by Andrew Gille
They were massive, much bigger than any tiger I’d ever seen in the zoo and their curved canine teeth were as long and sharp as daggers. The one in the middle shook his body as the others snarled, sizing up their helpless meals as they lay stunned in the snow.
Colin struggled to reach his gun which was pinned awkwardly underneath his body, I knew this just made him more intriguing, and I stayed completely still. The Savage 99 had been flung 10 yards from my body after the impact and getting to it would have taken more time than I had. I would have just died struggling to get my gun with the tiger on my back as I assumed Colin would in a few moments.
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I’d read about smilodons, I’d certainly seen pictures of them, but I could have never imagined seeing one in real life. What were they doing here? They acted, just like you’d expect a cat to act. They lowered their bodies, pinned back their ears and focused intently on us, their haunches shaking in preparation to pounce.
Two watched Colin, but the one in the middle had his yellow eyes intently focused on me. It was only going to take one of them to kill me. Colin was probably lucky, the other two would rip his body apart fighting over him, he’d die more quickly. I was probably going to be pinned down and toyed with before those razor sharp dagger-like teeth punctured something important.
I saw the one focused on me leap into the air and I closed my eyes, waiting for the impact of his muscular body. I counted to two. Far, far longer than it should have been in the air, I heard a wild snarling sound and opened my eyes. A blur of fur and teeth tangled near me, I could feel the power of the combatants, the snowy ground almost shook as they fought furiously.
I looked toward Colin, behind him a massive form had skewered one of the tigers and held it up like a kabab. Another shape which I could not identify at that moment pinned the third beast to the ground with his spear.
Then my ears were deafened by the terrifying barking of Colin's gun. The furious fight between the unarmed form and the biggest smilodon ceased, and he turned to me. I felt dragged through the snow, so fast that I thought a vehicle of some type was pulling me. Then I felt myself being pulled into massive arms. I was being carried like a child as the bullets of Colin's gun sailed by making a low sucking noise as they narrowly missed the creature who held me.
The sound of the gun trailed off, Colin's magazine was empty, and I heard only the heavy breathing of the creature who carried me. I was nestled in the thick warm fur, too shocked to scream or do anything about my condition. Soon two others joined us at the left and right, I held on like a baby in the beast’s arms as it ran off into the dark forest.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Rescue
WITH GREAT SPEED and dexterity, the giant creature carried me through the snow. I was warm and felt strangely secure stuffed within his thick fur. I grabbed him, and a tuft came off in my hand, I had the forethought to place it in the pocket of my parka as we continued on. Only when I allowed myself to overthink did I fear for where the beasts were taking me. They seemed to treat me with care and concern.
I looked out into the forest, the nearly full moon rose, scattering light through the trees allowing me to see the form of the creature who carried me. Massive, fur covered, like a giant man, the beasts were precisely what was described in countless legends. Their power and speed were unbelievable through the difficult terrain, especially when carrying my 220 pounds through the forest. I estimated the snowman who took me to be 900 to 1200 pounds, which explained the ease at which he carried me. I was at most a quarter of his weight, it would be like carrying a 50-pound child for a powerful 200-pound athlete.
I heard the heavy breaths he inhaled into his cavernous lungs as my head stayed buried in his fur. The more time I had to think the more I worried about our destination. What did they want with me? Why had they rescued Colin and me from the tigers and put themselves at risk to do so? I was bewildered, but it was something I was getting used to on this trip. Nothing made sense anymore.
As I resigned myself to my fate accepting whatever the beasts had in store for me. The snow before us came alive. What appeared to be five or six smaller beasts popped out of the snow. Suddenly, I saw what seemed to be lightning flashing in the forest and cracks of thunder so loud that once again my ears were deafened and I heard only a high pitched ringing noise.
I tumbled into the snow, not knowing what was going on. The small beasts that had come from nowhere grabbed me. I screamed, attempting to fight them off. I saw the creature who carried me laying in the snow, a massive geyser of blood poured out from a gaping wound in his head melting the snow and coagulating into a pool the size of a truck tire. Again, I could not fathom what was happening.
I then heard the beasts who now had a hold of me shouting at me in Russian. The sounds they made, though foreign to my ears were distinctly human. They pinned me to the ground in some kind of wrestling maneuver and then shined a light into my eyes. I took deep breaths as I stopped struggling. The one holding me shook his head and spoke into a throat mic. The sound of a helicopter became barely perceptible.
