Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre(37)
“Wait!” We stopped at Mostar shouting from down the trail. She came huffing and puffing after us, carrying her javelin. “Here!” I could see that she’d cleaned and tried to straighten the blade. “I’m making a better one,” she said, and stuck it into my hand. Looking at Dan, she said, “Don’t stay out there too long.”
The stink hit us as soon as we crossed over the ridge onto the downward slope. Strong, pungent. I smelled it on the palm of my hand, coming off a tree I’d just touched. I put my nose to the bark. Rotten eggs. My hand also came away with something else. Plant fiber, probably. It was long and black. Thick like a horse’s mane. I’m not sure if it stank, it could have just been my fingertips. Animal hair?
Then we saw the white specks, standing out in a patch of turned-up earth and reddish leaves.
Reddish from blood. It was everywhere. On the bushes, the bark, soaked into the ground, mixing with ash into these solid, rusty pebbles.
The white specks were shattered bones. It was hard to even recognize them at first. Most were just chips. They looked like they were smashed with a hammer. I found a few rocks, nearby, with blood on one side. Not splatters. Deep, thick stains mixed with fur and bits of flesh. And this is weird, but they looked, okay, painted? I know that sounds funny, but the blood on the rocks, on the trees and leaves, there were no droplets. Other than in the ash, all the other stains looked like they’d been smeared with a brush, or a tongue. Like whatever killed the cat went around licking every last spot.
Even the bones. They were clean. The marrow’d been scrubbed out. In fact, there wasn’t any meat anywhere. No organs, muscle, brain. I found what had to be the remains of the skull; just a curved, polished fragment next to a collection of broken teeth. That’s how I knew it had to be the cat. Those yellow fangs. I found one, intact, still stuck to a piece of upper jaw.
What could have done that?
If my mind wasn’t already shaken by what we saw, Mostar’s reaction made it worse.
She just listened, without judgment, eyes off to the side, taking in every detail without the slightest reaction. It scared me, scares me, that she didn’t immediately respond with, “Oh well, what you saw was…” She always has an answer for everything. That’s why I didn’t like her at first. Bully. Know-it-all. “Go here, do this, believe me when I say…” This is the first time I’ve seen her genuinely perplexed. No, that’s not right. The first time was when I’d been chased, when she turned her eyes on the woods.
Does she suspect what I’m trying to dismiss? The smell, the howls, the large “boulder” I’d seen on the road. Now this. I’m sure I’m just trying to come up with an explanation for something that doesn’t make any sense. That’s me. A place for everything and everything in its place. I’m just grasping on to what I’ve heard. And I haven’t heard much. I’m not into that stuff. I’m the practical one. I’ve never been interested in things that aren’t real. I’ve never even watched Game of Thrones. Dragons and ice zombies? Really? When Yvette was going on about Oma, she was speaking metaphorically! It can’t be real or else everyone would know. That’s the world we live in, right? Anyone can know anything. We’d know about this.
And yes, I know I saw something. We both did. But knowing you saw something is different from knowing what you saw.
I spotted the first one, the first clear footprint. It was next to the skull fragment, so deep it pressed right through the ash into the soft earth. It couldn’t be a wolf or another puma. The shape was all wrong. Maybe a bear? I don’t know. I’ve never seen a bear track, so maybe that’s the simple answer. But the print looked almost like a shoeless person right down to the five toes. But it couldn’t have been. Dan took off his hiking boot. He wears a size 11. He took off his sock as well, and placed his bare foot right next to the print. The toes matched, the overall shape. But the size. That’s impossible. It must have been a trick of the ash, or maybe the way it was planted.
Nothing could have such a big foot.
There is evidence to indicate the possible existence in Skamania County of a nocturnal primate mammal variously described as an ape-like creature…and commonly known as “Sasquatch,” “Yeti,” “Bigfoot”…
—Ordinance No. 69-01, Skamania County, Washington State
From my interview with Senior Ranger Josephine Schell.
Yes, I’ve heard the legend. And no, it’s got nothing to do with my heritage. I’m from the Southwest, not the Northwest.*1 Not that we don’t have our own stories. Everybody does. You’ve got the Almas in Russia, the Yowie in Australia, the Orang Pendek in Indonesia, and a bunch of Sisimite stories from Latin America. And that’s just today. The Judeo-Christian Bible has Esau, the primitive brother of Jacob. And the Epic of Gilgamesh, the first written story, has “Enkidu,” the wild man. Show me a culture anywhere on this planet, and chances are, they got something.
Including this one, and by this one, I mean mainstream pop culture. Bigfoot’s as American as apple pie and guns in schools. That’s how I learned about it. Like any good Gen Xer, I was raised by TV. I’ve checked out my fair share of the modern Bigfoot media.
I’ve seen a lot of the newer, shaky-cam Blair Witch–wannabe flicks. I’ve flipped through a couple of the faux documentary cable shows. I keep meaning to check out the one from the survival guy, not the British fraud, the real deal. The Canadian. He knows his shit, and maybe he’s actually on the right track. But all the other stuff I’ve seen, fiction and “managed reality,” I gotta say, just feels like a polished rehash of the ’70s–’80s craze I grew up on.