Читать книгу Real Monsters, Gruesome Critters, and Beasts from the Darkside - Brad Steiger - Страница 35

In the spring of 1967, Carla, one of the English Department’s student assistants, pulled a very reluctant young man into my office and insisted that he tell me what he had seen that weekend.

She introduced me to Bob, her boyfriend, but I acknowledged that we were already acquainted with one another. Although my principal teaching assignments were classes in creative writing and journalism, in 1963 I had also been an instructor in the Freshman English Core Program—where everyone, from future medical doctors to physics teachers, studied the classics of world literature. Bob had been in one of my classes, and even though he was a very polite and pleasant young man, he never made it a secret that he was a science major, concentrating on biology.

Although Dostoyevsky and Goethe may not have held an enormous amount of interest for him, when called upon in class, Bob’s answers were concise and demonstrated that he had been paying attention. And now, four years later, in his senior year, his excited girlfriend was dragging him into my office and pressuring him to relate the details of an experience that he obviously he felt very awkward discussing. Finally, after a bit of coaxing from Carla and my assurance that I was no longer grading his work, he told a remarkable story—that weekend he had encountered a creature that was nowhere to be found in his biology texts.

He had been driving on Minnesota Highway 52 on his way to Decorah, Iowa. It was about ten o’clock in the evening, and he was a short distance from Rochester when his headlights picked up the form of someone crouching at the side of the highway. Bob’s first thought was that someone might be injured or ill, and he pulled his car onto the shoulder of the highway only a few yards from the person to see if he might be of assistance. When the headlights caught the “someone” in full illumination, Bob saw that he had encountered something beyond his knowledge.

“I could see that its features were apelike,” Bob told us. “There was no snout on its face. Its features were definitely humanoid, and its shoulders were heavy. The thingran up the steep embankment to the shelter of the woods as easily as if it was running up a flight of steps.”

Bob walked a few feet to the spot where he had seen the creature crouching and saw that the thing had been kneeling over a recently killed rabbit. Bob picked up the rabbit, and the thing standing on the embankment raised itself up to its full height and barked what sounded like a harsh cough of anger and protest. “It obviously thought that I was going to steal its dinner,” Bob said, “and I wasn’t about to argue with it. I dropped the rabbit and ran back to my car.”

On his way to Decorah, Bob had time to ask himself a lot of questions in an attempt to explain away his impossible encounter. He decided that the creature could not have been a bear or a wolf—predators that would have been rare in southern Minnesota. “That thing had been crouching in a humanlike position,” Bob said. “That was why I thought that I had seen a human being in trouble. When my car approached, it turned to look over its shoulder. The creature’s head had definitely turned on a neck.” Bob explained why such an action was strangely significant. As a biologist and an outdoorsman, he knew that neither a bear nor a wolf can look over its shoulder—they have to turn their entire bodies to see what is behind them.

“The thing that really capped it for me,” Bob said, “was the fact that while it was running away from me, I saw well-developed buttocks. Buttocks are a distinctly human characteristic. No bears, wolves, or apes have buttocks. What I saw could only be described as a naked, hairy wildman!”

Bob was an intelligent young man. As his former English teacher, I could say without pronouncing any taint of disapprobation that he was not a highly imaginative student. Although always attentive, Bob’s lack of participation in class discussions made it quite clear that he was a rationalist, a scientist, who was only intellectually respectful of the imaginative works of great literature—and who would not indulge in wild stories to entertain his buddies or his girlfriend.