Chasing the Demon

by Paul Sating

  Careful to keep himself and Frank far enough away, he followed the tracks into the tree line where the underbrush slowed his progress. It was so thick that many of the tracks were difficult to find. As he moved deeper it only got worse. Whatever had come through here did so in a hurry, knocking over and trampling the brush, destroying any chance to collect evidence. After about a hundred yards anything usable was long-gone. The trampled vegetation made the tracks below indistinct from the clumped mud. This part of the trail grew cold thanks to the matted flora. That didn't make sense. No matter how big this thing was, it couldn't have disrupted the vegetation this much. The destruction was too expansive.

  Maybe it dragged something alongside? A deer? But that couldn't be what happened. Frank didn't mention the Sasquatch carrying or dragging anything and the rest of the tracks didn't show this wide of a berth.

  Unless what he was seeing had come from the other direction.

  He hurried forward and was discouraged for all his troubles. The matted underbrush spread out even wider just a few feet ahead.

  It didn't make sense and time wasn't on his side; he was wasting the precious moments of sunlight he had chasing bad evidence. He'd have to head back into town with Frank soon and that meant he wouldn't be able to come back out tonight. Anything could happen in those hours he was away. Forks rested along the Pacific, which was unfriendly to evidence like this. Another reason Peter should include in his reasons to understand why the Pacific Northwest served as the home of Bigfoot. Animals evolved from their environment and this place handed Sasquatch all the advantages. Bigfoot hunters were playing against a stacked deck.

  He was losing time. He had to make a decision quickly. There were still the footprints on the bank. They were few in number, but they'd make excellent casts. He was going to head back there to collect them. It just didn't make sense to—

  A wall of tall Pacific wax myrtle stood defiantly in front of him. But that wasn't what caught Jared's trained eye. He couldn't believe was he was seeing. His heart thudded in his chest as he reached around his side to try to unzip the backpack without taking his eyes off what he was witnessing. He didn't want to look away, afraid that this was a dream, that if he blinked it would be gone. No, he needed to absorb this; it needed to be real.

  He was looking at the lair of the beast.

  *****

  Jared squatted, setting the pack on the ground and feeling around inside to dig out his camera. His eyes never left the nest.

  That’s what this was. It fit all the eyewitness descriptions he’d taken over the years. The experiences his peers reported; this resembled the structures they described. A fucking nest! After all these years, he was finally seeing one for himself. Thank God I asked Frank to hang back by the river. He'd have a goddamn heart attack.

  This was starting to make sense, as scary as that was to think about. The underbrush he followed looked trampled because it was a well-worn path, probably used daily. He was confident of it because of what he was now looking at.

  The home of a monster.

  Never in his twenty years of doing this had he stumbled onto one of these. He heard they existed. He'd seen pictures from other investigators, pictures they wouldn't release to the public that purportedly showed and served as evidence for Bigfoot nests. He just couldn't be too careful when it came to believing the claims. Some of them were easy to dismiss; they were as pushy as used car salespeople. But some investigators and hobbyists spoke about witnessing a nest with a sense of awe that Jared didn't understand.

  Until now.

  Now he did.

  He stood on the edge of a clearing of matted deer fern. A circle about fifty feet in diameter was laid flat by traffic and a body ... or bodies. Someone or something walked through here often. More importantly, this was most likely where they ate, slept, and lived. Off to his right, something had spread the remains of what looked like a raccoon across a small area. They looked relatively fresh, killed within the last day or so.

  He snapped a thousand pictures if he snapped one. The expanse was wide, too wide to be natural. This place had been deliberately cleared and designed for living. Twigs, branches, and mud were amalgamated into rounded huts. Three of them spread across the back half of the clearing. Homeless people wouldn't be this far out from town and they wouldn't have done this. Stealing tents would have been much easier than constructing these huts. Animals did this.

  Intelligent animals.

  His heart raced. His pulse thumped. He felt ... nauseous ... dizzy. Nerves maybe? Adrenaline?

  And suddenly aware of something ... disturbing.

  A sense that he was being watched. It was a feeling he'd sensed before, a feeling many Bigfoot investigators experienced, but not something he went around telling people about. It wasn't something he even recognized until it was over, and even then, the words failed to capture what it felt like in the moment. It was like that moment when you thought you were over a hangover, right on the cusp of being a normal person again, and the irrepressible desire to puke led you to emptying your stomach all over someone else's sidewalk. That wave of immediate nausea when the world tilted and faces blurred; that's what this felt like. It was something he wanted to remove himself from as quickly as possible.

  He knew what it was.

  And yet he couldn’t stop it.

  Fleeing meant acting on instinct, not rationality and he wouldn't fault himself for that.

  He had to get clear of the influence. His head was fuzzy the entire walk back to the river, clearing only before he reached Frank, for which Jared was thankful. The tourist didn’t need to see him like that. The last thing he wanted, the last thing he could afford, was to give Frank a reason to doubt him or his sanity. By the time he reached the river he was able to put on an act of calmness, though he did catch Frank examining him. His act failed.

