PART 2: Hunters Claim They Killed a Sasquatch in t...

Part 2

His name is Royce Adler. In the summer of 2001 he was thirty-four years old and he thought he knew what the woods were.

He had hunted since he was a boy. He had been alone in wild country dozens of times and never once felt afraid of it. Hold on to that, because the man who walked into that valley and the man who crawled out of that river are not the same man. The thing that changed between them was one shot fired in fear on a green summer afternoon.

He lived. That is not the twist. He is here to have his story told. But what living cost, and what he saw, and what came for him for six days in a rented cabin on the edge of nothing—that is the story. And then you can decide what you believe.

Royce had come off a bad year. His marriage had ended that spring and the work he did running heavy equipment on road crews had dried up. He had reached the point a certain kind of man reaches where he believes what he needs is to be completely alone in a large empty place for a while. He says he still half believes it. He still thinks about wild country the way a man thinks about a woman who nearly killed him.

He rented a cabin for two weeks that August. It was on the Kenai side of things, up a spur road in the coastal forest—the kind of thick wet green timber where the birch and alder grow close and you cannot see forty feet in any direction once you leave the road. The nearest anything was a lodge nineteen miles back down the spur. The cabin belonged to a man he never met, booked through a listing. Cash left in a coffee can under a rock by the door. There was a generator, a wood stove, a hand pump for water, and no signal of any kind. That was the point. That was why he came.

He had told one friend the name of the road and nothing more, and only that because the friend made him. He remembers being annoyed at being made to, because the whole idea was that nobody would know where he was.

Nobody knew where he was. That is the load-bearing fact of everything that happened.

He was there four days before it happened, and those four days were the last easy days he has ever had. He fished a small lake at the end of a game trail and caught more than he could eat. He split a great deal of wood—more than he needed—because splitting wood is the closest thing to peace he has ever found. He walked the old cut lines in the evenings with his rifle, an SKS his father had left him, the wood-stock kind, not because he expected anything but because a man walks in that country with a rifle the way he walks with boots.

On the third evening he found bear sign and thought that was the worst thing in those woods. On the fourth evening he found the river and stood a while watching it go by fast and cold and thought nothing of it, and did not know he was looking at the only thing that would save his life.

On the fifth evening he walked further than usual down a cut line into a low boggy stretch where the alders grew thick, and that is where he met them.

He did not see them come. Royce says he has talked to other men since—in the years after, men with their own stories and their own reasons to keep them quiet—and every one of them says the same thing. You do not see them come. They are there and then more of them are there and you never see the moment between.

He came around a screen of alder into a clearing and there were three of them in it, spread across the open ground thirty feet away, and a fourth off to his right at the edge of the trees. Black. Solid black. All of them tall, hunched at the shoulder, arms too long. And they were not surprised to see him.

That is the thing he needs you to understand. He was surprised. They were not. They had known he was coming down that cut line for who knows how long, and they had arranged themselves in that clearing, and they were waiting for him to walk into it.

And they started toward him. Not fast. That was almost worse. They came slow, spread out, closing the distance the way you herd an animal, the near ones angling to cut off the sides.

And Royce did the thing every instinct in a frightened man screams to do. He raised the rifle and he fired. He fired at the nearest one, the big one in the center, and he knows he hit it—at thirty feet you do not miss—and it did not fall. And it did not run. It stopped. It stopped and it looked at him. And the others stopped, and for one endless second the whole clearing was frozen, the smoke from his barrel hanging in the wet air. And Royce understood in that second with his whole body that he had done something very wrong.

Then they came at him fast, all of them, and he ran. He ran the cut line back the way he had come in a blind animal panic, and he could hear them behind him and beside him in the alders, keeping pace, that heavy crashing gait. And he did not think. He just ran for the one thing his mind could hold: the cabin.

By some grace he made the cabin door with them right behind him. He got in and threw the bar and stood in the middle of that one-room cabin with his heart trying to come out of his chest.

