Hominid

by R. D. Brady

  Questions flew at Tess fast and furious after that. Tess answered them for twenty minutes, wanting the assembled reporters to have no doubt that her life’s work was entirely fraudulent. Finally, though, she could take no more. She put up her hand. “Thank you for your time. I will not answer any more questions on this subject at any point again.” She stepped from the podium as flashbulbs exploded.

  Dev quickly escorted her out of the room and closed the door behind them, shutting out the questions still being hurled at her by reporters.

  Tess began to shake. “I did it. I just ruined my career. No one will ever believe me again.”

  Dev pulled her into his arms. “And you just saved a population—an entire species. That was one of the bravest things I’ve ever seen anyone do.”

  Tess wrapped her arms around him and held him tight. “Thank you for standing by me.”

  He looked down into her face. “I have been waiting forever to have the chance to stand with you. Bigfoot, journalists, hit men, heck, you can throw in UFOs, and I’ll still be standing here. By your side is where I always want to be.”

  “Same goes.” Tess leaned up and kissed him, feeling a peace that only comes from doing the right thing.

  EPILOGUE

  Two Years Later

  Rogue River National Park, Oregon

  Tess walked along the path in Rogue River Park. Her park ranger uniform was getting a little tight. She’d have to get a new one soon.

  Sunlight glinted off her wedding ring, and she ran her thumb over it. Even though she had worn it for over a year, she still loved looking at it. It wasn’t fancy, it wasn’t expensive, but it was a part of Dev. And that’s all she wanted.

  She approached a campsite where a group had been camped out for the last week. She noted with approval that they had policed their own garbage. She loved when people respected the park. She wanted people to enjoy the outdoors, but in a way that allowed others to do the same after them.

  Tess pulled her radio off her belt. “Brannick to base.”

  Eric’s voice came over the line. “How’s it looking out there, Tess?”

  “It’s good. They cleaned up great. I’ll be heading back in.”

  “Good. Dev said he’ll be here at three to pick you up.”

  “Okay, great.”

  “Oh, and Jeanne wanted to ask if it’s okay if she brings flowers tonight.”

  Tess smiled. Missy had her first dance recital tonight, and everyone was coming to see her: Pax, Shawn, their son Dylan, Sasha and her latest boyfriend, Abby and her husband, Madge, Eric and his wife Jeanne. It was going to be a packed house.

  “Tell Jeanne that would be great.”

  “Will do. See you in a little bit.”

  Tess keyed off the radio. Missy now had a full-fledged extended family—her own little tribe.

  Tess felt eyes on her, and the hairs on the back of her neck stood up. Very carefully, she unsnapped her holster and placed her hand on the Browning there. But the fear she felt disappeared as quickly as it had appeared. It was replaced by an overwhelming feeling of trust.

  Tess looked around, trying to find the source. And then a seven-foot bigfoot stepped out from the woods. Tess recognized her immediately, even though she was now fully grown. As Sugar approached, Tess’s initial happiness turned to surprise and then joy. She gently placed her hand on Sugar’s protruding belly. “Congratulations.”

  Since she’d become a ranger at Rogue River almost two years ago, she’d seen her friends every few months, sometimes more often. She and Dev had brought Missy out camping a few times, and inevitably their friends found them. The last time she’d seen Sugar had been two months ago, and there’d been no sign of the pregnancy. She wasn’t sure how long bigfoot pregnancies lasted, but she really hoped she got to see this little one.

  Tess never would have believed after everything they had all been through that this would be the end result. After the press conference, Tess had been raked over the coals in the media. It hadn’t been easy, but the fact that everyone thought she was an unscrupulous liar at least meant that people had lost interest in investigating the areas where she’d said bigfoot were—and that in turn meant the bigfoot were at least as safe as they were back before any of this happened.

  Sugar tilted her head and then sniffed. Her eyes grew large. Gently, Sugar placed her hand on Tess’s stomach. Tess laughed. “Yup, me too.”

