Luring the Beast
It was early afternoon when we arrived at base camp, and I started to realize several flaws in my plan, many of which Nate had already pointed out. The first and most important was that neither one of us had a cell phone signal out here in this rocky, empty forest. The people setting up the camp were almost exclusively straight white men. Outdoorsy men in Washington State far from Seattle tended more toward the conservative side of the political spectrum. Then there was us, two city gays having relationship problems. I signed up for Bigfoot hunting because I thought it would bring us together, but I began to wonder if we’d ever find our way back out of here.
“Have you ever been camping?” Nate asked as we drove up twenty miles of gravel mountain road.
“When I was a kid,” I told him, leaving out all of the details. “It will be fine. We’re grown adults. And it will be fun! Just think, what if we actually see Bigfoot?”
Nate was not convinced. I did not actually believe in Bigfoot, but I think the outdoors, the camping, the fun idea of the whole process will be just the thing we need. Especially after I started to suspect Nate was cheating on me with his unusually attractive dentist.
We parked twenty minutes back down the forested hill we have just climbed and now broke out into a clearing. At one end of the clearing is a forest edge where everyone is setting up. The other side of the clearing rose gradually to a tall peak. I breathed in the fresh air and the smell of pine and fir as we nervously approached the others.
“I don’t feel safe,” Nate said under his breath as we walked closer.
The group of people all turn to stare at us. We were the last to arrive, but it was alarming. I felt their gaze on us as they sized us up, formed their opinions, and saw how out of place we were. I was about to say something when I saw our leader, Bob Shooply, wave his big arm and stomp toward us.
“You made it!” he bellowed, chuckling.
He was a big, tanned, shirtless man with graying blond hair and a substantial gut hanging over the waistband of his denim cutoffs. He had to be in his sixties, and he had small beady eyes that made him look perpetually confused. His brief bio in the brochure I found said he had been some sort of bush pilot in Alaska and had worked at some sort of medical clinic in Madagascar. He ushered us over to the camp, where an angry-looking man tried to start a fire with flint and steel despite the conveniences of our modern era.
Bob introduced us to the group, starting with his possible wife/girlfriend/love slave, Sumalee. They met in Mae Sot, and she was young enough to be his granddaughter. I was not sure what her role was on this expedition, but it seemed to require wearing lots of makeup.
“And these are my old friends George and Pam Murphy,” Bob said, turning to an older couple in outdoor gear.
George is tan and leathery. Pam is plump and very concerned about color coordinating. She looks like she has just been voted off Survivor.
“They’ll be our trackers for the expedition.”
“I once saw a ’Squatch over in Pierce County,” George proclaimed, Pam nodding beside him.
“That’s Craig down there,” Bob explains, pointing at the angry man making the fire. He blew on a wad of wood shavings.
He had gray curly hair and a matching mustache, and his eyes were very blue and full of menace. He looked ready to burn the whole forest down if he had to. Craig does manage to look up at us and nod, his mouth a strained, tight line across his face.
“He’s from Indiana.”
I am not sure why that was important, but it was clear Bob was not very good at this.
Our technical geeks and Sasquatch experts were Alan and Phil. They were both pale, distracted young men with beards who were often hunched over a laptop or a map or black bear scat. They wore baggy Sasquatch themed T shirts and an alarming amount of camouflage. Alan was the one in charge, though. He stood there and watched as Phil set up tables with electrical equipment under a tall, open tent-like contraption.
“Have you ever seen a Sasquatch?” Alan asked, almost like a challenge.
“No, but I guess George has,” Nate replied.
“Yeah, I wish I could have been there,” Alan grunted. “He tried to get pictures, but he was also trying to catch up to it, stomping through the forest while trying to get his phone to work.”
George never stood a chance, I think, as I pictured that old man fumbling to open his camera app while he tripped over logs.
