Roanoke Ridge

  The windows are frosted over with dust and grime. I knock on the door lightly, fearing the thing will fall right off its hinges. Boards creak under our feet; aside from that, and the wind whispering through the tree branches, the whole area is quiet.

  “Try the door,” Ted says.

  I look back over my shoulder at him.

  “What? We came all the way out here,” he says.

  “Mr. Lawman over here wants to break and enter,” I say.

  “No breaking, just entering.”

  I turn the knob, and as the door creaks open, I close my eyes for a split second, expecting a face full of buckshot. Then I step inside, Saad and Ted fanning out behind me.

  “Hello?” I call out.

  The inside of the house is covered in cobwebs, the air thick with dust. Moving deeper into the kitchen, I notice a wood stove against one wall, the kitchen sink against the other, and a door leading to a mud room. Only a small area around the sink and counter has been cleaned recently. Through another doorway is the dining room, with cabinets covering one wall and a big oval oak table in the centre, and beyond it are French doors that open into a den.

  “If you fixed this place up, it’d be a beaut,” Ted says.

  In the den is a dead lynx mounted on a log, its glass eyes glazed over with dust and cobwebs dangling from the gaping mouth. In the corner, sitting on the floor, is a TV in a massive faux wood case, the cathode tube in its back the length of my arm. It’s older than the TV in our motel room by at least a decade. The corners of the screen are filthy, but somebody wiped it recently, a swirling, circular area visible in the centre. Resting on top is an old VCR.

  Upstairs there’s a bathroom and a long hallway with two doors on each side. The ladder leading to the attic has been left down in the middle. I head straight for it, while Ted and Saad sweep the other rooms.

  “We got some gear in here,” Ted says. “And clean sheets.”

  In the attic are the gaping mouths of a hundred cardboard boxes. At the far end is a window with a sunbeam pouring through, and beneath it a long wooden trunk like a coffin. I walk immediately over to the trunk and flip the lid. Inside is a gorilla costume with the hair coloured brown instead of black.

  “Sasquatch,” I say. “The body found.”

  Ted joins me, keeping his head down to avoid bumping it on the beams.

  “Well, at least we know what happened to Scott Kelly’s gorilla suit.”

  “Not going to laugh at that,” I say, remembering the video of an astronaut dressed as an ape floating around the International Space Station.

  Beside the trunk there’s a box of VHS cassettes, Roanoke Ridge 1993 written on the side in black magic marker.

  1993. The same year my father shot film of a juvenile Sasquatch and its parent.

  “We have to take these tapes,” I say.

  “I know I was all about looking around in here, but stealing stuff? I’m not sure I can be a part of that,” Ted says.

  “Go and take a leak in the woods and Saad and I will move the stuff into the trunk.”

  “Do you really need it?”

  No one knows where the original Roanoke Ridge tape is. Many skeptics highlight that fact alone to undermine the tape’s authenticity. I’ve searched through a full garage trying to find where my father hid the tape. If it’s here, if he and Rick Driver were together when he shot it, I need to know. I need to find that tape.

  Saad drops the boxes down to me through the attic door, then climbs down. Ted walks ahead as if to maintain plausible deniability. In the reflection of the French doors I see the VCR sitting on top of the TV, like a male tiger beetle mounting a much larger female.

  “Saad, grab that VCR,” I whisper. “We’re going to need it.”

  When we step outside, a grey truck slows down at the end of the driveway, then speeds up as we get closer. A carcass, mutilated by a car, is now lying at the side of the road. Three crows pick at it with all the urgency of unionized city workers.

  “What is that?” Saad asks.

  “No clue,” I reply.

  Ted studies the carcass, squinting at it from where he stands but not getting close. His mouth opens and closes again. He wants to be able to answer, to be the man with all the answers. But sometimes a dead animal is next to impossible to identify from a glance and at that distance.

  When we get to the car, a northern goshawk soars over the opening in the trees. Ted looks away while we load the trunk with the stolen articles.

