Roanoke Ridge

by J. J. Dupuis

  “Is that true?” Saad asks. “About the bear carcasses?”

  I shake my head. “They’re rare, but they’re definitely out there. I looked into this myself, read reports from Katmai National Park, which has one of the densest bear populations in the U.S. A survey of brown bear deaths near the Brooks River, in the interior, notes that only thirteen bodies had been found in thirty years. However, another study from the Pacific coast of Katmai states that seventeen carcasses had been reported in a seven-year span. The Canadian Parks Service did similar studies in four parks that surround and encompass the Rocky Mountains. Between 1990 and 2009, they only found twelve black bears that were killed by natural causes. Your average hiker or hunter probably never reports a dead bear sighting, so we have no way of knowing how many are actually out there.”

  Inside the Rotary Club, a disco ball hangs from the ceiling in the centre of the room. In the back corner is a small bar. The lights are off and the glass door of the fridge reveals empty shelves. The Rotary Club is obviously the social centre of the town, but nobody is planning on partying tonight.

  Rows of brown folding chairs with plastic backs are set up in the middle of the room. There are only a few seats left, and a crowd lines up at the side of the room, near the table with the coffee machines on it. Old friends greet each other, introductions are made. There’s an air of reunion. The faithful sit at the very front, rigidly upright like there’s rebar in their spines. Saad and I stake our claim to some standing room beside the table with the coffee and the stacks of cups and bowls of creamers.

  Lindsay Chiu stands behind the oak lectern at the front of the hall, double- and triple-checking the projector and her PowerPoint slides. Her dark brown hair is tied in a braid that rests on her right shoulder. The reflection of her laptop is visible in her oversized vintage-style glasses. She shifts papers around next to her computer, then looks over at a man with white hair and a white beard, dressed like a hunter on safari, who joins her at the front.

  The room settles, voices drop to whispers. Every chair is now occupied by men and women who look like farmers, honest-faced people who go to church on Sunday and stop by the side of the road when a stranger is having car trouble. A line of men stand at the back of the room, arms crossed and stoic. It’s a packed house. I recognize several people from cable network “documentaries” on the paranormal and cryptozoology. The Bigfoot Festival tends to draw a who’s who of the squatching community.

  “I want to thank you folks for coming,” the bearded safari man says. “Some of you may know me from the Cryptomania website or my appearances on NatureWorld’s series Monster Hunt. You may have even read one of my books. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Lon Colney, and I’m here tonight because, like most of you, I’m absolutely fascinated by Bigfoot.”

  The crowd claps. A hefty farmer-type puts four fingers to his mouth and whistles at a pitch that could shatter a champagne glass. The energy in the room is akin to that of a tent revival, and like a circuit rider in the days of old, Lon Colney is here to minister to the faithful.

  “Before I introduce tonight’s speaker, I just want to say a few words. As some of you may have read on Cryptomania this morning, a new species of wolf has been identified in Nepal. This species was identified from DNA taken from scat samples, which tells me two things. One, large mammals are still being identified to this very day; and two, we don’t need a dead body or even a captured specimen to prove a creature’s existence!”

  The crowd is all-in now. Lon could ask them to stand up and join him in the hokey-pokey and it seems like they would without hesitation.

  My website, Science Is Awesome, commonly called ScienceIA, posted that same story this morning, albeit with a radically different slant. Canis lupus chanco was thought only to be a subspecies of European grey wolf. However, when the DNA samples collected from its scat were put through GenBank, an open access database of nucleotide sequences maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information, they were found to represent a separate species. A new species wasn’t actually discovered; the Himalayan wolf has been known to science for two centuries. Instead, an animal we already knew about was just given a new taxonomic status. But that didn’t stop Lon Colney from bending the story to fit his cause.

