Just before we reached the end of our path, he vanished over the upper edge of the canyon wall. Maybe he was gone for good. It must have taken us nearly five more minutes to reach the top. The path had disappeared and things were very treacherous. It was extreme rock climbing. We gripped ledges and edges and slowly moved up those last ten metres, terrified to look down at Hell’s Gate below and all those people who were probably still staring up.
But we made it. For a second we dropped to our knees and just gasped for breath. Then we heard sounds that made us move: Lance and his snipers gasping for breath, right below us! We jumped to our feet and looked around for sasquatch signs. We didn’t have to look far. There were tracks and twisted-off branches and knocked-over trees on a path that headed straight into the forest, making a beeline back in the direction of his big nest. He was seeking shelter, desperate to get away.
Seconds after we darted into the trees on his trail, we heard Lance and the others climbing onto the top of the canyon wall. Then the race was on. We all tore through the woods, our lungs burning, not knowing when the creature might suddenly leap out and grab us and twist off our heads like he’d done to the mule deer.
But all the signs suddenly vanished. There was silence in the rainforest. We stopped running and stood still. I looked back and saw Lance and his snipers doing the same. Their upright figures and the outlines of their guns were about fifty metres away, partially camouflaged by the big dark trees going straight up like bars in a huge jail. We all stayed still for a long time.
Then we heard a rhythmic thudding, like someone pounding something against a tree. It echoed in the forest.
“Indigenous people say sasquatches made that sound,” whispered Uncle Walter, “thousands of years ago.”
Alice shifted nervously from one foot to another. “What does it mean?” she asked quietly, as if she didn’t want to wake anyone.
“I don’t know. But people fled when they heard it.”
Gulp.
Even those idiot snipers knew something was up. They had formed a circle and were slowly turning around, their backs to each other, looking out into the trees, guns ready, listening. Their circle was steadily moving towards us. I was looking the other way, but I could hear their footsteps softly crunching on the ground and Walter’s and Alice’s quiet voices drifting through the forest.
Then the steady, thudding beat stopped. So did everything else. It was so quiet we could hear ourselves breathing. The wind picked up, whistling through the trees. Poe appeared out of nowhere, the flapping of his wings sounding like a helicopter coming in for a landing. He swooped down onto Uncle Walter’s shoulder. Then he pivoted, looked in the opposite direction, and gave a little gasp: a raven gasp. I will never forget that sound.
“Ahhhh,” he said quietly.
Walter began to turn, then Alice turned too. He didn’t shout and she didn’t scream, but I could feel their horror, like it was something so real it was hanging in the air.
I slowly rotated my head.
Poe flew straight up into the air.
Standing in the woods about ten metres away was a nine-foot sasquatch! It was looking right at us. Half ape, half human, its hair was long and dark brown, its skull wide at the back with a ridge bulging along the top, its small eyes black and wild. It had a big, flat nose on a hairless face, huge arms hanging down past its knees—and that smile.
But I knew now for sure that it wasn’t smiling. It was snarling…at us. It had teeth like a massive dog, and was rocking back and forth on its big feet.
This was the monster from my dreams. I was facing it. For an instant I hallucinated. I must have been dizzy, or perhaps my eyes rolled up in my head, because I had that weird sensation of blue sky again, passing in front of me, like I was moving along underneath it.
Walter had done many amazing things throughout the last few days. He had made a whole series of fantastic decisions. But he was about to make a bad one: a very bad one. He reached for his video camera and pointed it directly at the sasquatch.
It wasn’t how his towering subject reacted that made this such a bad move. It was what it told Bennett and his snipers. They were still a good twenty metres away. They couldn’t see what we were looking at, but when Walter went for his camera, they knew. They started to run towards us.
“Take the shot!” Bennett screamed, the adrenaline pumping through him and turning his face red. A vision of the legendary sasquatch monster stuffed and mounted in front of one of his many businesses on gorgeous Harrison Lake must have been racing through his overheated brain. He searched for the outline of the creature in the trees, his eyes bulging as if they would come out of his head.
He found it.
In fact, all eight eyes locked on the sasquatch as the four men screeched to a halt within ten metres of where we stood. Guns were levelled.
Unlike Uncle Walter, many of my moves over the last few days had been ridiculous, and at that moment I made one that topped them all. I bolted from my position and placed myself between the sasquatch and the snipers.
“DYLAN!” cried Walter.
“Don’t!” pleaded Alice.
“Move,” growled Lance Bennett, a snarl on his face worse than the sasquatch’s.
It was strange: the creature wasn’t trying to get away. It was still rocking back and forth, watching us. We knew that it could easily outrun us, that it could crush us if it wanted to. But it was as if it had given up. You want me? Here I am. Do whatever it is you human beings do. Kill me, or leave me alone.
It was a standoff…at least for a few seconds.
“Shoot over the kid! Take a headshot!” screamed Lance.
One of the snipers squeezed off a shot. It felt like I could see the bullet coming at me. Everything around it moved in slow motion as it exploded out of the gun and rocketed forward, turning in the air as it whistled past. It whizzed over me and I thought I could feel it cut through my hair, which must have been standing about a kilometre straight up towards the canopy of trees above us. It hit something behind me and the sasquatch screamed.
