by R. D. Brady
“There are some newer field cameras on the market which may work. You can hide them in decoy animals, add some scents to further disguise them.”
“Excellent. And I want to remind you, Dr. Brannick, what an incredible service you would be doing, not only for your career but for mankind, if you succeed in this endeavor. The things we could learn. Well, it’s really impossible to imagine, isn’t it? Their immune systems alone could alleviate untold human suffering. Your work may be considered on the fringe by some, but I assure you, I view it as critical for our future.”
“Yes, Mr. Hayes. Thank you.”
“Well, enjoy the rest of your evening, Dr. Brannick. I look forward to hearing of your progress in the weeks to come.”
CHAPTER 32
Scottsdale, Arizona
Carter hung up the phone and swiveled his chair to look at the view behind him. His office overlooked the lush industrial park that held offices for all the corporations he had acquired. To date there were twenty-two. Three more were scheduled for construction before the end of the year. Normally, the view gave him a sense of satisfaction. Today he was decidedly dissatisfied.
There had been nothing new in Tess’s last two reports—which normally wasn’t a problem. But there had been something in her voice…
He drummed his hands on the side of his chair. His gut told him that something had changed. Turning back to the desk, he hit the intercom button on his phone.
“Sir?” Thaddeus asked.
“Get me Abe.”
“Right away, sir.”
A few seconds later, Thaddeus’s voice rang out again. “Abe is on line one, sir.”
Carter hit the lit button on the phone and picked up the receiver. “Abe. How are you?”
Abe Cascione’s thick Bronx accent filled the room, causing Carter to grimace. “I’m good. How are you?”
“Fine. But I think I may have a little problem that I’m going to need your help with. You received the file on Dr. Tess Brannick?”
“Yup. Was just looking it over.”
“Well, I’m going to need you to do a deep background. Find out if there are any secrets hidden in her closets, any buttons that can be pushed.”
“No problem. Anything in particular you’re expecting to find?”
Carter paused. “I’m not sure. But she’s received a hefty sum from us, and I have the feeling she’s not being entirely forthcoming. I’d like some leverage if I need it.”
“I have to say she looks pretty clean from what I’ve seen. But I’ll check and see if there’s anything. And even if there isn’t, there are other ways to get the information from her.”
Carter sighed. Abe always preferred the violent method of extraction. Carter wasn’t morally opposed to it himself, but it could become a bit of a legal headache. And there had been a time or two when Abe had enjoyed his work a little too much.
“That’s still on the table,” Carter said, “but let’s see what the background reveals first. We’ll go from there.”
“Will do.” Abe disconnected the call.
Carter once again swiveled to look at the setting sun. But his thoughts were on Tess Brannick. She was a smart woman. But she had made an unwise decision.
You shouldn’t keep things from me, Dr. Brannick. That is not a healthy endeavor.
CHAPTER 33
By the next morning, Tess had decided she’d go back to her camp. Still, she strapped her Browning into a holster at her waist, and she brought her shotgun instead of her rifle. She wasn’t sure any of that would make a difference, but she felt better having them.
Before Tess went to the camp itself, she went through the normal routine: dropping the food, checking the cameras, doing a walk around for any signs. But this morning, she was taking longer than normal. She knew she was stalling. Suck it up, Brannick, she told herself. You chose to study a giant primate, not little fluffy bunnies. A little bit of fear comes with the territory.
Squaring her shoulders, she headed for her camp. She paused on the edge of it. Nothing looked disturbed. The forest was giving off its normal sounds. Everything was as it always was. She wasn’t sure if she was relieved or disappointed.
She thought about working on her paper; she’d brought a printout of it with her. When she had thought back over her interactions with Charlie, she’d realized he never showed up when she was using technology—and after the camera incident, she thought it better to be safe than sorry. So all technology was off limits—except her sat phone. That she kept with her.
But she was too restless to concentrate on the paper. So instead she pulled out her sketchpad and began to draw. The image of Charlie gradually appeared on the page in front of her. She had tried to sketch him before, but those had been more scientific drawings, trying to capture his build and musculature. Now she was just drawing his face.
She shaded in his hair and tilted her head, inspecting her work. It was actually a pretty good likeness.
When she looked up, her heart slammed to a stop. Charlie was only six feet away. She’d often been amazed by his silent approaches, but he’d never made it this close without her sensing him. She knew that humans could learn to approach others in complete silence—Apache warriors, for instance, had been known for being able to touch their victims before they even knew they were there—but the fact that Charlie, at almost nine feet and at least eight hundred pounds, was able to be just as stealthy… it was absolutely mind-blowing.
He gestured to the bag where she kept the food.
Hastily, Tess closing the sketchpad, in case Charlie didn’t like his likeness being captured, and placed it on the table. She stood up, not happy at how hard her heart was hammering. “Um, sure, okay.”
She went over to the bag, and Charlie took his usual seat on the log. Tess walked slowly toward him and placed the food on the ground within his reach. Then she sat on the other side of the log and tried to pretend this was just like every other time he had visited—and that she wasn’t completely terrified.
