by Paul Sating
He didn't have solid proof yet but it did give him insight into the possibilities of their behaviors, their culture, and way of life. All varieties of primates lived in communities of differing sizes so why wouldn't this one? And if it built nests near Forks, why wouldn't another community do the same here? If that was at least two Sasquatch last night, there was a chance he was going to find another site that would confirm his Forks' finding.
Jared stopped, his breath catching.
A snapped tree branch caught his attention, drawing his eyes, and then he saw them.
Prints.
Everywhere.
He knelt down, his fingers dancing into the crevice created by the creature's foot. It was here. Here! He planned to hike a few miles before he reached the distance he calculated the calls came from last night. Instead, he'd made it a half mile before he stumbled across these.
He hit RECORD.
"It turns out my nighttime concert was more than a couple of Sasquatch calling to each other," he said. "See, the vocal range of a Sasquatch is impressive. Their calls can carry miles in the right conditions. And last night the conditions were perfect, so I figured the animals were maybe a mile or so away. I was wrong. I found their trail about a half mile from camp. I stumbled into an area completely trampled by a Sasquatch, which left hundreds of prints behind. I'll cast one of them. It has nice, distinct ridge lines I want to preserve. They're beautiful. They're genuine."
His fingers danced over the print before he leaned to reach another pair a few feet away. This Sasquatch had hung out here for a while! "You don't fake prints like this with a pair of custom boots. These are legitimate and there are hundreds of them in what is an area no bigger than two hundred square feet! I've never seen so many prints in one area; it's like this particular Sasquatch was hanging out for a while, pacing, a lot. Maybe he was getting impatient waiting for his lady friend."
He squat-walked around the trampled area. Branches broken. Vegetation ripped as if the beast got hungry while waiting. Then he saw it, a trail that led back down the slope. Jared stood and followed it. "There’s a clear track, about two hundred yards from the trampled site and ... wait. There's something. Jesus. There's a second track joining this one! This other track is equally as fresh and it's definitely from a different Sasquatch! The shape, the size is different than the one I've been tracking!"
It couldn't be possible, could it? Two Sasquatch this close to his camp? They had joined up. Of course, that's why the calls stopped last night. Whatever they'd been communicating to each other was accomplished when they rendezvoused. But what? What was it that made them so brazen? What made this pair so reckless? It was fascinating. And another reason to not give up.
"Two Sasquatch together!" Jared panted. "This is remarkable. I've never had a multiple-track find! Hang on; I need to take some pictures of this." He ripped his pack off and dug around for his camera. The morning light was perfect, bright enough to mark the distinction between the pair without washing out the dimensions. He wracked his brain to remember if he'd ever seen anything like this online or at a convention. He was the first, again. This was going to set him apart from other investigators. And draw more attention to you and what you're doing, idiot.
Not now. He was not going to let those dark thoughts return. Not right now. He had a job to do. He was facing remarkable evidence of a pair of Sasquatch and he had a trail to follow. Who knew what was at the end! Today could be the day everything changed.
Today could be the first day of the rest of his life.
"This is incredible," he exclaimed. "Even though they walked single file it's still easy to pick out two distinct prints. They're both fresh, they have to be from last night. The likelihood that individual Sasquatch would trudge the exact same path at different times is slim, especially when you consider the series of calls last night. I'm going to keep following these and see where they lead. This is incredible."
He forged ahead, carefully proceeding, aware of the noise he was making. He didn't want to pose a threat to anything out here, but least of all he didn't want to go plunging into the middle of a Sasquatch nest, completely unaware of what he would be walking into. Even if it was a pair of them, his chances of fighting them off weren't very high. Not that he wanted to. He was here to observe, to study, not to disturb. He had to be careful. But this was strange.
He didn't expect what happened next.
