Bigfoot Filmed From Four Feet Away in the Yukon, Then the Footage Was Seized in 1994

Bigfoot Filmed From Four Feet Away in the Yukon, Then the Footage Was Seized in 1994

On the morning of October 3rd, 1994, a line cutter named Neil Pelky walked out of a survey camp on a tributary of the Stewart River in the Yukon Territory and did not speak again for two days.

That is where every version of the story starts, because it’s the only part that was seen by more than one man.

I have spent twenty years with what came after. I never met Neil Pelky. By the time I found his name, he did not want to be found. What I have are two things. The first is a field log, kept in a cheap spiral notebook with water-stained pages, recovered from a duffel bag the company never collected from a shed in Mayo. The second is the working file of a claims investigator named Margaret Vesseli, brought in three months later when North Star Geomatics filed for a missing-man payout on one Gunnar Tully, 61, and the insurer, to its credit, refused to write a check that said “lost in wilderness” when the file so obviously said something else.

These are the bones. The flesh is Pelky’s, in his own words, until the record leaves his hands.

I. The Log

I have cut line for 30 years and I have never turned down a valley. I turned down two before this one.

That is his first line. Pelky writes like a man who measures words because he has spent his life measuring distance.

The pay was wrong. That’s the second thing he writes. Too high for the work. “When the pay is too high for the work, it means the men who set it already know something you do not.” He was 57. He took it anyway because, as he puts it, “there’s not much line left to cut for a man my age. A younger man says no and finds other work. An old man says yes and hopes.”

Six men staged out of a camp on a tributary. The foreman was Rurick Dornan. Pelky had cut with Dornan before. “He is a careful man which is why what happened later sat so wrong on him. A careless foreman you can blame. A careful one you cannot and that is worse because then the fault is not a man.”

The contract itself was ordinary, except for one environmental condition. The territory wanted animal movement logged down the whole corridor. Grizzly, caribou, whatever crossed the cut. So they ran a string of trail cameras. Pelky stops to explain them, as if he needs you to understand they were not there to look for anything strange.

“If you’ve never seen one, a trail camera is a small box you strap to a stake or a trunk. It watches nothing and everything. Motion trips it. It fires in the dark on its own, and it does not care if you are there.”

They staked them at intervals down the line and ran a rotation, swapping the memory cards every few days and carrying them back to log in the mess tent. That is the whole reason any film exists at all. “No man aimed a camera at anything. The cameras were watching the line for animals on a timer in the dark with no one there. I want that understood before I go on. We were not looking for it. It found the cameras.”

The trouble started before they cut a foot of line.

They hired a packer out of the settlement, Selby Voran, a man Pelky had known for years, a man known for packing gear into places that would kill a younger man. Voran got to the airstrip, saw the corridor coordinates on the work order, and quit on the spot. Would not fly in, would not say why beyond, “It was not his kind of country.”

Then a father and son, the Scarlands, hired to help stake the line. They drove up, looked at the same coordinates, turned the truck around in the lot. The old man rolled his window down before he left and told Dornan one thing, the way you would tell a man his brake line was cut.

“It was the wrong valley to be cutting line in.”

Dornan had to overpay to fill the crew. They laughed about it that first night. Superstitious old-timers spooked by a map. That’s what Pelky wrote on night one.

“I do not laugh at it now.”

The last man Dornan hired was a kid from down south who had never worked the north and did not know one Yukon valley from another and so had no reason to say no. “That is who you end up with when the men who know the country will not go. The ones who know say no and the paper gets filled with the ones who do not know. And I have thought since that this is not an accident. I have thought that the valley empties itself of the men who understand it and lets in only the ones who cannot read the warning and that this too is a kind of keeping.”

One more thing before they cut. A float plane brought the first load of supplies. The pilot would not shut his engine down. He held it running on the water the whole time they offloaded, and when the last crate was out, he was gone before Dornan could walk down to the float. Every plane after that was a different pilot. A man flies a contract. He flies the whole contract. Theirs would each fly in once and never come back, as if flying their camp once was a thing a man did once and then arranged never to do again.

The first week was ordinary. Cold, wet, long days. The cameras came back with what cameras come back with. A grizzly sow. Caribou at a crossing. A fox that sat down in front of the lens and stared into it for the better part of an hour, frame after frame, which they passed around and thought was funny.

“I want to set down how ordinary it was because it matters to what came after.”

