by Rod O'Grady
Only a few years older than Minnie, Kaayii was a good two feet taller, and more than twice as wide. His hair was of such a dark reddy-brown that it appeared black from a distance, covering his entire body, except for the soles of his feet, the palms of his hands, under his eyes and his wide, dark-grey nose. His forehead was covered with short dense hair growing to a prominent brow ridge above his widely spaced, deep-set eyes, which had no whites to them and were black with a dark-brown iris. His neck was thick and short; his shoulder muscles seemed to reach up to near his black, human-like ears. His head was higher at the back than the front, appearing somewhat conical with a tuft of hair at the top.
A fly circled his head and landed between his eyes. He twitched and wrinkled his nose and the fly flew away. He peered up at the pale grey cloud of smoke that filled half the sky. The eastern slopes, valleys, ridges and ravines, were punctuated by blackened tree trunks, stripped of their branches by fire, standing like slim dark monuments in the barren, shadowy landscape.
Twisting on his perch he peered out across the bay. On the far side of the water a dark glowering cloud loomed over the tree-covered hills. He watched as a jagged three-pronged fork flashed to the ground, striking the highest point on the long, green, hilly island that lay close to the opposite shore. Then there came a loud crack! and a deep grumbling roll of thunder.
He noticed the distant silhouette of a bird wheeling and arching high above. Turning towards the mountain, gliding on the warm air. It was a golden eagle. As it flew overhead he could see splashes of white on the underside of its wings, the black-and-white fanned tail, and bright yellow talons.
His huge black hairy hand released its grasp on the mottled pine branch and he began to climb down from the top of the tree. He clambered down, dropping from the lower branches to the ground. A tuft of long dark hair from his arm snagged on a branch and hung there, waving gently in the breeze, the sun highlighting red hues among the dark-brown hair.
Where behind him in the tree line there had appeared to be nothing but underbrush, pine saplings and an evergreen tangle of branches, now suddenly there appeared two more, even bigger, Sasquatches, standing looking out at the fire-ravaged slopes.
His mother Yumiqsu and father Taashi stood tall and upright, with long arms hanging to their knees. They walked towards their son with slightly bent legs, a long high-stepping stride and a graceful fluid motion. Both were well over eight feet tall and covered in thick, very dark brown hair. They were thickset and broad across the chest and waist, again with no obvious neck and with heavily muscled upper back, arms and shoulders.
They stood in the tree line amongst the pines and firs beside Kaayii, and stared across the bay to where the claw of forked lightning had struck the high point of the island and where now a wisp of grey smoke curled. They lifted their huge hairy arms and pointed at the island.
Taashi then lifted his youngest child, a very young, small female Sasquatch, Yaluqwa, off her mother’s back. He sniffed her head and dumped her gently on the ground. She clung to her mother’s leg. Her head was round and, like her body, was covered in thick, short light-brown hair. Her skin on her face and hands and feet was a pale brown. Her big, round eyes were black with a golden-brown centre. Her teeth were small and white when she smiled at her brother Kaayii.
Klunk klunk! Two solid knocks rang out from the wooded slopes below them. A dark shape could be seen pushing through the tall brush. Soon another huge Sasquatch strode smoothly out of the pine thicket to where the group stood.
This was Kaayii’s uncle, Ahniiq. He opened his black wrinkled hand and showed a pile of plump golden-currant berries. In his other hand he held a puffball mushroom, the size of a small soccer ball, creamy white with beige, scaly patches. He sensed the other Sasquatches’ gratitude.
Yumiqsu, as the matriarch of the clan, gathered the berries in her hands, squatted down and spread the food on some birch bark. The Sasquatches settled down around her on the flattened grass amongst the white, pink and yellow flowers of the meadow and began to share the fruit and the mushroom.