By my count, we had stranded ourselves in the wilderness with five straight white conservative men and two women. We had no cell phone signal. We were at least twenty miles from the tiny nearby town we passed on the way up here. These were very intense outdoorsmen who fervently believed in Bigfoot and hunting him down. Everything about this now seemed like a bad idea, and I tried hard not to express that to my already concerned and annoyed partner.
It was after dark by the time we finished setting up camp. We sat around the fire and watched Bob and George drink from a bottle of Scotch while Alan and Phil told us about their experiences hunting Bigfoot. Sumalee leaned against Bob and looked at her phone. I wondered what service provider she had that gave her enough signal to do anything. I suppose if we got desperate we could wrestle her phone from her. Pam cooked beans for everyone in a cast iron skillet in her role as wilderness wife. I stared up at the dark sky, filled with stars, and spotted several bats. Bob got up to wander into the woods for his regular pee break.
Nate yawned halfway through Alan’s story about hiding from a rampaging Bigfoot.
“We should get to bed, it’s late.”
______________
The next morning I drank my coffee by the campfire. Bob was sprawled in a canvas chair across from me, wearing nothing but a pair of tiny blue nylon shorts. He drank his coffee and read from a Clive Cussler novel, completely unaware his balls were hanging out of his shorts. I couldn’t wait for Nate to wake up and see this.
It was a beautiful summer day. The sky was a bold blue, dotted with cumulus clouds. In the distance I could see Mt. St. Helens, and we were practically on Mt. Adams. The smell of bacon and eggs mixed with wood smoke drifted over from the campfire, where George made breakfast.
Alan and Phil had their laptops set up and stared at their screens. “We’ve scanned some maps of the area and we got some expedition tactics from the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization website,” Alan said.
“We brought coolers of fruit to put out this evening to try and lure Bigfoot and brought multiple trail cameras.”
Pam was dressed all in yellow today, and rubbed her arms with some foul-smelling concoction she said keeps away bugs.
“I think we should start by surveying the nearby forest, looking for signs,” Phil told us, and he showed us a map on his monitor. “Not this whole area, that would take weeks, but just the immediate area around here.”
“What kind of signs are we looking for?” Nate asked. He had just emerged from the tent and looked nice in his National Parks T-shirt and shorts.
“Hair, footprints, droppings, broken limbs or brush, anything unusual,” Phil answered. He looked both scared and excited. “We need to be careful, though. Once we find signs we need to document them, record their location, and then remove ourselves. Alan and I can then go back and set out fruit and the trail cameras.”
“What exactly is the danger?”
“Sasquatch, for one,” Alan said as he swaggered toward us near the fire.
I saw Alan has decided to be shirtless today as well, showing off his pale, fleshy upper body dotted with patchy hair.
“We have no reason to think he’s carnivorous or violent, but he’s still big and strong. Also, there’s bears and other dangerous animals out here we’ll need to be cautious of.”
I thought it was interesting that Alan referred to Sasquatch as ‘he,’ like ‘he’ was his neighbor, Mr. Sasquatch.
“Why do you think no one has ever found any dead Sasquatches?” Nate asked as he raised a skeptical eyebrow.
I gave Nate a look that I hoped conveyed: please don’t antagonize the men we’re trapped here with. He didn’t seem to notice.
“There are many theories out there, but I personally believe Sasquatch bury their dead. It’s reasonable that with a mind developed enough to evade humans for so long they’re also able to bury their dead,” Alan said.
It was difficult to tell if Alan was annoyed by the question or not. He was strangely emotionless despite the intensity of his personality.
“I think Sasquatch eat their dead.”
Craig had appeared out of nowhere, his voice raspy and deep, to deliver this chilling theory. He stood over us and looked stern and troubled.
“Bones and all?” Nate asked.
I elbowed him. Craig was the last person I wanted to piss off. He looked capable of killing us all in our sleep with the giant knife he kept clipped to his belt.
Craig’s icy eyes rolled down to look at Nate.