Something hit the wall. The whole cabin jumped. Dust came down from the rafters. Something hit the door and the bar held and the door held and he heard the wood groan. He got the rifle up. He got the shutters closed over the two windows—heavy plank shutters with iron pins. Thank God the man who built that place had built it against bears, or against these. Royce does not know which.

He barred everything he could bar. And then he stood in the middle of the room in the dark with his father’s rifle and listened to them go around and around the outside of the cabin all night long, hitting the walls, testing the door, running something hard and slow across the shutters like a fingernail as big as a knife.

That was the first night. There were six.

Royce says the story is not the running and it is not the river. The story is the six days and what they did to him without ever getting through the door.

They never left. That is the first thing. In all his life in the woods he had understood animals to move on, to lose interest, to have somewhere else to be. These did not. Every time he put his eye to the crack in the shutter, at any hour, one of them was in the tree line, standing, watching the cabin—just standing there at the edge of the green in the rain, patient as a stone. And when one moved off, another took its place. They were in shifts. He is careful saying that because he knows how it sounds, but they were in shifts, and animals do not work in shifts.

They did not let him sleep. The second night and every night after, the moment he started to go under, something would hit the cabin—one tremendous blow in the wall right beside his head—and he would come up with the rifle and his heart slamming, and nothing more would happen for an hour until he started to fade again. And then another blow on the other wall. They were doing it on purpose. They were taking his sleep from him a piece at a time. By the third day he was seeing things at the edges of the room. By the fourth day he was not sure anymore what he had heard and what he had dreamed.

They took the generator on the second day. He heard them do it—a wrenching and a dragging—and when he dared to look, the generator was simply gone from its lean-to, torn off its mounts and taken, and with it any light and any hope of noise covering him. They took the wood pile the same way, not all at once, a little at a time over the days, so that each morning there was less of it. And he understood after the second morning that they were not taking it for any use. They were taking it because he needed it, because the stove was the one warm living thing he had in there, and they wanted him to watch it get harder to keep.

That is a mind, Royce says. That is not an animal. An animal does not ration your firewood to break you.

On the third day one of them spoke through the wall. He does not know how else to say it. He was against the far wall in the gray afternoon light that came through the shutter cracks, and something came up to the outside of the wall close, and he heard it settle against the logs, and it made a low sound, very quiet, right at the level of his ear through the wood. And then it made another sound, different. And then it waited, like it was asking him something, like it was giving him a chance to answer. And when he did not answer—when he just sat there with his hand over his own mouth to keep from making any sound at all—it hit the wall once, hard, almost gently, the way you would knock a last time on a door you knew someone was hiding behind, and then it moved off.

Royce did not sleep at all that night. He prayed instead. He had not prayed since he was a boy, and he prayed all night, and he was not sure anyone was listening. But it was the only thing he had that they could not take through the wall.

They made sounds at night—long low sounds spaced around the cabin, answering each other—and once, only once, on the fourth night, something he will not describe well because he cannot. A sound that went up and up and had almost words in it. Almost. And every hair on his body stood up and he put his hands over his ears like a child.

By the fifth day he had begun to lose the edges of things. He would look at the shutter and be sure he had seen an eye at the crack—a real eye, wet and dark and level with his—and he would blink and there would only be the gray line of daylight. He would hear his own name in the sounds they made outside, which was not possible. They did not know his name. But he heard it anyway, low, drawn out from the tree line, and he knew it was his mind coming apart and he could not make it stop.

He ate the last of his food on the fifth day. There was nothing after that. And he sat in the dark and did the arithmetic of it—how long a man lasts without food, how long without sleep—and he understood that they had done the same arithmetic, that they had known it from the first night, that the whole siege was just the long patient wait for a number they already knew, and that the number was close.