  “We should copy all these videos to my hard drive,” Saad whispers to me.

  “How?”

  “I don’t have the necessary equipment, but I’m willing to bet that those NatureWorld guys have everything we need in their van.”

  ELEVEN

  Roger Patterson, 34, the man who said he photographed an abominable snowman in the mountains of northern California this fall, has been charged with grand larceny involving a 16mm movie camera.

  — Lethbridge Herald, December 2, 1967

  BEFORE WE RETURN TO THE MOTEL, I INSIST on checking in at the ranger station. It’s practically empty when we arrive. What was just, a few days ago, the nerve centre for the search and rescue operation is now a frontier trading post. The crime scene and the use of helicopters in the search completely change how the operation is being run. There are two rangers on duty. One sits by at the comm station; the other leans back in his chair and is tossing a water bottle up into the air then catching it right above his stomach. He snatches the bottle out of the air and sits upright as we walk in.

  Ted greets the two men. “Morgan, Karl.”

  “’Sup, Ted,” Karl says, squeezing the water bottle.

  “Did the helos turn up anything?”

  “Not yet,” Morgan says. “They’re done for the day.”

  “Is the chief in?”

  “No, he’s taken Barb home.”

  “Barbara Sorel?”

  “What? She insisted,” Karl says. “Isn’t this your day off?”

  “Yeah, but these are some friends of the missing person and they have some information that might prove helpful.”

  We sit around Ted’s desk. It’s organized and sterile and mostly tells me nothing about him. There is, however, a red picture frame on the corner with a photo of a German shepherd sitting on the edge of a porch, mouth open, tongue dangling.

  “Cute dog,” I say.

  “Yeah,” Ted says. “Ralph was the best. Dad had him put down when I was overseas. Cancer.”

  “I never realized dogs got cancer,” Saad says.

  “Yep,” Ted says.

  There is a large map of the area on the wall to my left. Professor Sorel could be anywhere on it. It’s almost inconceivable that the helicopters have been unable to pick up his heat signature.

  “This whole thing is turning into a mess,” Ted says quietly, conscious of the two other rangers on duty. “It should be simple SAR, but then a man gets killed. And then there’s this mess with, of all things, Bigfoot. Who’d want to set up such an elaborate hoax at a time like this?”

  “That is, assuming it is a hoax,” Saad says.

  “I don’t see any evidence that says otherwise.”

  “There’s the bloody moss I found,” I say.

  “We can’t be sure that it’s blood,” Ted says. “This whole thing could be some kind of publicity stunt. Ben Compton could’ve shot a blank.”

  “Were there blanks in the magazine when you ejected it?”

  “No. But he only fired one shot. The first one could’ve been a blank. Think about it. If you’ve spent your life hunting Bigfoot, and now you believe it killed your buddy, wouldn’t you fire more than one round? Especially if all you’re packing is a nine-millimetre? You can’t take down something the size of Bigfoot in one shot with anything lighter than a thirty-aught-six.”

  “There’s no official size for Bigfoot,” I say.

  “It shouldn’t be too hard to determine if it’s blood or not,” Saad interjects. “It’s a simpl
e enough test. I could probably find the materials in your kitchen and first aid kit to test that substance myself.”

  “The sample’s still in the trunk,” I say.

  There are times when it pays to hang out with a chemical engineer.

  After retrieving the sample, Ted leads Saad through the back of the office into the dark hall, yellow lights flipping on as they move room to room. I’m about to follow when the map on the wall catches my eye and makes me realize something.

  Let’s operate under the assumption that all the recent Bigfoot sightings were of the same thing — that there is only one individual “creature” on this side of the mountain. That’s not a rational conclusion, but for my purposes it’s a workable hypothesis. Let’s stretch the facts a little further and assume that this creature also killed Driver. A pattern becomes clear: the creature is moving down the mountain, and at the same time away from the search grid.

  “Laura,” Saad calls from down the hall.