“Yes,” he said. “They have powerful jaws.”
What followed was a brief discussion between Alan and Phil about whether this statement about Bigfoot’s jaws was true or not. Craig did not join in. He didn’t care. He knew what he knew about Bigfoot. He stared into the forest as if Bigfoot had murdered his wife.
______________
Later in the day, Bob led us through the wooded area below the campsite so that we could scope out areas to leave fruit out that night and get a glimpse of the local wildlife. Sumalee elected to stay at camp and talk on her cell phone. Nate and I trailed behind the others so that I could talk to him.
“Was that a gun I saw Bob taking out of his duffel bag this morning?” I asked Nate.
“Yes, yes it was,” Nate said. “We’re in the wilderness, so it's not unheard of, but of all the people to have a gun…”
We followed the group through the forest in silence then, not sure what else to say about that situation. Sun filtered down through the trees and lit up the bright green ferns and moss. I avoided a large patch of stinging nettles and listened to the chattering bird song overhead.
We suddenly heard a shout. It was Pam.
“Look! Look at this!”
The group hurried ahead to join Pam and see what she had discovered. Nate and I looked down where she pointed to some branches and plant debris on the ground. Nate looked at me and shrugged.
“That area there looks trampled,” Pam said, waving her finger toward the ground.
“There’s no footprints,” Bob said.
“But those branches were broken by something.”
“The ground isn’t wet enough for footprints,” Alan said, pushing his way to the front. “Look, that could be hair on that branch.”
Nate and I moved back to look around at other areas, hoping to encourage the group to look for something more tangible. They instead spent the next fifteen minutes speculating about broken plant debris before Alan recruited me to help him find some damp ground somewhere nearby.
“I’ve been hunting Sasquatch for 15 years,” Alan told me as we pushed through the brush of the forest.
“Wow,” I said, unsure of how else to respond.
“I’m hunting for solid evidence. Proof at last of his existence, lurking in our forests, hiding from us for so long. It’s scary to think of him out there, so big and powerful, hiding in the darkest forests of the northwest.”
“What made you want to hunt for him?” I asked.
“I was a kid. We were hiking up near Mitchell Peak when I left the trail looking for more huckleberry bushes. That was a warm, beautiful summer, and the huckleberries hung big and ripe from the bushes. I shouldn’t have left the trail, though. I didn’t realize I was heading deeper and deeper into the forest away from the trail until I finished my last handful of berries and couldn’t find another bush. I looked up and found myself surrounded by huge, old growth trees, and the trail nowhere to be seen.”
“Oh no,” I said.
“I started to panic. I couldn’t see the trail. I couldn’t hear or see my parents. All I saw was the dark forest all around me.”
The story unsettled me. Or maybe it was just Alan.
“There was a foul animal smell that wafted through the air toward me. When I looked up, I could see his huge darkness, hidden in the shadows. He was so effing tall, when he took a step it thumped into the ground loudly. There was a low, heavy breathing or growling. I saw small birds and squirrels hurry away from the dark mass between the trees, frightened by the smell and the sound.”
“Oh my god, what did you do?” I asked, a pained expression on my face as I listened.
“I screamed,” he said, shoving some tall bushes out of his way with his long walking stick.
“I screamed and ran as fast as I could. I tripped over a fallen branch and rolled down a ravine. My arms and legs were scratched by rocks and plants, and I was knocked out as my head hit a rock. I woke up in the hospital.”
“Holy shit,” I said.
“Yeah,” Alan said as we both processed his story. I took a few deep breaths, breathed in the smell of pine and listened to birds chirp in the trees as Alan cleared out an area on the ground he thought would work near a small creek.
It had become clear that the low-budget, unprofessional aspects of this expedition annoyed Alan. Three areas were picked to place different fruit, two of them areas where there was little ground vegetation and some soft wet soil for capturing tracks. Alan and Phil weren’t happy with the locations, and no one gave them much input into the matter.