The trail headed downhill. Sasquatch didn’t live in higher elevations because those heights didn't provide adequate tree cover. That was why he was shocked to hear about the report at Mount Rainier. But that Bigfoot had only traversed the mountain, leaving one area for another. It was solitary and there was no evidence of a nest, not where Andrew had shown him the location of the sighting, at least. These two could have been doing anything. Because they walked off together didn't mean they were heading back to a nest. But it was still strange that they'd go off together downhill, increasing the risk to themselves with each step they took. There had to be a reason.
He kept going. The Bigfoot had been walking, not running; he could determine that from their stride lengths. There was no hurry, no rush, no escape or pursuit indicated by these tracks. These prints were left by a pair of calm, composed animals who were acting with purpose. Hunting or scavenging? That would make sense. If they'd found a fellow nocturnal friend who would make a tasty meal it wasn't without reason to posit that was all this was. It would explain the series of calls last night. They would have had to communicate their location and the location of their prey to each other as they tried to flank it. Or, if they were taking the more vegetarian route, one of them could have been calling to the other that they'd found a natural vault of goodies. That would explain the area he tripped across that looked as if a Bigfoot had paced for a considerable time.
But this trail didn't deviate. It was a straight march back down the mountainside, indicating a particular destination. That was the kicker. If they were hunting, their trail would have varied as they pursued their prey. There might even have been evidence of their pace increasing. But there was none of that. The prints led down the mountain in a straight path. And there was no indication that they paused either. No area was carved up with shuffled footprints. No steps off the side of this path to survey the berry inventory of particular bushes.
Just straight ahead. Determined and focused. But why? Trepidation crept into his mind. He could be walking into something he wasn't ready for and he had to be ready for that.
Down.
Down.
Down.
The pair of Sasquatch tracks continued in pretty much a straight path. Trepidation turned to unease. There was something wrong here. Something very wrong. Something that told him he should turn around and give up on this folly. He might have even followed that instinct too if it weren't for the fact that turning around would lead him back up the mountain. He was already heading back to the general direction of the road where he'd parked.
Were there dumpsters down there? There weren’t, Jared was confident of that. He hadn't noticed any but he also hadn't thought this would happen. It wasn't ridiculous to think that Sasquatch would notice a possible food source like dumpsters, but dumpsters meant humans and Sasquatch did everything they could to avoid their evolutionary brethren. He didn't eliminate the possibility, but he was so far up the mountain that it didn't pass the common sense filter he tried to employ to make quick decisions when investigating. This could also have nothing to do with food. He smiled devilishly thinking that the pair went off to find a place for another basic need all creatures had. Imagine how awkward that would be for everyone involved, he laughed.
And then he stopped laughing as he reached a plateau.
A familiar plateau.
He couldn't believe what he was seeing. He didn't want to see what he was seeing.
He refused to believe this wasn't some nightmare.
Jared pulled out the recorder, speaking only as loud as necessary. If this was it, if this was the end, he
had to leave some sort of record and hope it would be found by a future him, a future investigator. Hell, I'd take a park ranger at this point.
"I followed the tracks," he groaned. "They never separated. The Sasquatch stayed single file until they reached the place where I'm now standing. It's obvious the pair stood side by side, behind a thin row of junior trees. Their prints indicate they didn't move much either." He looked around when he thought he heard something. A branch cracking? He couldn't be sure. His thoughts were a mess. For the first time in his collective adult memory, he had no idea what to do. What do you do when you've found this? He put the recorder to his lips again. "But I can't tell how long they were here. There isn't much evidence of shifting or moving around. It's obvious they were only interested in observing and moving on. The tracks turn back to the thicker foliage, splitting off almost immediately."
He swallowed hard, looking over his shoulder. Was this what paranoia felt like? Infrasound? He swallowed the fear. "I'm standing where they stood last night," the darkness of his own voice wasn't lost on him. But he wasn't going to do a re-take. If this was ever going to be heard by the public it had to be genuine. "I'm ... rattled. I'm not going to lie."
