The Naturalist (The Naturalist Series Book 1)

by Andrew Mayne

  “What about around here?”

  “Like the wendigo?”

  “I’ve heard the name. But I don’t know much about that.”

  “It’s an Algonquin legend. A half-man creature that eats people. Indigenous people took them very seriously. But that’s more associated with cannibalism. Is that what you mean?”

  “Not quite. But that’s worth looking into. I was just wondering if you had heard of any recent cases of people mistaking a person for an animal.”

  “No. Not recent.”

  “Well, thank you for your time.”

  “Unless you consider the 1980s recent.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “The Cougar Creek Monster? It’s a kind of local story, but it made it into a few of those silly cable television documentaries.”

  “Wait, what’s that?”

  “I moved here after, but that was this area’s Mothman or Bigfoot for a while. Hikers near Red Hook said they spotted something lurking around their campsites at night. I think maybe even shots were fired. I don’t remember much else. Everyone was talking about it; then it just went away.”

  “What did they say they saw?”

  “A man walking on four legs. Like a big cat. Or the other way around. I’m sure you can look it up.”

  “Did it ever attack anyone?”

  Seaver shrugs. “Maybe? I think there was some account of a camper getting clawed across his chest.” He gestures with his hand, tracing a path across his body I’d seen too many times in the past few days.

  “Thank you, Dr. Seaver.”

  I leave him in his basement with his skulls and weapons of murder.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  UNSOLVED

  In June of 1983, a group of seventeen campers, most of them recently graduated from Chilton High School, took a trip to Beaverhead National Forest. The first and only night of the camping trip, something happened. The details vary among the accounts I’ve been able to find in the public library in nearby Red Hook, but the general story is fairly consistent.

  The hikers spent several hours trekking through the woods to a remote spring. Along the way several of them thought they were being tracked by a large animal, possibly a bear or a mountain lion.

  There had been other reports in the area of people spotting something in the woods watching them. This creature would stand on two legs to observe them and then slink off into the brush when noticed.

  The Chilton High campers reported seeing something that was tall and lithe, too skinny to be a bear. Although they never saw it clearly, they reported the skin as being more light brown or tan in color than the black or brown of a bear.

  After they made camp, three of them went into the woods in search of firewood. They came running back after a hiker said he spotted a large cat sitting on a log watching them.

  One of them claimed that it gave chase to him, but when he looked back, he saw glowing yellow eyes at the same height off the ground as his own.

  The other campers dismissed this as a prank or a confused sighting of a mountain lion and decided they would be safe in numbers.

  At some point after 2 a.m., when the last of them had left the campfire to go to sleep, several of the campers said they were awoken by the sound of something prowling outside their tents.

  One member of the party, who’d brought along a rifle, went out to investigate but didn’t see anything.

  Sometime after 3 a.m., the camp woke to the sound of screaming.

  This is where the versions begin to differ.

  True Tales of Mountain Creatures says a large, catlike creature walking on two legs tried to drag one of the girls out of a tent, only to be stopped by a group of campers, one of whom was clawed to death and carried off.

  Big Sky Mysteries says the students saw a ghostlike apparition of a Native American on the outer edge of the campsite commanding a large cougar to attack the campers, only to vanish as quickly as he appeared.

  Angel Encounters claims that the boys in the group stumbled upon the girls in some kind of consensual sexual congress with half-cat male spirits and took issue with it.

  Perhaps the most accurate account—at least the one that best aligns with the experiences of the campers—is an article in the Montana Tracker detailing the encounter and claiming that one of the students received an injury when something climbed into his tent. The article is accompanied by a black-and-white photograph of four students sitting on a couch animatedly explaining their experience.

  There’s an oddness in their expressions that could either be the face a trickster makes when trying not to let on that it’s a gag, or the confusion and awkwardness of dealing with this much attention. From the tone of the article, it’s quite clear that the reporter didn’t take them all that seriously.

  It would seem that nobody else did, other than the sensationalist authors of the books I found in the library.

  It’s an easy story to discount. You have a group of high school kids off in the woods, already primed for hijinks. Add to that whatever they were drinking and smoking, and you have the perfect opportunity for an actual animal encounter to get blown out of proportion.

  But when I look at the photo from the article, the expression of a dark-haired girl on the edge of the couch strikes a chord. She resembles outwardly how I felt when I was first interrogated by Detective Glenn—confused and frightened.

  The caption lists her only as Elizabeth L. I don’t know what the other students saw that night, or if they were just trying to push themselves into the story, but she has the eyes of someone who witnessed something she’d rather put behind her.

  Unfortunately, a first name and only the first letter of the last isn’t much to go on. Unless . . .

  I get up from the table and ask the librarian if they keep high school yearbooks.

  Ten minutes later, I’m back at the table with three editions of the Chilton Champions Annual, scanning through the pages for Elizabeth L.

  It’s not hard to find her. Each graduating class is only about fifty students.

  Her face leaps out immediately. She’s smiling and looking forward to a happy future—a far cry from the frightened girl in the other photo.

