fight.
So as they're sitting there. He kept getting the feeling that they were being watched.
From where they set the net, the bank kind of went down lower to where they beached up, so the bank wasn't as high, and he had a better field of view of that immediate area because with the willows and stuff, man, it's really hard to You'll have all this grass right on the edge of the river bank, it'll be three four foot tall. Then you got the ten twelve foot willows there, so you don't have a whole lot of room to really see what's going on
beyond that. But where they banked up, he tied off, and he kept getting the feeling like they're being watched, and so he goes to the back of this gift.
He pulls out his Marlin four forty four and he loads up about three rounds.
Racks went in tells his wife something feels off, and she said, I feel it too. His daughter kept trying to interrupt, and he kept cutting off, hey, don't interrupt, adults are talking. In his mind's it was, I need to discuss with my wife what to do if a bear comes, because that's what they were thinking. As they're discussing this. The daughter keeps interrupting, and so he gets upset. Keith goes, what are you interrupting us adults for? And she goes, Dad, that man is. So he looks around
and he sees darkness in the willows. Duck down and he was like, what the hell? So he asked a daughter who was it? Because they know everybody who was it? Was it an elder from Elecni Gig, was it? Someone from Billingham?
Who was it?
She goes, I don't know. He was wearing a coat, he said, what kind of coat? She said, a fur coat. He stood up, he waved at me, he motioned for me, and then when you turn he ducked down and he goes, okay. He decides what he's going to do is get out of the skiff, walk along a little further up river, get up onto the river bank, and have the wife and the kids over here, hopefully get an eye on whatever's waving at his kid or whoever's waving at his daughter.
And as soon as he said I'm going to walk up a little ways, immediately his wife, the two daughters and a little boy they oh, no, don't go.
Because there was a feeling in the air. The air changed.
He was like, just calm down, don't be We ain't scared of bears. What we got, we're protected. He had the four forty four Marl and big whopper of around. It's basically a forty four mag just a lot longer casing with a lot more behind it. So he wasn't concerned about the bears in that aspect. So he calmed them, said hey, it'll be okay. He gets up, goes ahead of his plan, gets up to where he figures it'd be a good vantage point. They're lucky the wind is
coming towards them, so he wouldn't be winded. And he just took his hat and everything off, and he's just peeking up through the grass watching those willows where he saw the dark movement. Now he decides I'm going to since i'm over here. He didn't like smoking in front of his kids, so he lit up a cigarette since the wind was blowing into his face.
He figured he'd be good and not get winded.
So as he's lighting a cigarette and smoking, he notices dark movement, so he immediately stops what he's doing and starts looking. He sees he said it looked like something going like this in the brush, and he said he couldn't make it out because of how things were with the willows. It was silhouetted because the sun was rising from that direction. This is in the wee hours of the morning, just as the sun's coming up. And again
at landed the midnight sun. At that time of year, it doesn't fully get dark, so there was plenty of light and that he could see just fine, but he just the way things were going down, he couldn't make out what this motion was because that's all he was seeing out of the willows, was like a single arm going like this, and it made no sense.
And he hears his daughter start screaming.
He sees the willows moving, but from his vantage point, his family's off here to his right, and he's looking. I guess the family would be off between the two and three o'clock position ish two thirtieth position, and his twelve o'clock was directly at this thing.
So he's looking and he can see the movement, but he can't make.
Out anything because again it's silhouetted, and so he decides, okay.
He puts out a cigarette, puts it in his pocket.
He grabs his rifle puts his hat on and he ducks down as cutbank a little bit. And so what he does is he ducks down below the bank line and shimmy's on over closer to his family to get a bitter look at what's going on and if he has to shoot, he's between his family and this bear at the time is what he was thinking, but acting strange bear. So he gets over there. Danielle is telling him it's looking at us, it's looking at us.
It's a hairy man. It's a hairy man.
And immediately he stands up and looks and sees this thing duck back into the brush, and immediately all bets are off.
He realized, oh, it is a harry man. We gotta go. It's too close, it's showing too much interest in my kids. I gotta go. So he gets over to the skiff, he grabs.
An anchor line. He's loading up the anchor and his wife is firing up the kicker. He pushes off and they back away and they loop out into the river a little further and drop the anchor because they wanted to watch this thing. So as they're sitting there, they anchored up, the anchor catches and they're just a little bit below where they set the net.
They're looking and watching the willows.
