Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre

by Max Brooks

  When I brought up the rocks, Vincent just shrugged it away. “Who can tell in all that mess.”

  Maybe that’s why I didn’t mention the footprints. Afraid that they’d disregard it with another tipsy theory. Or maybe I was afraid that they wouldn’t, that it’d open the door to questions I couldn’t answer.

  I still can’t. Maybe that’s why I went over to the Durants’ afterward. I’m still convinced that Yvette thought she was talking about some quaint, indigenous fairy tale. But if I could learn more from that tale. Some details. Where it comes from. What it wants. Doesn’t all folklore have some basis in reality? Wasn’t there really a great flood sometime way back? Prerecorded climate change? And isn’t there a theory about the tides of the Red Sea being so extreme that it might have looked like the waters parted?

  I can’t remember where I’ve heard this, or if I’m just totally making it up. I’m pretty sure one of Dan’s college friends talked about how mammoth skulls inspired the Greeks to believe in the Cyclops. The cartilage between the eyes looking like one giant socket. I thought Yvette might have some nugget of useful information like that. If I could just get her talking.

  And Tony, I wanted to ask about that day he tried to drive away.

  Go for help! Oh my God. The day he tried to go for help! The day I was chased. Did he see something too? That look he had. I assumed it was from seeing the lahar, the realization that we were cut off. Maybe that was part of it. But on the way home, or maybe when he was standing there at the edge of the smashed bridge. Did he see something? Did it chase him too?

  Those were the questions spinning through my mind as I nervously stepped up to their door.

  I’m not sure what I was afraid of. Yvette slapping my face, yelling at me for betraying her? Both would have hurt the same. I took a deep breath, put on a fake smile, and knocked gently. No answer. I tried again, a little louder. Nothing. I thought I could hear talking. But it sounded far away. I glimpsed a faint, flickering glow coming through the living room window curtain. The TV. A recorded show. That’s what I must have been hearing. A shadow passed in front of it, heading in the direction of the door.

  I stuttered, “Tony? Yvette? It’s Kate.” I thought about ringing the doorbell but chickened out as my finger grazed the button. I watched the shadow pass the glow again, heading in the opposite direction. I moved sideways down the front of the house, to the garage. I could hear the steady zzzzzp-zzzzzp-zzzzzp of Yvette’s elliptical, and the muffled mumbling of voices. She must have been working out, because the zzzzzp-ing stopped as the voices grew louder. One voice, really. Hers. His stayed at this low murmur. I couldn’t make out her exact words, but the tone, high and clipped. I thought about putting my ear to the thin aluminum of her garage door, maybe even knocking on it. But instead I just waited like an idiot for a minute or so, until the voices faded and the zzzzzp-zzzzzp-zzzzzp resumed.

  I turned back for home, stopping as Dan came out of the Boothes’ house to do his roof cleaning. He saw me, waved, and even blew me a kiss that I returned. For a moment, I considered staying, to help or just to keep him company. Something about him being outside all alone. I didn’t like it anymore. I felt, feel, uneasy.

  Everything’s too still. No wildlife. No sound. But the smell. It’s constant now, like it followed us down from the kill site. And the eyes. I didn’t feel like I was being watched this morning. Maybe I was just too focused on the dead cat. But I feel them now. Walking home, I kept looking up and around me. Up to the ridge above the houses, scanning the trees. I didn’t see anything, but does something see me? That’s why I couldn’t wait to get inside. That’s where I am now, sitting on the couch, keeping an eye on Dan through the living room window. Blissfully scraping those panels, then jumping back from the falling ash like it’s a game.

  I don’t mean to keep glancing up at the woods. I’m trying not to memorize every tree, rock, patch of open space, to see if any of them change between glances. I’m trying really, really hard not to head back over to the Boothes’ to see if they have binoculars. With all their hikes, they must have a pair. I’ll be going over there for more compost, or staying home to work in the garden, something other than watching Dan out there by himself. I thought about getting in the car to listen to the news. But the car faces the house.