Taashi used his son’s name as he reminded him by the power of thought alone of his role in the clan that day: Kaayii, you are day watcher. Wiping the berry juice from his mouth with the hairy back of his hand, Kaayii stood and, in turn, gently touched the head of his father, his uncle – who grunted, his little sister who squeaked, and his mother who held his hand pressed to her forehead. As he turned to walk down the mountain, his father stepped forward, and again using mind-speak he told him: keep your distance if you see people.
Kaayii, like all Sasquatches, could sense the energy of the forest. As he walked he tuned in to the constant background throb of life amongst the trees, and it soothed him. His attention was alert to sensing animal energy from a long way off. If a group of deer wandered into Sasquatch territory while grazing, he knew where they were, and what they were, without even seeing, hearing or smelling them. So Kaayii knew that if a person were anywhere near, he’d be aware of them.
As he gained the soft, unbroken earth and the deep-green shade under the pines, he sensed the constant tremor of life energy in the ground beneath his feet. He knelt, put an ear to the ground and imagined the millions of hard-working insects breaking down the organic matter. He could feel the roots of all the trees and bushes taking moisture and nutrients from the ground. He could hear the underground fungus that grew a vital web of billions of thin threads linking the roots of different plants, sending nourishment where it was needed, pulsing through the veins of the earth.
Kaayii felt a sweet vague gladness in knowing that, for this day, he was guardian of the forest and of all the creatures of the forest, whether flighted, fleet of foot, slitherers, burrowers, creepers or crawlers. They all had their place and he would help them keep it.
Pausing at a stand of juniper bushes growing near a ravine he plucked purple berries. He chewed to let the juices build up in his mouth then swallowed the tangy sweetness. As he munched the fruit he made a sound, which conveyed ‘this is delicious…’ but sounded more like ‘goompoop…’
He clambered down the ravine and bounded up the other side. Feeling that he needed to run, he ran, he ran fast. The hair on his arms, legs, back and head flew out behind him, flapping and fluttering with each massive stride. Sometimes he would take a series of long arching leaps like a gazelle or a kangaroo, simply because he could, such was his immense strength and athleticism. This bounding and leaping required great concentration to ensure he always landed safely.
Stopping in a stand of mature pine trees. Kaayii put his ear to the orange-brown bark of a tree. He could hear the water carrying the sugars in the sapwood layer beneath the outer bark. It sounded like whispering and he knew by the sound of it that this was a very healthy tree. Using his strong fingers with their tough black fingernails, he prized away some bark, a piece nearly as long as his arm. He pulled at strips of the sweet white succulent inner bark. He chewed, and swallowed with relish.
Near the pine was an immense, solitary redwood tree, four times as wide as Kaayii. He eased his fingers into the deep, gnarled grooves of the soft, fibrous, red-brown bark that twisted thickly up the massive trunk, and pulled a chunk away.
He traversed two more ravines, before arriving where smooth grey granite shouldered out of the ground by a small outcrop of white quartz. The quartz was knobbly and bumpy, a dull creamy brown colour like an exposed brain, but in other places the quartz was clear and shiny, like glass. He bent down to touch it, closing his eyes and taking a moment to sense its energy.
A long, straight pine trunk had been dislodged from where it had been positioned, probably by a passing deer. Kaayii carefully replaced it, tucking it in tight to the quartz. He followed the network of precisely positioned tree trunks, each connected to the next, sometimes stacked two or three trunks high, but always touching the next one down, creating a link all the way from the quartz to the Giant X at the Aspen Grove.
Since the fire, Kaayii’s clan had create
d these structures on this side of the mountain, and he maintained and added to them as he passed through the forest.
He touched the Giant X with both hands flat on the wood, and he could feel the energy from the quartz five hundred metres up the mountain. It was a sense of connecting, balancing with the pulses and rhythms of the forest, and with it came a sense of peace and purpose.
Squatting down he gathered wild onions, swiping up huge handfuls of the pungent greenery with their small white bulbs. He ate as he walked through the grove of slim white Aspen trees, enjoying the fluttering sound the small round leaves made when tickled by a breeze.