As they're doing that, they're talking to each other about what they saw, what exactly, who, what, when?
Why?
His daughter kept it was waving at me and smiling. It kept waving and smiling, and he goes, what did it look like? And she said it looked like a man with the fur hat on, and all I could see it was his face, but his face looked really dirty. And he goes, dirty how and she goes, it was just dirty. It was dark brownish, it was dirt. They looked dirty, and she couldn't really articulate what.
She was seeing. So they sit there for a while.
He was a little shook up, so he ReLit his cigarette, and he hated doing that in front of his kids because he knew it was a bad influence, but he lit that cigarette anyway because he was a little shaky. Everyone in the skiff really didn't want to be anchored there, but they were trying to get a better view of what they're dealing with. They just set this net, so regardless, they're going to have to deal with it in one way or another.
When they get their gear and reset his cousin's gear.
And so as he's contemplating this, he sees the silhouette kind of move, and every once in a while it would stand up a little taller.
They were above the McClung river.
This thing appeared to be peeking back at them every so often and making it way towards the McClung. So, as they're discussing, okay, it's moved away, he decides, right then and there screw this set net site.
I don't want to deal with this.
So they hold the anchor, they go right back up on shore, they pull his gear, they change out the signs, they reset his friend's gear, and he said, as it got done doing that, and they just got his cousin's gear, retaunt and anchor and Blewie dropped, he said, something caught his eye off his right hand side, because they were going upriver, and they were facing upriver with the bow of the skiff as he was working this thing. So he looks over and he sees it standing up almost
where his daughter first saw it. It's motioning for them. It keeps motioning for them like this, and then it would look up, look around, and then do it again. And motion for them, and he said its hands were huge. He said it had to be over eight foot tall. But what caught him, instruck him was how wide it was.
It was.
Stay tuned for more sasquatch out to see. We'll be right back after these messages.
He said, it almost at that distance looked as wide as it was tall. But he knew it was just an optical illusion type of thing. But he said it was very wide, very stocky, but big, and so they're freaked out. Luckily, his cousin's gear was set, all his stuff was in the skiff.
He dropped it. They looked at a brief moment and got on out of there. Yeah. Again, none of these experiences are unique.
I know there's a little over one hundred experiences shared with you guys thus far, but understand that is a drop in the bucket. There's way more than that just from the Bristol Bay area, not counting the interior by Fairbanks, the Koyakuk River, name a river, the Russian River, the Kenai River. These things are happening, not on a daily basis. I'm not trying to lay it out.
Oh my god. Everywhere he turned, there's a Harry man out to get you. That's not it. Just be aware this encounter I want to share with you. This particular guy, he no longer lives at this place, which is just north of Willow a little ways.
His property is not far from the Sussitina River. His experience was last fall. His dog had been missing for about a week, almost two weeks, and this particular dog was really old. It was about sixteen seventeen years old, and he assumed the dog went off to die, which dogs would do, that kind of thing, same with cats. He decides he sees this path across the river there
and he wants to go check it out. So he goes, and he finds a shallow spot and he gets across, and then he backstracks to this trail and he starts going down it. Off to his right, he's going through black spruce and some cottonwoods and some fairly young birch trees. Someone had gone through there sometime before and knocked down a bunch of the old growth birch, probably for firewood.
From the stumps that had small little thing is grown out of it.
So he's going through there and he's checking it out, and something he feels like he's being watched. He really he can't put his finger on it. So as he's going through these trees, very similar to the what's behind me here. We got some cottonwoods birching, some spruce.
Back over there. So basically the same type of terrain behind me.
Now.
So as he's going along and he's going down this path it is fairly open, but off to his right is where the alders. They get thicker and they're blushed up. And as he's going along and there's some movement, he hears over there and he's, hah, I want if to ask my dog. Of course, for almost seventeen years, that's unconditional love. So of course he's going to head over to check it out.
As he's walking over and it's approximately thirty yards from his position, he felt no.
Danger, had no inklining, just anything bad or out of the ordinary. He's continuing over there and the bushes has really come alive, and then he hears a real guttural growl and he goes, oh, that's not my dog. I hope it's not a bear chewing on my dog. I don't want to see that. He backs out, he's smart about it. He backs away. He wasn't armed. He just went to go check out a trail not far from his property.
No harm, no foul.