Two men would walk the line every third day, pull the cards, drop fresh ones, check the straps and seals. At night in the mess tent they would sit with a little viewer and log what was on them for the environmental file. Grizzly, note the time. Caribou, note the number. Tedious work, and Pelky had done tedious work all his life, and there is a comfort in it.

Then the small wrong things.

A camera off its stake. Not fallen. A fallen camera lands in the brush face down or face up and is still pointed somewhere. This one was pulled clean off and sat on the ground facing into the dirt, as if someone had knelt and turned it to look at nothing. A bear will knock a camera loose. A bear does not aim it. They staked it back up.

Then the smell. Two men working the far end came back and said there was a stretch of the corridor that smelled wrong. Not a dead animal. They both knew a dead animal. This was a live smell. A wet, warm animal smell in a stretch of line where nothing was and nothing had been. There in the morning, gone by afternoon, back the next morning. Always the same forty yards.

Then the camera that was lost and came back changed. One of the far cameras was gone off its stake, strap and all. They searched the brush and did not find it, wrote it off as a bear carrying it away, which happens, and staked a fresh one. Three days later, on the next swap, that lost camera was back. On its stake. Strapped exactly as it had been. And the fresh camera they had put there was gone in its place. Someone had taken their camera, kept it three days, then returned it and taken the other, as though it were running a swap rotation of its own alongside theirs. Learning the thing they did and doing it back to them.

When they pulled the card from the returned camera, it was full. Hundreds of frames, all from the three days it had been gone. All of the inside of somewhere dark and close. A texture the men argued was hide and Pelky thought was the inside of something and did not say so. That card he did not log. He put it at the bottom of the box.

Then a card came back blank. A full night, time stamp said the camera had been running the whole time, and there was nothing on it. Not black. Blank, fired frames with nothing in them at intervals all night, as if the thing had been triggered again and again by something that did not show.

Then the 3 a.m. frame. One camera down the corridor caught something at the very edge of the frame at 3:00 in the morning. Half the crew said bear. It stood at the tree line where the flash barely reached and what you could see of it was too tall and too wide at the shoulder and standing in a way a bear does not stand for that long. But it was at the edge and it was grainy, and a tired man will call anything a bear if the other answer is worse.

“I called it a bear too. In my log, I wrote bear. I want to be honest that I wrote bear. That was the last easy word I put in this book.”

The knocking started that same week. At night, out past the tents, a knock. One knock, then quiet, then a knock from somewhere else. Wood on wood. “Any man who has spent a life in the bush has heard trees crack in the cold and knows the difference between a tree and a hand. And this was a hand.” It came most nights after that, never close, never far, moving around the camp in a slow circle across the dark, like something pacing the edge of the light and testing the trees as it went.

Denny Ashworth was the youngest, 24, good on his feet, quick, the kind of young man who does not get tired the way the rest do. Denny said one morning that he had woken in the night and there had been a weight against the outside of his tent. Not a paw, a hand flat, pressed against the canvas at the height of a tall man’s shoulder from the outside, holding still. He had lain there and watched the shape of it push the canvas in and had not moved.

Two days later Denny went out on a swap rotation to pull two cards down the far end. A two-hour walk and a two-hour walk back.

Denny did not come back that night.

They searched the corridor and the flanks for two days, calling his name down the cut until their voices were gone. Dornan called it in on the radio and there was talk of a plane. They found one of the two cameras Denny had gone to pull, pulled and set on the ground facing the way he would have walked, as if it had been turned to watch him go. The second camera they never found at all.

On the second day, Denny walked into a trapper’s clearing eleven miles out on the far side of a ridge and the trapper drove him to a road.

Eleven miles over a ridge no man crosses on foot in two days. Denny had no gear, no memory of walking it, and not one scratch on him. A man who walks eleven miles through that country comes back torn to pieces by the brush. His boots were clean. “That is the thing I keep. A man does not walk 11 miles of Yukon bush and keep his boots clean. And Denny’s boots were clean as the morning he had put them on.”

He would not talk about it. He would not go near the line again. He sat in camp with his back to a wall and watched the tree line. When the rotation went out, he did not go.

After Denny, Pelky checked the cards alone. He did not pass them around anymore. He told Dornan and no one else.

“There were frames on those cards after Denny that I will not put in this book, and I have thought a long time about why. It is not that I cannot describe them. It is that describing a thing gives it a shape you have to carry.”

