Читать книгу Real Monsters, Gruesome Critters, and Beasts from the Darkside - Brad Steiger - Страница 48

On the southern-most tip of Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula there once was a thriving little community named Port Chatham. Through the centuries, the village had offered friendly hospitality to strangers. When Captain Nathaniel Portlock visited the place on his 1786 Alaska expedition, he and his men were made to feel welcome.

In the mid-1930s, strange and terrible things began to happen to the people of Port Chatham. The Nantiinaq (“big hairy creature” in the native Sugt’sun) had become bolder and had begun to terrorize the villagers. Sometimes they would even come into the village and hurt people. Some witnesses swore that the Nantiinaq were led by the spirit of a woman dressed in flowing black clothes who would materialize out of the cliffs and summon the Nantiinaq.

A logger was killed instantly when he was struck from behind with a piece of log-moving equipment.

A gold prospector who was working his claim disappeared one day and was never seen again.

A sawmill owner saw a Nantiinaq on the beach, tearing up the fish traps that had been set.

By about 1936, the people of Chatham left the village en masse. They abandoned their houses, the school, everything, and vacated their once peaceful town to move to Nanwalek.

In the mid-1930s, strange and terrible things began to happen to the people of Port Chatham. The Nantiinaq … had become bolder and had begun to terrorize the villagers.

In the early 1900s, the town of Portlock, named for Captain Nathaniel Portlock, was established as a small cannery town. In 1921, a U.S. post office was opened, and the town appeared to be prospering. The population was made up largely of natives of the region who were mostly of Russian-Aleut heritage and who had lived in peaceful interaction for decades.

Sometime in the early 1940s, the same kind of strange occurrences that drove people out of Chatman in the past began to happen in Portlock. Men who worked at the cannery began to disappear. Some would go hunting for Dall sheep or bear and never be seen again.

Reports of sighting the Nantiinaq became common. So did the reports of mutilated and dismembered human bodies floating in the lagoon.

Hunters tracking signs of moose would suddenly find the tracks of the great animal overlaid with giant, human-like tracks over those left by the moose. Signs of a struggle in the snow were mute testimony that a giant human had slain the huge moose. Then the only tracks remaining were the monstrous, manlike tracks heading back toward the fog-shrouded mountains.

As with the people of Port Chatham before them, the residents of Portlock moved en masse, leaving their homes, the school, and the cannery. In 1950, the post office closed.

Naomi Klouda of the Homer Tribune (October 26, 2009) interviewed Malania Kehl, the eldest resident in Nanwalek, who was born in Port Chatham in 1934 and who remembers how the entire village left everything behind to escape the Nantiinaq. It was her uncle who had been killed with the piece of logging equipment. Once the people of Port Chatham left their community, Malania said, the Nantiinaq stayed far away from them and left them in peace.

According to Sugt’stun culture, the Nantiinaq may once have been fully human, but now, through some events not understood, he is a different kind of creature—half-man, half-beast.