  I don’t want my back turned.

  From Steve Morgan’s The Sasquatch Companion.

  The official history of cryptid hominid encounters has had, shall we say, a checkered relationship with indigenous oral evidence. In the words of J. Richard Greenwell, secretary and founder of the International Society of Cryptozoology, “Native peoples tend to not have a very clear line of demarcation between the metaphysical world and the physical world. We in the West very clearly separate those.”*3 This is obviously a heavily biased and debatable point of view, especially when so many “Western” (i.e., Caucasian) eyewitnesses claim to have seen supernatural, even extraterrestrial, elements associated with Sasquatch. Nevertheless, Greenwell’s statement typifies a substantial reliance on a Eurocentric record of encounters, a record that until the mid–twentieth century was woefully lacking.

  Given the chaotic, often competitive nature of Europe’s American invasion, and the incurious, illiterate nature of so many individual invaders, it is a wonder that any written accounts emerged from this period. While there are, of course, notable exceptions such as Fred Beck’s Ape Canyon Siege, Roosevelt’s “Goblin” story, and the writings of British explorer David Thompson, who discovered “the track of a large animal” which “was not that of a bear,” we simply cannot know how many trappers, traders, and gold-fevered prospectors took their Sasquatch experiences to the grave. For all we know, some modern-day Russian may have a mysterious, malodorous hide nailed to the wall of his dacha that his ancestor brought back from the tsar’s American colony.

  So why the change? Why did contact with Sasquatch suddenly go from a trickle to a flood? The answer is simple: World War II. Before this cataclysmic event, fewer people (of all ethnicities) lived between Northern California and the Canadian border than lived in New York City. With Pearl Harbor came industry, military installations, infrastructural expansion, and millions upon millions of Americans. Small wonder that, barely thirteen years after V-J Day, in Bluff Creek, California,*4 a road construction crew discovered what appeared to be strange, giant, humanoid tracks. This discovery prompted the investigation by a local newspaper, which, in turn, unearthed previous stories from the surrounding area.

  By the end of the year, the tracks had made headlines around the country, along with a name for their creator: Bigfoot.

  *1 Josephine Schell (maiden name Begay) is a member of the Navajo Nation.

  *2 Only after finishing my interviews for this book, did I discover that the film in question, 1977’s Snowbeast, did, in fact, produce an entire creature costume.

  *3 Interview from the History Channel’s In Search of History, 1997.

  *4 Bluff Creek is also known as the site of the 1967 “Patterson film” of Bigfoot.

  Eyewitness testimony in the case of Bigfoot…ahhh…I don’t think is very good because you can’t test it. It’s…it’s the credibility of the person…and these people…they want to see something strange…they can imagine it.

  —DR. THOMAS DALE STEWART, former head curator of the Department of Anthropology for the Smithsonian Institution

  From my interview with Senior Ranger Josephine Schell.

  Why haven’t they been found? That’s the ninety-nine-thousand-dollar question. And my two-cent answer is timing. See, the people in a position to prove their existence, who know how to find and analyze physical evidence, they won’t go anywhere near it for fear of ruining their reputations. And that fear goes back to the time when Sasquatch first came to light.

  If we’d had a rash of sightings way back in, say, the ’40s and ’50s, when we were still a coh
esive nation with shared beliefs, maybe there would have been enough traction to force the scientific community to act. And if they had, if they’d proven these creatures are as real as the gorilla or chimpanzee, icons like Dian Fossey or Jane Goodall might have built their careers studying the great apes of North America.

  The problem was that sightings peaked in the late ’60s, early ’70s, which was, coincidently, the dawn of public mistrust. We’re talking Vietnam, Watergate, “do your own thing” counterculture. Now, I’m not saying any of that was bad, especially in a democracy. You need a healthy degree of critical thinking. You need to question authority. But Bigfoot came along just as everyone started questioning everything, including academia. This was a time when university profs were getting hit from both sides; the right with their creationist agenda, and the left who’d suddenly realized the connection between science and war. The upshot was that already cautious PhDs got even more skittish about their grants and tenure.