There were frames where it was in the corridor at night far down, standing in the cut and facing the camera, the way a man stands when he has stopped to look at something. Frames where it was closer the next night in the same posture, as if it had learned where the camera was and had begun to keep an appointment with it. Frames where there were two of them, one tall and one taller, at the far edge of the flash.

And there was one card, one night, one frame of something moving down the corridor in the dark with a load, carrying something heavy, low against its body, the way you would carry a thing you did not want to drag. “That is all. Six words in my log that night, and I will not write a seventh here.”

The crew was down to four working men. Dornan decided to keep running the cameras. The environmental file required it and the company required the file and Dornan was a careful man. But Pelky thinks there was more. “I think Dornan had begun to feel that the cameras were the only thing standing between us and the dark. That as long as we were the ones putting film in the valley, we were the ones asking the questions. And the day we stopped would be the day it started asking them back.”

Every card came back with a little more of it in the frame, a little closer, a little more at ease, until the film stopped feeling like something they were taking and started feeling like something they were being given.

There was a night Dornan tried to raise the outside on the radio and could not. Clear night. The set had worked that morning. It came back on its own an hour later. And in that hour, the knocking had gone all the way around the camp twice, slow, patient, and they had all sat in the mess tent and listened to it circle them with no way to call for a plane.

“I understood that whatever it was, it knew what a radio was for the same way it knew what a camera was for. And it had decided we would spend that hour understanding that it could take the radio whenever it wanted and had chosen for now to give it back.”

The young southerner tried to leave on foot. He took a pack and started down the drainage toward where he thought a road was, a hundred miles off if it was a foot. He made it perhaps two hours before he came back into camp white and shaking, and would not say what turned him around.

Denny said one thing in that stretch that Pelky wrote down word for word. He was watching the trees, without turning his head, and said that it had not brought him back. Everyone kept saying he had come back, that he had walked out eleven miles and come back and that it was not true. He had not walked anywhere. “It had carried him out and set him down where the trapper would find him, the way you carry a thing and set it down, and that the reason his boots were clean was that his boots had not touched the ground the whole eleven miles.”

Then Pelky stopped sleeping, the week the close-up came. A camera near the camp, the nearest one to the line, fired a burst one night. Motion close. When he pulled that card, he saw it from four feet.

“I am not going to describe it the way you want me to. I know what you want. You want the eyes and the face and the height of it. All of it laid out so you can decide for yourself. I am not going to give you that. I have carried it 15 years and I’m not going to hand it to you clean. I will tell you it was Bigfoot. I will tell you it stood over 7 ft. And I will tell you the face was flat and wide and more like a man’s face gone wrong than any ape with a heavy bone across the brow and eyes that took the flashback flat. And that there was a torn notch in the left ear like a piece had been taken out of it long ago.”

It was four feet from the lens and it was looking into the lens. Not past it, into it.

The next morning that camera was gone from its stake. They found it set on the ground at the edge of camp, pulled clean and turned to face the tents, facing in, the way the first one had faced the dirt. It had brought the camera to them and set it down pointed at where they slept.

“I have never decided if that was a threat or something worse than a threat. Something patient.”

That night the knocking came right to the edge of the light and stopped and did not come again the rest of the season. “I do not know which was worse, the knocking or the night it decided it was done knocking.”

The supply plane came two days after the close-up and took the young southerner out. The pilot, a new one like all of them, did not shut the engine down.

Denny watched the plane go the way he watched the trees. Pelky asked him if he wanted out on the next one. Denny said there was no out. He said it had let the southerner go because the southerner had not seen it. Not really, not up close, and that a man who had not seen it up close was no use to it and no threat, and it did not care where he went. He said the ones it had seen, it did not let leave on a plane.

They were down to four. Dornan, Pelky, Denny who would not work, and a quiet man named Brimmer who did the work of two and said nothing.

The season had a week left. Dornan decided they would finish it.

When the season closed, it was Gunnar Tully who went out to pull the corridor cameras for the last time. You do not leave company cameras in the bush. Before he went, he stood at the edge of camp a while and looked down the cut. And then he looked back at the tents and then he went.

Pelky writes: “I have thought about the look back. I think he was counting us. I think he was making sure of the number he was leaving.”

Gunnar Tully did not come back. They searched until the weather turned and the company pulled them. They found one thing down the corridor at the last camera stake. The camera was pulled and bagged and set on the ground beside the hole where the stake had been. Bagged, set down neat as if he had pulled it, bagged it, set it at his feet to pick up and then not picked it up. His pack was there. His radio was there. His tracks went down the cut to the stake and they did not come back and they did not go on. They stopped at the stake, both boots together, the way a man stands when he has stopped to look at something.