He gets back to it just as the tree is sticking up right close to the river bank. He was getting back to that area when he noticed something was being thrown at him. He kept hearing things land in the shrubs beside him, but he couldn't make anything out. So he turned around and he's trying to figure out what the hell, and this piece of a foot leg lands almost at his feet, just into some bushes, and then it flopped on the trail by him. Thought nothing of it at first. He's kind of looking at it,
trying to figure out what it is. And this particular dog that had been missing.
Was all white except for some black socks basically on his feet, and it was one of those legs.
I'm a dog lover man, cats are cute. I got no use for him, but I've always loved dogs. Grew up with a sled dog team. So he was in shock, standing there staring because he's wrecking. That's a piece of my dog. So he looks back in the direction of the bushes. He sees movement back behind there, but it looks like a bear, because it looked like to be on all fours, pacing back and forth through the brush.
But the growling going on was not like that of a bear.
It was too long, too deep, too different, way too different than what you would typically expect. So as he's caught the plating, still in shock, like he's still trying to wrap his mind around about his dog's.
Leg at his feet.
I've seen some shit, but to have a piece of your loved one's corpse chucked at you, and.
Who knows what it was a warning, knew it was his dog. I have no clue. It's all speculation.
So he snaps himself out of it because all of a sudden, the movement turns into all out movement towards him, just out of.
You in those shrubs. So he's kind of shocked, and he went to start backing up, and then he seen this thing transition from fours up to two's just out of you with the tree line, and he was perplexed, still in shock, turned to run, but just was like contemplating taking the piece of his dog with him to bury it or something. He was in shock.
I could imagine in that moment what it would be like all of a sudden, a piece of your loved ones at your feet.
I digress.
As he's still in shock, this thing moves around and is coming back on his back trail. Now he's not that far. He's made it maybe eighty yards down this path from the river bank, so he's not that far. He just cleared the trees that line the river and then it opens up into some marsh and tundra areas and whatnot, and a bumping muskeg back in there. So he wasn't far. But this thing circled around. Now as it's circling around, it dawns on him. I need to get out of here because it's circling up on me.
So he leaves the dog's leg, turns and cuts down the trail and he's hauling ass at this point, and he can hear this big thing moving through the trees, not paralleling him, but like moving to cut off his forward progression. So he was a highly motivated track star that day. So he continues running. He gets to the river's edge where he's at is right in front of a deep hole. But it's pretty much shallow outside of this deep hole, so he backs up about ten feet
and this noise had stopped. So he looks over to his left and he sees this movement behind a tree. It was actually a group of trees. He saw a movement, something peeking out, something going back.
Now he didn't know what to do.
He was shocked because he knew it was on two feet shaped, humanoid, but massive.
So this thing wasn't hiding.
It was like the deer putting its head behind the tree. You could still see its body. That's what he said. It reminded him of because it wasn't putting eyes on him. Somehow, he wouldn't be able to see this big, massive things. So he gets stuck staring at this thing, and it's trying to contemplate what do I do. I could imagine at this point he had resolved himself that he's going to jump into the river to get the hell out of Dodge. I can't say as I wouldn't. I would
be all over jumping and there. I don't even think i'd still be standing at that particular point. However, I wasn't there. No judgment, No judgment, John, I'll get it. It's shocking when you're accosted by something like this and you have no reference point. You're thinking it's a bear or something like that, and then it's just totally mind
altering for sure. So he's contemplating everything going on. Meanwhile, this thing is making these movements, and he takes his gaze off it just for a moment to check the depth of the water again, contemplating how cold it's going to be, because it had stopped, so all this aggression had stopped, but it was still right there. So he glances away, pondering how far he'd have to jump, or if he's going to dive, just things of this nature. And then he looks back and there's nothing there, so
he calmed down, right, He's okay, it's gone. And then he started thinking, is my mind playing tricks on me? Because he felt he should have been able to hear it leave or watch it leave because it made noise as it was coming. Then all of a sudden, just poof gone. So he starts really looking like intently, and he notices it slipping from trees to trees. As he's turning this way. He notices out of the corner of
his eye the movement. He catches on to what's going on and starts adjusting He's turning his head but looking out the side of his eye, and he sees this thing moving back along, but it's circling back to where he was just at with the dog leg. He decides, you know what, the dog's gone. I'm not gonna try to retrieve this carcass. I don't know if it's eating it, I don't know. He had already resolved that the dog was dead anyway, so he was just gonna leave it
at that. Hey, fair enough, I get it. Move on that type of thing. So he's struggling with accepting what he's seeing. He's staring at his feet and he can hear noises going on around him, but he's in this surreal shock of what's going on? Why is this going on here? So he snaps out of it. He catches himself. Now, when I was talking to him about it, he was taking long pauses and I would have to sow what happened next.