  “Think of the ape-men who hurled stones at the group of gold miners in a cabin in Ape Canyon, just up the highway from here in 1924. Or the female Sasquatch caught on tape by Roger Patterson in Bluff Creek. Or the pair of creatures filmed in this very region back in 1993. We know that something is out there. Many of us have seen it, or heard it, or found its tracks, or have even dodged its rock-throwing attacks. One day we will find the evidence, and like this Himalayan wolf, we will get the eggheads in the white lab coats to take a good, long look at what we’ve known all along!”

  One member of the crowd shoots up out of his seat and claps furiously. There are more cheers and whistles. Saad looks at me curiously and I shrug my shoulders. Lon waves the crowd down and the noise dries up.

  “Tonight we have a Ph.D. candidate from the Washington State University’s Department of Anthropology. She has been on several expeditions to the jungles of Indonesia to study the behaviour of white-handed gibbons, and has come here to talk about finding Bigfoot’s home range and tracking their movements using state-of-the-art computer software. Folks, put your hands together for Lindsay Chiu.”

  The clapping stops and Lindsay slouches in front of the microphone. Poor thing. She clears her throat and her first words are just louder than a whisper. I hate public speaking, too, it’s so much easier to use a website to communicate with the world.

  “Th-thank you for coming. We may as well dive right in. I’ve been using ecological niche modelling to predict the distribution of Sasquatches, or Bigfoot, in the Pacific Northwest, using reported sightings as my source data. Using these reports as a baseline, we were able to run them through a computer algorithm that factors in the soil type, temperature, precipitation, and tree cover and predict what ecological niche the Sasquatch finds optimal and where these conditions are most favourable. With one exception — the San Bernardino county sighting of 2010 — all the sightings occurred in matching environments.”

  Her shoulder shifts and the slide on the projector changes from the title screen to a map of western North America, starting with the southern tip of California and stretching up to the British Columbia–Yukon border. To the left of the map is a sketch of Bigfoot, arms swinging, looking at the audience. It’s like a still frame taken from the Patterson-Gimlin film, except for one missing detail, the pendulous breasts that seem to be a constant topic of conversation in Bigfoot circles. Each sighting of Bigfoot used in the study is marked on the map as a black footprint. There is a line of these footprints starting in the Palm Springs area. It moves north in a sporadic single file until about Redding, and then expand all over northern California and up into Oregon. From there the map is covered in black footprints, clustered near the mountains but pretty busy over all the green space on the map.

  “I’ve taken reported sightings going back as far as 1924, using filtering criteria such as the number of witnesses, physical evidence, and plausibility. Included in the data are auditory contacts with Sasquatches as well, though we’ve only included reports from witnesses with a lot of outdoor expertise, those who are familiar with common outdoor sounds, like those of deer, wolves, and frogs, for example. And of course, track sites have been included.”

  Lindsay changes the slide to one that looks identical, except that the footprints on the map are now different colours, all the colours of the rainbow.

  “The colour-coding gives you the idea of when these sightings happened. As you can see, the area of highest concentration of sightings ranges from Oregon to British Columbia, and the highest concentrations of sightings in the last twenty years are in northern Washington State and B.C. The distribution of Sasquatch, according to my model, is similar to that of the American black bear, which makes sense give
n that the Sasquatch is, like the black bear, purportedly a large, furry, mammalian omnivore.”

  The slide changes to two maps side by side. The one on the left is the colourless map from the second slide. On the right is a map with a picture of a bear overlaid on the West Coast, tiny black paw prints marking its territory.

  “As temperatures continue to change in the Pacific Northwest — as they have been doing steadily over the last few decades — we will likely see the remaining Sasquatch populations, as well as that of the black bear, moving to higher latitudes, and shifting farther north into British Columbia.”

  Standing to my right, in the back corner of the hall, is a well-coiffed man staring down at his smartphone, glancing up occasionally as if a teacher might call him out for not paying attention. He’s wearing a dark, pinstripe suit with a blue shirt and tie. I can see his gold watch in the dim light. His bluetooth is still clipped to his ear. If I had to pick out the one person who doesn’t belong here, it would be him.