A crow cawed from somewhere close by, then swooped down and landed on a branch at about head height. In friendly greeting Kaayii said out loud, ‘Oosh’. The crow cawed again, and flew on to the next pine down the trail.
Kaayii sensed energy stirring in the forest – it was animal energy but it was also human energy. Far off he heard laughter. He heard a clear strong knock on wood from the direction of the humans, a good solid klunk! A woodpecker answered the knock with a steady drumming nearby.
He moved stealthily from tree to tree, sure that he’d see them before they saw him, knowing how he could make himself disappear if he needed to by becoming one with the forest.
There on a game trail, below where he was standing in a juniper bush, was a girl and a boy human. The girl carried a stick, had a lot of curly brown hair and was taller than the boy. Kaayii, knowing how far he could throw a green pinecone, decided they were about four ‘throws’ away.
Kaayii moved closer, keeping his eyes on them until he could crouch behind a tangle of bushes and branches, two throws away. The girl said something that made the boy laugh so much he rolled on the ground. This made Kaayii want to creep even closer to hear their laughter and to see what was so funny. He crept through the bushes, careful where he planted his huge hairy feet.
The animal with them was a shaggy-coated dog, like a small yellow wolf, with large floppy ears. Kaayii could see the dog moving away from the humans and being attracted towards the Watcher’s Place, which was nearby, tuning in to strange new odours.
The Watcher’s Place was a comfortable nest made of moss and grass amongst ferns and thick grasses. It was well hidden behind carefully positioned pine boughs and trunks of dead trees, with a good view down the mountain and across the bay. It was close to where the girl and boy had stopped, about one throw away. It smelt of Sasquatch there and he didn’t want the dog to alert the boy and the girl to the Watcher’s Place as they might then bring more people.
Kaayii briefly considered backing away as his father had told him to, but his curiosity got the better of him. He crept closer, sure to keep enough trees and bushes between him and them, and crawled behind a low grassy ridge. He looked at the dog through a mass of upturned tree roots and directed all his attention at the animal: go.
The dog stopped and looked directly at Kaayii. Gazing into the dog’s brown eyes he told it again with his mind: go. The dog backed away with its tail between its legs, keeping its eyes on Kaayii, alarmed by the aggressive energy directed at him, like a physical push from the big hairy beast in the bushes.
The two young people were crouched down, looking at the ground, talking intently. As Kaayii watched them he began to sense from the girl something within her. He sensed she held a deep sorrow but also a strong spirit. Both energies were battling with each other and this was unbalancing her. Her spirit was so strong that when he stared intently at her he could see her energy – the air around her seemed to gleam faintly. He’d never seen or felt that from a human before. He’d seen hunters carrying killing sticks and from time to time people walking on the trails in the woods but there was something different about this one.
The girl looked in Kaayii’s direction. She looked around and up in to the forest with a searching look, like she sensed they weren’t alone. He watched them as they talked together, then they and the dog started back down the track towards the bay.
Kaayii stepped on to the grassy ridge to watch them as they ran, squealing and laughing, with the dog bounding on ahead. He was fascinated by the way the girl’s mass of curly hair bounced and flopped as she ran, just as the dog’s ears flopped and bounced.
Jumping up to grab a low branch, he climbed the nearest pine tree, scrambling up to the top in a few seconds. He could see down over the treetops on the slopes to the group of cabins near the water. A flock of seagulls was floating out in the bay and something else caught his attention – on the roof of one of the cabins, bent over with his head in his hands was a man, sitting alone.
Kaayii watched for a while. The man didn’t move. Kaayii climbed down. He stepped carefully through the ferns and brush onto the trail where the young ones had been, and now he could see what it was they’d been so fascinated by – four distinct tracks in the muddy part of the trail. He recognised his own feet in the prints. Kaayii thought about how he’d been taught to try to avoid leaving any obvious signs, especially this close to people and their walking paths and their gathering place. It was very careless to leave tracks, as the last thing a Sasquatch wants is for people to know they are there.
