Roughly a decade ago, David and his wife Trina traveled by skiff upriver from Ruby along the Yukon River, hiking about a mile inland to reach a traditional family berry-picking site situated on an elevated meadow. While David was showing Trina how to harvest prime blueberries and salmonberries near an ancient beaver pond, an unnaturally sharp, piercing whistle echoed across the clearing from the tree line roughly eighty-five yards away. The blast brought an immediate, unnatural silence over the landscape, replacing the normal sounds of birds and wilderness with an oppressive stillness.
Calling out to see if a fellow villager was in distress, David was answered by a deep, garbled vocalization that resembled rough, primitive speech. Overcome by panic, Trina bolted down the trail toward the river, with David quickly catching up to guide her as heavy, unseen movement shadowed them at a forty-five-degree angle through the brush. As the path descended into tight switchbacks, Trina suddenly dropped to the ground; milliseconds later, a thirty-inch chunk of deadfall beetle-kill spruce hurled through the air directly where they had been standing. David immediately raised his shotgun and fired two rounds at the dark, silhouetted form standing forty feet away, unleashing a concussive, deafening roar from the creature.
Scrambling past the fallen log and racing down the remaining switchbacks, the terrified couple reached their beached skiff just as relatives were rounding the bend in a second boat to join them. As David frantically started the kicker and gestured for the second boat to reverse course, the same ground-shaking roar blasted from the dense foliage directly on the riverbank, prompting both skiffs to flee downstream at full throttle. Upon returning home, family elders confirmed this was roughly the fourth time over an ongoing multi-year cycle that an aggressive territorial entity had claimed that particular berry patch and violently driven visitors away.