On the fourth night they almost got in. He had thought the door and the shutters made him safe. He had told himself that for three days. On the fourth night they showed him they had been letting him believe it. They came at the door altogether, more than one—a weight against it that bowed the bar and cracked the frame and lifted the whole front of the cabin. And Royce got his shoulder against the door and his feet against the stove and held it. Held it with everything he had left. And he felt, on the other side of two inches of pine, a strength that made a joke of him. A strength that could have come through that door any moment of any of those days and had simply chosen not to. They held the pressure a long time—long enough for him to understand it completely—and then they let off, slow, deliberate, and the door settled back into its cracked frame, and something outside made a low sound Royce has never been able to think of as anything but satisfaction, and moved away.

That was when he stopped believing the door was keeping them out. The door was not keeping them out. Nothing he had was keeping them out. They were out because they had not yet decided to be in. And the only thing standing between him and whatever they meant to do was their own patience. And their patience was going to outlast him.

He had four days of food and made it six. He had the hand pump inside, thank God, so he had water. But by the fifth day he was starving and had not truly slept in five nights, and he had begun to understand that they were not going to leave and that no one was coming because no one knew where he was—because that had been the whole entire point. He was going to die in that cabin slowly and they were going to wait outside until he did. That was the plan and it was working. And it had all started with one shot.

There is one more thing from before the drone, and Royce says it is the thing that finally made him stop being only afraid and start being something that could act.

On the fifth night they brought something to the door and left it. He heard them come careful and heard a shifting and a settling right against the base of the door, and then they moved off further than they had moved in days. And it was so unlike everything else that he made himself, at first light, open the door a hand’s width against the bar to look down at the sill.

They had left the generator parts—his generator, the one they had torn off its mounts on the second day—broken apart, the pieces laid at his door. And laid among the pieces, arranged, not dropped, arranged, were other things. A boot that was not his. A strip of red cloth. A belt buckle green with age. The leavings, he understood, of other men. Men who had been where he was. Men whose things these creatures had kept the way a man keeps what is left of the deer on the wall, and had brought now to lay at his door so he would understand exactly how this ended. So he would see the previous chapters of the same story laid out on his own doorsill in the gray morning light.

He shut the door. He sat down against it. And something in him that had been only afraid for five days went very cold and very clear. And he thought plainly that he was not going to be a belt buckle at the next man’s door. Not without trying everything. Not without dying on his feet doing something.

That is when he got up and tore the cabin apart for the last time, all the way floor to loft. And on the sixth day he found the drone.

It was up in the loft under a tarp behind a broken chair—a hard plastic case. And in the case was a drone. One of the camera drones, a quadcopter, the kind people fly for pictures. It belonged to the owner, some hobby of the man Royce never met. The battery was dead, but there was a charger. And though the generator was gone, there was a small hand-crank emergency charger for a phone in his own pack.

He sat in the dark on that sixth day and hand-cranked a phone charger into a drone battery for what felt like a hundred years, a little at a time, watching the tiny light. And he made a plan.

The plan was insane, and it was the only plan he had. The drone was loud. He remembered that from watching people fly them—that high angry whine. And he remembered, too, that these things, whatever they are, they attend to sound above almost everything. They had spent six days using sound against him. He was going to use it against them.

The hand-crank was the worst part. It was never meant to fill a drone battery. And Royce sat in that dark cabin, starved and shaking and half out of his mind, and cranked it. Hours. His arm gave out and he switched arms and it gave out too and he switched back. The little indicator light on the battery crawled. Outside they hit the walls when he started to fade, and he welcomed it now. He welcomed the blows because each one woke him enough to crank a little more. And he laughed at that once—a bad laugh alone in the dark—that the thing keeping him alive was the thing sent to kill him.

He got it to what looked like half. It would have to be enough, because his arm would not do anymore and neither would the rest of him.

The plan was to fly the drone out of the cabin, out the door, away from him, down the cut line, and make it loud and make it move and pray that they went after it—all of them—the way a dog goes after a thrown thing. And in the seconds while they were looking the wrong way, he would run.

He knew where he was running. On his walks that first easy week he had found the river—a fast, cold glacial river, maybe four hundred yards behind the cabin, down a slope through the timber. He had thought at the time it was too fast and too cold to cross. Now it was the only door out of the trap, because it went somewhere, down and out to where the country opened. And water carries you, and water does not leave a trail a nose can follow.

