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Goražde is where this story takes us – taking place in 1992. The exact date of this event is not clear, but thanks to Namik Genjac, the man who shared the story, described the historical records of the conflict, we can be almost certain it was near the end of that year.
The weather doesn’t just help us pinpoint the time of the encounter, it also made a huge impact on the events themselves. It was snowy and very cold. Namik described it as a freezer, as every time he woke up in his camp, the feeling of cold would hit his body – freezing him all over.
Many others were in it with him – his squad, which consisted of fifteen people and many other soldiers from other divisions, but this wasn’t a social gathering, but one of war. Namik mentioned they were preparing an operation to take back some areas near Goražde – a small town that was taken over by Serbian forces around a year or so before.
Bosnian forces were there on a mission to regain control over the area – with Namik and his squad comprising only a small portion of the forces. Unsurprisingly, everyone was on edge. Most soldiers there were inexperienced and scared of the battle that they would soon march into.
Namik and his men were no different, most of them stayed up all night in their tents, playing cards and sharing jokes, trying to relax and not think about it, but this wasn’t working on Namik. His mind was full of bad thoughts, ones he couldn’t just laugh or sleep away – the latter being impossible due to his comrades loud manner in which they attempted the first method.
He walked outside of their tent in the middle of the night, which shocked his squad so much that they didn’t even try to stop him, thus leaving him to face the cold on his own. When asked why he left the tent in the first place, Namik wasn’t sure of his exact reason.
Maybe he was annoyed – maybe he needed some time to think, but whatever it was, he couldn't remember.
Setting his steps to the nearby forest – he put his hands in his pockets and moved. A few soldiers, who were sitting at the campfire in the middle of the camp spotted him going, but just like his squad did, they let him go without saying a word.
Maybe they understand one another well – men in the same war. They experience the same horrors together, whether they want to or not, but the horrors that Namik faced that night weren’t ones anyone in the camp, or the war, would understand or believe.
The snow was deep, even where their camp was set up, and it was only getting deeper the further he went into the forest. Slowly he realised his actions weren’t reasonable or sane. Where was he going? Why was he going away from his bed? On his way back, he couldn’t deny it to himself.
He knew exactly why, because he’d had enough of war, bloodshed and cold sleepless nights. The war could end tomorrow, but he could die minutes away from peace, minutes away from going home.
Many other depressing thoughts plagued his mind as he traced his steps back to the camp, but they all left his mind when he spotted something that made his insides as cold as his body was.
Another set of tracks were right next to his. Someone was following him into the forest – but why? Was it one of his squad mates who was worried? But if so, why wouldn't he say a word and just silently follow? Namik bent down and the gave the tracks a closer look...
They were strange and all over the place – whatever followed him was on two legs, that was for sure, but its prints were too big to be human. They were also very messy, the spacing between the steps was off and they went into a zigzag like motion, like the person who made them was drunk and stumbling around.
After looking into the strange shapes a bit more, he got up and kept on going back to camp, keeping calm by saying to himself that the strange tracks were made by a drunk soldier who got bored after following him for a while and then went back.
Any chances of this explanation being correct shattered when Namik reached the point where the strange tracks stopped following the path he made, but this was not in the camp, far from it.
He was about halfway there when the strange tracks separated from his own and diverged into the forest. They came from who knows where, but it sure wasn’t Namik’s camp. His mood changed from calm, to panicked and restless in a second and, before the next second even finished, he was running, as fast as he could, back to the camp.
He had to warn them, his people, that the enemy forces were there, inside the forest. That they were watching them, their every step. What other explanation was there for those tracks? Namik had none, except for the one he thought the scariest.
Little did he know there were scarier things than your enemy to be found in the woods – the enemy you’re not expecting. While he ran, he heard a distinct sound coming from the opposite direction and, to his surprise, this sound wasn’t loud weapons being fired at him – but screaming.
What made it distinct is that he never heard anyone scream that way in his life. Even thought he was terrified at that moment, he couldn’t resist turning his head to see what made the sound.
He did so and, while still running forward, he hit his head on a tree. Right before he blacked out from the impact, he remembered seeing a dark, huge figure running after him.
The next time Namik regained consciousness, he wasn’t in the same spot where he lost it. Instead, he was dragged away, to a place he couldn’t recognise. There were snow covered trees everywhere, with the only thing that could get him back on track to camp being a trail in the snow that his body left as someone or something dragged him to his current location...
Without a moments hesitation, Namik followed the path. A storm neared, which would soon erase his only way back to civilisation. Civilisation – not a word you would usually use to describe a war zone, but Namik wasn’t dying in the snow for no good reason.
As he ran through the woods that distinct scream appeared again, but this time, it wasn’t behind him – it was everywhere. These awful, inhuman screams filled him with terror, and this terror, fuelled him with adrenaline.
His body was in pain, whoever dragged him didn’t have the decency to avoid bumping him into trees, branches and rocks as they did it, but even though he was hurting all over, the place where it hurt the most was his mind.
It was his soul, which feared it would perish all alone – deep inside the cold Bosnian woods. These feelings are what gave him the will him to run – to not stop until he was safe, until he was back on the front lines, fighting for his life.
Life is, as many say, about perspective, and Namik's perspective at that moment was that a war was better than the cold hell he found himself in. The second his camp came into vision, he started screaming at the top of his lungs, screaming from pain, from fear, from the cold.
His screams were so loud that they drowned out the screams the forest was making at him. The men in the camp got out of their tents in seconds, all holding their rifles aimed at where the screams were coming from, all ready to fire.
Namik ran until he was behind the line of fire and then collapsed on the snow from exertion. As he laid there, face down in the snow, he wasn’t hearing what he was expecting – gunfire. There was none. The night was now completely silent, except for the cracking sound the wood was making while burning in the campfire.
Namik felt something grab him by his hands, there was two of them, one on each hand. He started wiggling, trying to set himself free of their grasp all while screaming at the top of his lungs that he wouldn’t let them have him for dinner.
After saying those words Namik heard people laughing, and those laughs, he knew well. The two men who grabbed him were his squad mates – Damir and Naser, both of which were hysterically laughing.
The rest of the camp couldn’t resist laughing with them for long, and soon enough, everyone there was having the time of their lives. A few men patted the still shaking Namik on the back, thanking him for the trouble he went through to cheer everyone up, while some swore at him for scaring them.
Namik played along, feeling like he had no choice in the matter. If he said the truth – that there were Bigfoots in the woods stalking them – they would first start laughing harder and then, after seeing he wasn’t joking, would send him to an insane asylum, which sounded worse than being on the front lines to him.
Soon it would be morning and with its coming – it came the time for the operation to start. Luckily for Namik, he wouldn’t have to spend another night near that forest.
The next day, while he packed, he took one last look at the forest that had almost taken his life for reasons he would never know or understand. Something hit him, a thought that he would rather die on the bloody battlefields of war for something he believed and cared for, than in the cold forest all alone.
The thought calmed him down, made his knees shake less about the upcoming battle, and then, after saying goodbye to the forest and its mysterious inhabitants, he turned his back to it and went to war.
Snow falled heavily, as it did through the whole night and soon enough, the tracks that both Namik and the creature made, would be buried by it – forever lost to history.
It would be years after the war that Namik would share his story with the world, but nobody cared. As expected, some called him a liar, some insane but most felt pity – they thought the war messed him up so much that he imagined the whole thing.
Is that really the case? Was everything he saw a by-product of immense stress? Could it be that, no matter how real the event seemed to him, it was only in his mind? Any of those could be the truth, but the one Namik swears is real, is the one you just finished reading...
Chapter 5
