Chasing the Demon

by Paul Sating

  Like before. Like she used to be.

  Jared took a deep, calming breath. His head arched up toward the open, star-filled, sky that promised a cold night. He had carved out a safe fire pit after getting his tent set up just in case the night turned on him. He was now glad he had. There would be no breaks, no comfortable sixty-degree evening to sleep through. No, tonight would drive home the spirit of doing hike-in camping. Roughing it, in the most comprehensive ways possible. Nights like this were the reason more people weren't interested in hunting or investigating Sasquatch. So few entertained returning to the days of less-than-perfect climate control. It was a shame. He loved the cold. The peaceful cold. It made focusing on your thoughts a simple task, usually because it was warmer inside your head than it was outside it.

  He thought about his childhood.

  His father.

  And about the passions that drove him to lose the very thing he treasured most.

  And yet there he sat, in the middle of the woods, on a cold-ass night so he could get up as early as possible and poke around to see what he could find? Way to change your life, buddy. If he didn't start changing soon he might start doubting how serious he was about the promises he'd made to Maria.

  And myself.

  He had to remind himself of that because he also thought about Sasquatch too. Right in the middle of thinking about the early life experiences that shaped the man he was, right in the middle of thinking about the woman he loved like no one else in the world, the woman he'd lost, he was thinking about that damn animal. Born of desperation, the thoughts pried their way into his mind. He was desperate to close this chapter, to prove to himself he wasn't chasing shadows. He was desperate to prove to the world that a grown man sitting in the woods because he believed an ancient upright mammal was also out there, made sense. Goddammit, it makes sense.

  It was convenient to never consider that this creature might not exist beyond Hollywood or fringe members of society who spent most of their free time on message boards and discussion forums, talking about inter-dimensional travel and Bigfoot visiting for the family barbecue. It was easy, too easy, for those types of investigators to get attention from the vast majority of people who don't think or care about Sasquatch. People don't care about wildlife that has been proved to exist, he wondered why anyone assumed people would waste any thought on a creature for which substantial evidence simply hadn't been yet uncovered. There were bills to pay, bad economic news every time you turned around and a world that was going to hell on the expressway.

  He understood their apathy.

  What he didn't get were the people who asserted the non-existence of Sasquatch without understanding the anthropology behind it. Especially problematic were those who made claims but weren’t bothered to provide the evidence to support them. Like those who insisted the Patterson-Gimlin film was nothing more than a man in a monkey suit but ignored all the evidence to the contrary. Those deniers acted as if this was some sort of new phenomena and failed to recognize human history was littered with cultural references to strange primates crossing paths with humans.

  It perplexed him, the peculiar mix sandwiched between skeptics so incredulous he could drop a living Sasquatch in their kitchen and they'd still deny its existence, all the way to people who didn't believe that Homo sapiens co-existed with Neanderthals. Interbreeding happened between Homo sapiens and them, as well as Denisovans. The evidence was there, waiting for humanity to choose to walk away from its ignorance. Yet millions had no clue or outright refused to acknowledge facts.

  Jared used his pack ax to cut up some of the wide branches he found scattered around the campsite and fed them to the fire. He was going to need to keep it hot and going as late into the night as possible. Fire helped keep away unwelcome visitors.

  His thoughts drifted back to the naysayers as he watched the orange flames dance. Skeptics should get it. Many of them knew examples of new species finds littered zoology, even large species which were thought to be extinct, like the Tibetan Riwoche horse or the Vietnamese Vu Quang ox. 15,000 new species are discovered each year. But the vast majority of people didn’t care to know that. It was depressing.

  They were as ignorant to the hominoid evolution, from the Homo erectus fossils in Indonesia that dated back to as early as 27,000 years ago or homo floresiensis, nicknamed 'The Hobbit', who lived as recently as 12,000 years ago. They looked a lot like the people who didn't believe anything humanoid but Homo sapiens ever walked the earth.

  The thousands of intersections of the tree of life was a beautiful thing when you understood it.

  And so much of the world was ignorant of that fact.

  Jared poked at the fire, accidentally knocking over a log. Willful ignorance was so damn infuriating. People were determined to maintain the status-quo at all costs, dismissing native stories as folklore. All the wild-men throughout history, across vastly diverse cultures. All ignored.

  Jared got up and went to his bag, retrieving his notepad. He needed to get these thoughts outlined for the podcast. The points needed to be made. They needed to be heard by anyone who happened upon the show when it went to air. The thoughts, like they often did when he got away from Olympia, away from the stresses and strains of life, away from all the things that blocked good thinking, came fast and thick.

  He scribbled the next one before he even finished the current thought. How did people not understand that when they dismissed this heritage they were trivializing the culture and history of these people? Why? Because a Sasquatch hasn't fallen on anyone's doorstep yet? He scribbled furiously. Some Amazonian tribes weren't found until years after humankind had already begun traipsing through and destroying that precious rainforest ecosystem. The Hopi, Sioux, Iroquois, Northern Athabascan, Lakota, the Ojibway, the Coliville ... all include a variation of the 'wildman' in their histories. If all were wrong, then why?

