Over seventy years prior to 2023, an elderly witness named Grandma Ruby was a young girl living in a remote village along the Yukon River. Following a large salmon harvest that was hanging in the family smokehouse, she walked to a trail corner near the dense tree line to sit on a doghouse belonging to her sled dog companion, Blackie. While wearing a newly tailored, rabbit-fur-lined kuspuk hood and practicing traditional native drum dance songs, she heard movement behind her in the thicket. Suddenly, a massive black hand reached from the brush, grabbed her kuspuk hood, and forcefully dragged her backward toward the tree line, tightening around her neck and preventing her from screaming.
Ruby managed to escape by slipping completely out of her hood and upper shirt. As she struggled on the tundra, Blackie charged out and bit the creature's forearm, attempting to divert its path. The entity—estimated in the 6-foot range with a jet-black face, white wide jaw, minimal facial hair, and an intense odor of rotten fish—advanced to grab her a second time, but the dog bit it again, enduring a violent hit before putting itself between Ruby and the attacker. The entity stood swaying in the timber until the village dogs began yapping, at which point it vanished into the brush.
Ruby's uncle quickly arrived with a rifle, and upon reviewing her torn clothing and spotting the massive silhouette slowly walking away past the tundra tree line, he alerted the village. Ruby's father and neighbors deployed a heavily armed tracking party into the brush, resulting in a lifelong seasonal warning regarding the repeating five-year cycle of the heavy salmon migration runs.
