by Thomas Page
The Indian emptied his pockets of bullets, dispersing them into the grass. He swung the rifle into the middle of the river where its splash was swallowed by foam. Then he crouched over the black, running water. He stabbed his hand deep into the icy water and emerged with a wet, flopping trout, which he killed with a blow against a rock. He pressed the fish into the dog’s mouth.
“Take this to him!”
The dog ran away, bearing the fish in its jaws. The Indian waited, his heart thudding, for the animal’s return.
What would his grandfather have done in such a situation? The Indian’s memory was treacherous; he could not retrieve things he wanted from it until too late. Those drugs the doctors had given him, the treatments, the sedatives, they had cured him up to a point but had left his memory dark. He could not remember his grandfather’s words. His grandfather had told him about Chinook the warm wind, the Blue Jay feast in the spring, and endless tales about Coyote, the laughing god who taught humans how to build tipis and use medicinal herbs. His grandfather had told him over and over about the night he went to the sacred ridge for his own spirit, who had been a human. The ghost had been his grandfather’s protector all his life. He had helped him through epidemics of flu and bitter-cold winters. He had been with the old man during the difficult transition to death, chatting with him, calming him, cheering him up, reassuring him about what was to come.
Of all the gifts a spirit bestowed, friendship and protection were the most valuable. His grandfather had never been lonely, never been lost, never been fearful about the world because of the closeness of his spirit. The Indian enjoyed thinking about his grandfather. He wished his memories were not so broken.
Not so enjoyable was the single, isolated memory of an Army doctor sitting before a sunlit window, hair waving in the draft of a small fan. “You are subject to hallucinations,” the doctor had said.
The dog returned without the fish, cheerful but yawning. That meant the spirit was going to sleep soon. Sometimes he slept for a full day. The Indian would not dream of intruding on the spirit at these periods. It would have been scandalously disrespectful. When the sleep was over, the dog would awaken the Indian with small wet licks on the ear and tell him it was time to resume the journey.
“I’ll have to make a bow and arrow,” the Indian mused to the dog. He could get ash wood from anywhere around and carve the arrows at leisure. The bowstring was another thing. He had nothing on his person that would suffice. What was needed was dried gut, as his grandfather had used.
The musk ox.
He found the carcass about a mile away, next to a Land Rover. He poked with distasteful movements inside the carcass and came out with a string of gut. He sliced a length of it with his bowie knife. The sun would dry it out, making it tensile and waterproof.
He returned to the woods, following the dog. At the mission school the Black Robes had taught him one thing of real value. Faith was a guttering candle flame that had to be cupped in the hands of the conscious mind lest the cold winds of existence blow it out. Once faith was lost, the present, the future, and even the past were yanked out from under your feet.
The Indian had to get his name. He would follow the spirit through hell itself if necessary. Occupied by questions of faith and eternity, the Indian put the helicopter incident completely out of his mind, along with all the other memories he had lost.
2
Jason awoke lying on his back, looking up at a dull gray morning sky veined by tree branches. A bird twittered from a bough somewhere up there. Buried deep in Jason’s skull was a hard sphere of pain that swelled whenever he opened his eyes to sunlight.
The morning was damp with dew that had soaked his clothes and pressed cold deep into his body. A thousand itches from the pine needles on the ground plagued his body. He rolled over onto his side and saw lying before his eyes the severed head of Dennis Hill. It had been carelessly thrown there like trash.
Jason closed his eyes, beating down the rising tide of nausea. Curtis. Where was Curtis? Jason sat up and searched for his rifle. It lay on the ground.
What else? What else?
The pictures! Curtis had photographed the prints!
Jason relaxed somewhat. The camera was at the camp, tucked away in a backpack. First he had to check the helicopter. He wanted to see what had caused the crash.
