by Tim Curran
“Shit!” Shiner said, hopping around in circles. “Did you get that? It’s out there! I grabbed a signature and…there it is again! Holy oh fuck, it’s fast! I can’t even track it! It’s everywhere and nowhere! It’s gotta be clipping at seventy, eighty miles an hour!”
“Four o’clock!” Pettis called out. “No…six…eight…ten! God, it’s moving!”
They bumped into each other and promptly went on their asses swearing. If it hadn’t been so frightening, it might have been funny. Now the dead zone was coming to life and getting windy. Dust and debris came blowing out at them in a moving barricade of sheer force. Shiner went down. He scrambled for a flashlight and clicked it on. The beam was a white sword in the darkness filled with churning sand. It jumped around in his shaking hand as he tried to get it under control.
“Kill that light!” Pettis cried. “You’ll bring it right down on us!”
Shiner did so.
The wind hit them from all sides now in cross-currents.
Jim was pretty sure the beast didn’t need a beacon to find them. Maybe it would help the way the headlights of an SUV out on Route 50 had, but it didn’t need them. It was homing in on them the same way their thermal cameras homed in on it—it was a heatseeker. Many desert animals that hunted by night had the ability and he had a feeling that the beast’s capabilities were particularly fine-tuned.
The dust blew and the wind shrieked.
In the distance, they heard a thumping, almost cracking sort of sound like trees being uprooted and split in two. It wasn’t trees, of course, but the sound of the thunderbird’s wings. The beast was pumping them faster and faster, picking up speed as it zeroed in on them, coming in with incredible velocity like a dive bomber.
The wind blew stronger.
The blowing dust and debris bit into their faces and hands. Shiner and Pettis were down with Jim now, clinging to the top of the rocky butte, cameras still in their hands. They dearly wanted a shot of the beast, but in their rising fear they realized there was something a little more important hanging in the balance than a photo of an elusive, legendary animal.
The wind hit them harder, threatening to peel them off the butte. They crowded together. No one was sure if it was a good idea or not. The sandstorm was whipping with such ferocity now that they couldn’t even open their eyes. They all knew what was creating it—the beast was pushing a wild, rushing column of air before it.
“Jesus, it’s getting stronger!” Shiner shouted above the din.
Just about the time they thought they were going to blow away and drop seventy feet to the desert floor below, the beast passed above them, no more than fifteen feet above their heads. The suction it created pulled them right to the edge of the butte. If they hadn’t been hanging onto one another, anchored by their combined weight, they would have went right over.
“Shhhheeeeeit!” Shiner screeched.
The wake of the beast was a black, gagging stink of animal rot and filth. Then even that faded. The creature was gone. The wind died out and Shiner promptly vomited.
No one could blame him; the hot smell of the beast was perfectly revolting.
“Is everyone all right?” Pettis asked, scrambling around with a flashlight to retrieve their expensive equipment. He got lucky: it was still there.
“I’m not all right,” Shiner said.
“You’ll live.”
“Thanks.”
Jim grabbed one of the thermal cameras and scanned around with it. He didn’t see a thing out there, but he knew better than to get optimistic. It was still out there and it would be back.
“We better get out of here before it comes again,” he said.
“What? Are you crazy?” Shiner said. “That’s what we came up here for, wasn’t it? To bait that cryptid and get a shot of it?”
“We didn’t come to die,” Pettis pointed out.
“Goddammit, this is as close as I’ve ever come to a real unknown animal.”
Jim sighed. “It knows where we are. It’ll be coming back and it won’t be just a fly-over.”
Pettis began packing the gear. “He’s right, Shine. What we just experienced was the only warning we’re going to get. It was an obvious threat display to drive us off. If we don’t leave, somebody’s going to get hurt. That thing’s immense. It could have taken all three of us if it wanted to. It didn’t, but next time it will. Let’s be sensible.”
In the darkness, bathed by brilliant moonlight, Shiner shook his head back and forth. “You can’t do this to me, man! I’ve been waiting for something like this my whole life! You can’t take this away from me!”