  Which led them to drop Bigfoot right into the “crackpot” files. Where it has stayed till…yeah…till this day…even with what’s happened…which we’ll get to.

  There’s a big reason Uncle Sam hasn’t released a full report on Greenloop. But…

  Holds out her hands like a traffic cop.

  “One thing at a time,” as Ms. Mostar said.

  Point is, public skepticism dissuades qualified experts from searching for physical evidence, and lack of physical evidence only fuels public skepticism.

  Which is why the burden of proof has been mainly left to amateur adventurers who either never find anything or make it worse for themselves like that time with the FBI.*1 You know about that, right? Came out a couple years ago? Some whack-job group in the ’70s pressured the Bureau to test a hair sample they collected and the sample turned out to be a deer. And it’s those kinds of public, Al Capone–vault fiascoes that keep credible eyewitnesses from going public. And I’ve talked to more than my share of eyewitnesses. In this job, you get a lot of folks who are sure they’ve encountered something. Not hoaxers. They don’t come to us. They go to the media. That’s where the money is, and fame. All that shaky footage that shows up every now and then. The most famous one, the “Patterson-Gimlin film” that gave us the image most people associate with Bigfoot…Roger Patterson claimed he was out there getting ready to make a Bigfoot movie and just “happened” to run into the real thing. Really?

  No, the folks I talk to, I believe them, or rather, I believe that they believe themselves. But like Mrs. Holland said, “Knowing you saw something is different from knowing what you saw.” That’s why, even now, when I think about one of those BS documentaries from my childhood, I still believe the guy who passed the lie detector test. He wasn’t acting. He really thought he saw it. They all do.

  Remember, I’m from the Southwest, where it’s, like, UFO central. If I had a nickel for every time somebody said they saw lights in the sky…and they do. I’m sure there were lights in the sky, and I’m sure they were sure those lights were coming to give them an anal probe. If you gave them all polygraphs, asked them, under oath, what did you see, or hear…

  You get a lot of those too. Hearing stuff. Noises in the night. Footsteps or breaking branches, or that grunt. A couple times, I’ve talked to folks who’ve sworn they heard or smelled something. I’ve had several hikers or campers who’ve consistently reported that refuse and spoiled eggs odor. I might have smelled it myself, that time when we found the dead deer.

  A thumb over her shoulder to the map.

  Maybe that was it, or maybe it was just us hoofing it for three straight days without a shower. I don’t know what I smelled but I know that I smelled something. I trust my nose, ears, eyes. But my brain…

  I think the human mind isn’t comfortable with mysteries. We’re always looking for answers to the unexplained. And if an answer can’t come from facts, we’ll try to cobble one together from old stories. If we’ve heard about UFOs when we happen to see a light in the sky, or a Scottish lake monster when we happen to see a ripple in the water, or a giant, apelike creature when we see a dark mass moving among the branches…

  That’s why I dismissed everyone who ever reported anything to us. Even the credible ones. And by credible, I mean embarrassed. They didn’t want to be there. They didn’t want to look crazy. They always asked to speak to me in private, remain anonymous, make sure that they weren’t being recorded. They were almost positive that their minds were playing tricks on them. They didn’t want to believe it.

  She sighs.

  I should have believed them. Each time I almost did, because once they started talking, the doubt fell away. I should have followed up every time someone looked me straight in the eye and said with confident clarity…

  JOURNAL ENTRY #10

  October 9

  I saw it!

  I don’t know what woke me up tonight. A sound, or the outside porch light flicking on. It wasn’t ours, not at first. The Perkins-Forster house, shining up onto the ceiling above my head. I got up, rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, and crept to the back window. I didn’t want to wake up Dan. He has a lot to do tomorrow. Village handyman. That’s why I didn’t risk opening the back balcony doors.