  Tess took a seat on a downed tree. Sugar sat next to her and looked at her expectantly. Tess pulled the Twinkies from her bag. Carefully unwrapping them, she handed one to Sugar.

  Then she took a bite of the other one, listening to the sounds of life in the forest scurry by. She knew she should probably head back to the station.

  Sugar sat next to her, already having finished her Twinkie, her head tilted back, her eyes closed as she enjoyed the feel of the sun on her face.

  Tess smiled and did the same. But there’s no rush. I’ve got time.

  FACT OR FICTION?

  A lot of different factors led to the creation of Hominid. Since I was a kid, I have always been fascinated by the idea of bigfoot. I asked my kids—my oldest is eight—if they knew about bigfoot, and they did as well. Bigfoot is pervasive in American culture.

  The idea for this story came about when I was conducting research for a different book, The Belial Children. I was looking for information about giants interacting with humans. Everywhere I looked, I found mention of bigfoot. And a seed took root.

  When I first came up with the idea for Hominid, though, it was going to go in a completely different direction. I had just seen a documentary on the 1959 deaths of a group of nine college students in the Ural Mountains of Russia. Their broken bodies were found, but the autopsies were withheld from the public for years. The documentary made the case that the menk—the Russian name for bigfoot—was responsible for the gruesome deaths. So when I first started thinking about a bigfoot book, that event stuck in my head.

  But then I started doing more research. First off, if you’re looking to do research on bigfoot, go for the books and not the websites. The websites tend to provide good examples of incidents, but I was looking for something that drew conclusions from those incidents.

  So with the Russian Yeti documentary fresh on my mind, I started looking for reports of violent attacks by bigfoot, sasquatch or yeti—and I was coming up empty. Oh, they threw trees, chased some people, and seemed to really dislike dogs, but there just wasn’t a lot about them attacking humans, which seemed odd.

  Almost all the research agreed that the beings were between six and eight feet tall, although some suggested that ten to twelve feet might be possible. And reports consistently said they were seriously fast. And I thought, if that’s the case, if they wanted to catch humans, or to hurt humans, they should have no problem doing so. So why weren’t there more reports of injuries from bigfoot encounters?

  I realized that if I wanted to write a book on bigfoot, even though it’s fiction, bigfoot needed to peaceful toward humans—because that fit with the actual encounters.

  And even though Hominid is indeed a work of fiction, there was a lot of research that went into making it believable fiction. So here are some of the facts incorporated, in no particular order.

  Bigfoot Scenic Byway. Yes, it exists. It’s an eighty-six mile stretch of roadway in Northern California. And the land along the highway is known for bigfoot sightings.

  Names. All the names for bigfoot mentioned in Hominid are real: Yeren, yowie, skunk ape, etc. There are dozens of names for a tall, hairy hominid across the country and the globe.

  Bigfoot and Early Humans. There really is a pictograph in Sonora California called the Hairy Man, which depicts a bigfoot family where the bigfoot is crying as man runs away. And the Hoopa story of how humans came to be through animals deciding their fate is a real story. And there are other stories, hundreds of years old, about man’s interaction with a hairy bipedal wild man.

  Jane Goodall Quote. The Goodall qu
ote at the beginning of the book is real. Jane Goodall, according to interviews, does believe that bigfoot exists. A large reason why, according to Goodall, is the tales she has heard from indigenous people in areas said to be inhabited by bigfoot.

  Bigfoot Erotica. Yup, it’s real. No, it’s not something I read… regularly. Seriously though, when I was doing research on bigfoot, I put in all sorts of keyword searches. One of them revealed the tale of a woman who fell in love with bigfoot. Or at least, part of bigfoot. Needless, to say, I was a little surprised.