The morning after Tully did not come back, before the searchers, before the company pulled them, Pelky walked out of the camp alone at first light.

“I think some part of me walked out to the tree line to put the question to it directly. The way you walk up to a dog you are not sure of.”

He walked to the edge of the cut and stood where the tracks had stopped, both boots together, and looked into the trees and waited to be answered.

“I was answered. I am not going to say how. I will say that I stood there some length of time I cannot account for. And that when I came back to camp, the sun was in a different place than it should have been for the time I thought had passed. And that I did not speak for two days after, not because I chose silence, but because for two days there were no words in me at all, as though something had gone through me and taken the words the way it took the film.”

That is where his part ends. He handed the cards and the log up to Dornan and Dornan handed them up the line and inside a few days men came for all of it.

II. The File

Margaret Vesseli started with paper because paper does not get scared.

A helicopter. Flight log showed a charter to the corridor in the middle of the season that no one on the crew had ordered and no one had seen land. Dornan did not order it. The company did not bill for it. It flew in and flew out. The only reason she knew it existed was a fuel record at a strip two valleys over. A single line, a tail number that went back to a registration that went back to a company that was an address and nothing else.

Second: cameras. The environmental file called for a set number of trail cameras. The rental invoice was for nearly twice that many. Someone had put cameras on that line that were not in the plan, and the extra units did not come back. She walked the corridor herself after the snow and found stake holes that matched no camera on the company’s map. Someone had been watching that line with cameras of their own from the start and had come and taken them back.

Third: the receipt. When the film and cards were taken at the end of the season, someone signed for them. Vesseli found the receipt in the company’s file. It was on letterhead with a seal and a signature line and a case number, and it named no agency. A receipt supposed to tell you who has your property. This one told you only that you no longer did. She ran the case number. It matched nothing in any system she had access to.

Then she went to the people.

She found Selby Voran. He gave her the same answer he gave Dornan. It was not his kind of country. She pushed. He told her his grandfather had packed that drainage and had told him one valley you did not take work in. What did his grandfather say was in it? Voran said his grandfather had not said what was in it. His grandfather had said what it did, which was keep. “It keeps.”

She found the Scarlands. The old man told her the country up there kept things and his people had known which valleys kept things and which did not, and that men had gone up that corridor before, and the ones who came back came back like her missing man’s friend had come back. Changed, quiet, watching the trees. She asked how he knew about Denny Ashworth. He said he did not know about that particular young man. He knew about the ones before. “It was always a young one. It sends back the young one. It keeps the old one.”

Vesseli wrote that she had now heard the word keep from two people who had never met and the phrase wrong valley from a third.

So she went looking for the seasons before.

The corridor overlapped a strip that the territorial survey record kept blank, not missing. Blank, a rectangle with no survey filed in country that had been surveyed all around it. She found three prior contracts that had gone into that drainage years apart, one in the 70s and two before that. All three ended early. All three had a name on the crew roster that went no further in any record than that roster. A man on the list and then nothing. No payout after, no next contract, no death filed, just a name and then the record closing over him.

In one of the three, beside a name someone had written in a hand that was not the clerk’s, the word returned. And beside a different name, the word not.

Returned and not. The old man’s words in a clerk’s margin decades before the old man said them to her.

She noticed the dates. The seasons that went into that valley did not go in at random years. They went in at a spacing, close enough that she could put them on a line and see the rhythm. A contract into that drainage every so many years, each one built the same way. A company formed and dissolved, a crew of men who did not know the country, a string of cameras, a helicopter no one ordered.

She wrote that the only reason she could imagine was that the thing in the valley required it, that the photographing was not something the men wanted and guarded against. It was something the thing wanted and the men provided every so many years on time, the way you feed a thing that must be fed.

Every one of those seasons had film. A game warden shot movie film in the 60s. A trapper before that kept stills and showed them once to a newspaper that ran a single paragraph and then in its next edition ran a correction saying the photographs had been withdrawn. Vesseli found the paragraph and she found the correction and she could find neither the trapper nor the stills. The film was logged and then gone, taken the same administrative way decades before a trail camera ever existed.