  But just looking through the window, I could tell that something wasn’t right. Their compost bin had been knocked over, which was weird because they’re supposed to be animal proof. They’ve got these deep stakes that go way down into the ground. And the lids are locked with twin rotating levers. The lid was unlocked now, or wrenched off. I could see it lying near the overturned bin among a carpet of scattered trash.

  Then I saw something moving. Just a shadow, I think, on the other side of their house. Rustling bushes along the edge of the tree line. It was gone when I looked up. Probably a raccoon. That was my conscious thought. Raccoons are smart, right? And I’ve seen them go through trash cans in the heart of Venice Beach. Still, I checked to make sure the balcony was locked, then crept silently downstairs to see about the other doors.

  I checked the front first, wondered if I should set the alarm, then realized that I had no idea how. That was when our back porch light went on. I started switching on the inside lights. Actually, I hit the downstairs master switch and squinted hard in the glare.

  That must have scared it, the whole bottom floor going from night to day. It was turning to run just as I entered the kitchen. It must have been standing right on the back step.

  It was so tall, the top of its head disappeared above the doorway. And broad. I can still picture those massive shoulders, those thick, long arms. Narrow waist, like an upside-down triangle. And no neck, or maybe the neck was bent as it ran away. Same with the head. Slightly conical, and big as a watermelon. I’m also not sure if its hair was black or dark brown. And the long, wide, silvery stripe running down its back. That might have been reflected light.

  I wasn’t scared. More startled. Like when a car swerves too close. That moment of focus, where you’re outside of your body. That was me, watching the thing run through the bushes bordering our yard. I inched up to the door and pressed my face against the glass. That’s when I saw, and I’m sure about this, two pinpricks of light through the brush.

  It wasn’t a reflection from inside. I had my hands cupped around my eyes. And they weren’t anything mundane like glistening leaves. I saw those too. These were different, set slightly behind the foliage, at what had to be, maybe, seven or eight feet off the ground. I’m not exaggerating the height. I know all those plants, and where I come up to them.

  I stared at the lights for a second or two. They stared back. They blinked. Twice! And then they were gone, darting sideways into darkness as a branch snapped in front. I must have kept leaning against the door for half a minute, fogging up the glass with increasingly deeper breaths.

  Then the hand grabbed my shoulder.

  Okay, a litt
le melodrama in writing this, and now, I see the humor in what happened next. But, holy crap, when I felt that grip.

  Who knew that Dan has such quick reflexes? If he hadn’t caught my wrist mid-swing, I might have totally nailed him in the nose.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Dan backed up, dropping my arm, holding up his hands. “What the f—”

  I cut his babbling off with my own, trying, failing, to cohesively relate everything I’d seen.

  He was looking past me, his repeated “What is it?” answered by my repeated “I don’t know.” We looked from the brush to the ground, to this line of big footprints that led right back to our doorstep.

  As he slid the door open, this wave of cold, stinking air whooshed in. It was “that” stench, so powerful I almost gagged. Dan grabbed the coconut stabber off the kitchen counter and took a step out onto the porch. I reached for the knife rack, then realized, like an idiot, that Mostar’s javelin was resting against the wall in front of me. I probably should have left it there. I nearly stabbed myself in the face as the long wobbly pole caught on the doorway. But I felt like I needed something for protection, especially after what we saw.

  Footprints were everywhere. Clear. Sharp. You could see the individual toes, and how they made trails leading from the Perkins-Forster bin, to ours (which was still intact), to the trees, which we were not going to investigate!

  The smell kept us on the porch, assaulting our noses, nudging us back inside. As Dan twisted the lock, I brought up the burglar alarm. Dan wasn’t sure how it worked either. At first, we kept getting these error messages. He finally figured it had something to do with the cracked windows, the ones damaged in the eruption. He’s learning how to bypass it now, sitting with his iPad at the kitchen table while I’m waiting for the coffee to brew. It’s our new “recycled blend,” all the week’s grounds pressed together. Mostar’s idea. “Gotta make it last.” I’m not questioning that anymore. “Watery coffee today’s better than none tomorrow.”