He got the battery to something like half a charge as the light started to go on the sixth day, and he decided he could not wait for night and could not wait for dark and could not wait one more hour, because one more hour and he would not have the strength to run at all.

He opened the door at dusk with the drone in his hands, and Royce says he has never in his life been so afraid. There were at least three of them in the tree line that he could see. He did not look hard for the rest. He turned the drone on and its lights came up and its motors screamed to life in his hands. That high angry whine filled the clearing and every dark shape at the edge of the trees turned toward it at once.

He threw it up and forward and worked the little controller with shaking hands and flew it out over the clearing, away from him, down the cut line to the south—low, loud, wobbling, a screaming blinking thing tearing off through the dusk. And he put everything he had into making it interesting, swooping it, buzzing the tree line. And he watched over the top of the controller as three, then four, then more dark shapes broke from the trees and went after it.

They went after it. It worked. They went south after the screaming light, fast, that terrible speed. And for about four seconds the way behind the cabin—the way to the river—was open.

He dropped the controller and he ran. He ran down the slope through the timber toward the river with no rifle. He had left it. He had left everything, running with empty hands and no breath and legs that had not truly worked in six days. And behind him, almost at once, he heard the note of the whole forest change. He heard the drone’s whine stop, cut off, and he heard a sound go up behind him that was rage. Pure rage. And he heard them come. They had figured it out in seconds. They came after him down the slope and they were faster than him—so much faster—and he could hear them closing. And he did the only thing left. He ran straight off the cutbank at the river without slowing down. And he jumped.

The water hit him like a wall. Glacial melt, so cold it stopped his heart for a beat. And the current took him at once, hard, faster than a man can run, and pulled him under and rolled him. And he did not fight it because he had no fight left. He just went with it, down and down the cold black river in the last of the light.

Royce does not remember much of the river, and what he remembers he does not fully trust. He remembers the cold most of all. It was not like being cold. It was like being struck all over at once—a cold that reached into the middle of him and squeezed. And his body wanted to gasp, and if he had gasped he would have drowned in the first three seconds, and some old animal part of him clamped his throat shut against the water while the rest of him screamed.

He remembers going under and not being able to find up. The river was fast and dark and turned him over and over and there was no surface, only black cold water in every direction. And he remembers the specific horror of not knowing which way to reach.

He remembers hitting a rock with his shoulder so hard his arm went dead—the whole left side of him numb and useless—and thinking with a strange flat calm that he was now a one-armed man in a river that took strong two-armed men and that this was the end of it.

He remembers being pushed under a sweeper, a fallen tree lying out across the current, the branches raking his back, and how close that was, because a sweeper is the thing that drowns rivermen, holding you under while the water pours over you. And he remembers the branches letting him go when they had no reason to let him go.

And he remembers praying—not with words, past words, just a single long reaching upward with everything left in him. And the strangest thing, which is that somewhere in the middle of that reaching he stopped being afraid. The cold stopped mattering. The dead arm stopped mattering. He went somewhere very quiet and very still while his body went on being thrown down the river. And from that quiet place he was not fighting anymore and not afraid and simply waiting to see what would happen, the way you wait at the end of a long day to see if someone is coming to the door.

He should have drowned. Royce is clear about that. A man at the end of six days without food or sleep, with a dead arm, in a glacial river at speed in the dark under a sweeper, drowns. That is what happens. That is the only thing that happens. Every riverman he has told this to has gone quiet at that part because they know what that river was and they know what should have come of it.

He did not drown.

He came to on a gravel bar a long way downriver in full dark, face down, half in the water, breathing, and he does not know how he got there and has never been able to explain it and has stopped trying. His dead arm had come back enough to hurt. He dragged himself the rest of the way up onto the gravel with it screaming and lay there on the stones in the dark. And he was alive, and he could hear the river going by that had not taken him, and he could not stop shaking. And it was not only the cold.