  The yearbook lists her last name as Lee. Her best friend is Brandy Thompson and her favorite quote is “’Cause tramps like us, baby, we were born to run.”

  An Internet search finds an Elizabeth Lee Collins living in the town of Lodge Pine. Property records list an address. When I type the address into a search engine, I get the phone number for Lodge Pine Aquaculture Supply—which I assume sells equipment to fish farms.

  I have her number now, but do I call her? Chasing down stories about the Cougar Creek Monster is a long way from trying to find my killer. If I ran down every crazy urban legend in southern Montana, I’d die of old age before I found anything concrete.

  It seems silly, especially given how outlandish some of the accounts are—Indian ghosts, animal orgies—but still . . . there’s something about the haunted look in young Elizabeth’s eyes. I want to know what she saw.

  Impulsively, I dial the number and curse myself for not thinking up what I want to say beforehand.

  “Aquaculture Supply. How may I help you?” A woman’s voice.

  “Elizabeth Lee?”

  “It’s Collins now.”

  “Sorry. Yes, of course. This is rather, um, awkward. But I’ve been doing some research and wanted to ask you a few questions.”

  “Oh, dear. This about the Cougar Creek thing, isn’t it?”

  “Uh, yes.”

  “Listen. That was just a hoax some of my friends pulled. I had a feeling that once these animal attack victims started surfacing I was going to get pulled back into it. I have nothing to add.”

  “A hoax.”

  “Yes,” she says, rather pat. “If you want to know what that’s about, I suggest you go ask that crazy professor who keeps finding bodies.”

  I hadn’t realized how well known that had become. “How d
o you know about that?”

  “My husband is a cop. Everyone knows. Anyway, go talk to the professor.”

  “I am him.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Theo Cray. I’m the one that’s been finding the bodies.”

  She takes her time to reply. “You’re the one that found those girls?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And what do you think killed them?” she asks.

  “A man.”

  “A man?”

  “Flesh and blood.”

  “What does that have to do with me?”

  “You saw something that night.”

  “I said it was a hoax.”

  “I’m looking at a photo of you taken just a few days later. That girl doesn’t think it was a hoax.”

  “That was a long time ago. She didn’t know much.”

  “I’d like to talk to you either way.”

  “Did I mention my husband is a cop?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “All right.” She sighs. “You have our address?”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  SHADOWS

  Elizabeth and her husband live in a well-kept two-story home on several acres of property. Three slobbering mutts clamber over one another to greet me when I let myself through the gate. After I dutifully scratch each one behind the ear, paying the entry fee, they run off to chase some invisible foe.

  Elizabeth is sitting on the porch with a pitcher of iced tea sitting on a table. She’s a bit more robust than the photo taken shortly after high school, but the eyes and hair are the same.

  “So you’re the man who keeps digging up bodies?” she asks.

  “I guess you could say that.”

  She motions for me to sit down. “Thomas says you lost a friend?”

  I assume Thomas is her police officer husband. “A former student.”

  “I hear they hauled you in as a suspect at first?”

  “That was an experience.”

  “I bet. I bet. But you’re here to talk about Cougar Creek. Really, you’re wasting your time. Like I said, it was a hoax. That’s all there is to say.”

  She delivers this as a prepared speech. I can tell that this has been weighing heavily on her.

  “Two people think there is,” I say.

  “Pardon?”

  “Two people see a possible connection. Me and you. When I called, you said you were expecting someone to reach out to you sooner or later. So far we’re the ones with the most intimate knowledge of this, and we’ve both drawn the same conclusion that they might be related.”

  “Maybe it’s time for you to go. I don’t want to have to sic my dogs on you.” She says this only half-heartedly.

  “Good luck with that. I met your dogs.”

  She shakes her head. “Worthless animals.” She resigns herself to accepting my stubbornness. “Fine. Understand that I didn’t have a clear idea what was happening at the time, and after the fact, my friends exaggerated parts of what happened. And then others just went crazy with it. I once even read an account that said we were up there having some kind of demonic animal ghost orgy. I went up that mountain a virgin and came down a virgin, thank you very much.”

  “So what did happen?”

  She takes a moment to collect her thoughts. “Well, as you probably know, we weren’t the first ones to encounter the Cougar Creek Monster, or whatever. In fact, it was stories about something lurking up there that made Reese Penny and Alex Danson organize the whole trip. They had some idea it was aliens or Bigfoot. Anyway, it grew into a postgraduation campout. Seventeen of us in all.”

  “What had you heard before?”

  “Hikers said they saw an animal on two legs watching them. They’d come back from fishing and found their campsite had been wrecked. There was even a photo.”

  “A photo?”

  “Yeah. I think Alex’s cousin took it a few weeks before. I saw a blurry mimeographed copy of it. It could have been anything.”

  “What did it look like?”

  “At the time, I think Reese said it looked like the Black Panther, from comics. He actually put a comic book cover next to the image. Maybe. But these new girls, these victims, they were attacked by a bear?”

  “There are five claw marks, which would indicate a bear. A cat would have four, normally.”

