Proctor was a carnival of enthusiasm, his eyes ablaze with excitement.
‘You’re assigned to our expedition?’ Lopez asked quizzically as she looked him up and down. ‘You know we’re going to be out in the forest for several days, right?’
‘Oh, don’t worry,’ Proctor replied with another big smile and a short burst of chortling laughter. ‘I once spent three weeks in the Amazon jungle searching for specimens of beetle larvae. I’m used to being outdoors.’
Lopez nodded slowly. ‘But you still don’t get out enough, right?’
Proctor hesitated, and then honked another laugh and nodded. ‘Got it, right, yeah. Good one.’
‘Where’s your colleague?’
‘Back at Dixie,’ Proctor said. ‘We’ll meet up with her and then head out. C’mon, there’s a lot we need to talk about. We’ve already found some interesting tracks.’
23
‘How old is it?’
Ethan crouched alongside Dana Ford as she indicated a row of 17-inch-long depressions in loose soil climbing a hillside less than a mile out of Dixie. The trail crossed a canyon wash where runoff from the hills swept down toward a creek a quarter-mile behind them. The long, slender prints were capped with toe marks and what might have been three or four nail-prints where the toes had dug into the soft earth.
‘Three days, maybe four,’ Dana replied. ‘There hasn’t been any heavy rain for the last week or so, so the prints have held up. But they’re too faint now to cast.’
Lopez and Proctor looked on as Dana traced the outline of the print with the tip of a pen in her right hand. Her long mousy hair was pinned back in a ponytail tucked beneath the hood of her waterproof jacket. Tall and slender, she wore fashionable square-lensed glasses that made her look a bit like Sarah Palin. The big difference was her Ph.D. and the excitement sparkling in her eyes as she pointed with the pen.
‘Look at this,’ she said in wonderment. ‘Seems like a huge human print, right?’
Ethan nodded. Dana smiled at him.
‘Well, it isn’t,’ she explained. ‘This was made by a three-hundred-pound bear.’
‘How do you know?’ Lopez asked, glancing furtively around them at the soaring hills wreathed in thick banks of swirling cloud.
‘Because we see this all the time,’ Dana replied. ‘People take photographs like this and pin them up on Internet sites claiming them to be evidence of bipedal creatures wandering the woods, but it’s nothing of the sort.’ She gestured to the depressions. ‘There’s only four toes, for a start, which kind of gives it away. The toe scratches are caused by claws, and the length of the print is caused by the bear’s paw sliding backward in the soil as it climbed out of the creek, probably foraging for fish.’
Ethan pictured the scene for a moment and figured it out.
‘The creek was flowing at the time, enough that the bear was sliding slightly on the surface soil under the water.’
‘Bingo,’ Dana grinned. ‘Mystery solved.’
Proctor gestured to the hills as they stood up from examining the prints.
‘History is full of these kinds of genuine mistaken identities,’ he explained. ‘You ever see all those photographs taken by climbers in the Himalayan Mountains, with the trails of huge footprints crossing snowy valleys?’
‘Sure,’ Lopez agreed. ‘The climbers always lay their pickaxes alongside the prints for scale.’
‘The same,’ Proctor confirmed. ‘Thing is, those shots are always made at dawn, when the climbers wake up and come outside. It took investigators years to realize that the prints were made by wonderful but normal animals like snow leopards when they had walked past at night. As the sun rises it strikes the tops of the prints in the deep snow, melting the edges and expanding them to gigantic proportions. When somebody tracked the trail into the shadow of another mountain, the prints returned to their normal size, betraying the illusion. Of course, that inconvenient fact never makes it into the reports.’
Ethan hefted his bergen onto his back as they set off again, heading north into the wilderness.
‘So you guys are sceptics?’ Lopez asked Dana, confused.
‘All scientists are sceptics,’ Dana replied. ‘That’s our job, to not take things at face value but to test them to ensure that they are real. A lot of people talk about having faith, about believing. Scientists don’t want to believe, they want to know, so the criteria for evidence that has to be met is much more demanding.’
‘You came out here, though,’ Ethan pointed out.
A drizzle hung like a fine mist of rain so light that it could not fall, only float on the cold air. It enshrouded the forests as they tracked alongside the edge of an icy stream winding between the soaring hillsides.
‘Because being a sceptic doesn’t mean you have to be an ass,’ Dana replied. ‘Wanting to test evidence is one thing. Writing it off before you’ve even looked at it is another entirely. Most scientists wouldn’t dare put their name to a study like this because it would be virtual career suicide. I don’t think that’s the most productive way to advance human knowledge.’
‘Is this an official visit then?’ Lopez asked.
‘Not exactly,’ Proctor admitted. ‘We were made to sign non-disclosure agreements.’
Ethan chuckled and shook his head.
‘So if you come out here and you find what you were looking for, you can’t tell anybody about it.’
‘No,’ Dana agreed as they hiked up between boulders littering the side of the creek. ‘But what we learn here can go into our next study. I figured that if the government wanted advisors out here who had some knowledge of cryptozoology and were insisting that we sign non-disclosure agreements, then there had to be something juicy waiting to be found.’
Lopez nodded as she glanced across at Dana.
‘Oh, there’s something out here all right.’
Ethan was about to put his foot down as he walked when he heard a faint metallic snicker from within dense trees to his right. He froze with his boot inches from the ground and turned his head fractionally to the right.
The dark maw of the treeline stared back at him, the misty dew-laden air drifting past in silence above the soft gurgling of the creek. Lopez’s voice reached him.
‘You smell somethin’?’
Ethan squinted into the woods for a moment longer.
‘We’re being watched,’ he replied.
‘By what?’ Lopez asked.
‘By whom, you mean,’ Ethan replied, then called out into the woods. ‘You guys want to come out or are you just going to sit there watching us all day?’
The voice that replied came from behind them.
‘We’re here.’
Ethan turned in surprise and saw seven soldiers now standing in plain view behind them, all wearing full battle-kit and cradling M-16 assault rifles. He turned back to the treeline and saw a single soldier stand up and make his way toward them. Caught in crossfire, he realized, an easy and deliberate way to distract the attention of enemy troops to a supposed error while the real danger emerged from behind them.
Ethan turned back to the seven soldiers, one of whom stepped forward. Tall and square-jawed, his face smeared with camouflage paint, he looked every inch the infantryman. There was no rank insignia on his fatigues, but his steady gaze and age marked him out as an officer. He offered Ethan a leather-gloved hand.
‘Ethan Warner? Lieutenant Jim Watson, Idaho National Guard,’ he introduced himself with a shake of Ethan’s hand. ‘We’re here to baby-sit you on your little camping trip.’