  Gigantopithecus. A ten-foot-tall ape did once roam the earth. Gigantopithecus is believed to have come into existence about a million years ago and survived until almost one hundred thousand years ago. It was believed to have gone extinct due to the lack of availability of bamboo. But as mentioned in Hominid, Gigantopithecus has actually been found to have been an omnivore—eating both meat and plants. So people don’t know why exactly the giant ape went extinct—or if it really did. And the realization that Gigantopithecus existed came about just as described in Hominid: a doctor found a giant tooth in a bazaar in China.

  Annual Cryptozoology Conference. There is no single annual cryptozoology conference. There are, however, different cryptozoology conferences held across the country to discuss cryptids.

  Land Bridge. The land bridge between North America and Asia was around when Gigantopithecus existed. Bigfoot believers have made the argument that Gigantopithecus could have crossed the bridge from Asia and ended up in North America. It is known that other Asian animals did so, such as the red panda, whose remains have been found in Tennessee. And as indicated by the fossil record, the land bridge had lots of vegetation to support animal life.

  Fossil Record. Speaking of the fossil record, it is indeed spotty. Environment plays a role here: damp, heavily forested areas are notoriously unreliable in the creation of fossils. But the larger issue is that a fossil or lack thereof is not indicative of when an animal ceased to be, but only when it actually was. Take for example the coelacanth, which disappeared from the fossil record for sixty-five million years before it was spotted in the Indian Ocean.

  Ancient Hominids. As anyone who’s read the Belial series knows, there have been many different types of hominids on planet Earth at one time or another. Science has now demonstrated that those hominids’ existences have overlapped. Homo sapiens existed alongside both Neanderthals and Homo denisova. In fact, as mentioned in the book, research has indicated that the Homo sapiens gene pool is not pure homo sapiens. It includes indications of other hominids, although these percentages are very low. But the existence of different hominids in our gene pool at all suggests there was interbreeding between these different hominid groups.

  Homo Denisova. All of the information provided in Hominid on Homo denisova is accurate to the best of my ability. And yes, new hominids are being discovered at a quick rate—such as the previously unknown hominid whose jawbone was found in Taiwan in 2014. Our family tree seems to be continually growing branches.

  Bili Ape. The Bili ape is a real animal. For generations, there were reports in Congo of giant chimpanzees that walked on two legs, hunted lions, howled at the moon, and made nests on the ground. These tales weren’t taken seriously—chimps couldn’t possibly behave that way and they were not that large. Then in 2005, primatologist Shelly Williams discovered them.

  Troglodytes. In 1735, Carl Linnaeus did indeed write the first codex on all the animals in the world. It was called Systema Naturea and included nine thousand species. In it, he said there were two types of humans: man and the troglodytes. The troglodytes, whom Merlin was said to reside with, were described as wild hairy men.

  Invisible Gorilla. The invisible gorilla experiment was an actual experiment conducted at Harvard University, and the results were just as depicted in Hominid: half the subjects did not even notice the gorilla walking through the middle of the basketball game. The video used for the study can still be found online.

  Leif Ericson. The tale of Leif Ericson’s interaction with bigfoot comes from Leif Ericson’s own journal. According to the tale, around 1000 AD Leif and his crew landed in Newfoundland, where they found towering hairy men of incredible strength and odor.

  Cross-Species Breeding. Dr. Ivanov was a real individual who attempted, on behalf of the USSR, to create soldiers who were half human and half ape. As mentioned in Hominid, he attempted to inseminate chimps with human sperm, but no fertilization took place. He was in the process of soliciting human volunteers when the project was scrapped.

  New Jersey Red Eye. In the late 1970s there were reports of a bigfoot-like creature with bright red eyes in the northwestern section of New Jersey. During the time when the sightings occurred, bloodcurdling screams were also heard late in the night.

  EPAS1. EPAS1 is a real genetic marker found in the people of Nepal. And as mentioned in Hominid, it allows the Nepalese people to thrive at high altitudes. Individuals without the genetic marker are unable to sustain the high altitude for long without getting sick, and in many cases, dying. It has also been theorized that EPAS1 is allows people to resist cold weather.