The rest of Hill was in the little hollow, with the rifle still clutched in one hand. The copter was a broken heap of aluminum plates mixed with the branches. It had literally torn itself up. The radio was dead. Jason picked the walkie-talkie off the floor. Still no Curtis. Either he had gotten away or he had fallen out. Or his body lay elsewhere.
Jason studied the curled stabilizer. The rear rotor blade was sliced to half its original circumference by the piece of the stabilizer that protruded inward.
At the joint where the stabilizer joined the fuselage, Jason found a bullet hole. It had punctured the base, weakening the cables. Maybe a smaller piece had done the original damage, but Jason knew he was right. That was not an echo he had heard last night. The Indian was a murderer, and a damned fine shot with a .30.30.
At the camp, Jason rewound Curtis’s film in his camera. He tucked the roll into a plastic sandwich bag and placed it in his zippered jacket pocket. While the gray morning melted to a golden brightness, he tramped through the woods, searching for some sign of Curtis.
It was an hour before his eyes chanced on the boot lying at the base of a tree. Curtis was upside down high up in the branches, his weight bending them. Jason wondered if Curtis’s death had been more merciful than Hill’s. He decided it had not.
The beast could still be around. Jason looked over his shoulder frequently as he walked back to the copter and from there to the camp. Had he not done that, he would have missed one final detail. A rock, its moist underside turned up, lay in the loam by Hill’s body. There was blood on one side. The thing could not have sneaked up on the pilot, so it must have thrown this rock to kill him.
Jason drove the Land Rover clear of the trees. The map showed a Canadian Ranger station not far away. He called them on the emergency frequency and told them there had been an accident and three men were dead.
Only after the voice on the other end said help was on its way did Raymond Jason dare to explore the tight, hard face of the Indian and that murderous giant locked in his memory. A hard feeling grew in his guts. He knew that feeling only too well by now. No matter how he analyzed the night’s events, he could not make the pieces fit, and he would not sleep well until he did. He worried at the cipher, he poked, prodded, and clawed at it with every rational method he could devise, but the mystery deepened, and within minutes Jason knew he would never rest until he had tracked both of them down.
Wind rustled the golden grass, splattered with brownish-red drops of his blood. Raymond Jason sat motionlessly in the Land Rover, his feet dangling outside the door, oblivious to throbbing pain and the constant trickle of blood on his clothes, his single-track mind fixed on a single project for the first time since he was young. Jason had found something to believe in.
He was flown to a hospital in Calgary and kept under treatment for two weeks. The Canadians were presented with two headless bodies, a helicopter with a hole in it, several expended cartridges, a sheaf of photos, and a baffling, disjointed tale of death and horror recited by Jason into a cassette recorder carried by a policeman who interviewed him while he was under sedation.
On the third week, Jason was released, and a policeman accompanied him to a plane for Kansas City. The policeman was polite but skeptical. “It’s not that we don’t believe your story, Mr. Jason. It’s just that there’s no proof these things exist. Besides, there are almost no reports of this kind of beast—Bigfoot, Yeti, whatever you call it—committing violence.” His face darkened. “We should very much like to find this Indian, if you know what I mean.”
“It w
as not the Indian,” Jason said emphatically. “I told you that. He wasn’t around when Nicolson was killed.”
The policeman smoothed down his hair and checked his watch.
“And the hole in the copter was a bullet hole, not a branch, like you said. I heard the shot.”
“Quite. You suggested the Indian was hunting the beast and you got in the way.”
Jason touched the turbanlike bandage on his head. He had been warned about dizzy spells. “Yes.”
“We must be especially critical of the incredible, Mr. Jason. We will keep an open file and all that. Do get your rest, and we will keep you informed of developments.” The policeman looked carefully at Jason’s pallid face. “And if I were you, sir, I would forget this business. Your friends are dead. It is over and done with.”
When Jason boarded the plane, the policeman wondered if that faraway look in Jason’s eyes was the result of his head injury or if he had always been like that.