  Shouldn't skeptics be thinking about that if they were the critical thinkers they claimed to be?

  Jared shook his head as he finished his last note. Not very skeptical behavior for self-professed skeptics, was it?

  Sometimes it made him want to give up, pack up, slug back down the mountain to his truck and sleep in his bed. His warm bed.

  Instead, Jared stayed up for a little while longer but put the notebook away. It was too frustrating. He pulled out the recorder and started talking. He didn't need the notes once he started; the words flowed into the recorder just as they had to the notepad. Twenty years of running into non-believers and bad thinkers did that, it made talking about the discrepancies so easy. Shaking people out of their comfort zones, though; that was, by far, the least enjoyable aspect of the job.

  He finished his beer and his recording at about the same time, strolled into the darkness, away from camp to a spot he'd scoped out when the sun was still up to make sure, at times like this, he wouldn't break his neck just trying to relieve himself. He made it back to camp with both legs and his neck intact and began closing up for the night. The recording wasn't planned, it'd just come to him, but it would make a great addition to the podcast. He hoped his passion made the information entertaining enough to listen to. People had to get smarter about this, they had to! Every day people were becoming more and more ignorant and what kind of legacy would he leave behind if he couldn't at least attempt to stem the flow?

  As he laid down, his mind still buzzed with the intoxicating combination of being out in the woods on an expedition and the impassioned plea he'd recorded. His eyes got heavier.

  Within minutes, Jared was in his dream-world, where people understood their own history.

  *****

  Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

  Jared bolted upright, stretching his already-wide eyes. "What the fuck?"

  Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! The call sounded again.

  "What the hell was that?!" He unzipped his sleeping back and quietly searched for the recorder.

  Crickets. Silence. Crickets over the top of sile
nce. Seconds passed without a repeat of the sound.

  Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

  "Shit!" There. The small, red light of the recorder stared back at him, the only thing breaking up the blackness of the night. Jared cleared his throat and narrated. This was going on the podcast! "I'm not sure what that was, but I can guess."

  Off in the distance, the sound he was waiting for came again.

  Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

  Silent, strained seconds passed. This time the same type of call sounded, but it was a different direction, distance, and voice! "Oh man, there are two of 'em! I can't believe I'm hearing this; a call and answer! I hope this damn recorder is picking them up. They sound far off; far enough for me to step outside and try to get clearer audio."

  He unzipped the tent. A slight wind chilled his forehead and the crickets around his camp quieted, using the advantage of the darkness to protect them from this human invader.

  Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! From the same direction as the first calls, but farther away.

  Jared waited to see if there would be an answer call. There was.

  Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

  Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! From the left. A thousand yards.

  Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! From his right, just as far away.

  He pulled the recorder close to his mouth so he didn't have to be loud. He wanted nothing to do with anything out there picking up his presence. Who knew if those were the only two Sasquatch in the neighborhood? "Dammit, they're moving away from my location. It's ... it's 3 am. I'm not going out there to look for them. They'd be miles away before I even got my boots laced. But at least now I know where I'll be heading in the morning. Man ... that was awesome! I just hope I can get back to sleep."

  But, of course, sleep came only in fits and spurts, reluctant to give him what he desired and what his body needed. Especially considering what I'm about to do.

  Jared stretched, his joints as reluctant to flex as his brain had been about allowing him to sleep the night before. Things cracked and popped and his shoulder refused to release a full range of motion until it decided it was time to, which wasn't at this moment. But Jared didn't need his body to cooperate; he needed it to do what it should be doing, and right now that meant cooperating with his brain to get the camp packed up. Fifteen minutes later, he finished and the fire pit was filled in; he wouldn't be taking out an entire forest today.

  *****

  He pulled the recorder out as he hiked. "It's freakin' freezing this morning. I packed up camp about an hour ago and I'm headed deeper into the Olympic National Park to hopefully find the source of those howls last night ... well, at least clues to what they were. I'm pretty confident those were two Sasquatch, but let's see what the evidence says first."

  A chill hung in the air. A frozen haze shrouded the mountainside. It wouldn't lift for another few hours, giving the distinct advantage to anything that wanted to make a breakfast out of him. He could see three hundred yards in every direction, enough to keep him comfortably numb to the risks that could be lurking three hundred and one yards away.

  Like what I heard last night.

  Even as he climbed, step after step, zig-zagging across the face of the terrain to preserve his knees and his stabilizer muscles, the haze refused to lift. It was going to stay this way, limiting his vision. He was sure, though, that it would lift at precisely the moment he was loading up in his truck again.

  This part of the mountain wasn't densely populated by trees. A fire had ravaged it years ago and the new growth was struggling to take root for some reason, though he suspected an active Bigfoot population might have something to do with that since junior trees served a multitude of purposes for them.

  He couldn't think about anything else because that was the moment he stepped into an area where fire had laid to waste almost all of the adult trees. This part of the mountainside was very new, very renewed.

  It was also where he made his most recent find.

