‘That’s what I thought,’ Professor Middleton said. ‘There is no good reason for Jesse MacCarthy to falsely claim a monster killed his brother. Nor could he possibly have faked the damage done to his body in his flight from those mountains. The simplest explanation, Miss Lopez, is that he saw something that terrified him almost to death.’
‘Couldn’t he have seen a bear though?’ Lopez suggested. ‘Been mistaken?’
Jarvis shook his head.
‘Two of the three MacCarthy brothers were experienced woodsmen and hunters, taught by their father. Jesse was the youngest but he knew the region like the back of his hand: well enough, if we assume he’s told the truth, to find his way home in the dead of night while in a state of blind panic. These guys knew what bears looked like. But that’s not what intrigues us the most.’
Middleton pushed his spectacles further up onto his nose as he took his cue. ‘This has happened before.’
‘To whom?’ Lopez asked.
‘A celebrity, believe it or not,’ Middleton explained. ‘Spirit Lake, near Mount St. Helens in Washington State, May 1950. Championship skier Jim Carter vanished without trace from a twenty-strong climbing party after diverting from the group in order to take photographs. He left the other climbers near a landmark called Dog’s Head, in good weather at the eight-thousand-foot level, to take a picture of the group as they skied down. That was the last time anyone saw him. The next morning searchers found a discarded film box at the point where he had taken a picture.’
‘So?’ Ethan asked.
‘Carter had left ski tracks in the snow going down the mountain,’ Middleton said, ‘that recorded a wild and death-defying flight. He took chances no professional skier would take, going like the devil and leaping crevasses. His companions claimed that he would only ever have done that if he was in genuine fear of his life. He eventually reached Ape Canyon and skied straight down the canyon wall, such was his evident terror. Yet his body was not found at the bottom.’
‘Seattle Mountain Search and Rescue combed the canyon for five days,’ Jarvis continued, ‘but no sign of Carter or his equipment was ever found.’
‘During the search,’ Middleton went on, ‘the rescuers reported feelings of being watched on the mountain, and agreed that there was something strange up on the high slopes of the Cascades. There have been about twenty-five different reports of people attacked by apelike men in the St. Helens and Cascade areas over a twenty-year period. One was a group of Boy Scouts from Centralia. Several were taken off the mountain in a hysterical state after claiming they had been attacked by what they called mountain devils.’
Ethan turned to Professor Middleton.
‘I take it that you think that whatever attacked Jim Carter also attacked Cletus and Jesse MacCarthy. Do you have any idea what it was?’
Middleton walked further down into the laboratory and picked up what looked to Ethan like a large slab of cement. The professor heaved it into the light and set it down on a nearby wooden table with a thump that sent little clouds of dust curling up into the sunbeams.
Ethan stepped forward and looked down at the huge plaster cast.
The depressions set into the cast marked the surface of what must have been a shallow pool or perhaps the bed of a stream, ripples of sand clearly formed by flowing water speckled with small pebbles and a grainy texture. But in the center of the cast was the unmistakeable shape of an enormous footprint. A plastic measuring gauge was glued along the edge of the cast, and he could see that it measured just less than seventeen inches.
‘This cast,’ Middleton said, ‘was made from a trail of fresh prints that ran along a watercourse in Umatilla National Forest, Washington State. The inferred weight of the creature that left this print, measured by the density of the riverbed at the time, was in excess of seven hundred pounds.’
Lopez squinted down at the print. ‘It looks human.’
‘Yes it does,’ Middleton nodded, ‘and yet at the same time, it isn’t. The step length of the creature that created this track was almost two metres, far greater than that of a human being. Moreover, details in the print reveal a compliant gait on a flat foot, compared to the human method of walking which uses a stiff-legged stride with distinct heel and toe phases. Essentially, this creature walks with a bent knee, using its legs like shock-absorbers and rolling the foot to keep the torso level. Humans bounce a little when we walk — this creature does not.’
‘Couldn’t it be a fake?’ Ethan suggested. ‘Some jerk with boards strapped to his feet?’
‘No,’ Middleton said as he gestured to details in the cast, ‘because it would be physically impossible to model all of the tiny variables we see in prints like this. The roll of the foot through the sand that created these mid-tarsal pressure ridges; the slight slip of the ball that has pushed the sand backward behind the heel; and here,’ Middleton pointed to fine lines in the base of the print, ‘evidence of dermatoglyphics, like fingerprints, the faint ridges in the surface of the skin of all primates.’
‘You’re saying that an ape created this?’ Lopez said. ‘Like a gorilla?’
‘A bipedal ape,’ Middleton corrected her, ‘sometimes known as sasquatch, or Bigfoot.’
Ethan stared at the print for a long moment before speaking.
‘You think that Jesse MacCarthy’s brother was killed by a Bigfoot? It’s no wonder the FBI walked away from the case.’
‘And even if it were true,’ Lopez said, ‘what the hell do you expect us to do about it? Head into the mountains and bring our homicidal Bigfoot back to trial? This is crazy. What possible interest can the DIA have in this?’
Jarvis gestured to the cast.
‘The department’s interest at this point is purely coincidental. The murder of Randy MacCarthy is an open and recent case, and having become involved we’ve been given tacit approval to head up there. Solve the murder and the case gets closed as far as the DIA is concerned. I’d like you to push a little further and find out what you can about what really happened to Cletus and Jesse.’
Ethan sighed and shook his head.
‘Okay, but don’t hold your breath for any spectacular discoveries this time. There have been people scouring the forests for sasquatch for centuries and nobody’s found a thing. For me, the idea of a giant hairy human wandering about in the forests is about as close to myth as we’re likely to get.’
Professor Middleton’s eyes hardened behind his spectacles as he looked at Ethan.
‘Perhaps your scepticism, although healthy, is both misplaced and out of date, Mr. Warner,’ he warned. ‘We humans are apes ourselves, primates, closely related to our cousins, the chimpanzees and gorillas. Our own lineage, that of the order Homo, until a hundred thousand years ago consisted of several different species of human wandering the earth.’
‘Seriously?’ Lopez asked. ‘I thought it was only us?’
‘The Neanderthals were a different species,’ Ethan said. ‘As were Homo heidelbergensis and Homo erectus, but they all walked the earth at the same time as us, Homo sapiens. Our species overlapped in their ranges and likely came face to face often.’
‘Impressive,’ Professor Middleton said, raising an eyebrow. ‘Your knowledge of human evolution is remarkably astute.’
‘I learned a few things about the origin of life in Israel a while back,’ Ethan said without elaborating, unwilling right now to think too hard about the Gaza Strip and the things that had occurred there years before. ‘But all of our competing species died out, became extinct. We, Homo sapiens, are the only ones left.’