About two seasons ago, Tim, a biologist, came up to interior Alaska to visit Valerie, whom he had met in college, to see whether a relationship might work. Valerie's best friend Laverne came along, and the three rented one of the state's public-use cabins outside Fairbanks, reaching it in a borrowed canoe with a couple of portages. It was midday in May. While Tim and Valerie talked down by the canoe, Laverne carried gear up to the cabin, and on her second trip she noticed the small back window over the kitchen counter had gone dark. As she focused on it she saw hair, then the shape moved off and light came back through. Thinking Valerie was peeking in as a joke, she walked around the corner, only to look down and see Valerie and Tim still at the canoe while a tall dark figure moved off into the brush on two legs. When Tim ran up with his phone camera to get a picture of what he assumed was a bear, a brief but powerful whoop-scream shocked him into dropping his phone and the small fish club in his other hand, and all three hurried inside. Moments later, a bang shook the cabin.
After waiting about 40 minutes, they went out together, Tim with the shotgun and Laverne with her .44 Magnum. His phone and club were no longer where he had dropped them. Deciding to leave, they found the canoe had been dragged completely out of the water, and as they pushed off Tim stepped on his phone near the shore, cracked at one corner but still working. About halfway across the lake, as they neared the narrow feeder creek they had to take out, a massive figure Tim conservatively put at 12 feet or more jumped across the 10-to-12-foot-wide creek ahead of them. Fearing an ambush in that tight, brushy channel, they paddled back to the cabin, and partway up the trail an air-raid-siren scream reverberated through their bodies from where the creature had last been seen.
With curtains drawn, they hid in the loft until the women needed to relieve themselves. Tim stepped out to pee beside the cabin while Valerie covered him with the shotgun, and the creature walked out from the back corner and crossed right in front of him, hunched and tilted forward like the Patterson-Gimlin footage, with very long arms. He scrambled inside, and no sooner had he shut the door and leaned against it than something slammed it so hard he felt it could have knocked the door down. Standing at the foot of the loft ladder with the shotgun, he watched a shadow circle past the windows, but when he took aim at the dark silhouette behind the rear curtain he was overcome by a feeling that if he fired he would be dead. They finally made a run for it in daylight, Laverne watching the banks with her pistol and Valerie holding the shotgun, down the shallow creek, across a smaller pond about a mile from the cabin, and over a short portage, as one last siren scream ending in a loud clicking or popping came from the direction of the cabin. They left the canoe at the parking area and spent the rest of the visit in Fairbanks.