  He and Ted stand in the tiny kitchenette. Saad scrapes a sample of the dried liquid off the moss and places it in the centre of a white plastic plate. He then reaches to his right and grabs a brown bottle with a white cap, untwisting the cap quickly like we’re timing him.

  “Fake blood in old movies used to be nothing but chocolate syrup, did you know that?” Saad asks. “In black and white the chocolate comes through more clearly on camera. Think of that great scene in Psycho, of Martin Balsam falling down the stairs after being stabbed, blood splatter on his face. Then movies started to be shot in colour, but blood wasn’t a big problem in Hollywood because of the Motion Picture Production Code — sometimes called the Hays Code — which heavily censored American films. The British, however, used a ton of fake blood, especially in their lame Hammer films. The blood they used was either too bright, screaming red at the audience, or too dark, because many studios still shot B movies in black and white. It was Dick Smith, who worked on movies like The Godfather, The Exorcist, and Taxi Driver, who perfected the recipe for fake blood. It’s a base of white corn syrup mixed with red and yellow food colouring, methyl paraben, and a wetting agent used to develop film called Kodak Photo-Flo.”

  As he speaks, Saad pours the hydrogen peroxide on the blood sample on the plate. Tiny bubbles cover the sample. I feel like I’m back at science camp mixing vinegar and baking soda together while a lady in a white lab coat talks about acids and bases. For a long time, I thought it was acids and bascids on account of her accent.

  “This is not fake,” Saad says. “That’s blood. The bubbles are given off by the enzyme catalase, in the blood, which breaks down hydrogen peroxide into water and oxygen. The oxygen then escapes as gas — all the bubbles we just saw.”

  “Let’s hope it’s a hoax,” I say, “that this is just pig’s blood or something, and Compton didn’t actually hit anything. There was too much of it scattered across that trail. The animal this blood belongs to will die if it doesn’t treat its wound.”

  “That’ll be the test of how smart Bigfoot is — if he can tie a bandage,” Ted says.

  “Ted, do you have a map of all the mining activity in the area?” I ask.

  “Of course. Why?” Ted asks, walking through the office and stopping at a filing cabinet that stands against the north wall.

  “I have a hypothesis,” I say, careful not to use the word theory frivolously.

  Ted, pulling the map from its drawer and crossing the room, lays it out across his desk

  “Where was the mine we searched yesterday?”

  Ted stabs the map with his index finger. The mine he’s pointing to, where I’d found the MRE wrapper, is right between where Rick Driver was killed and where the Bigfoot was shot.

  “Hey, Saad,” I say. “Remember those two wildlife documentaries, the one about wolverines in northern Alberta, and the one about Amur tigers in Siberia? In both cases, the cameraman had to hide for days in the area where these animals lived in order to become a part of the habitat, to fade into the background. They built blinds to live in, sometimes didn’t leave them for days.”

  “Hunters do the same thing. I used to work at Grand Teton. Every year I’d have to tear down blinds after the elk hunt finished,” Ted says.

  “What if Professor Sorel is tracking this thing the same way? I found an MRE in that mine yesterday,” I say, pointing to the map. “Mines make good blinds. They’re already familiar features on the landscape. A Sasquatch wouldn’t get spooked by them.”

  “How do you know the MRE belonged to the professor?” Saad asks.

  “I don’t, this is all guesswork, but it’s a hunch we can test. If we find any other evidence that a man has been hiding out in these mines, it will further confirm my hypothesis.”

  “But wouldn’t he call his wife?” Saad asks.

  I shrugged. “This is his obsession,” I say.

  “So, if he doesn’t want to be found, there’s nothing to be worried about, right?” Ted says. “Sure, there’ll be hell to pay for all the wasted SAR man-hours, but aside from that —”

  “Something out there killed Rick Driver. We can’t risk it getting Professor Sorel, too.”

  “So now you think there’s a real Bigfoot out there? That this isn’t a hoax,” says Ted.

  “It could be a hoax so elaborate it’s fooled even Professor Sorel,” Saad says.