Rattled? Is that what this was? No, not at all. What about traumatized? That might be more appropriate. More genuine. But he couldn't think about semantics or aesthetics. He only cared about getting out of here, about getting back to the truck in one piece, and leaving the Olympics.
He only cared about getting to Maria.
"Not because I can't figure out what happened and why they split back off, but because of what they were doing here," he said, his hand trembling. "I'm looking at what they were looking at hours ago. My camp."
12
Jared sat, staring straight ahead, with both hands wrapped around the steering wheel. What the fuck just happened?
Only yesterday he was sitting at a small, wobbly table in a restaurant in Port Angeles. Across from him was his soon-to-be-ex-wife who had given him hope that they might be able to reconcile. He drove out of that town high on life and full of the overwhelming hope only a promising future begat. He could have been t-boned in an intersection on the way out to Hurricane Ridge and still flopped out of his wrecked truck with a smile on his face after that conversation.
And now?
Now he didn't know what he was. In twenty years of chasing this damn creature around Washington State, British Columbia, Idaho, and even parts of the hated land of Oregon, Jared had never felt a series of emotions swirling through his head and body like the last twenty-four hours had born.
Of course, he also never had a pair of Sasquatch stalk his camp.
How? Why? For what purpose? A tumult of questions, yet he had no answers. The Sasquatch had called each other and then spent a portion of the evening outside his camp. Was their observation designed to decide whether or not he was a threat or was it because they were hungry and deciding if his middle-aged body was the juicy morsel they desired? Had he stumbled too close into their realm? It wasn't possible. Yesterday he'd done all the things he always did on expeditions; he carefully scouted the landscape for signs of habitation. Careful to notice subtle differences in the terrain and the flora, he would have seen something. He couldn't have walked right into their realm. He wasn't that sloppy. He wasn't that careless.
Yet, while he was completely unaware, they found and observed him.
And that was unnerving.
They could have done anything to him. It didn't matter if they couldn't figure out what the tent was, they had the power and intelligence to understand there was a human in their presence. They would have been well aware that he wasn't one of them but one of the kind who always came through the natural world and treated it as their personal dumping ground. The pair would have known that he was the kind that destroyed. Maybe they were intelligent enough to know Jared’s kind had pushed their kind into this small corner of the world.
But they hadn't done anything more than watch. He was alive and his camp was completely undisturbed. They hadn't even set foot in it. He’d checked. And they didn't scout it either; he verified that by checking all around the camp. They'd visited him, watched him for whatever reason, and then departed the same way they'd come.
It was possible the visit was born of sheer curiosity and nothing more. Was he assigning malice where there was none to be assigned because he was overthinking all of this, missing the opportunity to revel in the fact that two Sasquatch had come to him? Whatever their motivations and reasons for doing so, they'd still done it, and he was their target. Was that the problem with this? He'd never been the target before. Even during his childhood experience at Lake Cushman, when the Sasquatch tore up their camp, he and his family weren't the targets for the beast. That Sasquatch wanted to eat. That was all. It only killed his boyhood dog because it was being pursued. It acted out of self-defense, not malice. Just as these Sasquatch hadn't hunted him for a meal. They hadn't bothered with him. For all he knew, they'd watched him for a couple of minutes, got bored and hiked into the dark woods for a meal and a round of steamy Bigfoot love.
Jared put the truck in gear and pulled back onto the road. Regardless of the motivations of the pair of nighttime visitors, he was grateful to be in the relative safety of the truck and on his way back towards civilization.
He didn't wear vulnerability well.
But none of that cloaked the larger realization: he'd been found by Sasquatch and not the other way around. It could only mean he was getting close. So very close. The scope was narrowing. They were being pinned in. All those hours of researching and studying sightings, meticulously mapping every detail, confirmed or rumored, was paying off. Whereas so many of his peers were still scrambling across the region hoping for sightings without analyzing the data they collected, he was tripping over evidence at almost every turn. Closer.