  To avoid any awkward questions or conversations, Jared set about quickly making casts of the tracks he could grab good samples from as Frank looked on and asked questions about the history of Sasquatch. The older man wondered if these footprints looked faked, like all the other examples and stories he'd heard for years. It was a legitimate question; one Jared always kept in the forefront of his mind when going into investigations. Because people always asked.

  Sasquatch enthusiasts could be divided into two categories: knowers and believers. Believers entertained the idea of the viability of the species existing. Some even hoped the beast existed. But knowers were different. They proclaimed its existence, even when there wasn’t evidence to support their position. They were the unwavering types, the types that made his job that much more difficult. He wasn't a knower by any stretch of the imagination, preferring to keep a healthy balance between blind faith and equally-blind skepticism, though he had no idea how good of a job he was doing with either of those. As long as no one pried into his personal life he could fake it. If they did pry though, giving him a failing grade would be understandable. Maria might have a thing a two to say about his ability to be skeptical.

  He shared his perspective about con artists in the community. Frank looked disappointed. "Have you seen some of the stuff on television?" Jared quipped.

  "We don't watch much of it," Frank grimaced. "Bought the damn dish for the motorhome but we find ourselves driving and enjoying the places we stop. Dorothy's got her lady shows and I enjoy some of the fishing programs, but there don't seem to be too many of them on nowadays. Imagine you're saying Bigfoot is getting popular enough to have its own show now?"

  Jared shrugged as he started cleaning up the site. "I'd risk saying it's becoming less popular."

  "Yet it's got shows on TV?"

  "That's the thing," Jared replied, "those are the type of people who are hurting investigators like me; people who want to find legitimate evidence through doing legitimate investigations. It's hard enough to get people to want to speak up about this without some of the crap making a mockery of everything we do to find this animal."

  "Hmmm,"
Frank moaned, "might have to check some of this out. I don't know if I'm crazy about being linked with that kind of stuff."

  It was an easy sentiment to understand; Jared couldn't fault Frank for being queasy about it, but he also wasn't going to mislead the man. "Like I said, you feel uneasy about any of this at any point, including me, you let me know and we'll shake hands and go our separate ways, even after we've already gone our separate ways. I don't want you to have any regrets about calling me, Frank. But I'm telling you, what you've shown me ... you've propelled me to the front of the line in the community. There's maybe," Jared paused to do a quick count, "a handful of investigators out of the hundreds that I know who can claim to have evidence like what you’ve given me today. Even so, some of those claims are very, very weak." Jared didn’t feel the need to tell Frank about everything he’d uncovered today.

  "You seem like a good man," Frank beamed, "you really do. If what I showed you helps, I'm happy. Someone needed to see this. I just don't want to be looking crazy. It's not that I give a damn about what people think, I'm too old for that, but I do care about how it affects my kids and grandkids."

  "I'll honor your name, Frank. Hey, I can even send you the files so you can listen to them before I start releasing them."

  Frank laughed so loudly it echoed off the surrounding trees. "Sir, you'd have to teach me how to listen to them podcast things first. I'm a radio man. Never even got into those CDs, never mind all that fancy stuff you kids are listening to nowadays."

  They joked all the way back to Jared's truck, Frank helping him carry some of the casts. Jared tried to hide the constant smirk that wanted to stretch across his face at the sight of Frank's fascination with the prints. When they got back to the motorhome, Frank got out of the truck but hung by the open door, looking south, back to where they'd come from. "You know, Jared, it takes a special kind of person to do what you're doing. I don't imagine many would take the chances you’re taking and, by the looks of this truck, I don't imagine you're doing it for money. Some people never say it, but you're doing good work. May not feel like it some days, probably doesn't on the lousy ones, but if you do find the evidence you're looking for you're going to change the world. That's something to be proud of. That's called living. Don't you let no one take you off course. You'll regret it."

  Jared was stunned into silence.

  Frank pounded a hand against the side of the door after he closed it, leaning into the cab. "Stay on course, my friend. Don't be sitting in your motorhome someday wishing you'd done things differently, finding yourself too old to do 'em. Listen to me; I know what I'm talkin' about." And with one more booming laugh, he stepped back, away from the truck. "Now, get out of here. Dorothy'll have dessert for me and you made me work up an appetite."

  Jared thanked Frank, knowing his words weren't enough to express his gratitude. This phone call, this random exchange that followed his experience at Mount Rainier, changed the course of his investigation. Changed his future course. This wasn't even something he was planning, it fell into his lap, and yet he was now leaving Forks with digital and physical evidence of what could be an actual Bigfoot community. A few hours ago he was on the verge of passing on this request so he could stay home and mope about the slow death of his marriage. Now he had the best evidence of nests he'd ever seen, validating his theory about communities of the species in this region of the state. What today meant, at a minimum, was that Jared would have more trips to Forks in his future.

  He pulled away from the visitor center, heading south, back toward Olympia. Frank stood by his motorhome, waving as Jared pulled away.

  Funny, isn't it?

  A non-believer-turned-convert might have helped him stumble upon something that might change the course of his investigations for good.

