Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre(31)
Why didn’t I do that, do anything? Why do I never—
What the hell is Dan doing? Coming around the side of the house now. This giant, bamboo pole.
Wha
At this point the a ends with a long, deep squiggle that extends to the bottom of the page.
From my interview with Senior Ranger Josephine Schell.
Mrs. Holland’s probably too young to have seen Fantasia, but that’s what went through my mind when I saw the animals migrate…and freeze. Remember that scene, the plant-eaters smelling the T. rex? That’s what I saw, all those skinny, starved deer suddenly raising their heads to smell the air, just like Mrs. Holland described in her journal.
Again, like with the bone fragments, I didn’t have the time or mental clarity to dwell on it. I do remember feeling sorry for them. I don’t think I’d ever seen so many animals look so hungry before. First the berry harvest, then having to flee. You could understand why so many of them were getting aggressive. I witnessed a couple squirrel fights that seemed to go on forever. Buddy of mine in another team saw two black bears just rippin’ the shit out of each other over an elk carcass. I kept praying I wouldn’t find a similar situation but with the corpse of a human refugee.
And that almost happened, not with a person, but a deer. I stumbled across this pack of coyotes gnawing on a skeleton that’d already been gnawed by something else. Coyotes are pretty wimpy by nature. They’ll almost never confront a large adult human. But this pack did. They stood their ground, growling and snapping at me. I don’t think they were looking to hunt me, but they woulda definitely fought for the last strips of meat on those bones. Even when I yelled back, made myself big, threw a couple rocks, and finally fired a shot in the air, it took the rest of my team showing up for those little buggers to finally bugger off. I’ve never, in my whole career, seen animals be that bold.
Shows you what hunger can do.
JOURNAL ENTRY #7 [CONT.]
I can’t stop shaking. Half a day later and my heart still won’t slow down. I’m glad I decided to keep writing in this journal. I know you won’t see it for a while, and I know it’s probably silly to pretend like I’m still writing it to you, but just the act of writing, putting everything down on paper where I can see it, is so helpful in organizing my thoughts.
And I have so much to organize from six hours ago when I got interrupted by Dan trying to clean the solar panels. This all goes back to last night, when Mostar and I were discussing the ration plan. As she was talking about the problems of making more rabbit traps, Dan said, “We got a bigger problem.”
He hadn’t really been listening, focused pensively on his tablet. “We’re running out of power.” He flipped the iPad around to face us. I recognized it as some kind of energy monitoring page, an icon of our house with the wall battery in yellow and the roof solar panels in orange. “I think the ash’s covered them.” He tapped the panels, which showed 25 percent. “Yours too.” He tilted the screen at Mostar and swiped over to her house. He explained that, normally, these “smart panels” would automatically signal the Cygnus maintenance team for immediate cleaning. But now…
“Do we really need electricity?” Mostar didn’t look too worried. “Losing the freezer means we’ll have to find other ways of preserving what we have, and eat first what we can’t. But trust me, when the power’s gone you realize what a luxury lightbulbs are.”
Dan countered with, “Not for the garden. When the shoots come up, they’re going to need a ton of artificial light, and warmth.” He explained that our heating system was electric, not gas, that all that homemade methane beneath our floor was only used for cooking and fireplaces. I asked, innocently, if the rain wouldn’t just wash the ash off our roof. Dan nodded, digesting what I’d said, which makes me realize now that it’s been so long since he’s actually done that with anything I’ve said.
He acknowledged I had a point, “but eventually, the rain’s gonna give way to snow.” He took a breath, then asked Mostar if she had a broom, and on her nod, perked up. “Great, I can just get up on the roof tomorrow and brush them off.”
“You can’t!” I surprised myself with how quickly that came out. “We…” I tried to find a “safe” answer. “We don’t have a ladder.”
“We can make one.” Dan was still positive, even enthusiastic. His eyes suddenly sparked with an idea. “The bamboo! I can cut some stalks, tie or tape them together and—”
“You’d get in trouble!” Okay, so maybe that wasn’t a lie. I did, do, always worry about getting in trouble, but it was still a “safe” answer and not the one I was really hiding. “The bamboo belongs to the whole community, and if we cut them down, won’t that…” I looked to Mostar for backup, and got nothing. Thanks, Mostar.
But off her silence, I said, “Maybe we can eat the bamboo!” It was a brilliant redirect, I thought, and honestly, a pretty good plan. “The shoots, we eat them all the time in ramen!” I actually don’t. I love ramen but I’ve always ordered it without the bamboo shoots. I’m sorry but they smell how I think horse manure would taste. Still, I tried to enlist Mostar again. “The neighbors might not mind us harvesting the shoots! And if we get enough, we might not even need the garden!”