I saw several men now. They wore identical white ghillie suits which is what had given them the appearance of monsters. Several had large caliber sniper rifles which were now slung on their backs as they loaded the beasts into body bags.
The helicopter, a Mi-24 Hind, was now overhead. I felt straps and clips fasten around me, and suddenly I realized that I was connected to one of the men. He raised his hand behind me, and we were lifted into the air by a hoist. By the light of the moon, I saw the bags lifted up into the helicopter. We, however, did not get hoisted into the cockpit. Instead, we dangled below as the aircraft began moving swiftly through the air. The other men ran into the forest, they would obviously be extracting themselves. These men were efficient, well trained and fast. These were not ordinary Russian soldiers, I believe they were Spetznaz special forces.
For maybe 15 or 20 minutes we dangled below the helicopter. I saw the forest below me, and then in the crisp night air, I saw the lights of an airfield. The soldier behind me said nothing and made no attempt to engage me in any way as we glided over the treetops toward the base.
I wasn’t sure what to think. I wasn’t sure if I was being rescued or captured or what exactly was happening. It was apparent that we’d flown south and down out of the mountains as we began our descent to land. The air was warmer, and the snows that had been ubiquitous up in the hills were now absent.
The soldier’s feet dropped to the tarmac, he unhooked himself and then, making sure that I was steady and on my feet, disconnected me from the line that led to the helicopter. He said something into his throat mic and the Mi-24 disappeared into the night sky.
He grabbed me by the arm and marched me toward a nondescript green building, still silent. His lack of speech was not a concern in that I knew exactly what he wanted me to do by his actions. I saw his AK-74 rifle hung behind his leg on a tactical sling. I didn’t care to have him feel the need to point it at me, so I did exactly what I thought he wanted me to do.
We entered the building, coming out of the dim moonlight, the harsh, white fluorescent lights made me squint and hurt my eyes. I was led down a long hallway past rows of rooms which I could see through the windows in the doors were dark. A clock hung by the wall over the hall read 2:35, it was very early in the morning, and the building seemed unoccupied.
The lights were turned on in one room, and this is where the soldier led me. He opened the door, motioned for me to enter, shut the door behind me and walked away.
There sitting at a table set up in the room was Colin and the man who I’d seen at the cabin. They stopped talking to each other when I entered and assumed solemn, serious faces. The man got up when I joined, shook Colin's hand and left the room. The only acknowledgment he gave me was a slight nod as he walked by.
“Alright, we can go home now,” Colin said to me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Return
I
T WAS SURREAL to be back in a modern building after nearly a week in the wilderness. The suddenness of it was the most jarring thing. I’d gone from being a captive of a strange unknown species to sitting at a Russian airbase in less than an hour. I was a bit bewildered.
Colin packed up his belongings and began putting on his jacket.
“My jet is outside, we’re going to head back to Vancouver,” he said.
“I didn’t think you were allowed to land at a Russian airbase,” I questioned.
“Well, they flew it here, they want us out of the country as quickly as possible,” he said, stuffing items into his pack.
“So, just like that? We’re going home?” I asked, it all seemed very strange.
“Yep,” came his terse response, “I have the Savage 99, you dropped it.”
“Yeah, a saber-toothed tiger knocked it off of me,” I explained as he seemed to be blaming me like I’d just absentmindedly left it on a stump or something.
“Saber-toothed tigers have been extinct for over 10,000 years Mason,” he said matter-of-factly.
“Oh really? You got knocked down by one as well, and what exactly did you empty your magazine at as I was being carried away by…”
He interrupted me, snapping at me angrily, “You will not talk about this Mason, there were no saber-toothed tigers, nothing else, we came here, shot some bears and left.”
“What? This has to be one of the most incredible discoveries of modern time. It lends credence to an entire legend of cryptozoology, we can’t keep this quiet.”