Closer to finding Bigfoot.
Closer to being able to focus on Maria again.
Closer to the end.
His phone rang, jolting Jared from his sanguine thinking. Right now he wanted to be alone with his thoughts.
But it was Peter and he couldn't wait to tell his friend what had just happened. "What's up, Peter?"
"Are you alone?" Anxiety edged Peter's voice. Jared’s news would have to wait.
"Yeah, I'm driving right now. Why? Everything okay, you sound weird."
"Where are you heading?"
"Shelton," Jared answered. He would love nothing more than to get home, shower, and maybe have a beer—or a million—as he thought over the events of the past day. Peter's tone made him uneasy so he tried to lighten the mood. "I'm also drinking a Starbucks latte, wearing jeans and a hoodie, and doing approximately 63 miles per hour. Jesus, Peter, what's going on? You're starting to freak me out."
But Peter did what he usually did at times like this, times when he was uneasy, he answered questions with questions. "You heading down there for something related to your ... work?"
Jared sighed. "Yeah. Peter, listen, don't dance with me, something's going on, I can tell. You're rattled. Whatever it is, I want to help, but I'm weaving through traffic and I've got a lot on my mind. Things with Maria might be turning around and I had a great find this weekend that scared the shit out of me. I was going to call you about that later, actually."
There was only silence on the other end.
"Peter? You there?
"I'm here," Peter's voice trailed off. "Listen, I need you to not go to Shelton. There's ... you're being watched. You're too hot right now. I need you to think about something."
This was starting to go somewhere Jared didn't want to go. Not again. Not with Peter. They'd just done this dance when he dropped off the prints. The prospect of doing it again wasn’t on the agenda. He didn’t want to snap, but Peter was as pig-headed as he was and sometimes two men butting heads was unhealthy. "What?"
"How about laying low for a few weeks?"
"Too hot? Laying low? What are you talking about?"
"You're being watched, dammit! And you're being reckless. You've got to stop. At least for a bit."
Peter’s advice always came from the right place. If he needed anything in his world right now it was someone he could depend on, someone like Peter. Especially when the community finds out what I've discovered. "Who is watching me?"
Peter's response made Jared's throat close. "You know who."
He had a damn good idea of who Peter was referring to. But there was something about putting names to actions that made it all too real for him, especially right now. It wasn't that he feared them. It wasn't that he wanted to live in a lollipop world where people were always kind and good to each other. That wasn’t it at all. But thinking that otherwise rational adults could turn into such malevolent creatures due to their own self-interest was wasted energy. Anything that took his energy away from his pursuit wasn’t worth thinking about, and definitely not worth exploring.
The fire returned. He squeezed the phone. "Other enthusiasts? I'm not stopping because they're upset or jealous, or whatever their motives are. I'm way too close right now, Peter. Every single thing I find, it’s bringing me closer. My theory is right, bud. Right. Why would I give all that up because some amateur hunters aren't happy that they're not the ones with the findings?"
"It's more than that and you know it. Don't be juvenile." There was a pause and a deep breath on the other end of the line. "Listen, I'm your friend. I'm on your side. That's why I called. If I didn't care about you I wouldn't have bothered. I know you're frustrated but this goes beyond your interests. I'm trying to make you see that, Jared. Other people are being impacted by your actions."
A serving of guilt. Jared had no use for the tactic and no desire for someone to use it on him. He'd already had enough of that throughout his life. Dad and Mom. But Mom? She was good, leveraging it most of the years that followed his childhood incident that sparked this Bigfoot passion. He could give up recalling the times she'd berate his father, cried, begged, pleaded, screamed and yelled. Nothing was below her. At times she'd even use Jared as a tool to get his father to quit his pursuits. It worked, sometimes, but most often those tactics fell on deaf ears. Regardless of her varied success, Jared watched, listened, and learned; and he realized the power guilt had as a manipulative tool.