He walked out over the next day and a half. He had no boots that he remembers keeping, no rifle, no food, and a shoulder that would not work right. And he followed the water downstream because water goes somewhere, and he drank from it and did not think. He just walked, one foot and then the other, along the gravel and through the brush.

The whole first day he kept looking back and kept listening, certain they would come down the river after him. They did not come. Below that river, past that valley, they did not come. It was as if the valley was theirs and the river was the edge of it, and once the water had carried him over the edge he had passed out of their country and out of their accounting, and they were done with him.

The second day he came to a bridge on the main road, and a couple in a truck found him walking the shoulder. They told him later they had almost not stopped because they could not at first understand what he was—this gray, starved, shaking thing that had come up out of the trees, more like a drowned animal than a man.

He told them he had gotten lost. He told the troopers he had gotten lost. He told the doctor who treated him for exposure and a separated shoulder and six days of starvation that he had gotten lost on a hike and fallen in the river. And the doctor looked at him a long moment because none of it added up. A lost hiker does not look the way Royce looked. But he wrote down what Royce said. What else was there to say?

Royce went back once, years later, with two other men in daylight and no intention of leaving the truck. The cabin was still there. His rifle was still inside it, right where he had left it, and his pack, and the empty drone case in the loft. Nobody had touched any of it. The listing was long gone by then. He does not think that place was ever really rented to anyone but him. And in the mud around the cabin, grown over but still there if you knew to look, were the marks of six days of something walking a circle. A packed trail worn into the earth all the way around the building, round and round and round.

Royce keeps coming back to the one shot. Everyone he has ever told this to wants to know about the river and the drone and the six days, and those are the parts that sound like a story, but they are not the story. The story is the one shot. He has gone over it ten thousand times. If he had not raised the rifle, if he had stood still, if he had backed away with his hands down and his eyes down and let them do whatever it was they had actually come to do—which he no longer believes was to harm him, because if they had wanted to harm him they had six days and one door of pine boards to do it through and they did not—he thinks they came to look at him. He thinks that is all it was at the start. Four of them come to look at the man walking down the cut line, curious the way anything is curious. And he raised a rifle and fired into the middle of them and hit one of their own. And everything—the six days, the drone, the river, all of it—was the price of that.

He does not know if the one he shot lived. He has prayed that it did. He has prayed for it more than for almost anything—this thing he was raised to believe was a legend and a lie—and he does not fully understand his own prayers and he says them anyway.

Royce has met other men since. It is a thing that happens when you carry something like this. You find the others or they find you, quietly, at the edges of things. Men with their own valleys and their own six days and their own reasons never to go back. They do not talk about it much even to each other, but every one of them has the same look, and every one of them has come to the same two conclusions.

The first is that these things are not what we were told they are. Not animals and not monsters. A people—old and hidden and terrible when they are wronged, but a people with their young and their dead and their grief and their patience. And there is a way to be in their country that keeps a man alive, and Royce did not know it, and he raised a rifle.

The second is that he was let go. Not that he escaped. Let go. The drone, the river, the prayer, all of it—and at the end he walked out with his life. And he has never been able to believe that a people who could hold a door shut with a man’s shoulder against it and choose not to come in could not have taken him any hour of any of those six days. They chose not to. And the closest he has come to understanding why is this: that he fired one shot in fear and hit one of their own, and they made him live through every consequence of it—all six days and the river and the years of not sleeping—and then they let him carry it out so that he would tell it, so that the next man down the cut line might lower his rifle instead of raising it.

He is alive, but he should not be. A man does not survive that river, and he survived it. And he has spent the years since quietly certain that he was let out of that valley the same way he believes he was pulled out of that water—that he was spared. And that being spared is not the same as being forgiven. And that he will spend whatever is left of his life trying to tell the difference.

He fired one shot and he has never fired another one. He says he never will.

Real or fake, you decide.

But Ellis Warick has the photograph from 1998, and Royce Adler has the packed trail worn into the earth around a cabin that should have been empty, and somewhere between British Columbia and the Kenai there are other men who carry the same weight in the same quiet way. And the accounts are still open. The forest has not finished settling them.