  8

  Michael Shermer of Skeptics Magazine once said, "The key to skepticism is to continuously and vigorously apply the methods of science to navigate the treacherous straits between know nothing skepticism and anything goes credulity." Jared thought about Shermer's quote often, but especially at times like this. He could look at the pictures he took a thousand times and still be amazed by what he captured. What started as a pretty ambiguous trip to Forks to meet an elderly tourist might turn his entire investigation upside down. It might end up validating everything he'd been doing for the last twenty years. He didn't want to get ahead of himself, he didn't want to commit what he called investigator fraud by doing bad science, but it could be a sign of what he'd been looking for all along.

  A community of Sasquatch.

  He paced as he tried to control his runaway thoughts.

  Back and forth.

  Back and forth.

  Pretty soon the carpet under his feet would have a wonderful stress path carved out if he kept it up, but this was what he did when he was in deep thought.

  When he was consumed.

  It took everything he had, and a previously-scheduled obligation, to not pack up and make the three-hour drive back out to Forks for a longer stay and observation of the nest site. It consumed every ounce of his mental energy since last night. The entire way home, exhausted as he was, and even when he climbed into bed to try to get something that resembled rest; his brain refused to shut off.

  It'd been a long time since anything got him this excited. Seeing pictures of Bigfoot nests was promising, but to be standing at the site, trying to steady a shaky camera, that was something else entirely. To see the construction of those three pods, the careful consideration that was given to each to keep them stable, all from a creature most people were sure didn't exist, was transcendent. It was possible, he reminded himself, that humans made those pods but it was still unlikely. They were too far out, too far removed to sustain anyone who wasn't capable of living completely off the land. There wasn't even a fire pit, so if it was humans they were living a completely vegetarian or raw meat diet in pods that didn't protect their hairless bodies all that well.

  No, it couldn't be humans.

  He'd stayed up way too late on the internet, thanking the Bigfoot gods for his high-speed connection so he could examine aerial maps of the site. The search engine he used had a wonderful mapping system that allowed him to zoom in to an impressive depth but, even at a close distance, the tree coverage was too thick. Hints of the river and the road poked through occasionally but provided little help. The green canopy of trees shielded large portions of the ground from the flying eye of satellites. His tired mind quipped that it couldn't be a human encampment; humans weren't smart enough to be this thoughtful about how to protect their presence from discovery.

  At one point he passed out on the keyboard, a sign that he'd given enough of himself to Bigfoot tonight.

  Never gonna learn, are ya?

  The worst part of getting a shitty night of sleep was the realization that he had to get up and pack for another trip. Weeks ago he'd scheduled a room at a hotel in Quinault for an extended investigation since the area around the town was a hotbed of activity. Today he'd do anything to get out of that trip.

  Molly, his Border Collie, whined at his feet. She hadn't been getting the level of love she usually demanded lately. "You're not the only one, girl," Jared rubbed behind her ears. Her eyes narrowed and her tongue flopped out of her mouth as she enjoyed the attention. "I've got to go again, girl. Promise me you're not going to be mad. Please." He pulled his hand away and she lowered her head to the floor, between her paws.

  He better find a Sasquatch soon or he wasn't going to be able to afford the dog sitting the kid next door did for him when Maria wasn't in town to help out. "You're more expensive than a baby, you know that?" Molly whined in response before barking once, with attitude. He was going to pay for this, he knew. Probably by coming home to a nice, big pile of shit in the middle of the rug.

  But Quinault called. His destination. One more place to chase the never-ending trail of recent Sasquatch noise. An unincorporated community in Grays Harbor County, Quinault was bursting at the seams
with an impressive population of about 200 sturdy residents. The town was one of those places that could spend the expanse of eternity not existing as far as the rest of the world was concerned. It could go completely unnoticed and no one would care ... well, except for anyone who visited. There was a quaint isolationistic beauty to the area; it was the kind of place where Jared could retire and fade into obscurity if he had Maria by his side. Without her, the slow pace of life here would drive him crazy. He didn't mind investigating in the area surrounding Quinault, but he didn't look forward to it either.

  For the next few hours at least, this was the most important place in the world.

  This trip was long overdue.

  More and more reports were coming in from the Quinault Indian Nation. Sasquatch were being seen on the reservation. Far too many to be ignored. The secret was finding out why. There had to be a reason for so much activity springing up in such a small window of time. If he didn't hurry, the window of opportunity would close on him and the skeptics would happily taint the perception of anything coming out of the reservation. Give them enough time and those who denounced anything to do with Sasquatch would have half the state convinced there was some sort of collective delusion or correspondence bias going on.

  He owed it to the people who confided in him to do everything he could to make sure that didn't happen. Part of the responsibility that comes with doing a job right. It was what separated him from most of the investigators he knew, even the ones, like him, who were able to do this full-time. Most of his peers. Not that he considered many as peers, more attributable to a lack of integrity on their part than any sense of conceit on his. He didn't think that highly of himself; how could he after everything he'd fucked up in the past year?