Макс Брукс - Devolution - A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre

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.

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. [21] Josephine Schell (maiden name Begay) is a member of the Navajo Nation. 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.

You know! I read your article about the five classic films, and, yeah, they scared the crap outta me too. That one where a yeti attacks a ski resort. I think you’re right about them not being able to afford a whole costume, [22] Only after finishing my interviews for this book, did I discover that the film in question, 1977’s Snowbeast, did, in fact, produce an entire creature costume. but the result, the whole Jaws POV, terrifying. That scene where it breaks through a window… comes down from the mountain, right into town… It wasn’t supposed to do that! It broke the prime directive of horror films! If you don’t go looking for trouble, trouble won’t come looking for you!

That’s why our generation’s scary movies were essentially cautionary tales. That’s why I never had any sympathy for the horny teenagers going to the summer camp, or the greedy town mayor keeping the beaches open, or the rule-following spaceship crew that just had to investigate an alien distress signal. I knew I’d never be like them. I’d do my part and stay home. But after watching the snowbeast attacking Aspen, I thought, What’s to stop the real Sasquatch from doing the same?

Because it did! The other movie you wrote about, with the host from Mission Impossible, and exhibits like footprints and photos and an interview with a “psychic detective” and, most important, oh my God, those “dramatic re-creations.” When the girl… Rita Graham, I remember the name… when she’s sitting at home that night, watching TV, minding her own business… just like me… and a shadow appears across the window shade behind her two seconds before this giant, hairy arm smashes through the glass. I might have actually pissed myself on that one. It scared me so badly that years later I actually tried looking it up. Turns out the incident did happen, but was seriously dramatized for the show.

What wasn’t dramatized was another incident, two of them, really, that were re-created for that other movie, the one that actually ran in theaters! The first account comes from the 1920s where some rogue miners are prospecting near, of all places, Mount St. Helens. One night their cabin is attacked with boulders and fists and the classic animal screams we now associate with the legend. That’s why, to this day, the canyon where it happened is nicknamed Ape Canyon. The second story is from Teddy Roosevelt.

She reaches into her desk and thumps the old, dog-eared copy of The Wilderness Hunter onto her desk.

Fair warning, the first part’s pretty cringy. It opens with Roosevelt talking about how lucky he’s been to shoot every kind of large animal in North America.

Douche.

Anyway, it goes on to “recount,” not tell firsthand, recount, the story of an Idaho fur trapper named Bauman, whose partner was torn apart by a “goblin.”

Is either story true? How the hell do I know? I thought they were at the time, when I kept asking my parents to move my bed away from the window. I’d be like, “These are real accounts! A president wrote about it!”

To their credit, my folks didn’t just blow me off. They tried to get me to verify it, to look beyond words and see if there was any physical evidence. I think that’s why I got interested in zoology, why, to this day, I get excited when any new species gets scientifically proven. And there’re thousands of them. Every year! I’ve seen a live Goliath spider and the corpse of a giant squid. I’ve seen all types of specimens recovered from hydrothermal vents that would have been considered science fiction when I was born. And as soon as the Congo gets safe enough for eco-tourism, I’ll be the first one in line to see that newly discovered Bili ape. I’m open to any discovery, as long as it’s based on hard, physical evidence. Facts are supposed to banish monsters…