“Take it easy for godsake.”
“Bullshit! I’ve never done anything or seen anything in my life! I’m not like you, Pettis! I’ve never climbed up into the Himalayas to search for yeti! I’ve never camped on the shores of Loch Ness or taken a submersible down to the bottom of Lake Champlain!” he sputtered. “I was never lost in the Sumatran rain forest for two weeks and caught a glimpse of Orang-Pendek and I was never chased by a skunk ape in the Everglades!”
Jim looked over at Pettis. “You did all that?”
“I’ve been busy,” he said as if it was just a typical nine to five job.
“He won’t even talk about half of it,” Shiner said.
“We have to climb down,” Pettis told him. “That’s the way it is. We’re not leaving. We’re just setting up where it’s somewhat safer. We can get a better shot down there.”
“FUCK! FUCK! SHIT!” Shiner shouted. “I’LL NEVER FORGIVE YOU GUYS FOR THIS!”
Pettis waited a moment or two. “Are you done now?”
“Yeah, I’m done.”
They started climbing down.
17
Jim was the first one on the ground and when his feet touched solid earth it was like his entire body let out a huge sigh. He had no experience in rock climbing. He had gone up the face very slowly, making sure of every foothold. Shiner gave him shit all the way up, of course, calling him an old lady and what not. So when Pettis got down, Jim called up to Shiner who was only half the way. “C’mon, granny! Move it!”
“Kiss my ass,” a voice floated down from above.
“I want to position out in the open,” Pettis said. “Over near the gully. If it swoops us again, we can dive in there for cover. And that way…we…can…”
“Dammit,” Jim said.
The wind was picking up again and not gradually as before. This time it came on in a titanic blast that nearly knocked both of them off their feet. The wind scoured the butte, creating a whirlwind of dust particles and dislodging loose stones that came rolling down. Shiner cried out as he nearly lost his footing.
“I’m okay,” he shouted down to them.
“Hurry!” Pettis called.
The wind blew itself into a gale, Pettis and Jim shielding their eyes from the sandstorm as Shiner tried to make his descent before the beast appeared.
This time, despite the sand, they were certain they were going to see it.
Seconds before it appeared, Jim felt the rising tension in him suddenly spike. His legs felt rubbery with it. Then, out of the sky, out of the blackness they saw an immense V-shape pass before the moon as it swooped down with force and wind and terrible speed. They heard something like thunder as it pumped its colossal wings and the ground beneath them seemed to reverberate with it.
“Shiner!” Pettis cried.
But it was too late.
The wind was buffeting him and he was barely hanging on up there, thirty feet off the ground. Climbing down in that tempest was suicide; but so was staying up there.
Then the bird came.
It swooped over Pettis and Jim, pushing a hot wave of rank air before it and bringing a vacuuming suction in its wake. As it passed, Jim saw its oily black shape for only a moment…but long enough to know it was easily the size of a Twin Otter aircraft, its wingspan at least fifty feet.
Then there was an eruption of force and a sound like the mother
of all hailstorms had struck the face of the rocks. Somewhere during which, Shiner screamed and they heard him plummet earthward, hitting the ground twenty feet away.
And high above, they heard the creature making a wailing, screeching sort of sound that became something like the mocking, eerie laughter of a hyena.
“Shiner!” Pettis shouted. “Shiner!”
Jim had a flashlight in his hand by then and he was following Pettis, a beam of light bouncing over the rugged terrain.
“AWWWWWW!” Shiner cried. “OHHHHHHH! FUCK! MOTHER…FUCK! GAAAAWWWWD! I’M COVERED IN IT!”
By then they had both reached him, skidding to a halt as the flashlight beam revealed Shiner squatting on the ground, some viscous gray slime covering him in ropes and snotty tangles. A great pool of it was splashed around him and right up the face of the butte. The flashlight beam picked out clumps of things in there—mats of fur, broken bones, gristle and what might have been part of an antler. The stink was horrendous and eye-watering, like ammonia and rotting compost.
