Clare Burke still doesn’t know what made mysterious tracks in her garden last summer, but it left an impression.
The Fairmont retiree called the newspaper found in the snow near Curtis, 185 miles to the west.
“Whatever it was tried to eat some pumpkins and cucumbers but didn’t seem to care for them,” she said. “I was kind of scared to take the dog out at night because we have a little poodle.”
Burke wasn’t the only Nebraskan to step forward with a tale about mysterious tracks. From Filley, 61-year-old Ron DeLong sent a footprint photo he snapped while scouting deer near Crab Orchard in 2013.
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“I guarantee you, my word as a man, I didn’t put it there,” he said. “All I did was stop and take a picture, and it was lousy one at that.”
First, a refresher on what jogged their memories: In January, Sharon Jorgensen was taking her morning walk with her border collie through the Arrowhead Meadows Golf Course near her home in Curtis.
Snow had stopped her from walking the entire course for weeks. But the weather had broken, so they made their way to the third hole. The 63-year-old froze when she found footprints emerging from the trees, skirting the rough and disappearing back into the woods.
They were big, dwarfing the glove she dropped to give scale to her photo, with an estimated 6-foot stride through the virgin snow.
And they’re still unexplained: A deputy, a biologist and a Game and Parks staffer couldn’t offer any answers, although a Journal Star reader sent a link to children’s bigfoot-printmaking snowshoes available on Amazon (without explaining the distance between steps).
Clare Burke read Jorgensen’s story and remembered the morning last fall in Fairmont.
It must have been September, maybe October, because her cucumbers were still coming in and the pumpkins were still growing.
Clare is from Maryland and her husband, Robert, is from Beatrice. They retired to Nebraska four years ago. They didn’t want to live too close or too far from Lincoln, so they bought a house on the southeast corner of Fairmont, farm fields in two directions.
“We get little critters,” she said, “but never anything that big.”
They first found the roundish prints -- 6 to 8 inches across -- in their garden, and tooth marks digging into a pumpkin and cucumber. Two weeks later, Robert found more tracks in their tree line.
“Whatever it was, it was very, very big,” Clare said. “It’s crazy. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
The tracks have disappeared, but Clare and Bob clearly remember toe prints -- ruling out hoofed animals, like horses or cows.
She sent a picture to a relative who hunts, and he suggested they’d been visited by a bear. She went online to look at bear tracks and wasn’t convinced.
Her husband called the town marshal, Steve McLeish, who came out to take a look. He was puzzled, too.
“I’ve been riding horses since I was 8,” he said, “and this was not a horse track.”
Months later, he doesn’t remember seeing toe marks. More like a cloven hoof, he said. McLeish has owned cattle, and there’s a feedlot nearby, but any cow making these tracks would have to be huge. The tracks were big, sunk deep in the dirt.
He thought at the time: moose?
He waited for more reports.
“I have no clue what it was," McLeish said. "I was thinking something else would come in, and nothing else came in.”
He told Robert and Clare to send pictures to a state conservation officer, but he couldn’t identify them, either.
“The official word from Game and Parks is unknown,” McLeish said.
The Burkes didn’t find more tracks, but one night around the same time, they heard a strange crying noise coming from a neighbor’s tree.
Robert climbed out of bed and looked out the window. Nothing. He got his spotlight and shined the tree. The sound stopped. He turned off the light. It started again.
“He got up and locked all the windows,” Clare said.
In Johnson County, Ron DeLong was headed home from a weekend in Nebraska City in July 2013 when he decided to take a look at the area where he hunts deer near Crab Orchard.
“I was driving real slow, looking at the soft dirt on the side of the road, and I see this track,” he said. “First I drive by it and then I’m like, wait a minute. What’s that?”
DeLong wears 5X-wide shoes, and this was nearly twice as wide. It was longer, too, and had clearly defined toes, he said.
It looked like whatever made it had crossed the minimum-maintenance road from one wooded area to another.
He took pictures with his phone and showed them around at work. Months later, he read about a reported bigfoot sighting in Butler County and took a harder look at his photo.
That’s when he noticed a similar but smaller print inside the first, as if something smaller had been following close behind.
“Before I saw the little track, I was skeptical,” he said. “That little footprint speaks volumes.”
If it were a fake, a hoaxer wouldn’t think to put a second print inside the first, he said. And they wouldn’t leave a single track so far out in the country.
His photo isn’t entirely clear -- he couldn’t email with his phone so a friend took a picture of his screen. But DeLong, a quality engineer at a Beatrice factory, can see it all. The big print. The little print. His own print alongside both.
“It is what it is,” he said. “I did not see the animal that made it, but I sure wish I would have.”