by Delta Discovery staff
One late summer day, a man from St. Mary’s took a trip to Mt. Village along the St. Mary’s-Mt. Village Road on his four-wheeled ATV. It was August or September in 2011.
The St. Mary’s-Mt. Village road begins and ends at the airports of both villages, a distance of about 15 miles. The road goes over rolling, tundra-covered hills. The wide Yukon River could be seen flowing northerly on the west and south side of the road. Valleys drain the hills on its north and east side, and brush lines the streams flowing out of the valleys.
The man had gone on this stretch of road many times before, and as he rode his ATV on this day he looked around as he usually does. The weather was clear and sunny. It was about the noon hour and a nice day to be out and about.
Traveling along the road, he saw about 30 cranes feeding on the tundra on one of the hills. He even saw a cow and calf moose feeding along the brush at the bottom of a valley.
But on this day, he also saw something very unusual along the north side of the road not too far from some brush in a valley. “It was something I couldn’t recognize. It was standing straight up,” he said.
So he stopped his ATV to look at the object and try to figure out what he was seeing. The cranes and moose were moving as they fed but this thing wasn’t moving; it was still and motionless. He looked long at it without recognizing what it was.
He then got on the seat of his ATV and stood on it to see if it would help him see the thing better, or identify it. “The figure was all dark, and it’s black hair was shiny like a black bear’s coat, but it wasn’t a black bear,” he added. He could easily recognize a black bear, having lived around them all of his life.
He looked at the thing intently for several minutes, waiting for it to move so he could at least realize what this thing was. “I didn’t know what to think of it,” he said, but it did seem to appear taller than him. It was about 50 yards from the brush.
Finally, he decided to head up the road a little ways for a better look at the thing. But when he got there and looked again at where the standing figure was, it was gone. “I think it went off to hide in the brush,” he said.
He noticed the moose were also gone, but the cranes were still feeding on the tundra. So he waited a few minutes to see if the dark figure would show up again. But it didn’t. The man had things to do, he said, and didn’t have time to go down to the valley to check what it was, so he kept on going to Mt. Village.
“I can’t tell you if what I saw was a Hairy Man or not,” the man said. “I just couldn’t tell, but it was about the same time when others were seeing a Hairy Man around this area.”
The witness requested anonymity in this story. Most people believe he saw a Hairy Man. It is a characteristic of the Hairy Man in other stories to freeze or remain motionless in place until the person looking at it turns away, and when s/he looks back at it again, it is gone.