  The next slide is that of a strange-looking bear. It is large, with the long body of a polar bear, but the wide-set skull of a grizzly. Its fur is a soiled white, and there is a dark mask of hair on its face.

  “This is a pizzly, sometimes called a grolar bear. It is a polar-grizzly hybrid. Incidents of this hybridization are occurring more frequently as grizzly bears migrate north in search of the cooler climate they have grown used to, and as polar bears move south in search of food as the Arctic sea ice that once provided nourishment melts away. Because of that same melting trend, bears can easily travel where there were once insurmountable mountain glaciers, and procreate with one another.”

  The slide changes again. Now a moose, almost completely furless, looks lost in the centre of the frame.

  “Some of you have probably seen this before. It’s called a ghost moose. You can see it has scratched off most of its fur as it tries to remove the ticks from its hide. This picture was taken in northwestern Alberta, Canada. The tick population has skyrocketed as the winter is no longer cold enough long enough to kill them off in great number. This is just another factor to consider. Remnant populations of Sasquatch may move farther north to avoid the increase in parasites and insect-borne diseases brought by warmer temperatures.”

  Saad leans over and whispers in my ear. “Is she …”

  “Trolling the crowd? I think so,” I say.

  The slide changes again. There are three images running diagonally from the top left to the bottom right of the slide, photos of a mountaintop with years printed above them. The more recent the photo, the less snow sits on top of the mountain.

  “We have seen a twenty percent decline in snowpack in the Cascade Mountains over the last century,” Lindsay says. “Show of hands, how many of you fish the rivers and streams that run down from the mountain?”

  Six or seven hands shoot up immediately, without thought or hesitation. Then the next wave of hands goes up, those of the people who took an extra second to process the question. Then there are those who are reluctant, those who feel they are being lured into a trap. Their hands rise slowly; you can see the struggle in their eyes.

  “You’ve probably noticed the changes in fish populations in the lakes and streams here in Oregon. We see fewer chinook salmon and bull trout in these waters, as their habitat is extremely vulnerable to temperature change. Many of you are probably used to fishing the cold-water fish, salmon, for example. New species are starting to move in as the waters warm and the snowpack shrinks with each year.”

  “Tell Al Gore we ain’t interested,” a man shouts from the back, his arms folded tightly across his body.

  Lindsay continues, nervous, but persevering all the same.

  “Although many theorize that Sasquatch is a vegetarian, I know many more of you suspect that its diet is very similar to that of a grizzly bear. If fish play a large part in the creature’s omnivorous diet, then the radical shift in availability of fish may serve to further force the creature northward into Canada.”

  I watch the faces of the audience members. Lindsay’s words are sinking in. These people read the articles every day about salmon die-offs, about new warm-water fish appearing both off the coast and in the rivers and streams. They have seen the local effects of a global phenomenon. Lindsay is succeeding where my site has failed: she is making climate change relevant to people whose belief systems have steered them away from the fact that man is able to tear down Creation, and can do it not with atomic bombs, but just by driving to work.

  “Let’s consider the amount of food a Bigfoot would require. Individual orangutans, who weigh one hundred pounds on average, eat between twenty-five hundred to eight thousand calories a day. The average black bear, weighing two hundred and forty pounds, eats around eight thousand calories a day, up to fourteen thousand as they prepare for winter. A Bigfoot, if it were to weigh four hundred pounds, would require something in the neighbourhood of six thousand calories a day. It would have to travel at least three-quarters of a mile daily to meet its dietary needs, and therefore needs a wide range to forage. Not only are large tracts of land necessary for foraging, but we must also consider uninterrupted corridors allowing individuals to breed outside of their family group, to maintain a robust and healthy population. If we consider gorillas for a second: lowland gorillas need a sixty-five-mile home range to meet their dietary needs. That’s an area greater than the town of Bend. Bigfoot will likely require a lot of real estate to survive. Although much of the Pacific Northwest is an unbroken swath of wilderness, human development, habitat loss, and forest fires will prove detrimental to healthy Bigfoot populations.”

