Preface
In North American Indian lore, there have been uncountable stories told of certain tribes leaving their unhealthy children for the hairy men (Bigfoot/Sasquatch) of the forest to rear.
In part, this story is of such a boy. When finally his father made the decision to take him deep into the high mountain forest, the boy seemed to do little else but cry. He ate little, walked with much effort and had not learned more than three or four words.
The opinion of the Chief of this tribe was that if the boy were his, he’d place the child into the hands of the ancient hairy men of the mountains.
The handsome and much loved two-year-old was the couple’s first child. The young parents, however, were convinced by the tribe’s elders that their child would soon perish if he were not allowed to walk freely the good earth and to breathe deeply of the wide sky, which only the hairy men of the deep forests and high mountains could provide, could oversee.
(The Hairy Men of the High Mountain Forests is a work of fiction, as are the characters in the story.)
The Hairy Men of the High Mountain Forests
by
Linda Newton-Perry
with
Christopher Perry
The smell of them, the hairy men, is strong, powerful, sickening at times. And this for good reason, as I have often observed them roll around in the entrails, in the blood, in the bodily waste of their kills.
The same is true of the females, except during their time of mating, when to my nose they exude an overpowering green-grass smell. It’s tolerable, that is if one (one, meaning human) can smell it at all, for the acrid, overpowering filth of them.
For me, the odors were the least of the annoyances during the female’s mating time. I was not of their kind. But one of them, Baday, my name for her, would sniff my breath and maneuver her powerful hairy thigh between my legs in an attempt to excite me. After much difficulty, I always managed to escape her advances. By difficulty, I mean she’d pounce and claw me with her dirty, jagged nails. She’d bellow chest-rattling growls. She’d nip deep patches of skin from my face, neck and back. When done playing with me, and that’s what she was doing, for with one good swat of her hand she could have killed me, she’d spring to her feet and be off─off to her next conquest, these many, and of her kind, some milling close by, but most waiting patiently in somewhat of a line. And all this before I could rub the smell of her from my nose.
For as long as I had memory, I’d been here in the woods with these creatures. To look at my face you’d think I was one of them. Hair was thick and long on it, but the rest of my body had little hair. So I was given covering of animal skins, some with fur, some not.
While I knew I was not of their kind, I felt myself one of them. I don’t know how I came to be here, in this place with these beings. I have no memory of it. We, however, shared this in common: I didn’t speak and they didn’t speak. But having lived my life with only their kind, I on a simple level understood them, and it seemed, they me. We gestured, motioned and went ahead with whatever it was we intended communicating.
If the creatures spoke in some primitive language, I had no way of knowing. It did seem they’d gibber at one another, pound often on each other’s massive shoulders. If they had a language, then, this gibbering was it.
It was when the need was great on me to mate, I could not keep it from my mind, that the hairy being Lome (my name for him) brought a young girl to me and gave her into my care. He was for as long as I could remember, my father-figure. He cared well for me, providing shelter, covering and food.
For a passing of many moons, my companion girl cried constantly, or so it seemed, and ate little. She finally quieted herself, but still it was my constant concern that she would escape.
Still, when Baday’s time came to mate she’d bare her teeth and try to force me to comply. The girl had no choice but to witness these attacks. It was many moons passing that I kept her at my side, with a tight hold of her wrist. She twisted around to avoid the scene before her. Often she’d find herself tripped up and in the oddest of positions, laughable if the situation hadn’t been so repugnant and dangerous to us both.
My fondness for the girl, I now called Umyu, grew. She repeated to me often, Margaret, meaning that it was her name. But I could not call the female before me this name. Margaret sounded ugly to my ears. I called her what I wanted, Umyu, meaning to me, breath of many flowers.
In time, when we took our night’s rest, she allowed me to thread lightly my arm between her arm and waist (her back to me). More often, she’d allow it when it was cold, when the rain turned white and covered deep the mountainsides.
Several seasons of hot and cold passed. With good frequency, Umyu now allowed my hand to pull her in tight and caress her maturing body, often until she panted. But still, she refused me, stopping short of mating; whereupon, often I’d spring to my feet and yell out, in good imitation of the hairy men we lived among. With hard blows, I beat my chest with frustration.
Even though I had a companion, Baday when the need was upon her to mate, came to me, inflicting wounds that took many moons to heal. It was a mean and twisted game she played with me. Once I spied Umyu peeking through the tree branches while I fought Baday. She allowed the branches to snap back upright when I saw her. I wondered if she thought I gave in and did as Baday wished. I don’t know, for I didn’t speak to Umyu of such things. Maybe, I reasoned, it was why she would not have me as mate.
For all the moons and seasons that had passed, I believed Umyu was attached tightly to me. She seldom strayed far from my side. I enjoyed believing that, anyway. I did not worry overmuch about her running back to where Lome had abducted her. So, she was free to walk her own way during the day.
