The Creature

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II

The next month or so I met the creature almost every evening. He would stay as long as I would, sitting or squatting and observing me as I observed him. We ate food together and I was able to touch him cautiously and he would touch me. I brought other fruit to try out on him. He would eat bananas, pears, and plums but not cherries and citrus fruits. He would eat the fruit seeds and all with great chomps and much juicing. At first he ate the bananas peels and all and later he would peel them.

My main preoccupation with the creature was to measure him and if at all possible photograph him. My preliminary measurements confirmed my estimate of seven feet tall. This was done by noting the height of his head as he lined himself at the side of the cabin. When I tried to take out a steel tape he would run into the woods and would not return for a day or two. I got the same response when I left the car with my camera or a transistor radio. Photographing the creature would be difficult.

After the first week of real contact I decided to name the creature. I had to do this not only for my mental references but in order to give him some recognizable calling card. The only name that seemed to fit was King Kong and this was ridiculous but I settled on Kong for his large size and friendly approaches were reminiscent of the literary ape. So Kong now was his name and I could begin attaching a personality to it.

Kong's arms were about the size of my muscle at his wrists and about twenty inches around at the muscle. His legs were perhaps thirty four or thirty six inches around at the crotch. The front muscles on the upper leg was well developed. His buttocks were shapeless and flat. Other than those features he was well proportioned. much like a human without the long arms characteristic of the ape world. His feet were not large and about thirteen inches in length about an inch larger than mine. He would not qualify for the title bigfoot. I was never able to find a footprint or cause him to make one that could be measured or cast. He did not show on rainy days, or when the ground was very soft and wet, except for incidents which I will later relate.

As I had stated earlier his hair was short resembling a mohair couch and chair set we had at home when I was a lad. The hair was longer on top of the head, under the arms, at the pubic area, and on the ankles. There was no hair on the palms of his hands, very short on his stomach, chest and face, and as far as I could tell none on the soles of his feet. When I tried to lift his feet from the ground he would not budge and would exert pressure on my shoulders on top of my head with his hands. This pressure was very strong and I did not wish to contest it.

Kong had a full set of upper and lower teeth and when he yawned I was able to get a good look at them but was not able to count them. He wouldn't let me run my finger over them. All his teeth were even, that is, they came to an even row at their lower edge or biting surface. This was true of both upper and lower teeth. They all were flat at the cutting edge as if they were all molars. I could identify the area of the canine teeth hut they seemed the same as the others. The front teeth were thinner and I suppose incisors. Generally his teeth were white except when he had stained them by eating berries or choke cherries. I could never understand why he would eat choke cherries and not domestic cherries. Anyway, his teeth seemed to be grinders and not cutters.

His eyes were brown and quite large with the iris perhaps three quarters of an inch in diameter. He seemed to be bothered by sunlight and appeared only at dawn or dusk. At this time the pupils would occupy most of the iris. There was a noticeable body odor about him, much like that of a sweating horse or wet dog. When he would exercise it would become rank and without my scientific curiosity unbearable. No wonder he approached me only when I hadn't bathed and at first when I had been drenched with sweat. His nose which was covered with fine hair was protruding with a slight bump, just below the eyes. The nostrils were not inordinately large. Fine hair also covered his face just below the ears giving him a slight mask like quality. His ears were slightly pointed and exhibited no lobes.

I experimented with food both wild and domestic. He would eat raw grain, corn, wheat, and oats. The prepared foods which he took included white bread, rye bread, whole wheat bread, corn flakes, jelly. butter, margarine, honey, molasses, maple syrup but not candy. I was hung up on edible wild foods when Kong came into my life and so I was familiar enough with these to experiment.

I would walk through the woods with Kong following a few feet behind and would pick up plants and hand them to him after taking a bite of them myself. He ate dandelions, dock, berries by the handful, choke cherries, lamb's quarters, trillium root, indian cucumber root, wild mustard, pokeweed, and wild onion. Since most of this occurred in late October most plants were old and not tender. I believed the mature pokeweed to be poisonous but this seems to be an erroneous assumption. Kong loved spicy hot food. He ate the root of the jack-in-the-pulpit without flinching. Any nature adventurer knows that the root of the jack-in-the-pulpit is extremely hot and burns the normal stomach. He did not flinch when I fed it to him without taking a bite myself. My first impression was that he might take the root and then never trust me again but he loved it. He also ate wild onions with gusto.

One of his favorite food plants was bedstraw or goose-grass as it is sometimes called. If you are not familiar with the plant it sends out long runners with roseattes of leaves around the stem at intervals. In the fall it produces little balls that stick to the clothing. Kong would eat these by rolling the long stems into a ball and pop them into his mouth in a great wad. He would chew vigorously while the juices of the plant and his spit would squirt out in all directions. In one eating period he stripped away an area which I estimated to be twelve square yards. In that area there were other plants growing and these he left in place. His dexterity in removing the bedstraw was equal to that of the most careful gleaner of materials. I visualized him as a sorter of goods in some assembly line. On a few days Kong appeared smelling of wild onions. In this condition I could barely stand him, he simply reeked. I noticed that when he did that his eyes would take on a pink to red glow in the white areas. Let me state it another way. A few times he came to me reeking of an odor resembling onions and in this condition his eyes were red or pink. I do not know that he was eating onions or perhaps he had conjunctivitis and this was an odor given off by that condition.

