by Andrew Gille
We walked for probably twenty minutes after turning around when I smelled a campfire.
“Does the hermit have a roommate or something whose returned?” Colin whispered.
“No, we’re too far from the cabin to smell a fire,” I said extinguishing my MagLite.
We cautiously walked off the path and went toward the smell of the smoke, soon I could see the glow of a fire over a ridge. I looked at Colin who took his SCAR off safe and walked closely to my left. I took the Savage 99 off safe and looked down at the magazine counter. The light from the campfire was bright enough that I could see the number of rounds in my gun displayed on the counter, “5.”
Slowly moving, I heard a low guttural voice speaking some strange language. I knew it was not Russian. Perhaps it was Khazak or Uzbek. As I got closer, I realized that no, these were not sounds produced by a human being. We crested a ridge and down in a low valley we saw them. Three of the snowmen sat in the snow crosslegged while a fourth stood before them, wearing a hat adorned with antlers. The body of another of the beasts, lay in front of the one who stood. It was the one who had been impaled upon the tree, but now his wounds were cleaned and an incision ran down his chest, snow seemed stuffed in his body cavity. Rocks lay at his feet and head. I looked at the position of the moon and realized he was laying in an east-west fashion.
“Kill them all,” Colin whispered.
I lifted the scope to my eye, but the scene made me unsure. I took a breath as I noticed that the crosshairs were shaking slightly from whatever emotion I was feeling, I wasn’t sure if it was fear or anticipation or anxiety right at that moment, but inhaling the fresh air calmed the movement of the crosshairs.
As I peered into the scope, listening to the distant speech from the snowman, I noticed a peculiar thing. I put the crosshairs on his face, I’m not sure why. Even with the twinge of doubt in my mind, I think that at that moment I still intended on shooting him in the chest, now confident that the full metal jacket bullets would penetrate the thick fur. However, when I looked at his face, I saw a man with emotion. Tears streamed down as he spoke, he was mourning his deceased friend whose body had been prepared in a strangely familiar manner. I noticed too that he wore a cloak made of a tiger skin along with a necklace made of the tusks of what appeared to be wild boars.
He looked down at his friend laying before him mournfully, he said a few words then took a breath. His face no longer looked vicious and inhuman, it seemed like a caring, thinking being. I took my finger off the trigger continuing to look down the scope.
“Shoot them!” Colin urged whispering to me.
I watched as the others left their position sitting cross-legged and went up to their deceased friend. They placed a hand on his chest and spoke. I could see the tears streaming down their faces as well.
“Kill them!” Colin said, now almost breaking out of a whisper.
I watched the scene unfolding before me. Colin reached out to grab the gun, I jerked it out of his grasp and pointed it at him.
“Don’t!” I said as adamantly and loudly as I could in a whisper.
“What the fuck?” Colin mouthed, putting his hands up. I lowered the barrel of the gun, and he put his hands down, but the shocked look on his face did not go away.
“Let’s go,” I said and began walking through the snow.
Colin followed me looking bewildered, I watched for him to reach for his SCAR and fire at the snowmen, I was ready to stop him from doing this, but I did not have to.
We walked another hour back to the cabin and said nothing to each other the entire time.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Camp
“THEY DIDN’T KILL Anatoly, they didn’t kill the man who owns this cabin,” I said.
“What? What the fuck Mason? If you can’t kill those things, you should have given the gun to me!” Colin said, and now he was shouting.
“Watch your language Colin,” I said.
“Just shut the fuck up Mason. You pointed a fucking gun at me,” he said, the anger in his voice no longer subdued by his need to conceal himself.
“I’m sorry, it was the only way.”
“You’re the one who taught me to never point a gun at anything you don’t want to kill, you want to kill me, Mason?” He said now tears welling up in his eyes.
“Colin, just listen,” I said, trying to reason with a man who was becoming more and more volatile.
“Listen to what? I bring you here, I try to give you the greatest experience of your life, and you point a gun at me? You protect those things? What is wrong with you Mason? You have totally flipped!” Colin shouted.
“No, I saw something in those snowmen, they didn’t kill Anatoly, they mourned his death! They didn’t do what you think they did.
“What do you think you are the…yeti whisperer, Mason? You could have saved us both, now we have to go out there tomorrow with those things hunting us. I’ll tell you what is going to be different tomorrow, I am going to carry that 99, in fact, you can’t have it anymore. If I’d known that you were so mentally impaired that you’d point a gun at me, I’d have never given it to you in the first place! Give it to me.”
Colin and I struggled for a few moments with the gun, I was not going to have him in the same cabin unhinged like this and not have my own weapon. He was bigger and stronger than me, he was a trained martial artist, but he’d never been in the military, and I used an old trick that we’d learned fighting with the pugil sticks to throw him to the ground.
