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

It has to be the bloody footprints. The space between those two enormous feet. So close together. I’ve seen them run, the stride would have only left a pair of prints between the couch and kitchen. These were too close, too numerous, and mixed with far too much blood. The parallel trails, thicker one left by the body, thinner by the head. Reinhardt’s head, splattering across the walls and floor, as if the killer, holding it by the mouth, had let it swing back and forth. Unhurried. Unafraid.

And why not? Why fear us when we can be invaded so easily, when we won’t even try to fight back?

From my interview with Senior Ranger Josephine Schell.

Boulder, Colorado, 1991. The town looked like a paradise. Lush and green and totally unspoiled by humans. Only it wasn’t unspoiled because it wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place. The area around Boulder is naturally semi-arid. It was the townsfolk who pumped in all that water for their lawns and fruit trees. And when the fruit trees came, so did the deer. Locals loved it. “Hey, Honey, there’s a deer in our yard!”

And with the herbivores came the inevitable carnivores. Mountain lions were pretty scarce back then. Early Europeans had driven them to the brink of extinction. Those that were left went deep into the Rockies, far enough to avoid any possible contact with humans. But when they followed the deer out of the mountains, they found that this new breed of human wasn’t anything like their “shoot on sight” ancestors. These humans shot with cameras. “Oh wow, kids, look! A real puma!”

Some wiser individuals tried to speak up. “You’re not in a zoo. These are predators. They’re dangerous. They need to be tagged and relocated before somebody gets hurt.”

No one listened. They couldn’t believe how lucky they were to see big cats “out in the wild.” Who needs a zoo when you’ve got the woods right behind your house? And then the dogs started disappearing. The little ones at first, the tiny toys who couldn’t defend themselves. That’s why no one listened when folks with badges tried, again, to convince them of the danger. “Oh c’mon, what do you expect if someone’s bichon-poodle mix gets off leash?” I think one of the casualties was a cockapoo literally named “Fifi.” Never mind that the attack didn’t happen in the woods but right in front of Fifi’s house. Naysayers still thought she was “low-hanging fruit,” that no way a cougar’s gonna go for a full-sized, fighting canine.

Until they did. A Doberman barely escaped with its life. A black Lab and German shepherd didn’t. “What do you call a dog on a leash? A meal on a string.” That was one of the jokes going around, like that cartoon in a local paper. It showed a dog’s owner handing her pup a letter from a cat saying, “Welcome to the food chain.”

She shakes her head.

The food chain. Nobody remembers where our link is supposed to be. The warnings were right there. The trail of escalation leading right to people’s front doors.

They did start to react, I’ll give them that. One lion was killed after it attacked a game ranch, and there was a town meeting on what to do. But like so many other problems, it was too little too late. The cats were there, they were multiplying, and after testing our boundaries, they were getting bolder every day.

Once killing dogs became common, it was only a matter of time before they worked their way up the chain to us. A jogger was chased, treed, and only survived because she’d learned to fight back in her “model-mugging” course. A hospital employee was chased in the parking lot. Several people couldn’t leave their houses. The list goes on.

And then Scott Lancaster went for a run and never came back. Scott was eighteen years old, healthy, strong, doing a cardio workout on his free period up the trail behind his high school. Two days later, they found what was left of him, chest torn open, organs eaten, face chewed off. Those remains were found in the stomach of a cougar. The investigation proved that the cat wasn’t rabid, or starving. You know what that attack also proved, along with all the other fatal attacks we’ve had since then? [34] At the time of this writing, ten humans have been killed in North America by cougars since the death of Scott Lancaster.

They’re not afraid of us anymore.

“It wasn’t your fault.” Mostar, standing behind us. Reading my mind again, the inevitable punishment she knew I’d inflict on myself. I didn’t have to go home. I could have pushed back. Together with the lights on, with me calling for help. I might have saved him. If I’d only stayed!

“Not your fault,” she repeated. Then, “It’s mine.”

A flash of something I couldn’t recognize. A nervous swallow, an unwillingness to meet my eyes.

Guilt?

“I didn’t think they’d be this bold this soon.” Her voice was low, just loud enough for me to hear. “I thought with the fire… their first kill to satiate… I thought we’d at least have one more day….”

She shook her head, dry-spat another foreign phrase that sounded like, “Majmoonehjedan!” [35] Majmune jedan : You ape.

Then it passed. Back straight, eyes clear, looking us over like a general in a war movie.

“We don’t have time anymore, not enough for a full perimeter. We have to make a smaller one, right now, around the Common House. Carmen…” The poor woman practically dropped her hand sanitizer. “Go get Bobbi out of bed. Do whatever you have to do but get her up and dressed. Go.”

Carmen dashed out as Mostar pivoted to Effie and Pal. “Go home and grab some blankets, the heaviest you’ve got. One armload, one trip, and get them over to the Common House.”

Without question or pause, they left.

Turning back to me, she said, “Go through Reinhardt’s kitchen. Grab what’s frozen, canned, dried. One bag.”

I nodded as she grabbed Dan’s sleeve. “C’mon.” And they were gone.

There wasn’t any emotion in her voice. There wasn’t time.

I raced back into Reinhardt’s kitchen, my shoe sticking on the floor’s red trail. I grabbed a plastic garbage bag off the roll, shoved in the remaining frozen meals, then ran for the Common House.

Their stink was stronger, and it wasn’t my imagination. Neither was the figure on the ridge. A tall black outline between two trees. Just standing there, watching me. My eyes flicked down to avoid a rock from two nights ago, then back up to a now-empty slope. The howls began a second later, a solo swelling to a chorus. I felt naked. My new spear. Back at home. I hadn’t thought I’d need it. No time now.

I kept my head down, trotting the last few steps to the Common House. I threw the meals in the freezer and ran back outside to see Mostar and Dan exit her house. Both had armloads of stakes. Both dropped them when Mostar pointed up to something just behind my field of vision. Dan reached for his spear leaning against Mostar’s entryway as she called for Effie and Pal. “The Durants!” Voice like a megaphone, frantic waves to follow her.

We all met her at their house; myself, Effie and Pal, and Carmen with a very dazed, pajama-and-robe-clad Bobbi in tow.

I’m not sure what Mostar was thinking by then. Rallying us all to their door. All of us together? Societal pressure? Or maybe just the physical force we’d need to drag the two of them out.