My property did not have many evergreens, a few small hemlocks, white pines, and five small blue spruce which I had purchased from the state department of agriculture. Kong ate the needles of these and completely stripped two blue spruce as we stood beside them one morning. I tried to stop him but as I grabbed his arm he lifted it and sent me sprawling. He wasn't trying to hurt me but merely wanted his arm free to get the spruce to his mouth.

I knew that the paltry food I offered could not support the body of such a huge creature and his diet puzzled me. It was partially explained by the event which I shall relate. I will tell this story now even though it occurred much later in time. It was evening and Kong and I were squatting in front of the porch staring at each other when a young deer appeared off to the side of the cabin. It was the first one I had ever seen on my property. It spotted us and shot up the road toward the top of the hill. Kong leaped to his feet and was off like a flash of lightning. His speed was fantastic as he ran the deer down before it got more than a hundred feet away. He picked it up in his powerful hands and slammed it to the ground, I assume killing it instantly. Instead of returning to me he put the deer under his arm and stalked off through the brush. I did not see him again for five days.

After the incident with the deer I saw him kill the following animals, two chipmunks, an opossum, a dog, and a robin. The two chipmunks were captured near an old rotting log about sixty feet from the cabin. We happened to be in that area when one chipmunk appeared on top of the log. It stopped and looked at us and froze in its tracks. As Kong walked slowly towards it the chipmunk gave out a large birdlike "cheep" and started to run along the edge of the log which must have been about twenty feet long. Like a defensive back intercepting an open field runner Kong sidestepped to the right and put out his right hand stopping the chipmunk in its race along the log. The chipmunk reversed its field but the other hand trapped it. As Kong held the chipmunk in his left hand he reached down under the log and extracted a second chipmunk with his right hand. These he squeezed into numbness and then set them down, both small animals wretching near the log. I went over and took a look at them and saw that they would soon be dead. When I returned the next evening they were gone and I assumed Kong took them with him. The opossum was an easy mark as it strolled between us as we squatted in the evening. The squatting in the semidarkness had such an aura of unreality that the opossum, which was the size of a large cat, seemed to fit right into the surroundings. It had a white bony face and a gray rumpled fur. In the fading light it appeared as a ghost mask as it moved slowly between us. Kong moved over to it and with a closed fist of his left hand knocked it over the head. He set the body of the animal out flat and stroked its rumpled fur with his hand. When he left he took the carcass with him.

The stroking of the fur was an act which puzzled me. What it meant is beyond my comprehension. Was it an act of kindness or was it the feeling of an artistic accomplishment and every out of place detail had to be righted. One other incident of this nature now occurs to me. A small rabbit had run up to Kong. Most rabbits came around in the evening in the spring but this was autumn and not only were small rabbits a rarity but this one seemed myopic as it ran right up to Kong. Kong picked it up and cuddled it in his left hand and stroked it with his right hand for a long time. He then set the animal down. It hopped around his feet for a few minutes and then bounded slowly into the underbrush.

The dog incident seemed contrived. It was a medium sized animal with whitish yellow fur and it approached us with much sniffling and barking. I thought that Kong would depart for the woods when the dog approached but he stood there looking at me with a calm facial stare. I hollered at the dog to leave. One thing I had learned about dogs is that you have to look them down or stare them down, like Daniel Boone and the bear. If you run the barking dog is most likely to become a biting dog and attack. When the dog got within a few feet of us Kong turned and started to move swiftly away with the dog growling at his heels. As if he had it planned Kong wheeled about and with the flat hand edge caught the dog just below the ear. The dog flew about ten feet and was of course dead. Like all the other animals the carcass was gone the next day.

The robin just happened to land too close to Kong's head. He was such a part of the wilderness and environment I can imagine people and animals moving right by him without even noticing him. The robin flew in and landed about two feet above Kong. He reached up quickly and caught the bird without difficulty. He then squeezed its neck with his index finger and thumb.

I was worried that Kong might try human flesh but this did not bother me after a while. He ate none of this food in front of me and perhaps he did not eat it at all. Somehow though he supported his large bulk with what must have been an enormous amount of food. After the deer incident I wondered if he had a family and did he take the food somewhere. My efforts at tracking him were in vain for he left no tracks or trails.

No doubt about it, his favorite food was apples and I could lure him with a mackintosh or yellow delicious. I tried many times in vain to set up camera triggers to apples but when the camera or any piece of equipment of that nature was anywhere near he would not appear.

By the end of October I was able to drive the car up to the cabin. When I would slam the door on the car I would holler "Kong — food" and after a few minutes he would emerge. He would come to the area of the car and stand beside it, towering over the car like some escapee from a Japanese science fiction film set. My car was a green Dodge Coronet station wagon with an electric operated rear window, the rear door opened from the top or from the side.

I could place apples on the tailgate and he would take them hut he never got inside the wagon part. I was not clever enough to set up my camera and trip it even though I sought advice from my camera nut colleague from San Francisco. Also, when I usually saw Kong the light was bad and once when I appeared with a flash bulb set up he never showed. I imagine he was somewhere in the brush watching me from a safe distance.

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