“Calm down now Colin!” I shouted at him as he looked up at me shocked from the ground. I offered him a hand, and he sheepishly took my hand and stood up.
“It wasn’t them,” I repeated as he stood taking in deep breaths and shaking.
“They have fangs and claws, whatever ate Anatoly had fangs and claws, their footprints are all over the place both where Anatoly died and here by that guy in the yard. How can you not think they did it? You’d be a really shitty detective Mason,” Colin said dismissively.
“The burial customs, they mourned for Anatoly, they didn’t kill him! There is a kindness in their eyes,” I couldn’t explain what it was I saw during the funeral ritual that told me that I was right, but I knew I was.
“Kindness? What kind of shit is that? Deer look kind, we still shoot them! What’s going on with you Mason?”
“They were intelligent, they were sentient beings, Colin. Don’t you understand?”
“No! I do not. I understand that you put us in danger by not taking the opportunity to kill the things we set out to kill. We need to kill those things, Mason!”
“You know, you’ve become a real asshole Colin,”
“You’ve mentioned that,” he said.
When Colin was younger he was actually a very nice kid, he just wasn’t what you’d call assertive. He was a little timid and meek. I actually worried about how he might get pushed around in later life. He was skinny, quiet and rarely confrontational.
By the gender norms of the ’80s, he was also a bit effeminate. In retrospect, it seems like something we shouldn’t have been concerned about, but back then the gender roles between boys and girls were very black and white, or blue and pink you might say. Colin routinely played with his sister’s dolls and had his own Barbie doll that he’d asked for, which his mother bought him in spite of Tim’s objections. The guy had two sisters, and he went to private school a half hour away, so he spent a lot of time either by himself or playing with his sisters. So he played around with makeup, and the girls dressed him up in dresses and heels and stuff. His father hated this.
Anyway, that all changed around the time, he became a teenager. I think he tried to overcompensate for what we would now say was a healthy view of gender roles. The way he behaved when he was younger, I mean it was just a kid who found those things fun. He just didn’t really care what other people thought a boy should be doing. It was really nothing more and nothing less, I don’t think it said anything about what he was like or is like
now. However, I do think he was embarrassed that he was known for playing with Barbies and makeup and I think he went in the polar opposite direction. I think he sought to prove that he was the opposite of anything feminine.
He started doing karate and playing football, and he became, I don’t know, almost a bully. He kickboxed in high school, and his mother didn’t like it, this was something he found out about through the karate dojo, they recruited him because he had won a lot of karate trophies. Teenage karate tournaments and amateur kick boxing are entirely different, one is basically a game of tag wearing pads, and you can’t even hit or kick someone very hard with the pads. His parents didn’t attend his kickboxing matches, but I did, and it was insane.
The kid who I’d once seen covered in lipstick and eyeshadow wanting to show me his Malibu Barbie doll was now a shredded 175 pound monster in the ring. Some guy, he was an adult, fought him, it was the 17 and 18-year-old division and Colin was only 17. Colin later told me that he didn’t like the way the guy looked or he had made up some assumptions about him, he just assumed all this stuff about this guy he never met so that he could hate him and he tore into him. He kicked him in the face and broke his nose about 20 seconds into the fight. Remember this guy was only 18 but he was an adult and he looked to his corner and told them he wanted to continue. They let him make his own decisions. It was the wrong decision. Colin just kept punching him in the nose. Colin clearly outclassed this guy, this guy had no business being in the ring with him. Colin hit him at will, he opened up a cut over his eye, and I saw he was just punching him in places that he was going to damage him but not knock him out. He wasn’t throwing kicks, just punching him with surgical accuracy. I shouted to Colin to knock him out but he wouldn’t. Blood was everywhere, it was the most brutal thing I’d ever seen. Finally, the other guy’s corner threw in the towel when Colin punched the guy’s eye shut. Colin was pissed, he wanted to beat this guy some more. Colin himself looked like a butcher, blood was dripping everywhere, his karate pants which started out white were now a brownish red. The referee looked like someone had chainsawed open a cow next to him. Even the judges and some of the people in the front row were covered in blood.
I drove him home, and he delightfully described how he chose the spots to punch this guy, and it actually made me a little uncomfortable. He was a sadist, he enjoyed every minute of it and to knock the guy out would have meant an end to the pleasure of inflicting more pain on a person who he’d decided needed punishment.
I worked a lot in those days, so I really noticed the transformation of Colin to what he became. Every time I saw him, he was more bull-headed, more of a jerk and talked more about how he’d pushed a person into doing something or bent someone to his will through intimidation and manipulation.