  What pops into my head, and I’d never say this out loud, is that maybe Professor Sorel has become so desperate that he can be taken in pretty easily.

  “This all sounds looney tunes to me,” Ted says. “So, what’s the game plan?”

  “We check all the mines from here to here,” I say, drawing a line with my finger. “Do you think we have enough light left to check any of them today?”

  “Sure,” Ted says, squinting at the map. “I’d say we can make the closest.”

  A pair of headlights catches my eye through the window of the ranger station as a car makes a U-turn out front, heading back in the direction of town.

  Saad checks his phone for the time. “What about Danny LeDoux and that video equipment?”

  “Right,” I say.

  “I could meet him at the motel,” says Saad.

  “You don’t mind?”

  “Anything to avoid doing any more hiking or climbing.”

  Ranger Ted is loose now, relaxed, not the rigid military man I met three days ago. We get into his truck and hit the road, and the whole thing seems routine.

  “You’re a tough girl, aren’t you?” he asks, not taking his eyes of the dirt road.

  “There’s a limit to how much I like being called a girl,” I say.

  “Fine. Tough young woman.”

  “Depends on how you define tough.”

  “I mean, you can handle yourself out here.”

  “I was practically raised outdoors,” I say. “And I train Muay Thai twice a week, and my gym offers a ladies’ Krav Maga class that I attend every Sunday.”

  “I don’t know what that is but I take it that it’s some fancy type of karate.”

  “Something like that,” I say.

  “Which one of those classes taught you to nut that idiot Compton?”

  “Actually, my dad taught me that,” I say.

  When we arrive at the first mine, Ted pulls the truck over as far as he can, wedging it into some small shrubs along the shoulder. On the other side of the road is a steep hill leading to the river below. I push my door open and face an almost perfectly vertical rock face.

  At the edge of the road stands an evergreen tree with drooping branches that look like rags. The tree itself looks like the witch from Snow White, an eerie figure in the waning daylight.

  “Brewer’s spruce,” Ted says, “Picea breweriana. It’s endemic to this region and is considered a relict species. Dinosaurs would have chewed on trees just like that.”

  “Aren’t you Mr. Knowledgeable.”

  “That’s my job.”

  We start the slow climb down to the riverbank, Ted in the lead. The in
cline is gradual and there are plenty of trees and rocks to hold on to.

  “Have you had enough yet?” Ted asks as we reach the halfway point.

  “Enough?”

  “Of all this hiking around.”

  “Not at all. I could get used to this.”

  “It’s addictive. I couldn’t do what you do, sit in front of a computer all day.”

  “I’m not sure how much I can do of that either.”

  “The Forest Service could always use you,” Ted says.

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I say, climbing down to the rocky shore of the river.

  Recreational mining and panning have been commonplace in the rivers of Oregon going back to the middle of the nineteenth century. Millions of years of water cutting through the mountains, eroding the soil and splitting the rock, have made the area ripe for resource extraction. In the summer, these riverbanks will be occupied by visitors panning for gold, some travelling from out of state hoping to make a buck. In the Wild West days, when most people couldn’t even pronounce the word regulation, miners dynamited the rocks alongside the river and dug long tunnels into the rock. Now the Bureau of Land Management cracks down on anything more elaborate than simple panning, and even that is prohibited while the salmon are spawning.

  “But seriously,” Ted says. “Are you considering a career change?”

  We walk against the current, scanning the bank and the hill for the entrance of a long-abandoned mine.

  “I’ve received an offer,” I say, “for the website.”

  “A good one?”

  “A great one,” I say, “if you’re talking about money.”

  “What does Saad think?”

  “I haven’t told him yet.”

  Ted pauses, turns at the waist and looks at me. He raises his eyebrow. “So, I’m your confidant now?”

  “Shut up.”

  “Your bosom friend?”

  “There’s the mine,” I say.

  About fifteen feet up from the river, the adit sticks out against the wall of rock surrounding it.