“Shiner…” Pettis said.
“IT SHIT ON ME!” Shiner cried out in his shame. “THAT GODDAMN FUCKING BIRD SHIT ALL OVER ME!”
Jim and Pettis just looked at each other and then back at the pitiful figure of Shiner. They they both started laughing and they couldn’t seem to stop.
“AWWWW…GOD!” Shiner said, brushing it from his arms. “IT SHIT-BOMBED ME! IT FUCKING TOOK A DUMP ON ME! GYYYYAHHHH…YUCK!”
When Pettis finally got control of himself, he said, “Now you’ve been closer to a cryptid than I ever have. You have intimate knowledge of the unknown.”
“Fuck you,” Shiner said.
As he climbed free of the slop, Pettis did the only thing he could do: he grabbed the Sony Handycam and recorded Shiner’s predicament for posterity.
18
The next day Jim spent in research, going over the information that Pettis had given him—books, printouts, a morgue of newspaper clippings, and even a DVD of blurry mystery bird videos.
In ancient Sumeria, a monster bird known as the Imgig carried off antelopes, its favorite prey. In New Zealand—a place well-known for its monstrous avians such as the moa and Haast’s Eagle—there was a monster bird called Poua-kai, which was an absolute terror.
The thunderbirds were deeply entrenched in Native American tradition from the Inuit of Alaska to the Kiowa of Texas, from the tribes of the Pacific Northwest to the Great Plains and Great Lakes region. Like the Roc of the Arabian Nights, they routinely carried off people and large animals.
There were countless legends about them being sky spirits that created powerful storms simply by flapping their mighty wings. Thunderbirds were carved atop totem poles, reinforcing their mythological association with rain, lightning, and thunder. The Winnebago had a thunderbird clan. The Ojibwa and Dakotas made offerings to these creatures and the Menomini of Wisconsin lived in fear of them at one time. While some tribes described them in purely supernatural terms, others had oral traditions of them being scaly creatures or having feathers longer than a man’s arm. And all believed them to be deadly, carrying off humans whenever the opportunity presented itself, children being a favored prey item.
The Cherokee called them Tlanuwa and to the Ottawa they were the Pinasi. Nearly every tribe had a name for them. The Pueblo knew them as Achiyalabopa, the Ojibwa as Binesi, the Algonkians as Piyesus, and the Mississauga as Pinesi. The Shoshone had a giant bird called Nunyenunc, “the behemoth Bannock bird,” and the Illinois had the legend of the Piasa, “the bird that devours man.”
And as Pettis had said, many anthropologists believed that prehistoric encounters with giant teratorns were probably the basis of the legends.
Thunder Bay, Ontario, Thunder Lake, Wisconsin, and Thunder’s Nest, South Dakota, were but three place names inspired by the birds. These places were traditional nesting sites. Local Indian tribes who visited these nests—all built in very inaccessible locations—after the birds had gone, described them as great mounds of sticks and brush smelling of death.
The thunderbirds were not limited to Indian tradition, but showed up frequently in the accounts of white settlers. One of the earliest was a description of a monstrous bird that preyed upon deer. This came from New England in the 17th century. In 1863, a thunderbird terrorized Tippah County, Mississippi. It carried off pigs and lambs and even a small boy, who died after he was dropped from great heights. In 1883, another giant bird made off with horses and cattle. It was seen by many witnesses who described it as being an immense griffin. In 1894, yet another bird made a visit to the Bouquet River outside Elizabethtown, New York. It was sighted by several hunters, who didn’t dare shoot at it for fear of its size. The flapping of its wings was so loud they compared it to the cacophony of freight trains. In 1895, a thunderbird terrorized West Virginia. It snatched a ten-year old girl, tore open shed roofs, preyed upon sheep and fawns, and attacked a bear hunter, leaving him badly mauled, and flying off with his dog in its claws. In 1925, a gigantic bird was seeing flying with a mule deer in its talons in the Canadian Rockies. In 1954, birds larger than airplanes were sighted by crowds in Oregon. And in 1977, monster birds terrorized central Illinois, being seen by dozens. One of them tried to carry off a boy and was frightened away by his mother. The bird dropped him and flew off.
