"It’s not just the Abominable Snowman-which, incidentally, isn’t abominable at all; the term is a misinterpretation of a Sherpa word meaning manlike wild thing." Obviously, Chace was getting into a familiar speech. "No, it’s much bigger than that. There’s the wudenwasa seen and reported by the Anglo-Saxons; the Fomorians that inhabited Ireland when the Celts invaded it; and the hairy men of Broceliande in Brittany. What about Grendel? Knowledge of these beings goes back to Beowulf."
"So does knowledge of griffins, and devils, and goats that fly."
Chace laughed. "I guess we differ on the reliability of myth."
I guess we do, Gideon thought.
"But what about scientists? Modern scientists with unimpeachable credentials? What about Ivan Sanderson? Bayanov? Bourtsev? Kravitz, right here at Washington State? How do you respond to them?"
Gideon could respond, all right, but he wasn’t interested in an argument. He shrugged. "All I can do is look at the data and draw my own conclusions."
"Professor Chace," Abe said, "I’m a little curious. What does Sherry Washburn think about your theories? Or Howell?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"You don’t know Washburn?…You’re not with the University of California?"
"Yes, I am."
Abe’s eyes narrowed. "Sherwood Washburn is-"
Chace laughed easily. "Oh, I see. Are they on the biology faculty? Well-"
"Anthropology," Gideon said.
"Yes, well, I’m in supervisory development."
"Supervisory development?" said Abe. "This is a university department?"
Chace seemed to find that very funny. "No, goodness me, I’m not technically on the faculty, you see. I teach evening courses in Extension-public speaking for managers, office organization, that kind of thing. Just do it to keep my skills up."
"You’re not a professor, then?" Gideon asked.
Chace slapped his thigh and chuckled with the air of a man who was above overly fastidious distinctions of academic rank. "Never said I was."
No, and never denied it either, Gideon thought.
"You got a Ph. D.?" Abe asked bluntly.
Chace’s face became solemn. "I have a D.B.A., a doctorate of business administration. My formal education is in marketing and public relations."
Gideon looked at his watch. "Mr. Linger, I’ve certainly enjoyed this evening, but I’m afraid I have to be up early tomorrow-"
Chace put down his glass with a thump. His expression had changed from solemn to earnest. He leaned tensely forward. "Gideon-may I call you Gideon?-I’m not one of your kooks, or one of these UFO nuts, or someone out to make big bucks. I’m a scientist like yourself, even if I’m self-taught, and I don’t go off half cocked. But I’m sitting here telling you"-his first two fingers began tapping on the coffee table, keeping time with his words-"that I know Bigfoot exists." His fingers curled into a fist, and he banged on the table. "I know it!"
"Dr. Chace," Gideon said, "neither contemporary nor fossil evidence support you. No one has ever found an ape bone on this continent. The only primates that have ever lived in North America are people."
Abe corrected him at once. "And what about the Eocene prosimians? They weren’t primates?"
Gideon deferred. "All right, but they were gone by the middle Oligocene, thirty million years ago. Bigfoot’s still supposed to be around. Does anyone have even a single tooth? One bone? One conclusive photograph?"
"Don’t get mad at me," Abe said, his hands outspread. "I only asked a question."
Linger smiled and tilted his handsome, silvered head to the side. "But isn’t there evidence?" he said, addressing them all. "I’ve seen a thousand-year-old scalp in a Tibetan lamasery-more than a thousand years old, they say-that no scientist in the world has been able to identify."
Gideon leaned forward. "If you give a decently sized piece of skin, in good condition, human or otherwise, to a laboratory, they’ll be able to tell you what it is very quickly. But once it’s tanned, or rotted, or simply desiccated from the passage of time, it becomes unidentifiable. The thing is, you have to remember there’s a big difference between finding an unidentifiable piece of skin and saying it’s from an unidentified species."
"The yeti’s beside the point anyway," Chace said. "It’s a different species altogether." He turned toward Gideon, his face set, seemingly on the edge of anger. "I have in my files," he said slowly, "verified and certified by me, personally"-he waited for a challenge-"hundreds of cases in which Bigfoot sightings or unmistakable Bigfoot tracks have been positively identified."
"Yes," said Gideon, "I saw some of those unmistakable tracks myself near Quinault a few days ago."
Chace brushed the comment aside with a wave of his hand. "Pranks. Kids probably, amateurish, as I’m sure you know. I’ve already seen the casts and rejected them. I’m not one of your fanatics, Professor. I don’t accept everything people tell me. When I certify something, it’s real. And I’m telling you I’ve seen eighty clear, fresh sets of prints with my own eyes, in Washington and British Columbia alone." He leaned back and waited for Gideon’s reaction.
"Olas Murie once made a simple observation," Gideon said. "He pointed out that where tracks are abundant, the animals that make them are abundant." Chace looked warily at him, not sure where he was heading. Gideon continued, "You say you’ve seen all those Bigfoot tracks-eighty?"
Chace nodded. "Eighty-two, and another ten probables I didn’t certify."
"Well," Gideon said, "how many bear tracks have you seen? I mean clear, fresh, unmistakable ones. Or mountain lion? How is it that a presumably rare creature can leave so many tracks? Are they more common than bears?"
"Maybe they are. We don’t have an accurate count, but we know there are many populations of them."
"You keep saying you know," Gideon said, "not you think."
"We know. The Bigfoots are there, watching us, hiding from us. No question about it."
"Then why," Gideon said, "hasn’t anyone ever found a bone, a carcass? Don’t they die and leave remains? Why hasn’t a dog ever dragged a piece of a Bigfoot home with him?"
Chace sat quietly a while, then sighed. "It’s like I told you, Roy. They’ll deny the evidence even when it’s right in front of them if it doesn’t fit their theories."
"What do you mean, they?" Abe said cheerfully to the room at large. "I’m denying something? I’m just sitting here listening." He spoke good-humoredly to Chace: "Who’s denying?"
Chace looked darkly at Abe for a long time, then noisily expelled air through his nostrils: an unambiguous snort of derision. The skin under Gideon’s eyes grew taut; for the first time he was angry, angry at this shifty con man who derided Abraham Goldstein. Before he could speak, however, Abe went calmly on, still smiling: "All the same," he said, "it’s a funny thing… Where’s the kids?"
Chace looked at Linger and shook his head slowly back and forth. Linger glanced at Gideon with a small, polite smile of commiseration. Gideon hadn’t followed the question either, but he’d long ago given up wondering if Abe’s mind ever wandered. It didn’t.
"The kids," Abe repeated patiently. "Aren’t there any Bigfoot kids? All the tracks I ever heard of, they’re sixteen, eighteen inches long. All the Bigfoots anybody ever sees, they’re great big guys that scare the pants off everybody. No one ever sees a little baby Bigfoot? A medium-size teenager, even, say six feet high? How come?"
Gideon had never thought about it; it was a good question.
Chace didn’t agree. "I don’t see much point in continuing this," he said. "You’ve obviously closed your minds. There’s nothing I can say that would-"
"It’s not a question of say," Gideon said, "it’s a question of show. It’s evidence that’s needed, not argument."
"I have in my home," Chace said slowly, with infinite patience-he was straining the limits of his tolerance to give it one more try-"a glass-walled box in a climate-controlled vault. In that box sits nearly two pounds of fecal matter. I can show you letters from the University of Michigan, the University of Arizona, and Cal Poly, all of which say that those feces cannot be identified as belonging to any scientifically known form of life." He paused to let the weight of his words sink in. "They were found in 1974 in a cave…" When Gideon wearily closed his eyes and shook his head, he stopped. "You don’t believe me?"