Travelers' Tales Alaska (31 page)

In the late 1950s, one of Angasan's teenage pals reported seeing a hairy, humanlike creature near the village of South Naknek. The friend, named Peter, had surprised the animal as it lay on some fifty-five-gallon fuel drums. Panicked and alone, Peter grabbed his gun, shot—and missed. The creature, in turn, screamed loudly, then took off running.

Peter ran too and didn't stop until he'd reached the village, where he told of his meeting with Hairy Man. Most people remained skeptical. “They thought he'd seen everything but a Hairy Man,” Angasan recalls. “But I believed; you can tell
when a guy is lying or not. He was scared to death.” Angasan pauses a moment, as though sorting through memories, then adds, “I know the story is true, because I've seen it, too.”

Angasan saw Hairy Man in 1985, while on a commercial flight from Kulukak Bay to Dillingham, the region's largest town. Passing over forested mountains near the village of Manokotak, he noticed an unusual form below. “There was this giant thing sitting in the trees,” Angasan says. “He looked like, not quite like a gorilla, but dark and full of hair. I'd say, from the trees around him, he's between seven and ten feet tall.”

Angasan rejects the suggestion it might have been a bear. “Uh-uh,” he says, shaking his head. “I'm color blind, so I look for shapes. I could see his eyes and his head, his whole body. He was looking at us, watching us fly by; he didn't seem bothered at all. But he was a Hairy Man, all right.”

Rather than announce his discovery, Angasan remained quiet for the remainder of the flight. “I didn't want the pilot to go down there and scare the daylights out of him. I figured it would just make the thing go crazy, so I kept it to myself. But he exists, the Hairy Man. And he looks exactly like he's called.”

Angasan tells his stories in a dispassionate, matter-of-fact manner. There's no attempt to convince the listener, or sensationalize the experience. If anything, he seems reluctant to say any more than necessary. Yet the fact that they're his stories makes them all the more believable.

Angasan is a respected leader within his culture. Among other things, he has served as the Bristol Bay Native Corporation's executive director and represented the region on Alaska's Inter-Tribal Council. From a Western perspective, he's articulate, politically savvy, sharp. In both worlds, Native and Western, he's a credible witness.

And he's not alone. Many people throughout Alaska—mostly Native and mostly rural—acknowledge the existence of a large hair-covered, two-footed creature that is human or ape-like in nature. The Hairy Man.

Nearly every region on earth has legends of a mysterious “hairy biped” that inhabits wilderness areas. The best known are the Himalayan Yeti, or Abominable Snowman, and the Sasquatch, or Bigfoot, of Canada and the Pacific Northwest. Over the years, thousands of people have claimed to have seen these creatures. More rarely, their footprints reportedly have been found, or their pictures taken. During the 1970s, Canadian journalist and author John Green studied 1,000 reported sightings of Sasquatch. What he discovered was “a consistent picture [of] an upright ape…a remarkably inoffensive creature” that is solitary, omnivorous, largely nocturnal, forest-dwelling, and much larger than humans.”

Still there remains no documented proof of their existence. Or at least none that Western science is willing to accept. As anthropologist Grover Krantz (a believer in the possibility of Sasquatch's reality) explains in his 1992 book
Big Footprints: A Scientific Inquiry into the Reality of Sasquatch
, “Science requires solid evidence for the existence of a new species.… Nothing of the kind has been recovered for the Sasquatch; therefore it does not exist in the eyes of science.”

Scientists and other researchers have so far shown less interest in Alaska's hairy bipeds than in Sasquatch or Yeti. Of the half-dozen Sasquatch/Bigfoot books at Anchorage's public library—books aimed at a general audience—none mention Hairy Man. From an academic perspective, the anthropologists who've documented Alaska Hairy Man stories have tended to treat them as Native mythical beings, rather than real creatures—not surprising, given their scientific bias.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game has not undertaken a Hairy Man study, says Jim Fall, an anthropologist with the state's Subsistence Division. And yet he's often heard Dena'ina Athabascans speak of
Nant'ina
, large, hairy creatures that “are fairly malevolent and dangerous. One of the themes is that they steal children and raise them in the wild.” From a Western perspective, Fall says, “One could speculate that the origins of these stories might come from outcasts or social misfits not subject to traditional norms, and therefore dangerous.

“The thing you have to remember about Native beliefs,” he adds, “is that boundaries between humans and other creatures are often blurred. There's no question the
Nant'ina
is part of Dena'ina reality.”

Like the Dena'ina, most of Alaska's Native groups include some version of Hairy Man in their worlds. To many southwestern Eskimos, this being is
Urayuli.
To Lake Iliamna's Athabascans, it is
Get'qun
, to southeastern Tlingits,
Kushtaka
, and to Bristol Bay's Yup'iks,
A-hoo-la-huk.
For some, the Hairy Man is gentle; for others, menacing. But whether dangerous or harmless, human or ape-like, the creature most often seems to be dark-haired, larger than people, reclusive, solitary, nocturnal, and a forest- or mountain-dweller. He doesn't speak, but may scream, whistle, or imitate animal sounds.

Sam Stepanoff has always been comfortable in wild places. An Aleut resident of Perryville and, later, Chignik Lake (villages on the lower Alaska Peninsula), he learned wilderness survival skills from village elders; even as a young boy, he would often go camping alone. “I was never afraid of anything,” he says, “not even in the dark.” But once, at age fourteen, he lost his usual cool.