Charlie ate one apple. Then he stopped and just sat quietly on his side of the log, his eyes closed. Tess thought he might have even fallen asleep. She got up and retrieved her sketchbook, then returned to the log and sat on the ground, her back against it. She began to sketch the bear and her two cubs. Charlie watched her out of the corner of his eye for a few seconds before closing them again. Tess got lost in capturing the cubs, and when she looked up again, Charlie was gone.
She let out a breath. She’d done it—faced her fear, remained objective, approached the issue clinically. Bigfoot was an incredible creature, but he was without a doubt an animal. Any thoughts beyond that, and she would be veering way off the scientific track. And she had no intention of doing that.
She stood up and dusted off her pants, then paused. A single apple sat on the log. He had left it for her. She knew that in the animal kingdom, animals provided sustenance to other animals they felt were worthy of surviving.
But another part of her wondered. What if it’s more than that? She knew she was humanizing the action, but it still felt an awful lot like an apology.
She stood up and dusted off her pants. No. Even Shelby did things that could be construed as human—looking sorry, happy, showing emotions.
CHAPTER 34
After the apple sharing, Tess and Charlie maintained their routine. Except Charlie now always shared his food with Tess. One day, after Charlie left her camp, Tess decided to follow him into the woods. She was able to keep up with him for about fifty yards, and then he disappeared.
She scoured the area but could find no sign of him and no trail. She sighed and blew out a breath. “You’re very good at this game.”
Charlie stepped out from behind a tree a mere ten feet away from her. She could swear he grinned.
Then he took off again, and Tess followed. They traipsed through the woods for an hour. Every once in a while she would lose him, only for him to once again reappear much closer than she would have thought possible.
>
As she walked behind him, she couldn’t help but notice the difference in his gait compared to a human’s. Humans bobbed with each step; Charlie glided. His head remained completely level as he transitioned from one step to the next. And despite his long stride—his footsteps were at least five feet apart—his feet came down in a line, as if he were walking a tightrope, rather than landing to the left and right like a human’s would. Amazing, Tess thought.
Eventually, though, Tess lost him for good. She waited, as she had before, but this time he didn’t reappear, and after ten minutes, she knew he was gone. Maybe he’d grown tired of the game.
But for Tess, the experience had been incredible. Not only had she been able to observe his walk, but also his ability to soundlessly appear and disappear. She’d read the many eyewitness reports that spoke of bigfoot vanishing, but she had always written them off as overactive imaginations. Now she knew there was truth to those reports. Charlie didn’t literally disappear in front of her eyes—but if she looked away, by the time she turned back he could be gone.
Tess trudged back to her camp, thankful that she had kept a mental map in her head of where she was going. Her brother Pax liked to joke that in the womb she was the one who was given a sense of direction. Pax, on the other hand, could get lost in his own neighborhood.
She reached the camp, packed up, and then stopped and looked around one more time. She squinted at the log where Charlie had sat. Could that be…? She moved closer and knelt down. Her heart began to race. She ran back to her pack and pulled out her specimen kit. Using the tweezers, she plucked her find from the log and then held it up.
Three long, white hairs.
Shock, followed by elation, ran through her.
I have proof.
CHAPTER 35
That night Tess sat on the couch with Dev watching a movie. But her attention wasn’t on the screen or on the man beside her. It was focused on one single question: What is bigfoot?
It wasn’t the first time she’d pondered the question, of course. But the strange game of hide-and-seek in the woods had demonstrated that bigfoot had a playfulness she hadn’t anticipated. And then there was his walk. It was so… refined, for lack of a better term. It wasn’t the awkward stride of an animal used to being on four feet. It was confident, self-assured.
There were always mysteries and uncertainties when dealing with ancient fossil records, Tess knew. For instance, scholars originally argued that Gigantopithecus went extinct due to a loss of vegetation—yet its teeth and jawbones indicated that the species was omnivorous, making that hypothesis suspect. Tess believed that the most likely cause of the species’ extinction was human beings. Wherever humans appeared, they tended to have disastrous effects on indigenous populations, whether plants, animals, or other humans. And Gigantopithecus was believed to be a contemporary of Homo erectus; the two may have competed for food resources. Homo erectus, due to their ability to use tools, would likely have been the winner in that battle, helping push Gigantopithecus to extinction.
We destroy so much, Tess thought. She remembered an article she’d read on animal life in Madagascar. Five thousand years ago, the African island was thriving with exotic animals. There were pygmy hippopotamuses, lemurs the size of gorillas, even elephant birds who grew ten feet tall and laid eggs approximately 180 times the size of chicken eggs today. Then, in 500 BC, humans arrived, and a short time later, all these animals were gone.
But Charlie somehow survived. Was it possible Charlie was part of a group of animals that had hidden themselves from the human world in order to protect themselves? There were documented instances of other animals doing exactly that. For example, the chimpanzees in Uganda’s Kibale National Park shifted to nocturnal activity after years of human civil war and poaching. By only foraging at night, they were able to avoid human detection—giving their species a chance to survive human destruction.
Perhaps there were more hidden species than humans dreamed of; they were, after all, hiding. Like the Bili apes, which no one believed existed until just a few short decades ago.
