First yeti blogger found in western Siberia

Most of you probably already know that numerous sightings of yeti – the fabled abominable snowman of yore and lore — have been reported recently in western Siberia. As recounted in Yahoo! UK news, “According to 15 witness statements by Siberian locals in the Kemerovo region, 7-ft tall, hairy, manlike creatures have been spotted wandering the Mount Shoria wilderness, with one man even claiming to have saved a yeti from drowning in a river while hunting.

“Villager Afanasy Kiskorov in Tashtagol reportedly witnessed the yeti activity first-hand. He said: ‘Their bodies were covered in red-and-black fur and they could climb trees. The creature was screaming in fear after falling into a swollen mountain river.’

“Despite the alleged sightings, no photographic evidence as yet confirms the existence of the ‘abominable snowmen.'”However, hair specimens, large footprints and huge branch shelters in forests have fuelled scientific belief to traces of the yetis, described as the ‘Neanderthal ancestors of man.’ “

This news is extraordinary enough, but wait until you hear the rest of the story. In a Gadling exclusive, we present an encrypted dispatch that has just arrived from our Western Siberia correspondent, Gregorio Samsavich (whom, we would like to add parenthetically, we hadn’t heard from since that unfortunate incident in Bangkok and whose reappearance here gladdens our collective heart).

Here is Samsavich’s report:

When I heard the villagers yakking about yetis, I knew I had to follow the trail. After interviewing numerous sources close to plucky villager Afanasy Kiskorov – himself off-limits because his slick new agent ($1500 Testoni loafers in Tashtagol? Quel affreux!) wanted the kind of ransom for an interview that not even Justin Bieber’s agent would dare suggest — I macheted a path through uncharted wastes in search of the aquaphobic yeti.

After walking without stop for two days and nights, sleeping in a wonderfully weather-worthy tent donated by Polar Enterprises of Hav on Wye, UK (thanks, PE!), I came upon what can only be described as a yeti settlement: four dome-shaped shelters crudely constructed from piled branches with evidence of primitive attempts to plaster them with mud, extremely arduous work in this frozen steppe.

As I crept closer to the settlement, I could detect movement inside and heard a kind of plangent clanging of stone and vigorously swished water – a combo that could only be described as rock and roil — that sounded like the opening notes of the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction.”

When I crept forward another inch, a twig snapped and the sounds suddenly stopped. The musk of fear rode the air. Suddenly a blinding flash snowstorm – all too common in March in this forsaken region — momentarily obscured my view. By the time the snowstorm had subsided, the 7-foot-tall, manlike creatures covered in red-and-black fur, with distinctive white markings on their foreheads and stubby tails – if indeed that’s what they were, for I never got a good look at them, in fact am not even sure there were any creatures in the compound at all – had decamped.

But all was not lost. I was able to enter their compound, which was surrounded by rude cairns and odd scraps of hair and what I could only presume to be yeti dung, though in fact it tasted a bit like the curry I had some months ago in the Magic Theatre in Kathmanville, but that’s another story.

In the dying light, there was little to distinguish inside from outside, as in certain Eastern religions. But on one “wall” I could just make out an exceedingly unsophisticated twig-and-leaf portrait of a personage who appeared to be Lady Gaga. There was also a set of massive reindeer horns at one end arranged in what seemed to be a kind of altar, suggesting that the beasts might be part of a long-rumored reindeer cult that once existed in these parts, whose avatar appears just one day a year, in mid-winter, descending from the heavens in the dead of night.

Then the momentous discovery occurred. Partly hidden under leaves and whortleberry branches in a far corner of the smallest hut, I espied a rudimentary computer, I believe it was an Altairior X2zE (a precursor to the fabulous machine on which I type this dispatch, courtesy of DooBDoo Computers in Bideux, AK – thanks, DooBDoo-Bideux!). To my absolute astonishment, five words had been typed on the screen. They glowed there, in an eerie Siberian penumbra. The hair on my neck stood on end, and a frisson not unlike the chilly digits of a Tashtagolian masseuse ran up my spine. For on that ancient screen the creature had somehow typed these Webby-worthy words: “I blog; therefore, I am.”