National Affairs: Wild Giant

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Under the hard ground of the cemetery at North Creek, N. Y., last week was buried a swart, nameless giant who died in a blaze of gunfire among the snowbound mountains of Essex County earlier this month.. Police and U. S. Army records had failed to identify him. But inhabitants of the vicinity had not ceased to wonder and talk about the prodigious "wild man of the Adirondacks" and the terror he spread in the three days it took to catch him.

First men to see the "wild man" were Ernest Blanchard and Leslie Turner, two trappers, when he burst from the woods and started shooting at them. Whether the towering, dusky creature was an insane nature-lover bent on saving the lives of animals, like mad Albert Johnson who was killed in the wilds of Canada last month (TIME, Feb. 29), Woodsmen Blanchard and Turner did not stop to inquire. They fled through the woods and reported to the State police at Long Lake. A lieutenant with four of his men and two forest wardens, accompanied by the trappers, set out on the giant's trail. Shutters and doors in Essex and Hamilton counties clapped apprehensively shut while the chase went forward.* After a 72-hour search, the pursuers sighted a huge, dark figure silhouetted against the snow, a man without snowshoes making incredible speed through the deep, stubborn drifts. It was their man. He came to bay inside an abandoned lumber mill.

As the lieutenant approached, calling for the fugitive to surrender peaceably, he could see that the man's clothing was a, patchwork of deer and rabbit skins. Incongruity upon incongruity, the man appeared to be a Negro. The discharge of a sawed-off shotgun was his answer to the police. Then he jumped through a window, started running.

A rifle shot from the posse caught him in the leg. The giant reeled, fell, crawled behind a tree and opened fire once more. The posse returned his fusillade. When the echoes died out among the cold hills the lieutenant approached. Behind the tree the great brown figure lay lifeless, his blood melting dark holes in the soft snow. A week after the wild man's first startling appearance, he was sledged back to North Creek, interred with his secret history.