The Shadowkiller (46 page)

Then Ty went to the home of the owner of the woeful Cavalier, a thirty-eight-year-old divorced ER nurse with four kids, and profusely apologized for the theft. She calmly reassured Ty that she understood, which was easy to do given that Ty Greenwood had recently been featured on the covers of
Time, Newsweek, Life,
and three hundred or so other publications worldwide. But she was speechless when Ty handed her the keys to his fairly new Suburban along with a check for $100,000. “Your car saved my family” were the only words he could choke out as they hugged.

With Ronnie's blessing, Ty mulled over the notion of taking an active role in the exploration of unexplained phenomena around the world but finally dismissed it. He knew the most important job he could have would be watching his kids grow up, so he decided to stay home, do research, and read and write. He had some hard moments, even days, suffering the effects of alcohol and OxyContin withdrawal, but he was under a doctor's care and through his own iron will would be healthy again.

During the vacation Ty and Ronnie agreed to seek therapy, both together and individually. There were many walls that needed to come down and they understood the necessity of an experienced guide to help tumble them.

While the earth's media co-opted Ty's photos in their articles, Ty actually passed on all offers for direct interviews—from magazines to Barbara Walters—save for one. Turning his back on the giants of the news and entertainment world, Ty gave his only interview to his new friend, John Baxter, publisher of the
Snohomish Daily News.

As part of her job of sorting through the wreckage, Ronnie checked all the computers in the house and ran diagnostics to make sure they were working properly. Calling up Ty's files, she was about to launch her damage-checking software when she noticed the file “Why I Killed Myself.” Some mental backtracking on the entry date reminded her it was the morning he had driven off in his Mercedes. And the title told her much.

Her fingers kissed a couple of keys and highlighted the file line item. As she poised her digit on the delete key, she hesitated. She knew Ty had created the file for her to discover; she just knew him too well. So much had happened since and she knew the file was old history, written by a very different Ty Greenwood. But there was curiosity, about the whats, the whys, and maybe even the hows. Suddenly, with a terrible thought of the latter, she quickly stroked the key, and the file—and that chapter in their life—was gone.

“Hey,” came that soft southern vocal coloration,“what's up?”

Ronnie turned fast and guiltily got up from the chair. “Oh, nothing,” she said to Ty, “just running diagnostics. Your computer's okay.”

Ty felt Ronnie's heart beating rapidly as he took her in his arms. He understood they were all still suffering from the effects of the attack. Then his eye caught the screen. Though she'd quit the directory, he remembered that one file from what seemed like so long ago. For a second he wondered if Ronnie had read it, but he knew his wife too well. It wouldn't have mattered to him if she had, because things were okay now.

They kissed and Ronnie pulled back slightly, her face suddenly concerned.

“Where are the kids?” she asked. She hadn't seen them in the last hour, so consumed was she with the cleanup. It was a question both of them had asked a lot lately, almost unconsciously. Ty looked into her eyes and smiled. For the first time in a long time Ronnie saw that strong, loving sunshine in the face of her man, the old Ty. He was back, his shoulders broad again. He kissed her softly, then put his hand to her head, bringing their cheeks together.

“Safe,” he assured her. “They're safe.”

Doris Campbell had not slept well since losing Ben. But it was not because she worried about her future. Ben had secretly salted money away over the years, and between it and his insurance Doris was set for the rest of her days. Ben had also arranged for an account that would pay for everything, including her Home Shopping Channel bills (“Within reason,” said the lawyer). But her zest for TV shopping had waned after she'd lost the most important thing in her life.

Turning in to bed early, Doris tossed and turned but sometime around midnight passed into dreamland. So it was a surprise to hear that familiar voice, gentle but strong and very real, whisper in her ear. A sleep-dazed Doris bolted upright, the murky room's shadows playing tricks on her: a familiar tall, lanky shape appeared at the foot of her bed.

“Benny?” she said, rubbing her eyes to focus yet knowing it couldn't be. “Benny?”

Then it was gone.

Doris sat in the same place for a few moments, but nothing else happened. She knew those whispered words she imagined she'd heard had been just a wishful dream. She'd never really had the chance to say good-bye. Feeling sad, a little empty, Doris finally gave up and laid her head back on the pillow. His passing caused her more pain than she had ever felt. She had been balming her other hurt for years with shopping, but now, without him, she had to stand on her own. It scared her but she had courage. Closing her eyes, she knew Benny had always been her crutch, and although he was gone, she still felt his strength.

As she was regretting losing her chance to tell him good-bye…

She felt a weathered old hand lovingly brush her face. She didn't need to open her eyes, she knew that touch.

“Love you too,” she answered the whispered words, then fell into peaceful sleep.

On a sunny Friday afternoon, October 20, 1967, an ex–rodeo rider named Roger Patterson, along with another cowboy named Bob Gimlin, were guiding their horses through a remote creek bed near Bluff Creek, in northwestern California's Humboldt County, twenty miles from the Pacific Ocean. Something spooked their mounts and the men were thrown to the ground. As a large, hairy black creature strode away from them, Patterson juggled his sixteen-millimeter camera and captured some of the most famous footage ever recorded.

