Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre(79)
From my interview with Senior Ranger Josephine Schell.
Do you know that more people are hurt by bison in North America than by sharks all over the world? Do you know why? Because they try to ride them. Tourists from New York or Tokyo, whatever urban bubble, literally try to jump on the buffaloes’ backs. Feed them, hug them, take selfies with them. They think they’re at a petting zoo, or in a Disney movie. They’ve never learned the real rules, so they think they can just make up their own. This is called anthropomorphizing. This is why families let their little kids play around coyotes, why the Venice Beach “Grizzly Man” tried to live among Alaskan bears, why a whole town in Colorado couldn’t imagine that mountain lions would ever be a threat to human beings. All these overeducated, isolated city dwellers who idealize the natural world.
And they don’t stop with animals. My people too. All that “noble savage” shit. From Rousseau to that alcoholic, woman-beating, racist anti-Semite. Ever see the movie he made in the Yucatan? The simple, sweet natives living “in harmony with nature” until, oh no, here come the evil, pyramid-building, crop-growing, corrupted Mayans! Thank God the Spanish show up as divine punishment. Movie shoulda been called Them Injuns Had It Comin’. I’ve heard versions of that philosophy all my life.
Nature is pure. Nature is real. Connecting with nature brings out the best in you. That’s what I hear from the poor dumb dipshits who come up here every year in their new REI outfits, never having felt dirt under their feet, just aching to lose themselves in the Garden of Eden. And then a few days later we find them crawling through the muck, half-starved, dehydrated, nursing some gangrenous wound.
They all want to live “in harmony with nature” before some of them realize, too late, that nature is anything but harmonious.
JOURNAL ENTRY #15 [CONT.]
The touch on my hand woke me. I sprung back, legs up, ready to kick. I opened my eyes and saw Palomino hopping backward as well.
“Oh God, sorry!” I think I said, and got up to pull her to me. She shook in my arms, or maybe that was me. My neck was aching, my back. As I bent my head to rest it on Pal’s, I felt my skin burn from under the right ear to the base of my shoulder. I discovered, later, that I’d scraped the top layer completely off.
I also discovered, later, how Pal and her moms had survived. Effie said that when the Durants’ window wall had caved, when the first monster stormed in, Carmen grabbed Pal with one hand, Bobbi with the other, and ran up to the master bedroom. Effie’d been right behind them. She’d been the one to slam, lock, and throw a chair under the knob while Carmen forced Bobbi and Pal under the bed.
Then Carmen started grabbing all the dirty clothes she could, and there’d been a lot to grab. Apparently, upstairs was even gnarlier than the living room. Stained, dirty, skid-marked. That’s right. Effie even gagged at the memory of Tony’s shit-streaked underwear, which her germophobe wife snatched up without hesitation and jammed all around the sides of the bed. Carmen thinks these creatures depend on smell as much as sight and sound. She thought clogging the space between the bed and the floor with a noxious moat would mask their own scent.
And it must have worked. By the time their pursuer, Dowager, I think, beat down the door, they were all hidden under the Durants’ bed, behind a berm of filth. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for Carmen, lying there in that dark stuffy stink. Maybe that’s why she hit Bobbi, although Effie insists it was necessary.
That happened right before Dowager barreled in, as the door began to buckle. They’d just gotten under the bed, Carmen stuffing this damp moldy towel over the last open space. Bobbi started to lose it. Heavy breaths, faster, louder. Effie said that Carmen whispered angrily for her to be quiet. That Bobbi kept saying, “I can’t, I can’t!”
Effie said the third “can’t” was when Carmen hit her, not an open-mouth slap, but a full-fisted punch right in her eye. I don’t know how she managed it with them all lying on their stomachs. I don’t know how she found Bobbi’s eye in the darkness. But she connected, and Bobbi was stunned into silence. But that wasn’t good enough for Carmen. She grabbed Bobbi by the neck, put her lips right next to her ear, and whispered, “Shut up or I’ll fucking kill you.”
On “you” the door fell in. Effie said she could feel the footsteps vibrating through the floorboards as Dowager stomped past them into the bathroom. The old female must have just poked her head in, reached out to pull the shower curtain down, then come back out to tear the doors off Yvette’s walk-in closet. For a few seconds they heard clothes being ripped down, drawers pulled open. (Why? Just curious or thinking they made a small entrance to another room?)
Then Dowager growled angrily, frustrated, probably, and turned for the bed. She couldn’t have been looking for anything, the way Effie described the sheets, pillows, and eventually mattress tossed around the room. If Dowager had just made it to the box spring, if Alpha’s outside whoops hadn’t pulled her from her tantrum.
They owe them, the Durants. That’s how Effie looks at it now. The grimy concealment, the distraction of their murders. When Effie described it, she couldn’t help but repeat, “We owe them our lives.”
I know I’m getting ahead of myself. Sorry. Back to the moment when Palomino woke me up. I was so dazed, bouncing between thoughts and feelings.