He considered dragging a pine branch over the prints to brush them away but he was hungry again, so decided instead to find a suitable tree from which to harvest some more sweet inner bark, which was his second favourite thing to eat in the forest, after honey.
The rest of that day he watched and waited and ate soft inner bark and berries, and he dozed. He used the spongy red bark from the redwood as a headrest seated in his nest, leaning back against the pine tree. A part of him was always alert to the energy in the forest, but all day, like most days, nothing unusual happened. Birds, squirrels, mice, a sleek brown stoat, its larger cousin the pine marten and hundreds of dancing white butterflies had all passed near by. He thought about the girl, the boy and the dog, and he thought about the man on the cabin roof. They were perplexing, and they sparked a curiosity in him. He decided he would watch them from a safe distance, whenever they ventured into the forest.
When darkness fell he walked back up the mountain and stopped to stand on an outcrop of grey rock looking back through a gap in the trees at the few lights twinkling around the bay. He could see red and white lights moving slowly across the water and wondered what they were, where they were going and why. The human world was so close, yet so strange to Kaayii.
Chapter Two
Inside the dense thicket of pine trees on High Ridge, just below the top of the mountain, was the clan meeting area. They kept it cleaned and cleared, with stacks of branches, and structures from pushed-over pine trees placed all around so that from the outside the middle was well hidden.
It was where they gathered at night to eat a kill together if they had one, or before dispersing to hunt if they hadn’t. There were two family groups in the clan. His family group consisted of grandmother, Shweya, father Taashi, mother Yumiqsu, sister Yaluqwa and uncle Ahniiq. The other group in the clan was made up of three females and two males – Ahnoosh and Yaaqwun and their daughter Shumsha, and an older pair, Wesh and Enksi.
When the fire had been raging in their forest Kaayii often saw Enksi standing alone at the far edge of High Ridge looking out over the ravaged, smoking land. His eyes sparked with excitement whenever a pocket of flame took hold and the fire spread on a distant slope. Kaayii understood his interest as, like all Sasquatches, he was drawn to fire – fascinated, but afraid of its power. Kaayii remembered a long time ago, when he was very young, Enksi had dropped a pile of rocks, which somehow made a spark, which quickly lit the dry grass around. The wind spread the fire so quickly that it brought people and the Sasquatches hid and watched as the men extinguished the flames by beating them out with strange flat sticks. The clan told Enksi to be more careful. The fire that devastated their forest started a long way away but the wind blew it closer and closer, jumping rivers and ravines, forcing animals to flee ahead of it. The Sasquatches had had to leave their
deep caves and find a new home. Kaayii hoped their new home might be on this mountain.
The eleven sat together, feeling safe and comfortable in each other’s company. The Sasquatches used mind-speak to share simple ideas, observations and instructions, but to address a large group or a visitor from another clan, or on special occasions, or simply when excited, surprised or scared they would resort to spoken words.
Their language had been shaped over millennia: as old as the hills and as complex as the cavernous networks in the rocks beneath them – a language of musical rhythms formed in geometrical sound-shapes as complex and as perfect as crystal structure.
Kaayii spoke in this rich language, telling the clan about the boy and the girl and his footprints, and they all lobbed small sticks at him for being so careless. He tried to describe the girl and her strong spirit, and as he did so they leant in closer to hear. There was no sense of worry in the group because the boy and the girl were young and so far down the mountain.
Looking at his mother and without speaking Kaayii asked where his father was. Yumiqsu nodded at the huge pile of branches and stacked trees at the far end of the clearing. When the fire had first come and started to spread in to their territory, they had abandoned their caves and all moved up to High Ridge. They had watched the fire spread on the lower slopes until the wind changed after many, many days, but they couldn’t go back – not until the grasses had grown back and the voles and the lemmings had returned to eat the grass, and the martens had returned to feed on the smaller rodents, and the larger beasts had returned and the trees and bushes had recovered. Only then could the clan return.
