The flames caught vigorously, and Ethan watched as Duran slowly added the thicker, heavier sticks to the fire until it was crackling and snapping and casting a wide, flickering glow out into the forests around them. Finally, Duran set the lattice in place and stood up to look out into the woods as Kurt returned and glanced at the roaring flames.
‘You think you’ll find your monster by firelight, old man?’
‘You don’t find sasquatch,’ Duran replied. ‘It finds you.’
Kurt chuckled as he made his way across the camp. ‘Yeah, and he sure as hell won’t find it hard now.’
Proctor and Dana, their small tents secured and ready for use, gathered around the old man with anxious, tense expressions.
‘That’s the first time you’ve used that name,’ Dana said. ‘Sasquatch. So you do believe in it then?’
Duran looked at her, his wizened old face creasing in bemusement.
‘Believe? Why would I believe in something like that?’ He looked down as he emptied a sachet of what looked like beef stew into a tin cooking pan. ‘No need to believe in something that’s plain to see. You don’t believe that the sun will come up tomorrow, do you?’
‘No,’ Proctor replied, ‘because we know that it will.’
Duran inclined his head as he set his pan on top of a steel rack to cook.
‘When people talk about faith, what they really mean is: I don’t know. But they can’t admit that to themselves or to others, so they hide behind words like belief and faith.’ He looked up at Dana. ‘But I know damned well what I’ve seen with my own eyes.’
Ethan watched Dana lean forward, her gaze fixed upon Duran’s face.
‘When? Where?’
Duran stirred his stew, Mary placing her own meal alongside her grandfather’s on the rack. She answered for him.
‘Three years ago, about ten miles east of here out near Bitterroot, close to the border with Montana.’
Proctor almost fell over himself. ‘You both saw it?’
‘Same time,’ Duran confirmed. ‘We were making our way down to a creek for water. I suppose it was doing the same.’
Dana shuffled closer to the old man, enthralled.
‘Height? Weight? Could you tell the sex? How would you classify it?’
Duran shot her a bemused look.
‘We didn’t sit down for coffee with it, ma’am.’
‘Your best guess is fine,’ Dana replied.
Duran stirred his stew and tested it.
‘Eight feet, maybe nine feet tall,’ he said finally. Dana produced a slim recording device that she held out as Duran spoke. ‘Way too large for a bear or any other large animal. I’d guess it was about six hundred pounds. Very muscular. I could see its abdominals even through the thick fur.’
‘Did you see its face?’ Proctor gasped. ‘Did it look human?’
Duran sat back with his bowl in his lap and stared at the fire for a moment.
‘Very much so, but at the same time it was different. It had a high crested skull, deep-set eyes and a flat, flared nose, much like a gorilla. But it had more expression than a gorilla, like with a person, when you can see what they’re thinking sometimes even when they don’t say it.’
‘What did it do?’ Ethan asked.
Duran shrugged as he shoveled in a mouthful of stew. ‘He just sat there and drank water by scooping it out of the creek into his mouth. We were downwind of him, so he didn’t realize we were there.’
A voice spoke to them from the edge of the firelight. ‘You didn’t try to shoot it?’
Kurt Agry stood over them, spooning food out of a silvery ration pack. Duran looked up at him.
‘Why would I?’ he asked. ‘It wasn’t causing me no harm.’
‘Only because it hadn’t seen you,’ Kurt pointed out. ‘Probably a mangy bear or something.’
‘Bears drink straight from the stream,’ Dana Ford pointed out. ‘They don’t scoop water into their mouths. Only primates do that.’
Kurt shrugged and foraged deeper into his ration pack.
‘Did you smell it?’ Proctor asked. ‘We get a lot of reports that these things have an unpleasant odor.’
‘Yeah,’ Mary nodded, ‘we could smell it. It’s a wonder the damned thing can creep up on anyone stinking that bad.’
Lopez looked at Proctor. ‘Why would anything smell bad like that on purpose? Surely it would make it difficult to hunt. Is it some kind of defense mechanism, like a skunk?’
It was Dana Ford who answered.
‘The sasquatch is a primate, so therefore is also an omnivore. But, like most great apes, in a natural environment it’s mainly herbivorous so it would have no need to sneak up on prey.’
Kurt Agry scoffed over his ration pack.
‘We’re carnivores,’ he chuckled. ‘We’ve got canines.’
Dana Ford shook her head.
‘It’s not the kind of teeth we have that define our diet,’ she replied. ‘It’s the shape of our gut. We’ve evolved to be good at digesting both meat and plants, but we’re far better at digesting plant matter. Carnivores have totally different stomachs to ours. Besides, there are plenty of herbivores with canines, they just don’t use them any longer for what they originally evolved for. Evolution is always in motion, always a work-in-progress.’
‘So this thing stinks,’ Ethan conceded her point. ‘Why?’
‘It may not be a facet that evolved for a particular reason,’ Proctor replied. ‘If we assume that the sasquatch is indeed a primate, which all of the evidence suggests that it is, then it must have come here from elsewhere, as all bipedal primates evolved in Africa and spread from there over millions of years. So for instance at some point one of our ancestral species crosses from Asia into North America, perhaps across the Bering land bridge during an Ice Age, and settles here in America’s northwestern territories.’
Dana nodded as she continued.
‘The process thereafter is straightforward. Even if the progenitor species of what we’re calling sasquatch did not possess excessive body fur, it would soon become an evolutionary advantage because those that possessed the genes for extra fur to combat the cold winters here would begin to dominate. Over time, you would have a series of evolutionary responses occurring that predominate survival in cold climates: greater physical size, thicker fur, flared nostrils and suchlike. The Neanderthals evolved much in this way to deal with severe cold in Europe during the last Ice Age.’
Duran Wilkes, silent now for some time, looked up at Dana.
‘You think that what I saw was a man?’ he asked.
Dana inclined her head.
‘Perhaps not a man, but much closer to a man than we might think. You see, we sweat from our skin to keep cool, an evolutionary trait stretching back to our earliest ancestors in Africa. There’s no reason to suppose that the ancient cousins of sasquatch would have been any different. But now it’s been living in a frozen environment for tens of thousands of years. It evolves the heavy fur and facial features to endure severe cold, just in time for the Ice Age to come to an end. Suddenly, it’s sweating to keep a five-hundred-pound-plus body cool beneath a thick fur coat. Imagine having thick hair all over your body and not taking a shower for ten years. You’d stink real bad too.’
Ethan nodded in the firelight.
‘Doesn’t explain the aggression we’ve heard about recently,’ he said. ‘Whatever these things are, they may have been taking people for decades and we never knew a thing about it.’
‘Cannibalism is a survival strategy,’ Proctor said. ‘When times are hard many primate species resort to killing their own species, even members of their own families in order to survive. Sasquatch may be a long-lost cousin of ours but it’s unlikely they’d see a human as anything more than prey.’