“Only we will, you will not say anything about this. There are a lot of very powerful people who do not want this to get out. They are going to let us go home, a dead billionaire is a black eye they do not want, and since you’re with me, you get to go home as well. However, there is one caveat, we never, ever talk about this to anyone. Anyone we tell who starts talking about yetis or Pleistocene era megafauna is going to be a target. You correctly surmised that my friends here are dangerous. If I want something quiet, I can usually have a person shut up, I just dig up dirt or make something up about them. An insignificant journalist or blogger? I’ve bankrupted them or ruined their reputation. I’ve taught plenty of people who tried to sully my name a lesson that way, they’re all still alive, although I’ll bet there are a few who wish they weren’t. That’s not what it is like here, this guy isn’t a billionaire, he’s a trillionaire, and he has an entire nation’s resources at his behest. If we tell this story, yeah, we might sell some books, we might make a movie, but not only will it be discredited and thoroughly discarded, we’ll soon die of some rare form of the flu or a strange car accident. If I take my entire security detail to Patagonia and hide, they will find a way to poison my Yerba Mate, if I go to Madagascar, they’ll get a trained lemur to kill me. No, we are not going to say anything about this. You tell Aunt Diane, she’s dead, believe me, they’ll probably bug your house, my jet is probably already bugged. And as far as this conversation goes, I think you should probably say for all of the microphones in this room that you are going to shut the ever living fuck up about this whole thing,” Colin's face was red, and his voice was getting loud and shaky.
“Yeah, sure,” I said suddenly hit with the gravity of how dangerous words could be in this country, “I won’t say a word. Can you answer one question for me and then I’ll never mention this again?”
“What?” Colin snapped.
“What exactly happened? What were those things? I know what I saw, how do you explain it?”
“I don’t know, Russia may have some different rules regarding genetic manipulation of extinct species. A plane went down north of here while we were en route, maybe something escaped that plane that was destined for a lab or some other facility. I don’t think we need to think about that. We’re alive, we’re being allowed to leave, and I don’t really care. There are things in this world that I’d rather not know, that’s one of them.”
“Alright,” I said, taking a mental note of the plane crash.
“Okay, get ready to leave, there is really nothing more to discuss. One thing though,” Colin said grabbing his pack, ”Take off that jacket, you reek like piss and wet fur.”
I stuffed the jacket into my bag, as we left the room, a soldier, checked us over. He wiped some white fur off my pants and spoke to Colin.
“He says do you have anything else with fur or any kind of evidence of those things on you?”
“No,” I answered, but I was in such a daze that I honestly thought I was telling the truth.
We walked out of the building to Colin's waiting jet, the engines were fully warmed up and making the loud hiss of a turbofan. I could smell the kerosene smell of jet fuel, and I knew that they had recently been fully fueled for the flight.
I packed my bag in an overhead compartment and buckled myself into a soft leather chair awaiting takeoff.
“The Savage 99 is in that compartment,” Colin said, “You can have it when we get back to The States as long as you don’t point it at anyone else. I don’t want to be liable for that.”
I nodded and said nothing, I was getting it back, and that was really all that mattered right now.
“Here’s the story about our hunt, memorize it. I’ll be asking you questions, and I expect you to know the details in that paper. That’s what you’ll tell anyone who asks, like Aunt Diane, but you don’t need to tell anyone more than those who ask you,” Colin said handing me a two-page report.
I read the report, it detailed an almost comically perfect hunt where Colin and I both shot two Russian bears and had a wonderful time “roughing it” in some area of Siberia called Kamchatka. I didn’t even know where that was until I got back and Googled it. I am assuming that it was pretty far from where we actually were.
“What happened to the bears?” I asked after reading the report.
“What?” Colin asked like it was a dumb question.
“The bears, if I shot two trophy bears in Russia, I’d have one made into a rug, and I’d do a full mount on the other one, what did we do with the bears we shot?” I asked.
“Um, they’ll show up in Kalamazoo I guess. How long would that usually take to arrive?”
Obviously, he didn’t think this through, “Probably a couple months to clear customs I think, I don’t know, you didn’t think about this?”
“You’ll get two bears,” he said. Then he put on some giant earphones, bigger than the ones I had in the ’70s and sat back in his leather seat and closed his eyes. He was clearly not interested in conversation.
The flight to Vancouver was quiet and strangely relaxing. Everything I’d been through seemed so surreal and imaginary that I am not sure my subconscious actually believed that it had happened. Since then I’ve had some difficulties sleeping, and occasionally I am troubled by painful thoughts, but it isn’t like I can go see a counselor about this. I just have to deal with it. Colin probably did secretly see someone to get help for it, he can afford his own personal therapist to deal with any issues, but I wonder if he even cares or has any troubling thoughts about this entire thing.
When we reached Vancouver, Colin had someone take me and my bag to the terminal where he presented me with a boarding pass to Kalamazoo/Battle Creek International.
“Someone will deliver the Savage 99 to you in a few days, too difficult to arrange customs on that right now,” were his only parting words, as I walked out onto the ramp with my bag. I had stuffed my suit into the bag I’d brought thinking I was going to a conference and I carried both of them with me to a Chrysler 300 that waited on the tarmac for me.