Bob was unhelpful, and did not seem like he knew what he was doing, especially when it came to Bigfoot. He did know the outdoors, though, and he seemed a born leader despite his flaws. He went out that afternoon with Phil and Alan to set up the trail cameras near the chosen spots. Now we would wait and see what we managed to lure out of the forest.
Tonight, Bob and George drank Scotch again by the campfire while Sumalee painted her toenails and Pam roasted marshmallows. Bob regaled us with tales of his adventures.
“Yeah, I was a bush pilot in Alaska for quite a few years,” he said, taking a long drink from his flask. “For the last six or so years I’ve been in Madagascar, working for two medical centers that provide free health care to people living in remote areas. I even delivered a baby once…”
“Do you have medical training or experience?” Nate asked, concerned about Bob as a midwife.
“I do now!” he laughed.
We stayed until he pulled up pics on his phone.
Nate and I joined Craig and the nerds up on a rocky ledge above the campsite as Phil had heard something. As we sat up on the ledge, looking out over the moonlit woods, we heard a loud animal shriek in the distance.
“What was that?” Nate asked.
“Doesn’t sound like any animal I’ve heard before,” Alan said.
That was debatable. It sounded like a bobcat/peacock to me.
“What could it be?” I asked.
“Bigfoot screams have been recorded before, and then compared to other common animal noises in the area they were heard. None of the other animal sounds matched the screams that were heard.”
“Who decided it must be Bigfoot screaming? Who says they even scream at all? That could be anything down there. It could be Sumalee for all we know,” Nate argued.
The men aren’t amused. They looked out at the forest, as if they could penetrate its secrets with their stares.
“If it doesn’t sound like any known animals, what does that leave?” Craig said, squinting in the darkness as if trying to turn into Clint Eastwood.
I jumped as the shriek came again. This time it sounded closer. Less like a peacock. The folks down by the fire looked up and turned toward the woods.
“I got it recorded,” Phil said, holding up a round microphone. He pushed his glasses up his nose and moved his arm around in the air. “Do you think he’ll do it again?”
“Maybe,” Alan said.
All three men were still and tense. Another shriek echoed out of the forest, and I saw bats flap out of the trees and into the sky.
“Definitely got that one,” Phil said. “This is amazing.”
“This is the first time I’ve heard him,” Craig rasped.
“But you’ve seen him before?” I asked.
“Oh yes,” Craig said.
“Do they have Sasquatch in Indiana?”
“No, I saw him here. Up in the Hoh rainforest on the peninsula,” Craig said. “It was only for a moment, a darkness moving through the dense forest. I was seized with fear. I knew I was in the presence of a monster. I knew I would never be the same.”
“We’re going to see him,” Alan said then with certainty. “We’ve seen the signs. We’ve heard his shrieks. It’s only a matter of time.”
______________
Bob is missing.
Sumalee told us that Bob had got up to pee for the fourth time around 3am and never came back.
“You didn’t start to wonder what was taking him so long?” Nate asked.
“I fell asleep again,” she said with a shrug.
We began searching the campsite area, then spread out further. Alan and Phil said they were going to check the closest fruit piles. They came running back some time later, telling the rest of us to come quickly.
Various woodland creatures had eaten much of the fruit during the night. There were tracks from black-tailed deer and possibly elk. Birds had pecked some of the remaining fruit. I stared down at a gnawed apple lying on its side in the mud. Next to it was one of Bob’s running shoes.
“Is there any evidence of an attack?” George asked, looking around the area.
“Nothing. There’s deer tracks, but nothing else,” Phil said.
“How did the shoe get here? It doesn’t look damaged or anything,” I asked.
“Maybe he took it off and left it here for us to find,” Pam said, chewing on a piece of jerky she pulled out of her blue fanny pack. She was having a blue day.
“What? Why?” Nate asked.
“Maybe a Bigfoot carried him off and he kicked off a shoe to help us track them down,” Alan said.