The Kansas City Primate Research Center was located hundreds of miles away from any primate other than man. The director himself, a Mr. Kimberly, said he would be delighted to see Raymond Jason and examine his footprint photographs.
Kimberly’s office was filled with shelves, on which were displayed skulls, bone fragments, teeth, and other oddments from his jungle work. He spread the photos out on his desk and studied them intently. “Quite impressive. Not bad at all, Mr. Jason. Have you heard of the Bossburg prints of 1969?”
“No.”
“Those were quite impressive too. There were one thousand eighty-nine of them going along a river, over a fence, through fields and all. The right foot was crippled. Whoever faked those really knew his business.”
“Faked them?”
“That’s what I said. How about the Patterson film? Have you seen the Patterson film?”
“Day before yesterday,” Jason replied. It was the most famous piece of motion-picture film since Zapruder’s strip of President Kennedy’s assassination. Filmed in Bluff Creek, California, by a sometime rodeo man named Roger Patterson, the short movie depicted a six-and-a-half-foot-tall female Bigfoot walking across a dry riverbed with one enigmatic glance back at the camera. Whether it was authentic was debatable. Patterson had forgotten at which speed he filmed the beast, which was a crucial point. At twenty-four frames per second, the walk could have been human. At a lesser speed, the beast had a gait that was distinctly nonhuman. Patterson died vouching for the film’s authenticity, a fact which did not seem to impress Kimberly.
“What a mess that was. A gorilla head on a more-or-less-human body? A bare pink heel? The Russians examined the print and thought it was a Neanderthal man. Now, whoever faked that didn’t know anything.” Kimberly sat in a swivel chair and blew out his cheeks. “All these so-called sightings. All these prints. It’s really such an embarrassment, Mr. Jason.”
Jason tapped the photos. “These are not fakes, Kimberly.”
“Oh?”
“I see I’ve come to the wrong place.”
“You say you saw this creature?”
“Yes. At night.”
“Exactly what do you think it was?”
“Some kind of gorilla,” said Jason. “A very strange one.”
“There are no gorillas or chimpanzees or hominids of any kind in North America, Mr. Jason. Never have been. There’s no fossil evidence of anything older than modern man, not even Neanderthals.”
“You mean you haven’t found any,” Jason retorted. “Kimberly, I’ve knocked around a few museums in my time, and they’re full of bones in cardboard boxes shipped in by every digger in the Western Hemisphere. Folsom Man’s skull was kicked around for seventeen years before being identified. I wouldn’t be surprised if a whole skeleton weren’t rattling around some museum, waiting to be pieced together.”
“Mr. Jason, really! Where are his bones? Surely Bigfoot dies occasionally, leaving bones!”
“There aren’t any bones in the woods, Kimberly, what’s the matter with you!” Jason’s voice rose. “Birds eat them, insects, predators! They weather away after a week!” Jason reached for the pictures. Kimberly slid them a bit closer to himself. It began to dawn on Jason that Kimberly was using a dry kind of sarcasm to draw him out.
“But how does he eat? Really, when you come down to it, a beast this size has to eat tons! There are long winters up north, which kills off food for half a year, even for an omnivore. He can’t migrate or we’d see them all over the place. And primates don’t hibernate.”
“Kimberly—” Jason began.
Kimberly continued talking, more to himself than to Jason. “And you may be sure it takes more than just a male and female to keep a population going. Ecologically speaking, there’s a minimum population which must continue to exist for the species to survive. Life is too hard for just a male and female to continue the whole line. I’ve heard estimates that a minimal population of two hundred of these creatures is necessary for survival.”
“They’re not surviving, Kimberly,” said Jason.
“Oh?”
“They’re in the process of dying out now. The Indians say there were whole groups of them that fished the Columbia River. The white man’s diseases wiped out most of them.”
Kimberly clasped his hands and rested them on top of his head, rocking back and forth in his swivel chair. “You’ve done your homework.”