The film was analyzed frame by frame at the time by the special effects department of Universal Studios. Their professional opinions were that the overall effect, from the sheen of the multicolored hair to the cords and sheets of musculature undulating under that hair, could not possibly have been man-made, given the limited technology of the day, even with an unlimited budget. Since then many experts have deconstructed and analyzed the film, most recently by using the latest computer technology. All acknowledge that it is a virtual impossibility that the film was faked and that the subject was simply a man in a fur suit. In 1969, Canadian John Green, a former journalist and still one of the most respected of Bigfoot investigators, showed an executive at Disney the film and was told essentially the same thing.

So, does a North American great ape exist? And if it does, the natural follow-up question is What is it? As a boy growing up in Oregon, I had a fascination with this uncatalogued hominid that began when my parents read me a series of newspaper reports on the bizarre encounters of a road-building crew at a remote location in the mountains of northern California. The men reported a number of inexplicable occurrences over several evenings. After the workers turned in for the night, various items were vandalized, including a three-hundred-pound oil drum—
carried half a mile and hurled into a ravine—and the tire of an earthmover, weighing nearly eight hundred pounds, that was rolled and hefted hundreds of yards, then tossed like a child's toy into a ditch.

The nightly visitors to the road-building crew also disturbed other equipment and, in each instance, the morning light revealed enormous humanlike footprints peppering the dust around their encampment. The possibility that the events were hoaxes was eventually dismissed given the sheer weight of the items that had been disturbed.
¹

I was particularly impressed then, as I am even now, at these spectacular demonstrations of brawn. In the last few years I've occasionally watched the World's Strongest Man Competition on ESPN, and I think of that earthmover tire back then—so effortlessly carried and rolled—as I watch men who are literally the strongest of their species exerting themselves to their limits to merely tip the same item end over end. Eventually, when people began to accept that perhaps something odd was indeed afoot, one proposed answer was that the crew may have encroached on the territory of enormous unknown beings who wanted them gone.

Not long after I discovered Bigfoot, I learned that a team led by New Zealand's Sir Edmund Hillary had just spent months searching Nepal and Tibet for the legendary yeti. To an eight-year-old kid the possibility that a different version of such a fantastic creature was practically in my own backyard was thrilling. It was then that I began a lifelong quest to determine whether these creatures existed, and if so, what they were. Years later when I was looking for a subject for my first novel, knowing what I did about Bigfoot, he seemed like a natural as an antagonist.

When I was all of nine, I went to my local library and checked out the book
Abominable Snowman: Legend Come to Life
by the celebrated British zoologist Ivan T. Sanderson.
²
Though much of Sanderson's technical rationale confounded my fourth-grade brain, I was mesmerized by the many anecdotes and eyewitness accounts. It was at that time that I realized these large creatures were being seen all over the world, and that the American and Canadian West counted more sightings than anywhere else. Incidentally, the term
Bigfoot
was coined by a newspaper reporter at the time of the Northern California sightings and I use that name for the sake of clarity.

The mythology of
every
North American Indian tribe includes a large creature, neither man nor animal, that walks the forest floor on two legs. Indians have carved uncounted thousands of totems in their honor. From Northern California through British Columbia and up into the Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Alaska, nearly every totem has a representation of this manlike being. According to scholars who have studied tribal mythology, these creatures from Native American legends and folk stories are seen almost exclusively as corporeal and not ethereal. That they are viewed in the same vein as other living entities such as eagles or wolves, as opposed to spirits or demons, is telling. Yet Native American tradition generally elevates these beings somewhat over their fellow forest dwellers in that they are ascribed traits that are more human than animal. Indian folklore—and in many cases, acknowledgment as fact within historical Indian culture—has these creatures possessing such advanced qualities as wisdom and even spirituality. They are often viewed as gentle protectors and the prospect of glimpsing or even encountering one is not to be feared. However, just as humans give each other mixed reviews, North American Indians acknowledge pretty matter-of-factly that while most of these beings are good, some are not so good.

A study of maps of the American and Canadian West show more than two thousand places with Native American names referring either directly or indirectly to Bigfoot. Interestingly, the locations mainly correspond to traversable ridgelines, natural pathways in the wilderness, or locations near water. Many contemporary Indians have reported sightings, but many more have not because the acceptance of the creature known as
Sasquatch, Oh-Mah, See-Ah-Tik, Tsunoqua,
or any of the hundreds of other names given it by Indians over the last several centuries, is part of their culture.

In the last century, many tens of thousands of sightings have not only been reported in western Canada, and the states of Washington, Oregon, and California, but large hominids have also been witnessed in every province of Canada, as well as in all other U.S. states except Hawaii. Widening that field, we find that such creatures have been encountered on all other continents save Antarctica. Are these encounters an elaborate and fairly consistent hallucination by many thousands of people in all walks of life, including teachers, doctors, scientists, law enforcement officers, and ministers? Perhaps. But recall William of Occam's philosophical proposition, Occam's razor, which posits that
given competing explanations for a specific thing, the simplest of those explanations, regardless of how improbable it may seem, is probably correct.
Perhaps they really did see what they thought they saw.