  “Thomas says the folks from Fish and Wildlife think there might be a polydactyl cat running around, and that’s why there’s all this confusion. Both big cats and bears are known to bury their prey.”

  “Mrs. Collins, I’ve seen these burials. No animal did that.”

  “Elizabeth. But you think the Cougar Man might’ve?”

  “You still haven’t told me what you saw.”

  “Right. Right. So we hike up the hot spring, and some of the others say they think we’re being watched. Lucy Plavin and a couple other girls and I started straggling, picking wildflowers and talking. Pretty soon we were isolated from the rest, but the trail isn’t too hard to follow. We’re walking along, making lots of noise, giggling, whatever, when Carey Sumter stops and asks, ‘What’s that?’ She points to something on the ridge to the left up in the trees.

  “We don’t see anything. She says it was something big, and I tell her if it was anything, it was just a bear. Now she’s bone white. Scared. She saw something, but we talked her out of it. Ten minutes later she’s laughing with us and whatever she saw is out of mind.

  “It’s not until we get to the spring and start making camp that we find out that three or four other people saw something watching us.

  “This is where it started to get a little unsettling. There were three separate sightings at different times. When we compared notes, all of them had the same thing to say: it was on the left ridge, at first it appeared to be a man, but then it slunk off like a cat.”

  “Did you think someone was playing a trick?”

  “Well, yeah. I thought Reese or Alex was doing something with a costume or one of their friends was hiding in the trees. But they were the ones that seemed the most skeptical. Trying to convince Carey and the others it was a bear. Only they insisted this was too skinny to be a bear. They said it looked like Alex’s photo.”

  “Did you see it again?”

  She locks eyes with me, as if I’d asked the stupidest question in the world. “Did I see it again? Hell, yes. When it tried to drag me out of my tent.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  ENCOUNTER

  “By the time we’d opened up the third case of beer, our nerves had settled down a bit and the ones that came up there to hook up went off to their tents.

  “After most of us started to sleep, there was a commotion outside the tents. Carey, Janet, Vivian, and I had decided to share a tent because we trusted the boys less than whatever we thought might be lurking out there.

  “One of them woke up at the sound of the tent zipper being opened. At first she thought it was another girl, or one of the boys playing a prank, but when she grabbed her flashlight, whoever or whatever it was had gone. A little while later, Stacey Kavanaugh heard something and yelled. This got everyone up.

  “We were back by the fire comparing notes on what happened. Half the tents had said they heard something prowling around and saw a shadow moving past.

  “A consensus was reached that it was a bear or a cat. The girls decided to split the boys up among them for protection. Which would have been the perfect plan for Reese and Alex to concoct, only they seemed just as disturbed by what was going on as any of us.

  “I knew Scott Cook wasn’t as into the ladies as everyone thought he was, so I ended up sharing a tent with him. He was also captain of the wrestling team, so I felt safe. Poor Scott.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I thought you knew that part. Well, I’m sleeping on the top of my bag because it’s hot. Scott is sound asleep, curled up in the corner of the tent with Depeche Mode playing on his Walkman.

  “At first I think it’s a dream. There�
�s a sound I can’t quite place. Later on, I realize it’s the tent zipper being raised very, very slowly. My eyes are shut and I’m still half out of it, but then something touches my leg.

  “I think maybe it’s just Scott being playful. I decide to ignore it and see how far he goes. Then suddenly, something grabs my ankle and I’m yanked out of the tent.”

  Elizabeth’s face gets animated as she recalls this. Her body twists as the muscle memory floods back.

  “I scream and grab at Scott’s sleeping bag. As I’m getting pulled outside, I try holding the tent flaps, but this thing is stronger than me and I lose my grip. I roll over on my back and I see this shadow . . . this thing.

  “Scott comes running out of the tent and jumps on it. Then . . . then, oh, hell, the thing claws at him. I remember seeing its arm pull back and swipe at Scott.

  “That’s when Reese fired the pistol he’d brought with him. Nobody knew he had it until then. The thing let go of me and ran off into the woods.”

  “Was he wounded?”

  “I don’t know. Scott sure as hell was. Not only did the thing claw at him, but Reese managed to clip his shoulder with his shot. That’s why none of the stories were straight. It was against the law to have a gun in Beaverhead Forest, and on top of that, Reese had a couple of previous charges.

  “Neither of the wounds was life threatening. The gashes were messy, but we were able to patch him up enough to get him to a clinic in Red Hook. The gun wound wasn’t too deep and could have passed for a cut.

  “We agreed to leave the part about Reese shooting Scott out of it, but with over a dozen people, soon everyone knew. When the sheriff asked Scott what happened, though, he denied being shot and that was that.”

  “What about the Cougar Creek Monster?”

  Elizabeth shrugs. “What about it? Everyone, even some of us who were there, thinks we were making it up or had a drunken encounter with a mountain lion. It made the paper. Some Bigfoot hunters showed up for a while, but that was the last anyone saw of the Cougar Creek Monster.

  “A few months later when those California hikers went missing, nobody even mentioned the Cougar Man.”