Out harvesting sea urchins with friends one night, Stepanoff
heard a dog barking in the nearby mountains. Recognizing it as his dog that had run off four days earlier, he followed the howls into the hills and tracked it down. As he stooped to pick up the dog, “the alders made some noise right beside me, and I saw a person. I thought it was the boys; we used to play around, scare each other. I said, ‘Knock it off, I know who you are.' But it didn't move, so I shined a flashlight, and it was a man, his face just pure wrinkles. I said, ‘Who are you?' but got no answer. He's just looking straight at me, not speaking. I got so scared, I dropped my dog and went down the cliff. I ran to where [the others] were gathering wood for a bonfire, and told them what I'd seen, and they took off running, too.”

Back in Perryville, Stepanoff shared his story with the village elders, who searched the hill but found nothing, not even tracks. The elders told him other “hairy guys” had been seen in the hills; occasionally they'd come into the village and rob fish from smokehouses.

“I've read all about the Abominable Snowmans and Bigfoot,” Stepanoff says. “But the guy I seen was little, smaller than me. I never could figure it out; he just looked like a real old man, all wrinkled. He had a beard and was kind of hairy, but he was human.”

An aside. There are numerous Native stories of “little people” who dwell in Alaska's mountains. But they tend to be leprechaun-sized beings, whose bodies are not covered with hair. John Gumlickpuk, a Yup'ik elder in New Stuyahok, has described an
iircingarak
, or mountain spirit, that he saw many years ago. It resembled a regular person but was much shorter, carried a stick and wore a tall, pointed hat. When Gumlickpuk approached, the
iircingarak
vanished without a trace. “Most of the time they're invisible,” he explained through a translator. “But occasionally they allow themselves to be seen.”

Gumlickpuk also once encountered a Hairy Man near Togiak, where he was born in 1906. Then in his early thirties, he went outside at sunrise and met a man covered with long hair. “He was as big as us, but hairy all over,” Gumlickpuk says. “The only place he didn't have hair was his face.” Startled by Gumlickpuk, the man quickly ran away.

Speedy exits are characteristic of many Bristol Bay Hairy Men. “I've talked to lots of people in the Nushagak and Togiak drainage, and the stories they tell have many similarities,” says state wildlife biologist Larry Van Daele. “One thing that's consistently said about Hairy Men, is that they can run incredibly fast. Another is that they can jump long distances, over large rivers or trees.”

Case in point: John Gumlickpuk's wife, Elena, tells of a Hairy Man who was spotted by a woman washing clothes. When confronted, she says, “he jump off, way far. He could jump over high bushes and really run fast.”

Numerous Hairy Man sightings have been made in the
Lake Iliamna area east of Bristol Bay. During the mid-1970s, one was reportedly shot and wounded at the Athabascan village of Iliamna. Bush pilot Tryg Olsen recalls, “The thing was supposed to be as large as a moose standing on its hind legs. Jim Coffee said he shot it, and when they checked where it apparently bled, they found what looked like red transmission fluid. There was quite a fuss; a story got written in the newspaper, and a TV crew even got sent out. But they never found it.”

Though it didn't receive any media attention, an even more remarkable encounter with hairy bipeds occurred nearly two decades earlier in Iliamna. Myrtle Anelon, a lifelong resident, was seventeen when two “hairy things” visited her home in October 1957.

One night, after everyone had gone to bed, the family's cat began meowing loudly, then scampered up a ladder onto the roof. Shortly after, there was a loud crash, “like something had fallen through the ladder's steps,” Anelon says, “and while falling it broke the bedroom window next to Mom's bed.” Myrtle and two brothers went outside, where they found several tracks, “really huge, but narrow, with big toes. We knew that nobody around there had big feet like that.”

Later that night, the family's dogs began barking, “like they're really scared,” Anelon says. “Mom tells the boys to take a bright flashlight, and shine it where the dogs are looking. When they did, they saw two real hairy things; they thought it was two bears standing on their hind legs. They come running in saying, ‘Give me a gun, a knife, anything,' but my mom says, ‘Don't kill anything. You don't know what they are. They might be human.'

“The boys go back out and don't shoot, but they start chasing those things all over the place. They said the things ran like humans, not bears, but were full of hair, and fast. They came around three nights in a row, even looked in our windows.
Mom said they were probably wild people, and if we don't harm them, they won't harm us. So we never bothered them anymore, and they kind of quit coming around. I never saw them, but my brothers did.”

Several theories have been proposed to explain Hairy Men. One is that they're simply humans who've gone wild. Out in the forests and mountains they become larger, faster, and more hairy, though no one knows how, or why.

“Through the years, we've had people just disappear, with absolutely to trace,” says Shirley Nielsen, a lifelong resident of the Bristol Bay Iliamna region. “The thought is that these people have gone back to the wild, but who knows? In a village like this, there's lots of superstition. And we always used to say that one way parents can control their kids is by saying, ‘You have to be in by dark, or the Hairy Man will get you.'”

Van Daele, the wildlife biologist, recounts a more supernatural explanation that bears a vague resemblance to the Dracula legend. “What I've heard is that some folks wander off, get lost and are caught by Hairy Man, who eats their livers while they're still alive. After their livers are eaten those people also become a Hairy Man, and have special powers.”