More tales..from the rangers in the area...

Years later, we returned to the area for a spell, different time of year, earlier.

We shared stories with local and Indian folk who live there and received their stories as well.

Some of them work with the forest service or fire, clearing trees for fires and that sort of thing.

They called them nests I think and they would happen upon them sometimes and then quickly decide to move on and clear out for fear of running into one.

The beast would take trees and bend them over to make an arc and do that several times until having constructed a sort of yurt of living trees bent into arced rafters.

They would lay down foliage within it and make a bed for themselves beneath the covering they would construct out of bent trees, so as to make it dark where they could sleep during the daytime.

Sometimes, high up in the mountains where humans would not even have roads to get there.

They live where we do not go, for the most part and that is why they are so elusive to us. We lack the physical vigor to go where they do and so they coexist where we can not and remain like a myth with folks believing nothing like that could really be true ... but the skeletons we find of early huge cousins of man, built stronger and larger than us are not our ancestors -- they are the ancestors of them.

We are their much smaller and distant "cousin" if you will, but not evolved directly from them through evolution, if you will...our genetics are spun off quite a ways from theirs.

We don't have the hair, the strength, the stature, the foot structure to carry the weight and our diet is different.

The theory is that some higher functioning humanoid types from the distant past, skilled in genetic engineering; were able to take some relative of this being from the past -- considered more intelligent than any other land creature and more able bodied and then crossed their genetics with other creatures to make them domesticatable but intelligent and less of a physical threat; we took our skin, our eyes and our digestion from a relative of the pig and our ability to tinker with technology and language or speaking from either our "creators" and/or perhaps even some of our speaking ability from the genetics in talking birds. I don't know, but there are different versions of these tales from different times.

Of course, the original forms of all of the species drawn upon to create us may have evolved over time without interference from tinkerers, but there have been tinkerers along the way; for one thing -- evidence exists in that we have one chromosome abnormally longer than all the other; somehow spliced it -- something you just don't ever see with any other species on the planet; and of course, no other species on the planet converts the planet in such a way as to make our species more comfortable since our bodies seem unadapted completely to any specific natural environment; our brains and hands giving us the ability to modify our environment much more than any other species. So much so that we actually harm our environment in order to bend it to our comfort level; certainly a trait that didn't evolve with the environment, but the result of tinkering with our genetics and making our own tinkering with our environment necessary to compensate for our own ability to survive.