South Dakota

On a cool December evening in 2006, I was hiking in Badlands National Park as the sun set behind the unique clayish rock formations. Descending into a draw, a strange feeling came over me and I turned around to look back up. A gray, smoky ball of something zoomed away and was gone in an instant. Eyes went with it.

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Two years later, I read the book “The Work of Wolves,” by Kent Meyers.

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“Over the prairie, in the direction of the Badlands, in a dark draw, leaves stirred in a wind, in a place where no wind should find its way. Stirred and stirred. Whirled. The wind grew stronger, whirled harder. Rose. A shape formed out of the whirl and emerged from the draw and stood on the prairie. Starlight glittered on horn. Or something like it. Goatish nostrils, or something like them, nostrils made of wind and air, sniffed the air and wind…

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… hear a sound of wind approaching. Out of the darkness and into the edge of light comes a rushing thing, tall as a dust devil…”

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Goat Man

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Kent Meyers visited a fourth-grade classroom in Mission, South Dakota, located on the Rosebud Indian Reservation. The students told him stories of the beast-like creature.

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One student asked, “You don’t believe us, do you? You don’t believe he’s real…”