Long ago, before the security of modern times, Koyukon people occasionally ran perilously short of food in their remote camps. Sinking toward death from starvation, people would sometimes resort to the almost unthinkable desperation of cannibalism. But the price was very great indeed. Anyone driven to the point of surviving on human flesh (or sometimes a person who committed murder) would vanish into the forest. There the culprits became wild, suddenly lost fundamental aspects of their humanity, and never again returned to the society they had left. Although it has been many decades since anyone fled this way, woodsmen still stalk the wilds, hiding themselves almost completely from human contact, living more like animals than humans.
(Richard K. Nelson – Make Prayers to the Raven: A Koyukon View of the Northern Forest, 1986, pp. 194-5)
Это представленіе коюконовъ о йетиподобномъ существѣ какъ о деградировавшемъ потомкѣ Homo sapiens sapiens, а не – что было бы болѣе ожидаемо – его предкѣ / болѣе примитивной формѣ, вызываетъ ассоціацію не только с произошедшими отъ человѣка обезьянами въ шедеврѣ постколоніальныхъ штудій The Arabian Nightmare Роберта Ирвина, но и с коперниковскимъ переворотомъ, которому біоновскую концепцію β-элементовъ попытался подвергнуть Джеймсъ Гротштейнъ, предположивъ въ нихъ (см. A Beam of Intense Darkness: Wilfred Bion’s Legacy to Psychoanalysis) не сырье для α-элементовъ, а наоборотъ, продуктъ ихъ деградаціи.
Также примѣчателенъ слѣдующій пассажъ у Нельсона:
A Huslia man told of an experience he had one spring while hunting muskrats with a young companion. When he suggested they camp for the night at a certain spot, his partner said no—his grandmother had warned him it was a woodsman’s haunt. “I don’t know what got into me,” he said. “I told him there used to be woodsmen long ago, but they all got old and died. You know, that’s really what some people say.”
(Ibid., p. 197)
The two men finally bedded down; but sometime during the night the one who told the story began to hear something. It was coming toward him, but he was unable to wake up, as if he was “hypnotized.” All at once his blanket was torn off him, landing about twenty feet away. He jumped to his feet but saw nothing except a wiggling branch that the woodsman had brushed as it fled. “That woodsman probably bothered me because I said those things, acted tough. He probably wanted to show what he could do to me. I never talked like that again afterward.”
– приводящій на память идеи Б.Ф. Поршнева о суггестіи какъ об особой способности палеоантроповъ и основѣ языка.