2002, Shuryshkarsky district of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, a small Khanty village of Azov, adhered to the bank of one of the Ob tributaries. It was here that schoolchildren Volodya Kachin and Sasha Zakharov saw the strange creature.
They came to the river, when suddenly a hairy monster rose from the tall bushes. Raking the water with its hands in a place where the depth reaches more than two meters, it headed towards the shore.
The special correspondent of the Trud newspaper Leonid Ivanov told about further events.
“The boys screamed in horror at the same time, but the next reaction to a meeting with an unknown creature was already more individual. Sashka turned around and gave a tear to the village, and Vovka remained sitting, unable to get up on his legs that suddenly became wadded.
But he was able to make out in more detail an unprecedented creature. And he drew from memory a humanoid animal covered with thick long hair. In that picture, a triangle of denser hair on the chest is clearly distinguished: either the beard is thick, or the hair is thicker in front.
The meeting of the guys with the outlandish inhabitant of the forest alarmed the whole village. And the next day, having ridiculed the shy men, the women in a gang went to the bank of the river, where everything happened. From the place indicated by the teenagers, strange traces did indeed leave the forest.
Bare feet were clearly imprinted on the hard ground. The length of one was 62 centimeters, and the step exceeded two meters, although, according to the guys, the stranger's legs were short.
When the women confirmed the boys' story, local hunters also decided to survey the place. The prints they saw made them remember that they had encountered something similar before, but no one attached any importance to it. Some thought that the prints were left by a huge bear, others just left, not stuffing their heads with all sorts of horror stories."
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Then the rumor reached the scientists of the international expedition, which deals with the Siberian Cranes living nearby. At that time, the ORT film crew was with the scientists - Natalia Astafieva and Sergey Isakov.
Curiosity led both scientists and journalists to Azov. Although two weeks have passed, the rains did not wash away the traces, they managed to be captured on film. In fact, this was the only objective confirmation of the authenticity of the incident.
The children said the same thing to different interlocutors, without getting confused in details, when they described the monster that appeared from the water. A little embarrassed, Vovka even reported such a spicy feature - the genital organ of the creature hung almost to the knee.
Scientists followed the giant's trail to check if this was a prank of local wits. But it turned out that even if someone had made two huge feet and walked through, tying them to his legs, the joker had to weigh two hundred kilograms - the feet were so deeply pressed into the hard ground.
In some places, trampled grass in the forest preserved the prints of giant feet. In several places, apparently annoyed by the meeting with people, the strange visitor uprooted several trees, which is beyond the power of the company of young jokers.
By the nature of the prints, the location of the feet, the scientists of the All-Russian Research Institute of Nature came to the conclusion that the traces were left by a really large creature and could not be the result of a joke.
And the old-timers remembered that soon after the war, the villagers found a baby completely covered with hair on the mow. They brought him home, reported him to the police, fed him like their children, and then some scientists came and took the find.
In these deserted regions of the Subpolar Urals and the Lower Ob region, where hundreds of kilometers from village to village, there have been meetings with an unknown creature before. The Khanty people living here call these creatures forest people and bypass their possible habitats, trying not to even talk about them.
In subsequent years, strange traces were seen more than once in the Shuryshkarsky district. For example, in 2010 near the village of Gorki. Basically, all local cases were recorded in a small area - this is a triangle between the villages of Muzhi, Gorki and Azov.
These places are almost reserved, quiet, maybe for this they fell in love with "yam merabade", in Nenets it is translated as "a man measuring the earth with his steps" …