During a spring seal hunt on the windswept far west coast of Alaska, Gabriel and his younger cousin Lenny were set up in a driftwood blind when the wind shifted, bringing an overwhelming, putrid stench of rotting meat. Feeling an intense, sudden sense of being watched, the two men temporarily abandoned their blind. While regrouping in the towering coastal sawgrass, Lenny spotted a massive, dark figure pacing them in the distance. Investigating the area, they discovered massive, 20-inch humanoid footprints deeply sunk into the coastal mud.
Dismissing the tracks as a bear, the hunters relocated and successfully shot a harbor seal. As Lenny finished gutting the harvest and washing the carcass in the surf, he turned to see a towering, dark-haired entity standing directly behind Gabriel on the grassy bank. Frozen in a terrified trance, Gabriel only snapped out of it when Lenny frantically threw a waterlogged piece of driftwood that accidentally struck Gabriel’s rifle barrel. The two men sprinted down the beach, taking cover behind a small, isolated tuft of sod to watch the massive creature gorge itself on the seal gut pile.
As they hid, Lenny was horrified to spot a second, smaller creature with deep reddish-cedar skin and a whitish-gray face crawling toward them on its belly in a military-style stalk. Gabriel fired a warning shot, sending both creatures scattering, and the cousins began a grueling mile-long sprint through the dense sawgrass. Pursued by deafening, chest-compressing screams and a dark shape continually popping up in the grass behind them, they barely made it to a tidal ravine where a relative on a four-wheeler arrived just in time to rescue them from a notoriously dangerous stretch of coastline.