“Maybe Bob was drunk, took off his shoe as an offering to the wood nymph he was chasing, and fell off a cliff,” Nate said.
“All right, let’s just calm down,” George said, but he didn’t have the command of the group quite in the way Bob had. Perhaps he looked too old and feeble to be an expedition leader.
“We have to call the police,” Nate said.
“No signal,” Sumalee said.
“Besides, by the time the police got here that beast could have already eaten him!” Phil said.
“‘That beast’ you were trying to lure here with fruit last night?” Nate said.
“I think it’s pretty clear from the evidence that Sasquatch are omnivorous,” Phil said.
“No one until now expressed any ideas that Sasquatch was dangerous or prone to attacking people,” Nate pointed out. “And suddenly he’s a vicious predator?”
“How would you explain it?” Alan asked, his chest jutting out.
“Sasquatch would be at the bottom of my list of theories,” Nate argued. “Bob’s lost out here. He could be hurt. He could have fallen, or had a heart attack. He could have been attacked by a known predator, like a black bear.”
“Oh god,” Pam gasped.
The men looked up into the forest again, thinking of all the things that could have befallen their leader.
“No,” Craig said. “It was the ‘Squatch.”
We spread out into our natural pairings to search for Bob: me and Nate, Pam and George, Alan and Phil. Then there was Craig and Sumalee. Sumalee looked at Craig and made it clear she’d rather have anyone else as a partner. She looked over at me. I looked at Nate. Craig looked at the ground. I sighed and accepted my fate. I would go with Sumalee. Craig would go with Nate. Nate would resent me for the rest of the month, his eyes shooting daggers at me as he followed Craig into the wilderness.
Sumalee and I moved back out of the forest and headed for the rock outcroppings on the other side of the camp, since I knew Bob could be anywhere, not just bones in a Sasquatch den.
“Thank you so much, I hate that man,” Sumalee said as we climbed up the slope.
“Yeah, he’s kind of intense.”
“They all are. They’re awful. Wasting their time out here, looking for Bigfoot.”
I didn’t point out that technically Nate and I were doing the same thing, but with a lot more skepticism than the rest.
“Where do you think Bigfoot comes from?” I asked her, mostly to take her mind off Bob.
“I think he was created by white men,” she said, kicking a rock off the edge of the path.
“Sure, the concept…” I began.
“No, Bigfoot was born out of white men’s fears,” she said. “Made from the fears and anxiety they brought with them to the west as they wandered these big forests.”
I was quiet for a moment as I thought about Sumalee’s words.
“I’m starting to feel like I may have underestimated you a little,” I admitted.
“Now they hunt him,” she continued. “They think that if they can conquer the beast they created they can conquer their fear. But they can’t. And they won’t.”
We walked along in silence, climbed up on to a jagged peak and looked out over the forested valley below. She was right. These men were afraid, and they were determined. They could do anything. Their fear haunted the depths of the forest, taunting them and infuriating them, an endless cycle that would go on forever. What the hell were Nate and I doing out here? We needed to leave.
We found a scrap of Bob’s shorts down by a small river, west of the initial fruit pile, and that was all. Nate was silent and resentful towards me. We reluctantly agreed to spend one more night at camp; half of us hoped Bob would stumble back. He didn’t. The men continued to speculate about why Bigfoot would take him, how he took him, what he did with him. None of the other options presented by Nate were considered. I shook my head, amazed at their single-minded focus, the hold Sasquatch had over them. I packed up gear and ignored them.
We left in the morning, taking Sumalee back to town with us so we could report Bob missing to the Sheriff before the men came down and told them it was Bigfoot. I had to accept my relationship with Nate was over, and no amount of Bigfoot-hunting was going to save it. Acting out of desperation hadn’t helped anything. I sent Nate updates on any developments, but he never responded. They never found Bob. The men never found Sasquatch. They never conquered their fear. The forest keeps its secrets.