This comes from Simeon, who asked that only his first name be used, and happened in early 1994 near an unnamed village on Alaska's northwest coast, a little ways from treeline. He had saved about three or four years for a Polaris Indy 500, took delivery just after Christmas 1993, and had been riding it a couple of months, getting in last rides before winter ended. One morning, in very dense fog on packed, winding trails, after accidentally hitting the kill switch and restarting, he had a weird feeling and visibility was minuscule. The sled had a factory centrifugal-clutch problem that was burning through belts. He started hauling, smelled the belt burning, and broke trail to cut a loop back onto his packed trail, because the next turnaround was a couple of miles away. Climbing a hard ridge out of the softer snow, the belt gave out. He popped the cowling, pulled the old belt off, and was holding it up in the ambient light to check the wear when, past the belt, he saw a big, dark figure just at the fog line, almost out of view, moving smoothly between the trees. He had a little .22 single-shot survival rifle, but not with him. Shocked, he dropped the belt and watched the figure make a big circle around him. He yelled out "hey" and "hello," trying to get a response, and it was dead quiet. Then the figure was simply gone.
He dug under the Velcro seat flap for a spare belt, at first missing that one was already in a holder inside the cowling, then got the new belt on. The machine was half up on the packed trail, so he pushed the track and tunnel onto the hard pack, where it sat cockeyed, one ski in the soft snow and one on the hard. When he fired it up, the headlight caught green eye shine straight down the trail that then went away. He had disturbed a couple of moose earlier that morning and figured this was one of them, chalking the walking figure up to a moose. Trying to get fully onto the hard pack, the rear kicked back into deeper soft snow and left him stuck. The new belt was squealing and smelling burnt, and it was the only good belt he had to get home, so he killed the machine and tried to drag it up by hand. Waist-deep, he was powerlifting the rear onto the hard pack when he heard a growl from the other side, blocked by the machine. He got up on his knees and saw the dark shape again, about 30 feet into the trees, moving faster, the growl going continuous. With the machine off it was essentially half darkness. He could barely turn with it as it made a couple of full circles at about 30 feet. He grabbed the rear bumper and got the track up. The growling got louder, and around the third circle it seemed closer. He also realized there were other figures in the distance that weren't moving, as if this one were distracting him. He guessed it at about seven or eight feet tall, maybe a little taller because he was up on the hard pack while it moved through soft snow, and said it wasn't overly hulking or robust and was going too fast to make out clearly.
He fired up and realized one of those other figures was really close to the side of the trail just ahead; when the headlight came on, it immediately moved away. He hit the throttle, worried about burning the new belt before he got close enough to home. In thicker fog, something ahead crossed the trail even faster than he was moving and stepped on the hard pack, breaking it up. He hit that broken stretch hard, then looked back and saw one that had stepped in the soft, broken spot and tripped, splayed out like someone who'd fallen on their face, right behind him. He wasn't sure if it was the same one that had crossed and circled back, or one that had been following since he took off. He ran the little switchbacks hard; trauma kicked in and he doesn't remember exactly how many times. When the trail opened out of the trees, he gave himself about half a mile to let the belt cool, with still more than a handful of miles to a safe place. Sitting there, he noticed dark shapes just inside the fog coming up on both sides, and, about a mile after that face-plant, one coming out of the fog at a fast clip toward him on the hard pack. That made three, with one hot on his tail. He tore across the flats, getting the track speed up to about 65 or 70 mph, and the last time he looked down it was around 80. The flankers stayed mostly parallel, the one on the left having fallen back a little, while the one directly behind was losing pace. After a few miles he hit thick fog on a muskeg marsh and ran over old overflow from a warm spring, a very bumpy stretch he was scared would wreck him. He made it to the outskirts of his village, stopped, and waited; nothing came through the fog. That was the last year he went snowmachining alone. About three or four years later he and a cousin took the same trails on different snowmachines; Simeon didn't see anything, but his cousin saw one following them in that same area, and to his knowledge no one has used those trails since. When Fred asked how it felt, Simeon said he was terrified, that in the switchbacks he almost got bucked off a few times, and that he felt he was in imminent danger.
