The Chimera Secret (20 page)

Lieutenant Watson looked at the old man. ‘So?’

Duran leaned on his cane and gestured around them at the dense forest.

‘All of the attacks that have gotten your friends here so excited have occurred above the six-thousand-foot line in these mountains. Nobody has been killed in the lowlands. Whatever it is
you people think you’re hunting for, this is where it lives.’

The scientists and soldiers had fallen back to listen, and Dana wasted no time.

‘Great, we should set up the motion sensors and cameras around any camp we make, and start working out a watch-rota.’

‘We’re not camping here,’ Kurt said. ‘We can make another five hundred feet before dark, enough to get us into some open country.’

Duran Wilkes shook his head.

‘You’ll lose the cover of the woods from the rain if you do that,’ he replied. ‘And it’s colder out in the open.’

Lieutenant Watson offered Duran a reassuring smile.

‘Clear fields of fire are more important to us than staying warm.’

‘Fields of fire against what?’ Duran asked. ‘You haven’t been attacked, so why would you need them?’

‘We’re done here,’ Kurt uttered before Watson could reply, and turned to the men. ‘Move out! Half an hour more, then we start looking for good ground for our
LUP.’

The soldiers responded instantly, melting back into their wedge formation and advancing through the forest.

‘What’s an LUP?’ Mary Wilkes asked as they began following the troops.

‘Laying-Up-Point,’ Ethan replied. ‘A camp, basically.’

‘Easier just to say that, isn’t it?’ she suggested.

They marched for another twenty minutes, climbing ever higher. Ethan could see that as they climbed so the forest began to thin out. The Gospel Hump Wilderness held the highest mountains north
of the Salmon River and east of the Bitterroots on the Montana border. The dramatically varying elevations produced different climes depending on altitude, from deep fir, spruce and pine forest in
the depths of the creeks and valleys to permafrost on the lonely, high peaks. There was an altitude, usually referred to as the treeline, above which permafrost, snow and lack of soil prevented
trees from growing. Anything above the treeline was essentially a dead zone, used by most animals only to traverse from one hunting or feeding ground to another, or in desperate times to hide or
forage.

The last of the feeble light was fading as the soldiers gathered on a narrow strip of clear ground between ranks of spruce that stretched into the night on either side of them. In the distance
to his right, Ethan could just about distinguish clouds between the trees where the edge of the hillside fell away toward the valleys below. To his left, the forest was as dense and dark as
anything he’d envisioned as a child reading
Grimm’s Fairy Tales
.

‘We’ll set up here,’ Lieutenant Watson announced. ‘Jenkins, Klein and Simmons, you’re on watch for the first stretch, three-point placing from north. Kurt, Milner,
on me. The rest of you get some shut-eye before the next watch.’

Three of the soldiers peeled away without a sound and vanished into the blackness of the night as the remaining infantrymen began unpacking equipment from their heavy bergens.

‘Looks like we’re camping here then,’ Ethan said, and dumped his bergen onto the damp, springy moss of the forest floor.

Lopez dropped her own burden miserably down alongside his and scanned the forest around them. The haunting darkness was reflected in her eyes as she looked at Ethan.

‘Jesus, this place scares the crap out of me.’

Duran and Mary Wilkes wasted no time in gathering firewood from the surrounding forest and piling it up in the center of the camp. Ethan noticed Duran building a simple pyramid
fire stack, but then laying a lattice of thicker sticks and branches alongside it: the pyramid structure would burn quickly to get the fire going, with the lattice placed into the flames afterward
to provide a longer burn.

Nearby, the warm orange glow of chemical camp lights that Dana Ford and Proctor had brought with them began illuminating their tiny patch of land as though they were the last humans alive on
earth.

Ethan and Lopez unpacked their tents alongside Duran and Mary Wilkes, joining up with Proctor and Dana’s tents to form a large semicircle facing the fire that Duran was now lighting in the
center of the camp.

‘I’m not happy about having a fire here,’ Sergeant Agry muttered as he walked past. ‘We’ll be visible for miles. You might as well let off fireworks.’

Duran gently nursed a cigarette lighter from his backpack, but did not look up from his work as he replied.

‘Didn’t realize we was hidin’ from anyone.’

‘Maybe your big monster,’ Kurt shot back, and glanced at Ethan with a sly grin. ‘Besides, the woods here are sodden with moisture. It’ll take a while to get that fire
going properly.’

Duran did not respond, so Kurt moved on by with a pack of motion-sensors tucked under his arm, heading out into the woods to set them up. Duran reached into his pocket and pulled out a dense wad
of fibers that Ethan recognized as having been peeled from the bark of a tree. Duran must have pocketed them to help them dry for kindling while they climbed up into the hills.

Duran used a cigarette lighter on the fibers, which caught quickly despite the damp conditions. He gently blew on the kindling until it glowed and flamed in his hands, holding it with all the
care one would hold a newborn baby, before he set it down deep inside the dense tower of thin, tall twigs he had constructed.

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.’

‘Then why let a human victim go?’ Lopez challenged. ‘Why kill two men with unbelievable savagery, then let the last one go?’

‘Efficiency,’ Dana Ford replied. ‘You’ve gotten one meal, the second one shoots you so you kill him in self-defense. The last meal runs away but is no threat and you can
only carry so much meat anyway. You let him go.’

Ethan smiled ruefully in the dark.

‘That would work, except that the creature took one of the bodies, left another there for us to find, and let the third victim go. Three different targets, three differing responses. You
know what that says to me? That whatever this thing is, it
thinks
.’

Kurt Agry’s voice called across the camp to them from where the soldiers were sitting.

‘Only thing it’s going to be thinking about is the end of its goddamned life, as seen down the barrel of my M-16!’

Two of the soldiers laughed and clashed palms. Agry grinned as he slowly polished the barrel of his rifle.