Then…he picked me up.
He just loped towards me and lifted me off my feet with a single sweep of one of his huge arms. I might as well have been a feather. The stench was overpowering. Now my head was almost directly in front of his, and the rest of my body covered his heart and his stomach—in other words, all the best parts to shoot. Out of the corner of my eye I could see something red trickling down from his upper body. But I couldn’t look back—his gigantic arm had me in a vise-like grip, wrapped across my chest.
The sasquatch moved directly at the snipers. They had lowered their guns and their mouths were opening so wide it looked like they were fire-eaters, ready to swallow. We took three or four huge strides and loomed over them. The creature’s breathing was loud. His big muscles flexed and his heart pounded so hard I could feel it. He dropped me with a thud, almost throwing me at the snipers. I rolled over and looked up in time to see him smack two heads together. The men staggered forward, dropped their guns and fell face down on the ground. Then he seized Lance Bennett and the other guy.
“Please don’t hurt me! I didn’t—” screamed Bennett, as sincere as he’d ever been. But just as his next word was about to sound, his head connected with the other sniper’s with terrific force. His body was suddenly a wet noodle. He wiggled and wriggled, bent and swayed, then fell flat on his back. The sasquatch had done them all in like cartoons.
Then it fled, back in the direction we had come from.
Walter and Alice were still standing where they’d been when they turned and saw the sasquatch. “I’m into weird,” Alice liked to say. Well, now we had weird all right.
I noticed that Walter’s video camera was still in his hands and that its red light, the one that tells you it’s running, hadn’t been switched on. So did he.
“Oh, man!” he cried, look
ing down at it. “We’ve got to film him, even from a distance!” We leapt over the four woozy bodies and ran.
We quickly realized we’d been going in circles since we left the edge of the canyon, drawn around and around by the sasquatch. Within a minute or two we were back out near the top of the cliff, around a bend from where we had come up. On the other side of that bend and far below we could see the crowd of people, like toys, still gathered. Media vans were parked near the lookout. Lance had obviously alerted a horde of them.
Then we noticed something else. Standing at the very edge of the cliff, looking down at the throng who didn’t know he was there, was the sasquatch. We had a clear view of him. He had his back to us. He looked as wide across as a couple of refrigerators. There was blood on his shoulder.
Cosmos Greene had told us stories about other sasquatches being shot by people: stories that no one believed, stories that ended with the sasquatch getting away. It was said that they could take a lot of bullets without going down. It was like trying to shoot an elephant.
We slowed to a walk and moved cautiously towards the creature. We got closer and closer. Walter pulled the video camera off his back and trained it on his subject. He flicked the switch on. Instantly we were recording a sasquatch, as clear as day, as the sun began to set over the Fraser River Canyon. The creature turned. He gazed at us with a longing look as we steadily stepped towards him. That smile of fear was gone. We came within five metres as he stared right into the camera.
I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He looked like something someone had made up: an awesome character from a book, a creature from another world. He didn’t frighten me any more. He just amazed me.
There were sounds in the distance, near the edge of the cliff where we had come up from the top of the path. As the sasquatch turned to them, we slowly made out the forms of several reporters, pulling themselves up onto the rocky ground, swearing out loud, not looking up. They were dirty and exhausted, but held on to their cameras and notepads and cellphones like they were gold. They hadn’t seen us yet. They were nearly a hundred metres away.
The sasquatch looked at them, that eerie smile growing once more on his face. Then he glanced back at us, the fear increasing. He was caught. If he ran one way, he’d head right towards the reporters; if he ran the other, he’d come at us. Behind him was the sheer drop of the Fraser Canyon. I suppose he could have made a desperate charge and just trampled us. But it seemed as if he’d had enough of people. “You will never catch me,” said his black eyes.
So he turned…and leapt out into the sky above the Fraser Canyon.
We rushed to the edge and looked over. He floated like a skydiver, his hands and giant feet stretched out. We could hear him scream. It was a deep shriek, like a giant crying out, and it echoed and then faded as he fell, a haunting sound swallowed up by the canyon. Three-quarters of the way down, he hit the big trees. We saw him grab at one treetop: it snapped off in his massive hands. That slowed him, and when he hit a second tree he held on. We watched, spellbound, as he shinnied down its trunk and then disappeared into the trees and away from us all, down the canyon towards freedom.
We just stared.
“Dragons live,” whispered Alice.
I was stunned.
“You filmed him,” I told Walter. “He’s in your camera.”
We stepped back from the edge.
“HEY!” shouted a reporter, spotting us. “It’s that Middy guy and the kids.” They began running towards us.
“Where’s the monster? This is front page!”
Uncle Walter looked at me. “Yeah,” he said quietly, “I’ve caged him. In two days they’ll have the army out here looking for him.”
He paused, eyeing the reporters coming at us, their faces excited, drool almost dripping from their mouths. Then he turned his back to them and looked out across the canyon. In the distance we could see the sasquatch’s head in the water. He seemed to turn and look up at us for a second. Then he went around a corner and vanished from view.
“Free!” cried Poe, high above.