This carried over into his business dealings. There were rumors that he had a minor part in creating the compression software that had made him rich. However, he’d bullied his college friends with the threat of lawsuits, and they’d given him a more significant piece than he was entitled to. Whatever the actual story, the truth was that he’d been much more successful since then with the money he’d earned on that software. I’d heard around $35 million which he’d made in 1995 and by the stock market crash in 2000, he was worth over a billion dollars. That crash affected him very little, and he seemed to make even more money during it. Jason Sanders, such an instrumental figure in the creation of the software that the essential subroutines done to compress the files were called The Sanders Algorithm, lost everything and committed suicide in his San Francisco condo. He’d been invested in several startups that went under including Flooz.com which was actually a poorly orchestrated forerunner to BitCoin, Pets.com and Global Crossing. Colin, on the other hand, had losses, but they were only temporary and were in companies like eBay and Amazon which would rise meteorically after the crash. He also bought a significant number of shares in Apple shortly before the crash, this was around the time that Michael Dell had said he would “dismantle” the company if he was in charge of it. I think we know how that turned out.
He was chairman and CEO of Kiron Investment Group when he was 19 years old, and that company became an umbrella for a number of his investments. I’ve read articles in Forbes and online that his company's business practices are often ruthless. They strong arm their competition and dissenters within are quickly fired.
This billionaire, hardcore business dealing nephew of mine sat before me crying like he had when he was 6, and his dad took his Barbie doll away.
“What the fuck Mason?” he said, tears pouring out of his eyes as he sat upright with his legs splayed out and his hands resting limply between them.
“We need to keep going, fighting with each other isn’t going to save us and neither will killing those things. They weren’t attacking us. Save your bullets for something like a bear attack,” I said.
Colin picked himself up off the ground and looked at me angrily, tears still pouring out of his eyes, he now made sniffling sounds and wiped his runny nose with his tactical glove.
I began walking back toward the trail, and he silently followed.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Captured
MY STOMACH GROWLED as I noticed myself having more and more difficulty traversing the snow which had actually become less deep as we followed the trail. I seemed to be losing a lot of energy. I realized that the cold and the exertion and the stress had started to catch up to me. Colin followed behind, and we’d said nothing to each other since our previous exchange. I kept an eye on him as he was still armed with the SCAR-L and I wasn’t quite sure if I’d angered him enough that he’d consider killing me. He was indeed angry about me pointing the gun at him, which I’d certainly be as well, but I wasn’t sure if he was angry enough to consider killing me for it. I definitely felt he was capable of it if he were able to justify it. Just as he’d sadistically destroyed his opponent in the ring when he was 17, I figured he could do it if he made up enough reasons or became angry enough.
As we continued on through the snow, I realized that once again, we’d be spending the night in the wilderness. The sun sank in a familiar but disconcerting way that signaled that the end of the hours of light was near. Adding to the foreboding idea of spending yet another night sleeping in the cold and dangerous forest, I again had a distinct feeling that we were being hunted.
I didn’t dare share my suspicions with Colin as it would be one more reason for him to rage at me about not killing the giant fur-covered men we’d encountered. I didn’t even know what to call them anymore. Yeti seemed like a word for a sci-fi movie or a silly cartoon, these creatures were very real and very different from the untamed wild men I thought of as Bigfoot. They had a language, a culture, adorned themselves with artwork. The ceremony for their fallen friend made me certain that they believed in a god and an afterlife. It was evident to me that they’d performed the same ceremony on Anatoly. Whatever they were, this was their home, I felt that it was respectful and right to get out of Russia and leave them be.
As Colin continued to sniffle, no longer crying but probably still congested from his meltdown, I swore that I heard additional feet crunching through the snow. It was difficult to make out, and I didn’t want to talk to Colin right now or give him any indication that I felt like we were in danger.
I stopped a few times eliciting a “What?” from Colin, I heard nothing in the brief seconds of silence afterward. The sun was now sinking below the horizon again, and I dreaded the idea of telling Colin that we needed to stop and camp.
We continued on through the valley, the shadows cast by the sun through the forest had now disappeared, and darkness was beginning to cover the entirety of the area. My eyes were at the edge of being able to discern color, and I saw the stars coming out.
For some reason, something caused me to turn, I believe I was actually going to break the silence with Colin and ask him something. I turned and saw his face, he was looking down into the snow, if I had not twisted my bo
dy, I am not sure what would have happened to him either, because as I caught sight of him, he looked up and moved slightly. From the corner of my eye, I saw movement, and I dodged a massive object coming at me. I thought at first it might be snow because it was as large as a car and white. A powerful paw swiped me into the snow, and I saw Colin go down as well. Luckily because of our movement, they didn’t hit us directly, and their claws didn’t dig in but only grabbed the fabric of our jackets. As I lay on my back in the snow, shocked, trying to understand what was happening, I saw them. Three white and black saber-toothed tigers.