  The audience is pensive again. People lean back in the seats, stroke their chins, furrow their eyebrows. They’ve been taken off the subject of climate change and are back on Bigfoot. Lindsay herself doesn’t have much in the way of a natural charisma, which is why science communicators have to work so hard against the slick, polished PR professionals who make their millions sewing doubt about the dangers of tobacco or fossil fuels.

  “According to the Forest Service, wildfire season is growing in both duration and area affected,” Lindsay says. “With these other stressors, and the habitat loss that comes with expanding human populations, it seems safe to assert that the remaining Sasquatch populations will migrate north to the cooler, less populated interior of British Columbia. Now, if you’re of the mind that you’d rather have a corpse to prove the existence of Bigfoot, fire and starvation may increase the odds of finding one. All we can be certain of is that this region is changing, and the animals who like it the way it’s been for millennia will have to flee to the north.”

  The applause starts slowly, softly. An older lady with a mess of curls, a cross around her neck dangling over the lip of her turtleneck, starts clapping furiously. She, out of sympathy perhaps, is cheerleading the crowd. Many don’t want to clap, but either rural hospitality or the herd mentality kicks in.

  Since I’ve been standing this whole time, I’m the first one to the table with complimentary coffee. As I pour, I see Rick Driver, the notorious hoaxer, in my peripheral vision. Wearing a baseball cap and denim shirt, he approaches me from across the room, chewing on his lower lip and hooking his thumbs in his belt. He tilts his head back to look down his nose at me. I pretend that stirring a Styrofoam cup filled with black coffee requires a lot of attention.

  “I know you,” he says.

  “Pardon me?”

  “I know you,” he says again. “You’re Nate Reagan’s girl.”

  His words catch me off guard.

  “You knew my dad?”

  “Oh sure, me and Nate were thick as thieves.”

  It’s hard to picture my dad collaborating with a man who looks like he models his appearance after Larry the Cable Guy. He smiles at me like I’m edible and he’s starving. I take a small step back and feel the table press against the back of my legs.

  “You were just a tot last time I saw you,” he says. “Now look at you, all grown up.�
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  “I don’t remember you,” I say.

  “No reason why you should. Like I said, you were just a tot,” he says, looking back toward the front of the room. “A lotta people got sucked into this. They came here in good faith to talk about a subject close to their hearts.”

  “That’s a lot of sentimentality for a hoaxer extraordinaire.”

  “That’s the game,” he says, then he points to the projector, which has left a square of blue on the screen. “Not this. If she wasn’t such a tasty —”

  “Laura,” Saad calls out to me.

  He is standing next to a bookish, sandy-haired man in his late thirties to early forties, who is wearing a wool sweater a little too thick for the spring climate. He sticks out in this room, looking more like he belongs among ivy-covered bricks on a campus somewhere.

  “This is Duncan Laidlaw,” Saad says.

  “Excuse me,” I say without looking at Rick Driver.

  “I thought you might appreciate a rescue,” Saad whispers, when I get to him.

  “You have no idea,” I say through clenched teeth, smiling at Duncan. “So you’re Duncan Laidlaw,” I say, shaking hands gently with the academic-looking man.

  “Indeed,” he says in his thick English accent. “Everyone here seems to expect something different when they meet me. I think it’s my name. I sound like a police detective or action hero or something.”

  “I was picturing Alan Grant from Jurassic Park,” I say.

  “Oh, well, sorry to disappoint,” he says.

  “Not at all,” I say.

  “I’m delighted to meet you,” he says. “I’m a huge fan of your website. I was just saying to Saad that your website stops me from making one of my own. I would have loved to capitalize on the millennial love of science, but I’ve missed the boat, I’m afraid. You’re doing such a smashing job I figure there’s no point in trying, so I’m left to my little blog.”