  The listeners are going to love this! Jared pulled the recorder up again. "So I think I've found a clue to something. I can't be sure if this is the site of my nighttime entertainment or not but I'm standing at the top of a slight rise on the western slope of the mountain. There's heavy underbrush on all sides of me; this part of the mountain is cleared though. It looks like a small fire ravaged it years ago. It's showing signs of recovery but there's no mature growth here, which gives me a great view of my surroundings. I've also got some nice prints here too. Not as nice as the creek bed prints I got the other day in Forks, but there should be one or two I can cast, though I'm not a fan of carrying those back to the truck from all the way out here. I've already taken some pictures and marked them on the GPS. These definitely aren't of the Ray Wallace variety. No one would bother coming this far out into the Olympics to plant tracks they were hoping someone would accidentally come across, especially in a part of the world where those tracks could be washed away in an instant. And I'm not inclined to believe those calls last night were human, owl or coyote. I'll have them analyzed when I get back. The howls and footprints are great, but they're not all I found."

  Jared bent closer, sliding the recorder into his jacket pocket and taking a series of pictures from all angles before stowing the camera and grabbing the recorder again. He couldn't stop smiling. "I found hair samples. I'm not sure what they belong to, I'm not attributing it to Sasquatch, though it is consistent with other finds that have proved inconclusive. Peter has a friend I can send this sample to when I get back to Tumwater. Hopefully, she'll be able to tell me something about what it belongs to. I've got a long hike back. I need to get some answers to these things before I continue my investigation. I'm not sure what I'm going to discover, if anything, from these samples, but before I come out again I need to do some clarifying or some eliminating. There are way too many things lining up here, falling into place alongside my hunch, and I've got to make sure I'm at least on the right course before I convince myself that I am. There's no room to get sloppy here."

  Packed up and excited by the wealth of evidence he now possessed, Jared could have floated back down to his truck.

  10

  The silence was thick, disturbing. Somewhere, maybe two or three offices down the hallway, Jared could hear the stacking of something. Books? He couldn't be sure. But the specifics didn't matter; this place was so quiet he could hear muffled voices through the air ducts. How did people work in environments like this for more than an hour or two? Sure, the forests of the Pacific Northwest could be 'quiet' at times, but they were never silent like this. The forests were brimming with life; this place was a damn morgue.

  But even in a place like this that suffered being alive, Jared couldn't help but feel excited. His knee bounced as he sat in the uncomfortable chair. He tapped the stiff, plastic-encrusted chair arm.

  He hated waiting.

  Waiting was torture. Especially when you didn't know where you stood on something.

  Especially when you potentially had evidence that would rock the world.

  He decided he could get back to work, the itch to work on the podcast, which he'd neglected for days, needed scratching. But he had a life that needed attention, a dog that wanted loving, and a soon-to-be-ex-wife who was demanding he sign paperwork he didn't want to have anything to do with. While he waited in the stale office he might as well work on something, so he pulled the recorder out of his backpack.

  "I haven't recorded for a while and I apologize," he whispered, knowing that the walls of this professional tomb would easily carry his voice. "After my recent finds in Forks and Quinault, I needed to step back a little and let the science catch up. Now is the appropriate time to resume my investigation. I'm currently at the office of a forensic scientist who specializes in trichology, the study of hair, to see if she can help me with the samples I found at the Olympic Park. Peter handed the samples off to her a few days ago and she gave me a ca
ll earlier, asking me to come in. She stepped out for a moment to grab the report for me while I set up to record.

  "Her name is Nancy Reegan," Jared continued. "She's in her mid-40s and, I've got to admit, she's an intimidating presence. The way she carries herself. From the moment I met her, I felt like I was in trouble for doing something I wasn't supposed to do. We're about the same damn age but there's something about her that makes me feel like a kid again. She may not be the most welcoming person I've ever met, but if she's as good as Peter says she is, that's all that matters. She came with Peter's recommendation and testimonial, and he doesn't give those out lightly. Hell, I don't think he's ever had a good word to say about me to other people."

  He paused as the distinct, sharp click-clack of Nancy Reegan's heels announced her approach. He kept the recorder running as she came into the office. Jared hid his smile at her expense; she was everything he imagined someone who worked in this field would be. Her hair was cut short, probably for convenience's sake, her drab olive slacks added some color to her outfit because the unappealing blouse she wore looked picked out at some discount store. This was a woman who sacrificed style for functionality. She walked with mindless ease toward the back of her desk, avoiding Jared and anything in the office that would otherwise serve as a tripping hazard. Her face, buried in the papers she flipped through, was a mixture of excitement and confusion. When she spoke she did so without looking up at him. "Sorry to keep you waiting. It's been a hellacious week. Here," she slid a thin stack of paper across the desk, "that's your copy of the report."

  Jared grabbed it and flipped through a few pages. Pages of data assaulted him. Intimidating. This was no simple document. The amount of verbiage was overwhelming and he didn't have a clue what the small charts were trying to communicate. "No worries. I appreciate you taking the time to do this for me." He was trying to buy enough time to translate what it was he was supposed to glean from what he held. "I hope I didn't create too much work for you."