At this time it is good to say that she could have never found her way back, for we were deep into the high mountains, mountains shrouded in clouds and mists most days.
It was to my great pleasure when next Baday waddled into our private sleeping den that Umyu rose, turned and stared down the overweight and smelly being. In Umyu’s slim hands, she held tight a club that she’d made with a thick branch, thorns bristling all around.
Baday seemed amused, sniffing and jutting her hairy chin in jerks. She turned, seemingly to walk away and then whirled, catching Umyu off guard, trying to slap the club to the ground. With ease she dislodged it, but it now was stuck to her wrist, possibly by a thorn to the bone. She whooped in pain.
Grunting and sniffing loudly the air, Baday’s next-in-line suitor charged forward, black puffy hands clenched. His whole body swung to turn his massive head, as he tried to determine what was going on.
Umyu, shaking her stinging hands from the blow when the club was knocked from them, motioned me to make them leave.
It was everlastingly my finest and happiest day. Umyu that night turned to me and allowed our first mating.
From the time the girl was given to me, that is to say when she finally stopped crying, she made an attempt to teach me to speak her language, from the world whence she came. She tried to explain it, but I had no way to visualize it. She made it clear that one day she hoped to return to it, with me and our offspring. I’d smile, but I knew I would never have the courage to leave the high mountains and the hairy men, leave the only world I’d ever known. And so I hoped she’d never be rescued, but it was not to be.
Umyu called me Fellow. Some days, when the wind is quiet, I believe I can hear her voice, calling to me across the mountains.
Years later, 1887
Mrs. Margaret Sarah Jones, 83, sits now rocking slowly on the porch of her Oregon home. Her husband of many years has just passed, leaving her little to do during the days except care for herself and keep the small cabin she and her husband shared, tidy.
During her long and happy married life, she thought often of what happened to her as a girl. When she was rescued, she was pressed to explain her “ordeal.” “Ordeal” was used often; it was their word for what had happened to her.
It was many years before she found a decent man willing to have her as a wife. And that was only because David Brian Jones wasn’t aware of the details of her years with the hairy men. Margaret did not tell him everything, him or anyone else. All that kind-hearted David knew was she’d been taken by one of the hairy men of the mountains.
She told him they used her as a slave of sorts, and that she’d watched over several of the hairy men’s offspring, gathered food and helped build shelters when the group was on the move through and over the high mountains.
About Fellow she never spoke a word. And about their two children left behind, she never said a word. (No children were born alive of the union with her husband.) She expected that life would be lonely for her now, now that all her family had passed on.
She crossed her ankles and pulled a woolen throw over her knees, bunching it over her lap, covering her hands. The view before her eased the sore heart beneath the calico bib of her homemade dress.
The yard and field before her sloped down to a tangled thicket of blackberry bushes, a long line of them, shoulder high.
Again the thought of Fellow came to her. It was at such a thicket where Lome, the hairy man, came from nowhere and threw a great arm around her middle then barreled down into a near drainage ditch completely covered with a canopy of thick trees. She screamed the whole time, but there was no one to hear.
She’d walked the two miles to the berries by herself. She had walked it often, for she was twelve. Old enough to take care of herself, she assured her mother and father.
When she was rescued by the road crew at eighteen, her father and mother were quick to say that they were concerned over her disappearance, but her mother repeated often, “We thought it was Frank Roy Blain. You remember him? We were sure you’d gone with him and his family to Missouri. You were really sweet on him.”
And then her father repeated his own string of words, primed by his wife’s, told in just the same way over the years, never changing a word: “A splendid vision you were, when we finally recognized you.” Margaret’s father sniffed in just the same place, telling after telling, trying mightily not to let the tears show and the running nose give away his feelings for his only girl child. “Mercy, mercy such a vision!”
Margaret cried in grief now, for her husband of all these years, and for Fellow. What had become of him and their children? At least he was not left alone, he had the children.
“What a remarkable life I’ve experienced,” she thought; “first in the high mountain forest, and then with my gentle David here on the edge of this small Oregon town. Would even one soul have believed me, believed my story, if I had told the whole of it?”
She guessed not. So, she didn’t bother. She kept it all to herself and only nodded her head when a passerby would call to her on the porch, or one of the local newspapers reported, “A young girl (or boy) disappeared last week while picking berries.”
It was no surprise to Margaret Sarah Jones; after all, her children, her grandchildren would need mates, living there in the mountain mist along with the ancient hairy men. That is if they wished to produce families.
For a quick instant, Baday flashed across her mind. She ground her old teeth and before she gave any thought to it, she yelled out across the berry thicket at the bottom of the yard. It was her own version of the yell of the hairy men. Now in hoarse voice, she whispered to herself, “Fellow I hope you still live. I hope you and our children have mates, have families!” And then in loudest of voice she yelled, “F-e-l-l-o-w, where are you?”