Was Charlie a Gigantopithecus or some related ape? Was it possible the extinction date for Gigantopithecus was wrong? That it had existed longer than was currently believed? That maybe they never truly went extinct? The idea was not without merit, as areas with forests tended not to be great resources for creating fossils: the areas were simply too damp.
And the fossil record itself was extremely spotty. The coelacanth, a rare fish, disappeared from the fossil record 65 million years ago and was believed to be extinct—until 1938, when a live coelacanth showed up in a catch of fish in the Indian Ocean. Their numbers had been greatly reduced—there were once ninety different species of coelacanth, and now there are only two—but the coelacanth survived. The inherent problem with a fossil record is that we can only see what is there, not what isn’t, and proving extinction is thus a matter of drawing conclusions from the absence of observations.
Tess knew the record regarding hominids was probably no better. Researchers in Ledi-Geraru, Ethiopia had found a remnant of a jawbone that predated the oldest known human find by 400,000 years. In fact, it seemed like every year a new hominid group was being unearthed. Recently a 200,000-year-old hominid jawbone was found in Taiwan that couldn’t belong to any of the three ancient humans known to have existed there: Homo erectus, Neanderthal, and Homo floriensis. It was too big, incredibly thick, and with large teeth. The only conclusion was that it must have belonged to yet another unknown group of hominids.
As time marched on and more discoveries were made, it had become painfully clear that many different types of hominids once roamed the earth, and that we know very little about most of them.
Is it possible that like the coelacanth, there are now just two: Homo sapiens and whatever bigfoot is? Tess sighed. Or am I just grasping at straws? Forcing a square peg into a round hole? Trying to fit Charlie into a previously known animal category?
“Earth to Tess,” Dev called.
Tess pulled herself back to the here and now.
Dev muted the TV. “You’re not paying attention to any of this, are you?”
“Sorry. Lost in thought.”
“Care to tell me where you are right now?”
She sighed. “You know where.”
“Ah, bigfoot. So what in particular has you preoccupied tonight?”
Tess glanced over at Dev, and her heart tripped a little. The only light in the room came from the TV screen and the kitchen island. His sharp cheekbones were more defined in the shadows. His copper skin looked even darker. When he was younger he had been cute, but now… now he was gorgeous. A girl’s dream come true. At least this girl’s.
But she shoved those thoughts aside for the moment. She snuggled into his chest. “I’m trying to determine what bigfoot actually is—an ape or a something else. And why it is they’re so reclusive.”
“Well, you know the Hoopa have a lot of legends about bigfoot.”
Tess smiled, knowing he was about to tell her one. She loved when he did this.
“In one legend, the animals of the world got together and decided to create humans. One of the animals was bigfoot, who said humans should walk upright like they did. So humans were made to walk on two legs. Bigfoot was very happy about this, but humans took one look at bigfoot and ran away, terrified by their giant size. So bigfoot decided to hide themselves away from the humans to keep them from being afraid.”
Tess couldn’t help but think of the Hairy Man pictographs found in Stanislaus National Forest in Sonora. They were believed to be thousands of years old, and among other things, they depicted a bigfoot family where the bigfoot is crying. According to the legends, the bigfoot cried because the humans were scared of them.
“Is that what you think he is? An animal?” Tess asked.
Dev paused. Tess knew he wasn’t stalling but giving her question some thought. He shook his head. “I can’t really see that. All the stories I’ve heard, their abil
ity to stay away from humans… There’s an intelligence there that is more than what an animal is capable of.”
Tess nodded.
Dev kissed her on the forehead. “All right, I can see when I’m not wanted.”
“No, I—”
He laughed. “Relax. I’m just going to turn in. You can join me when you’re done thinking.”
She squeezed his hand and watched him walk to the bedroom. She knew she was a lucky woman. Soon, though, her thoughts turned back to the problem she couldn’t seem to answer.
Bigfoot had survived without human intervention for so long, and she couldn’t see that they’d receive any benefit from exposure now—only harm. Once they were proven to exist, hunters would no doubt traipse through the woods trying to get at them. Tess gave the TV a disgusted look. In fact, she knew of at least two shows where the entire goal of the program seemed to be to find and kill a bigfoot. Animal or not, they didn’t deserve that.
And it wasn’t only the hunters who were after a bigfoot carcass. There was the commonly held belief that until a dead bigfoot was in a lab, bigfoot would always remain only a legend. Tess knew that was probably true; some would forever doubt until a bigfoot cadaver was studied. But she recoiled at the image of Charlie on some lab table somewhere.
Tess didn't question that emotion. She would do that for any animal she was close to. Shelby on a lab table was not something she wanted to envision either.
She picked up one of the two clear sealed bags from the side table. Inside, two hairs with the bulb still attached could be seen. She had the proof right here. She could send it to Hayes and have him run the analysis. She’d probably have the answer within a day.
And yet she couldn’t bring herself to do it.
Originally she had wanted to rush home and send it out for testing. But by the time she’d reached her cabin, she had changed her mind. She wanted to examine it here first. She would have done it already, but Dev had been here when she arrived, and she hadn’t had a chance.