Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre(46)

I certainly wasn’t. I would have given anything to stay in my comfort zone. Even now, when Mostar mentioned the enigmatic trauma of her past. I could have asked about it, just like I could have asked all the other times she’d brought it up. But I didn’t. I just stood there, hoping she’d change the subject, then wishing a second later that she hadn’t.

“People only see the present through the lenses of their personal pasts.” Her lips soured. “Maybe that’s my problem too.”

She sat down on the steps, focusing on the ash. “Violence. Danger. That’s my zone of comfort.”

She looked up at us again. “You probably thought I was crazy that first night.” Her head jerked toward our house and, I’m guessing, our garden. “But I knew what I was doing. I know how quickly society can burn. I’ve seen it. I’ve lived through it. But this…”

Eyes back to the footprints. “These may be real.” Head up to the trees. “They may be out there.”

“They”? Not “it”?

“But how do I know that they’re dangerous?” She shook her head. “I don’t. They might be friendly. They might just be passing through. And the fight with that big cat. How do I know it wasn’t self-defense or that Vincent’s not right about scavengers? I don’t.”

And then I understood what had come over her. And it chilled me.

Doubt.

“Bear spray.” She huffed. “That was just the start. You don’t know how far I would have taken you all today if the others hadn’t stopped me. And maybe they were right to do so.” Her eyes, meeting ours. Apologetic? “Do I have any evidence that they’re threatening, any proof of anything except”—she blinked, hard—“the lens of my personal past?”

I couldn’t take it anymore. I still can’t. It’s been a couple hours since Mostar told us to go home. We haven’t seen her since. Dan’s off to work, brushing the Perkins-Forster roof. I’ll meet him over there after I’ve done some gardening. Not much really to do. The seeds are all in, even the rice now, scattered over a square-foot patch with some soil thrown over it. The drip line works great, so there’s no need to hand water anything. Not that anything’s coming up. Basically, my “gardening” consists of looking over a room full of mud.

I should probably go check on Mostar first. I feel so bad for her, and, yes, scared for the rest of us. We’re depending on her, Dan and I, and the whole village, whether they know it or not. We can’t have her doubting herself, ending up as lost as the rest of us. We need her to be strong. We need her to be right.

But in this case, with those things out there, what does it mean for all of us if she is?





From my interview with Frank McCray, Jr.


Yeah, I’ve read The Sasquatch Companion, and for the most part, I agree with the official origins story. I think the book makes some good points about being descended from Gigantopithecus and the migration from Asia to the Americas. But co-migration? I’m not so sure.

Now, I don’t have a shred of evidence to back this up, so if you want to nail me on that, be my guest. But given what happened to Greenloop, what if…what if…they weren’t just co-migrating along with us? What if they were hunting us? Isn’t that why we came over? Following the grazing animals across the Beringian land bridge? What if we were stalking the caribou while they were stalking us? It wouldn’t discount any of the adaptations, just give them a different purpose. Nocturnal hunting would catch us at our most vulnerable. Camouflage skills are ideal for an ambush. And broad running feet would give them the speed to chase us down.

And when they caught us…if the stats are right, then we’re talking about three times the strength of a gorilla, which is already six times stronger than us. And that large head, the same conical shape we see on gorillas, that’s a sagittal crest, the skull plate that anchors their jaw muscles. Those muscles give a gorilla one of the most powerful bites in the world, thirteen hundred pounds per square inch. Now triple that in a Sasquatch and picture what it would do to our bones.

Maybe they used that bite, and strength, and speed to compete with us for food, or maybe we were the food. You’ll have to talk to Josephine Schell about that part. She knows more about carnivorous apes than me.

But for whatever reason, we were the ones, not them, who couldn’t wait to flee into this vast new continent. And what if enough time went by for us, this weak little species, to build up our numbers, and our confidence, to eventually challenge the larger primates for dominance of North America? What if that’s why they’ve remained so elusive, because they knew what would happen if they stepped out of the shadows? They saw what we did to the saber-toothed cat, the dire wolf, the giant bulldog bear. They saw what we did to enough of them to realize that they were on the wrong side of evolution.

At least until Rainier.

Josephine Schell thinks I’m going too far. She’s all about ecosystems and caloric needs, and maybe she’s right. But maybe there was also some latent gene that woke up in those creatures when they stumbled across Greenloop and found themselves facing a herd of cornered, isolated Homo sapiens. Maybe some instinct told them it was time to swap evolution for devolution, reach back to who they were to reclaim what was theirs.