I've had the good fortune to spend a great deal of time in the wilds of Oregon and Washington. I've also traveled the length of British Columbia and have even spent a little time in the Yukon. I lived in Alaska for three years and most of it, like other parts of the West, is so remote, access is available only by aircraft. Those familiar with the forests of, let's say, the Northeast can scarcely imagine flying in a Cessna for an hour or two and seeing nothing but trees—not a building, not a telephone or power pole, not a person. The tracts of forest in the West may be diminishing but they are still vast, in the true sense of that word. Not to negate the majesty of the forests of Maine, or even New Jersey, those of the West have a different quality, a feeling of absolute isolation brought on simply by the great distances across them between towns and cities and the often complete lack of infrastructure.

And if much of the American West is isolated, then Canada is in its own special category. Most of Canada's thirty-some million people live within 150 miles of the U.S. border, yet Canada's area is considerably larger than the contiguous U.S. Much of northern Canada is uninhabited. And in the sparsely inhabited areas of the provinces, sightings of large hairy manlike beings are commonplace, particularly from western Manitoba through the Plains and Rocky Mountain provinces. Could a North American great ape exist in such remote stretches of wilderness? It would have food aplenty and, having evolved into a creature of northern climes in the past forty or fifty thousand years (since crossing from Asia over the land bridge that existed between what is now Russia and Alaska) it would, it seems, be right in its element. The only possible evidence of humans most of these isolated upper primates would have would probably be the rare jet contrail or satellite skimming by in the night sky, neither of which they would equate with a related race of beings.

Since the nineteenth century, curiosity about these unknown hominids has been rising. As America expanded to the west, amazing stories trickled out that caught the attention of eastern Americans and Europeans. During Mac Schneider's research to educate himself about unknown hominids, the story that gives him the heebie-jeebies really did come from Theodore Roosevelt's 1893 book
The Wilderness Hunter,
an account told to him by the old trapper named Bauman. A wild and lonely place even now, the head of Idaho's Wisdom River in the 1840s was isolated in a way most inhabitants of our modern world cannot begin to understand. Quite the woodsman himself, Roosevelt felt the fear in the old trapper's words and had no doubts about the veracity of Bauman's frightening account.

Yet another celebrated Bigfoot incident occurred at the base of Washington state's Mount St. Helens. In the 1880s miners working on its flank observed, then shot at and apparently wounded a “huge, hairy beast.” Later a group of such creatures returned and rained rocks and boulders onto the miners' cabin. The creatures eventually left, but the miners were so shaken, they abandoned their site. The miners' account tends to support the idea that the rock-throwing creatures were merely retaliating over the unprovoked aggression by the gun-toting humans.

In a tribute to Teddy Roosevelt's recount of Bauman's tale, I placed Ty's first encounter in Idaho. And Idaho has personal significance for me as well. During summer break from college, one night my girlfriend and I were camping by a babbling brook in the mountains of northwestern Idaho. A few hours after turning in, I awoke and sensed a presence near our tent. Just then something passed by us. The little hillock we had pitched our tent on was maybe three feet above the stream and consisted of packed pine needles and forest duff. Whatever walked next to our tent gently vibrated the soft, spongy ground with the magnitude of a horse. A stench wafted over the cool night air through our tent flap, then vanished. Although I knew whatever it was had moved on, I lay there for several minutes listening to make sure it was gone. Despite our vulnerability and the disturbing circumstance of having something so large right next to us, I had no fear. I am not sure what it was but I have my suspicions.

In this book I gave the Shadowkiller the ability to sense the emotions, and even thoughts, of humans. How much do we really know about psychic energy or such seemingly metaphysical manifestations? Having read some credible accounts that seemed to support this theory, as well as legitimate speculation by various scientists and investigators in relation to Bigfoot, I also drew on two events in my life as the basis for this phenomenon in the book. One was the incident in Idaho. I felt no fear at that time, yet such an encounter should have left me scared witless. Instead I was merely fascinated. Is it that I just have nerves of steel? No. To wit: drivers using BlackBerrys scare the crap out me. Maybe I'm reading something into this? Could I have merely speculated, years later, that whatever it was that passed me in the night gave off good vibes like a friendly cruise ship flashing a welcome? Perhaps. But the other event was just the opposite.

Many years ago while driving high in the mountains of Oregon, my family pulled off to the side of a logging road to enjoy the spectacular mountain vista before us. My sister and I played by the car as my parents stepped to the edge of the road to have a look. My folks tell me they suddenly had the most uncomfortable feeling, as if something were watching them. But it was more than that. They both told me the feeling of alarm was palpable, as if their senses were telling them to get the hell out of there. They quickly gathered us up and drove away. I never heard that story until I was well into adulthood. And if you knew my parents, you'd understand they are hardly the types to be alarmed, even in the face of danger. My dad did a horrendous tour in the field artillery in the South Pacific in WWII and is an extremely calm and rational guy. My mom grew up on a ranch in southern Oregon and handled a rifle at six. In both cases, what was it?