RICHARD FREEMAN: Swallowed by the wilderness (Part One)

Being a cryptozoologist can be a dangerous job. One has to traverse poorly explored, far-off regions often populated by dangerous wild animals. In the wild you might be hundreds of miles from the nearest help if anything untoward should happen. I have been attacked by a cobra, fallen off a cliff, fallen down a sheet of ice on a mountain, and blacked out due to altitude sickness.
Few people who have not travelled understand true wilderness. The yawning emptiness that is the Gobi Desert, for example, where one can journey for days without seeing the slightest indication of human life. You might as well be on Mars.

Some who venture into the heart of darkness pay the ultimate price: they are swallowed by the wilderness, vanishing as if they had never existed.

Anyone boarding the Southampton train from Waterloo Station on 23rd December 1919 at 11.30am may well have been startled by two outlandish figures. One was a fierce-looking hound that seemed more wolf than dog. The other was a tall weather-beaten man carrying a rifle. The man was Captain Leicester Stevens and his dog was Laddie. Laddie was a wolf/dog hybrid who had been a barrage-dog, bravely carrying messages under heavy fire in WW1. They were on the first leg of a journey to darkest Africa in order to hunt a living brontosaurus The creature in question was, of course, the infamous Congo Dinosaur known by various names such as 'mokele-mbembe', 'chepekwe', as well as many others. The creature is in fact more likely to be a giant monitor lizard than a dinosaur. Ironically, the report that inspired Captain Stevens to undertake his journey was clearly a hoax and the creature therein bearing no resemblance to any kind of sauropod.

Stevens had offers from de-mobbed soldiers, sportsmen, hunters and others all eager to join his expedition but unwisely he chose to go it alone. Neither man nor dog were ever heard of again after entering the jungle.

Vladimir Pushkarev was a bold young geologist who often braved Siberia's wilds alone on the track of the almasty, a relic hominin said to inhabit many of Russia’s mountain ranges. Siberia is one of the vastest and unexplored regions on Earth, and its great forest, the Taiga, is the largest forest in the world, stretching from northern Europe to eastern Siberia in a massive swathe. Rather than be involved in large expeditions consisting of many people, he chose to go solo and hoped to get closer to the Siberian wildman. In an area such as Siberia this took amazing bravery. Pushkarev was working on a thesis entitled Current knowledge on the Relict Hominoid in the North of Eurasia. Tragically, Pushkarev was drowned whilst on a one-man expedition to the Ob River Basin and the surrounding swamps and forests in 1978, the ultimate sacrifice in the name of cryptozoology. His body was never recovered.

Continued tomorrow....