In a museum, she found a single surviving trace of the trapper stills from before the war. Not the stills, which were gone, but a letter the trapper had written to a natural history museum offering the photographs and the museum’s polite acceptance. Between the two letters, a gap of weeks. After the reply, no further correspondence, no plates received, no trapper heard from again. The folder sat in an archive for the better part of a century. Vesseli photocopied the two letters. When she went back a week later, the folder was there and the two letters were not, and the archivist had no record of anyone signing them out. She did not raise it, because by then she had learned what raising it cost.

She found in the 70s contract one man who had walked out alive and would talk. He lived alone at the end of a road and watched the tree line across the road the whole time the way Pelky wrote Denny watched the trees. She asked him what had happened to the other men on his crew. He said the valley kept the ones it wanted and sent back the one it wanted to carry the telling. Why would it want anyone to carry the telling? “So that the men who came for the film would have a reason to come. The film and the telling were the same thing to it. It let itself be photographed and it sent back a man to say so because being photographed was how it called the men who take the film and the men who take the film were the ones it was really talking to.”

She found a retired lab technician who had, as a young man, developed a roll for a government contract in the 60s under a man who stood at his shoulder the whole time and took each print as it dried. He had seen enough coming up in the tray to know what he was looking at, and the man at his shoulder had told him pleasantly that he had developed a roll of caribou. The technician said, “Yes, caribou.” He signed a paper saying caribou. He told Vesseli he had a family and saying caribou was the smartest thing he ever did. Then he told her that the man at his shoulder had not aged. He had seen the same man or a man exactly like him 30 years later at the funeral of the warden who shot the 60s film, standing at the back.

She tried to find Rurick Dornan. She traced him to a town and the town to a box number and the box number to a lawyer who wrote her one letter saying his client had no recollection of the matter and no wish to acquire one. Vesseli wrote that this was the only thread that led to a living man who did not want to talk, as opposed to a dead man who could not, and that it told her Dornan had been given the same choice the lab man had been given.

She looked last at the company that held the contract, and found it had held exactly one contract, that one, and had been formed the spring before and dissolved the spring after, and its address was the same address the helicopter’s tail number led back to. The company that hired the crew and the aircraft that came uninvited were the same address. The men had not been sent to seize film from a survey. The survey had been built around them to put film in the valley for them to seize.

Near the end of her file, there is a note that reads differently. Vesseli wrote that in the last week of her work, she had begun to feel watched in the ordinary way a person feels watched on a street. A man at the counter of her hotel one evening who was there again the next morning and who did not seem to be waiting for anything. On the day she drove to see the lab technician, on the way back near dusk, she passed a vehicle parked on the shoulder of that empty road with a man standing beside it, doing nothing, not looking at a map, not looking under the hood, just standing facing the trees. When she reached her hotel, the same man or a man dressed as he had been was at the counter, having arrived somehow before her on a road she had not seen him drive. She wrote that she did not develop the thought any further.

A woman who spends her file describing a thing that takes film out of a valley, choosing at the one moment the thing turns toward her not to develop the thought.

And then she closed the file because there was nothing on the other end she could put in an insurance report. Margaret Vesseli filed her finding as inconclusive, because inconclusive is what you write when you know the shape of the answer and can prove none of it. She wrote one line past the finding which the insurer struck from the official copy, but which survives in her working file.

She wrote that the corridor cameras had been pointed at the line to see what crossed it, and that for three weeks something had crossed it and looked back into the lens, and that whatever came for the film afterward had been watching that valley far longer than the cameras had, and had never once let itself be the thing that got developed.

That is the whole of it.

Neil Pelky is still alive, in his seventies now, if the record I have is right. He will not say more than what is in the log. Denny Ashworth, if he is alive, would be in his fifties, a man who told a cousin once that it had not brought him back to save him, but to carry something, and that he had spent thirty years feeling like a letter that has been mailed and is still waiting to be read. Brimmer, the quiet man who did the work of two, went and found flat open country and stayed in it, and is the one man who seems to have understood the terms early and paid them without argument and been let alone.

Gunnar Tully was never found. The bagged camera, the pack, the radio, and the tracks that stopped with both boots together are all that was ever found of him. The searchers found one more thing. One of the corridor cameras that had not yet been pulled fired while a searcher was standing three feet from it, its little flash going off in daylight for no reason. When they pulled that card that night, there was nothing on it but the searchers. Frame after frame of the search party photographed by a camera none of them had triggered, as if the valley had turned its own eye around and begun for the first time to photograph the men who had come to look.

That card went up the line with the others. It was gone inside the week with the others.

The corridor is closed to survey to this day.