It went on and on, sightings in Alaska and Wisconsin in the 1980s, Pennsylvania in the ‘90s, and the Ozarks in 2002. That same year Manokotak and Togiak villages in Alaska were terrorized by gigantic birds.
It was all very interesting stuff, but as fascinating as it was, none of it intrigued Jim the way his own thunderbird did. He had been close to it several times by then and he planned to get even closer. It had become an obsession. And like Shiner, he wouldn’t stop until he looked it in the eye.
19
“I plan on being sorry either way,” Nina said the next evening as they were out on Route 50, the shadows already growing long. “If we don’t find your bird, well, I’ll be sorry. But if we do find it…I’ll probably be even sorrier, wishing that I hadn’t.”
“At the very least, the bird shit might still be there. That’s something,” Jim said.
“Your friend Pettis took samples of it?”
“Yes. Shiner was soaked in the stuff. He was a walking sample.”
Nina laughed.
“Pettis is going to have them analyzed. It’ll take time he said.”
“It always does. It’s amazing what you can learn from scat.”
Once he had told her about his night vigils with the cryptozoology boys and what had happened, she was more intrigued than ever to take a trip out into the desert. Though she still maintained that she wasn’t of their ilk, she did bring along much of the same equipment as they did, save the parabolic microphone.
“I think you’d like these guys if you gave them the chance.”
“I’ll pass on that,” she said. “The crypto people I did know were not exactly scrupulous.”
“But Pettis isn’t like that. He’s a skeptic like you and he’s a zoologist, too.”
“So he says.”
“Oh, Nina.”
“Sorry, but I’m still burning from those idiots and their giant rattlesnake. It still pisses me off.” She slowed and turned into the desert. The Land Rover jumped and bumped until it reached a flat stretch of land and Nina cut away towards a dirt road in the distance. “Bottom line is this: those people can hunt down all the mythical whozits and whatnots they want, just not on my dime and not if it means dragging my name through the mud. I won’t tolerate it.”
“Sure,” he said, biting his tongue so he didn’t tell her what he was really thinking, which was that he understood her anger, but certainly not her stubbornness. Maybe most cryptozoology people were nuts, but Pettis was okay. And Shiner, too, more or less.
Nina laughed with a tittering sound as she drove them deeper into the desert, the road winding this way and that, edged by withered-looking growths of sagebrush. “Poor Jim. You pro
bably think I’ve turned into a crotchety old bitch with my head stuck in the sand and maybe I have at that. But I’m not really some skeptical old pragmatist practicing flat earth science so I don’t shake up the status quo. And I do not claim that something can’t be simply because I haven’t seen it. Believe it or not, I really do have an open mind concerning cryptids.”
“According to Pettis, that puts you one up on conventional science.”
“Well, that’s not a bad thing.”
“I wouldn’t think so.”
The desert was growing cool now as the sun set and the shadows spread long dark claws over the landscape, prickly pear and yucca tinged red in the dying light. In the distance, Jim could see the rock sculptures of buttes and mesas standing sentinel.
“I’m excited,” Nina said. “Aren’t you?”
“No, just wary. I’ve seen it. It’s real enough. It’s also very dangerous.”
“And you’d rather I wasn’t here?”
“Only because I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
“That’s sweet.”
What really worried him was that the bird had gone out of its way to frighten them out of its territory. It could have killed them last night, but it didn’t. If they fucked with it enough, that was bound to change. He knew what it was capable of and he feared that sooner or later it was going to unleash its wrath.
The road cut into hardpan desert that was flat as glass for a mile or two before becoming rocky and irregular once again. Nina and he had already decided to park a good distance from the buttes just as he had with Pettis and Shiner. There was no point making too much noise and alerting the beast to their presence.