“A bit.”
“Then explain one last thing to me. Why is it that all the sightings of Bigfoot come together in the 1960s and 1970s? The Indians said they were all around in the early nineteenth century. The white man arrives, they begin to die off, then suddenly a hundred years later they seem to be popping up again. Does that make sense?”
It was one of the things that had bothered Jason in his preliminary researches. “Many people just feel more inclined to report sightings these days than they did a hundred years ago. I don’t know, Kimberly. I do know it’s real. I saw it.”
“It appears I can’t convince you otherwise.”
“Not a chance.”
“What did it look like, then?”
“It was a good seven feet tall. It was covered with black fur. It ran pretty fast on two legs. And it was mismatched, too, like the one in the Patterson film . . .”
“In what way?” Kimberly had become very still.
“I had the distinct feeling its head did not match the rest of it.”
“How!”
“The hair was too long. And I think it had a more-pronounced neck than apes usually have. It . . . it . . .” Jason rubbed his bandage. “It’s nocturnal.”
“How do you know that?”
“I just realized it. He could have examined the Land Rover any time during the day while we were gone. And that musk ox was about ten hours dead, which means he was killed at night. I’m certain he’s nocturnal.”
Kimberly doodled on a memo pad. “Let’s understand each other, Mr. Jason. I have a certain professional standing which necessarily excludes the existence of giant hairy apes in the great north woods. So long as we agree officially that Bigfoot is impossible and everyone who’s ever seen one, including yourself, is a fool or a liar, we can safely proceed to a higher level of irrationality. Is that clear?” He smiled. “The academic world can be very incestuous when it comes to such creatures. Too many sword fights with hatpins, if you know what I mean.”
“If I get him, I’ll leave your name out of it.”
“Thank you. What can I do for you specifically?”
“I want your professional opinion of those prints.”
“You mean besides being fakes?” He peered at the black-and-white photographs, turning them about as if to shed sunlight on them. “Well, there’s something that jumps right out at me, Mr. Jason. So far they’ve classified two separate and distinct types of Bigfoot prints, which clearly indic
ates this nonexistent creature exists as two entirely different species. And I do mean different, as different as trolls and unicorns.” On his memo pad, Kimberly drew a rectangle with five circles on top. “This is the print left by Patterson’s creature. It’s called the hourglass print because of the shape of the shank. Hourglass prints have long toes lined up horizontally, like marbles in a rack. He walks from the outer side of his foot. It’s a very clearly nonhuman stride with a nonhuman configuration.” Then Kimberly sketched a more-or-less-human foot, with toes that slanted forward toward the big toe. “It’s called the human print for obvious reasons. Not to imply it’s made by a human, but he walks like one. He comes down on his heel and takes off using the big toe. There’s an arch there, too.”
Jason studied the two drawings. Something was wrong. Something was really haywire.
“Yes,” said Kimberly. “It appears your ghost is a combination of both. You’ve got an hourglass foot with slanted toes. Yet according to the depth of the outline, he walks with his weight on the outer side. I bet his feet ache like hell.”
“What do you make of it?”
“It appears you’ve found a third species of Sasquatch, Mr. Jason.”
Jason remembered the word “Sasquatch.” It was a Salish Indian word meaning “wild man of the woods.” He knew he had been right. This ape was different, something that was not like the other primates—something that did not quite fit words like Bigfoot or Omah or the other legions of Indian terms.
Kimberly crumpled up the drawings and tossed them into his wastebasket. “Well, two species of a nonexistent gorilla are enough for me. Three is laying it on a bit thick. Whole groups of them, you said.”
“That’s right. Some Indian tribes say they were numerous right up to the 1850s.”
“After which they die out. Then suddenly, nonsensically, reappear in the 1960s. They just sort of fade away while Indians and whites slaughter each other. You’d think the late nineteenth century, with the farms sprouting all over the place and all that grain around, is when they’d really show up.”