  DUF1220. Researchers have identified DUF1220 as being responsible for increases in human brain capacity. It is believed to have allowed us to evolve beyond animals. It has also been linked to autism. Autistic individuals with a higher number of copies of DUF1220 have more severe symptoms of the disorder: repetitive behaviors, communications difficulties, and social deficits. It’s a new direction for autism research.

  Legal Rights of Bigfoot. There is only one county in the United States where it is illegal to shoot a bigfoot: Skamania County, Washington. In 1969, Skamania passed the Undiscovered Species Act, which contends that any individual who kills a bigfoot is subject to a substantial fine and/or imprisonment.

  Tree Structures. Structures built from tree limbs have been found in areas where bigfoot have been sighted. The limbs are not rotted at the end and show no evidence of having been cut with a tool, even though they are between four and eight inches thick. The limbs are often interwoven, but not in a way that would provide shelter.

  Twinkies. I have no idea if bigfoot likes Twinkies.

  Yeti and ancient polar bears. In 2013, Oxford University emeritus professor and geneticist Bryan Sykes conducted an analysis on twenty-seven samples of alleged bigfoot hair. Some samples came back with matches to known animals such as bears, but two of the samples came back matching an ancient form of polar bear believed to have gone extinct forty thousand years prior. Then, in 2014, new analyses of the same sample indicated that the sample was actually that of a subspecies of a type of Himalayan bear.

  Infrasound. Infrasound refers to low frequency sounds that occur below the hearing range of humans, and it has been found to be used by lions, giraffes, hippos, and even elephants. In humans, these low frequency sounds can result in nausea and dizziness.

  Bigfoot Must Die. There is not a TV show called Bigfoot Must Die. There is, however, one called Killing Bigfoot and another called 10 Million Dollar Bigfoot Bounty. I have never watched the shows, although I did read about them. They involve groups of individuals going out to track down and—yup—kill bigfoot. There are also Finding Bigfoot, Bigfootville, a few radio shows dedicated to the topic, and dozens of websites. Not to mention the individual episodes on shows like MonsterQuest and Survivorman, Les Stroud just did a season on bigfoot as well. Bigfoot is actually big entertainment. In fact, once you start looking for bigfoot, you find it everywhere.

  So do I believe in Bigfoot? I don’t know. But there is someone much better qualified to comment on them than me: Jane Goodall. In a 2003 interview, when asked why no one had found a body of a bigfoot, she said: “You know why isn’t there a body? I can’t answer that, and maybe they don’t exist, but I want them to.”

  So thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed yourself. If you have the time, I would appreciate if you left a review. It makes it easier for other people to find the book and decide if it might be right f
or them.

  Take care,

  R.D.

  P.S. If you are looking for some books on the topic, here are some of the books I found very helpful:

  Meldrum, Jeff. Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science. Forge Books, 2007.

  Williams, Autumn. Enoch. Amazon, 2010.

  Coleman, Loren. Bigfoot! The True Story of Apes in America. Paraview Pocket Books, 2003.

  Burnette, Tom and Rob Riggs. Bigfoot: Exploring the Myth and Discovering the Truth. Llewellyn Publications, 2014.

  OTHER BOOKS BY R.D. BRADY

  The Belial Series in Order

  The Belial Stone

  The Belial Library

  The Belial Ring

  The Belial Children

  Recruit: A Belial Series Novella

  The Belial Origins

  Standalone Novel

  Runs Deep

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thanks to all those who helped make this book happen. First and foremost, thank you Tae. Thank you for all your support, time, and love. Thank you for letting me take the time I needed to complete this book. Thank you for always being in my corner and being unfailingly there when I needed you. You are my rock.

  Thank you to my little gang of three who is always asking how Mommy's books are coming along. Your innocent inquisitiveness keeps me pushing forward and your love keeps me happy.