At that moment Uncle Walter made a big decision. He secretively slipped the video camera behind his back, away from the reporters’ view. Then…he dropped it over the edge of the canyon. It hit the rocks far below and shattered into a thousand pieces.
“Mr. Middy?” cried Campbell of the Vancouver Sun, puffing up to his side. “Tell us everything! This is incredible, isn’t it?”
“Tell you what?” said Walter with a very calm smile.
“About the sasquatch.”
“What sasquatch?”
Campbell gave him a puzzled look.
“The one you chased up here: there are hundreds of eyewitnesses.”
“Have you spoken to them yet?”
“No, not yet. We will.”
“And how close were they to this…sasquatch?”
“Well, maybe three, four hundred metres ”
“I think you’ll find that none of them are completely sure of what they saw.”
“But—”
“It was a bear. An unusually large grizzly bear. A male.”
“But—”
Alice stepped forward. “It was a giant bear.” She smiled at Walter.
“Yeah,” I added, “a great big bear.”
“I have been interested in the sasquatch for many years,” continued Walter, “and believe me, I’d know one if I saw one. As you are aware, many people claim to have seen them in the past, even crowds all at once. But no reasonable, grown-up human being has ever believed them. Only children. You have to have hard evidence.”
The reporters were all gathered around us now. You could see them sagging as they listened to our story. But then one of them noticed something over my shoulder. His eyes lit up.
Lance Bennett was making his way out of the bush towards us, staggering, feeling his head. One of the snipers was behind him, looking equally buzzed.
The reporters rushed towards them.
“Mr. Bennett, tell us what you saw!”
“I’ll tell you all right,” he growled. But before he could go on, Uncle Walter interrupted.
“Come, come, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Bennett is the esteemed proprietor of one of British Columbia’s most successful business ventures. Do you really think he could mistake a grizzly bear for a sasquatch?”
“Eh? A grizzly bear?” Lance sounded confused.
“Mr. Bennett isn’t the sort to go around seeing sasquatches, especially without any evidence.”
Lance looked around. It was dawning on him that the sasquatch had escaped.
“He’s a grown man,” continued Uncle Walter smiling,“a respected individual. He has a reputation to protect.”
Lance was eyeing us, calculating.
“You may even find footprints around here,” continued Walter. “They always have a way of turning up in the wake of these sensational stories. But as we all know, footprints can always be explained. They have been many times. Right, Mr. Bennett?”
Lance paused. Then that fake smile spread across his face.
“Yes, Mr. Middy, quite right,” his smile not nearly as perfect as before.
“What happened to your head?” asked one reporter.
“Uh…bumped into a tree.”
Half an hour later we had all made our way back down to the tourist area. All the snipers were on their feet again, walking on wobbly legs, all but Lance talking total gibberish. Not only were they telling tales of seeing a sasquatch, but of all sorts of other weird things they’d encountered in the forest: talking animals, children that grew and shrunk—you could almost see little birdies flying around their poor heads. Most of the crowd had dispersed and those who remained were talking animatedly. Some were saying they knew they’d seen a sasquatch, others claimed it had to have been a bear, or a man dressed up in a suit.
> Walter did make a few statements to the press. He said we had indeed thought we were after a mysterious creature and that was why we had come through Hell’s Gate Canyon on the raft. But we knew better now, he said.
“Everyone can be deluded at least once, I suppose. Every year, hundreds of people think they see monsters—the sasquatch here, the abominable snowman in the Himalayas, Ogopogo in Okanagan Lake—but really, they only exist in our imaginations…that’s something of which I’m becoming convinced.”
I could see my parents coming over in the air-tram before they spotted me. Mom was staring out the window, searching the crowd and looking anxious. Dad looked worried, too. If they’d been angry about what I’d done, their anger was long gone by now.
Then Mom caught sight of me. A huge smile came over her face and she waved so hard I thought her hand might snap off. I readied myself for her whole supply of hugs.
Once they got out of the air-tram they made a beeline towards me. I could see Mom was clutching something in her hand: a copy of the note I had sent with Mack Cook. I looked at Alice standing beside me, obviously feeling very alone. Her head was down and she was kicking gravel back and forth between her feet. Carol was far away in the crowd, with Lance, giving all her attention to him. I reached out and held Alice by the hand. I’d never done anything like that before. She looked at me. Then I felt her squeeze.
Uncle Walter was smiling at us. He came over and brought his face up close to ours. We were like a little island among all the grown-ups and their big opinions.
“We know,” he said quietly, gazing deeply into our eyes, “and that’s enough.” He looked like someone who knew a wonderful secret. He seemed very happy.
Then he stood up and spoke in a louder voice as my parents neared. Mom was getting teary, holding her arms out to me; Dad was hanging back a little. Walter sounded different now. His voice actually seemed a bit like mine. I looked up at him and noticed for the first time how much he resembled me, aged, with a dashing goatee and moustache, built like an athlete still, and an amazing, dreamlike life behind him.
“The only thing I can’t figure out,” he said, “is how that sasquatch could look exactly like the one I’ve been seeing in my dreams since I was a child.”
Monster in the Mountains Page 13