by Delta Discovery staff
These short stories happened a few years to many years ago.
There is a story about a Kass’aq who lived in one of the Yukon River villages that saw and killed a Hairy Man. He fled the killing and went back to the village. Then at night, one or more Hairy Man creatures came to his house in the village and began to bother him. This went on night after night. Finally the Kass’aq, for fear or otherwise, got fed up with the visits by the Hairy Man or Men and left the village. The villagers didn’t know why he left, but soon word came about why he did.
A boater from Mt. Village was riding on the Yukon River when he entered the slough at Fish Village above Emmonak. While rounding a bend in the slough, he ran into a Hairy Man along the bank of the slough. As soon as the Hairy Man saw the boat, it ran off into the brush.
Commercial fishermen from Kotlik were drifting for salmon along one of the forks of the Yukon River when they spotted a Hairy Man along the riverbank. The fishermen watched it for as long as it was out on the riverbank.
A man in Alakanuk was riding in his ATV when he rounded a bend in the road. A Hairy Man stood up from alongside the road and began walking away. It crossed a pond effortlessly on its way to a stand of brush on the other side of the pond. When it got out of the water, it walked into the brush and disappeared.
A group of boys were walking home in Mt. Village when they spotted a large Hairy Man walking on the edge of town, below the old airport. The creature stopped and stared at them for a moment before it walked away and disappeared behind houses and brush. The boys continued on home.
A couple men from Alakanuk were checking sloughs while moose hunting between their village and Emmonak when they spotted an upside down tree root whose trunk appeared to have been driven deep into the ground not far from the slough. One of the men said it was used by the Hairy Man as a post and to look around for game from a higher vantage point. Southeast Alaska Natives say that upside down tree roots are used by the Kushtaka (or Bigfoots) to mark their territories.