I sorry to interrupt, but he was in deep thought.
I think what it was is he was envisioning at that point the thing ripping his dog apart, but he had no clue if that's exactly what happened or not. Speculation anyway, he turns around and he decides he's not going to jump into the river. He's going to go back up river a little ways and cross across these rocks to where it because this thing wasn't actively being aggressive at that point. It was just slipping around like a phantom. It just so happened. It was going in
the direction real slowly. It's not like it was trying to cut him off. But he realized, I better get moving on this now while I can, and rightfully so and smartly, he started going down the trail and he had is this es gate plan. He's going to go across this is sitting if he has to this particular point where he has to cross.
It's not the easiest place to cross.
It's not a necessarily a small river, but this particular point he could navigate the way he got across relatively easy with the swiftness.
Of the water or whatever. He didn't want to have to swim.
Now, I know I'm repeating this, but he repeated it to me, so I'm telling you as how he conveyed it to me, I'm conveying it to you. So he's continuing down the trail and the movement he hears starting behind him. It's no longer off to his right hand side now the movement's behind him, and as he's going along the trail, he's trying not to look. He's really he's lost mentally, he's trying to put all these pieces
together that don't fit. And because he'd been there lifelong, never had a peaking, never had anything go missing, nothing no longer lives there now. So he's going along and he's contemplating all these things, and he hears the noises behind him, but he doesn't really want to look, but he's very cognizant of the fact that it's not horribly
far behind him and it can move silently. He's getting up to this little crossing point, which is a cluster of rocks, shallow area, some more rocks, a little deeper area, and then some more rocks to get across, so it's not just a crossing a creek.
Just understand that.
Now, as he's getting up, there's another trail that comes from where people come from a different road and come down there to do the fishing from the bank. Right, So as these two trails are merging, it's damn near right at that point where he's going to cross back across. Now, as he's going along, he hears the noise behind him,
but off to his right hand side. He notices movement going off back to his right hand side, and he's concerned, and he turns and looks, and it looks like his neighbor's dog, and he's I wonder why the neighbor's dog is over here. So he chalks it up neighbors problem. Hopefully it doesn't happen his dog. What I'm dealing with on mind. So he's getting onto the rocks.
And go back across, and just as he is, here's splashing rocks a little bigger than a softball. We're being chucked just at points where he would have to where he was going to be crossing. He didn't know what to make of it. I don't know what to make of it.
Usually they throw rocks and gets you out of there, scary or something. So he just starts making his way.
He does this thing.
He gets across, and the trail that cuts back towards his property is a lot narrower than the one on the other side where people come from a different road and go down there and fish. He's going along the narrow road, he notices a familiar patch of fur from his dog that was missing. What he surmises is that it threw it straight because where this particular piece of the dog was directly straight across the river from where.
He entered the trail and where the dog leg was further up. So he's assuming this thing just flung it across the river so he would see it on his way back to his property. He didn't give exact specifics on where he exactly was, but it's just north to me. Just that direction is where this went down.
The Susitna rivers back over here, it wraps, it goes all the way, it goes away. These things I struggle with, are they our friends? Not here in Alaska. I have not had a single email, a single conversation with anyone to where it was a joyous, calm, peaceful thing. It's always some form of aggression or predatory behavior. Some of these shares. They're very concerning as far as safety goes. It makes you wonder why certain things are being held back. A lot of it I think has to do with so many.
People not speaking on their experience. There's a lot of people I've had at least thirty people just want to tell me. So there are little pinpoints on a map, but they didn't want to share it. They didn't want me to speak on it. When there's at least thirty of those, which I understand, respect your privacy. You won't hear me talk about what happened to you.
Hear you never will if you have to be anonymous and just want to share so I can put a pin on a map.
Cool.
All I ask is, if you do share in that way, at least let me know the nature of it, screaming howling off in the distance, saw it and running whatever it may be, just so I can put a pin in the general area. Until then, thanks for joining me, and we'll see on the next one. They say, you.
Don't gotta go, but you can't stay.
Science still step side. I'm trying this chart, that chart everything. Can you ride right back? Joy for me? Joy staying right you call it right away and still still stay stay us to do dossssssssssst used these things