Wide Atlantic Weird is an on-going collection of stories that comment on the connections between Ireland and America - in particular, the shared weirdness that I have found in both cultures. I was going through a fairly big Sasquatch phase when I wrote this one. I've always been fascinated by the big guy, ever since I collected potboiler books of 'the unexplained' edited by Colin Wilson when I was a kid. In college, I got to do a bit of travellling and camping in California and Oregon, and this inspired this little tale...
(Received via email, August 2018)
Hi Cian,
Call me Claire Redfield. I’m a fan of the show. I’m
especially enjoying the listener-submitted stories, and I have a story myself
that I think will be suitable for inclusion, if you can bring yourself to
believe it.
In late August 2013, I was just out of college, and I was
hiking a section of the famous Pacific Crest Trail. The year before, I had read
Wild by Cheryl Strayed, and like many
others, I was inspired to lace up a pair of boots and follow her out into the
wilderness. Also like many others, I had never even heard of the PCT before
reading the book, and I was probably a bit under-prepared for the reality of
it. Especially considering I’m from Wicklow town, where the biggest wilderness
I had access to was the Wicklow mountains. And while it’s just possible to get
lost in the those mountains (a small number of people do every year), it’s
difficult to feel that the area is big enough to hide anything from humanity.
Washington State, of course, is different. Not being too
ambitious, my plan was to spend simply ten days trekking through Washington’s
Eagle Cap Wilderness, a solo through-hike. I didn’t have too much time, as I
was on holiday from my job in Ireland, but I wanted to sample some real wilderness. Eagle Cap stretches for
literally hundreds of thousands of acres, but I hit the maps, and chose a route
that allowed me to reach the trail from the highway, hike for just over a week,
and get back to civilisation easily after that.
But even this minor section of the PCT took me through the
kind of open spaces I had no idea could exist. Within two days I broke out of
the green tunnel of forest that had encased me, and first saw the pine-clad
slopes of Caribous Canyon and the chalky peaks of Sawtooth Ridge. Emerging onto
a trail that ran alongside a vast cliff, I yelled joyfully, hearing my words
roll down to the tiny river far below, and up the forested hills, and come
right back to my ear.
I saw many incredible things over the next week, but it was
the sounds of the wild that really gripped my imagination. Here there were no
engines, no electronic hum or hiss. Instead, the roar of a creek or the night
howls of a distant wolf reverberated for miles, with no man-made sound
pollution to muddy the aural map of the landscape.
By day eight, when I landed badly on my left ankle clearing
a steep bluff, and decided it was best to head back to the highway a couple of
days early, I was not too disappointed. I’d seen and heard all that I had hoped
to, and I had stories and adventures in my head that I knew I’d never forget.
According to the map, there was an old logging trail that would get me back to
the road in about half a day.
Of course, walking with a swollen ankle turned out to be
tougher than I’d hoped. It was getting dusky by the time I made it to the
highway. The mosquitos were out and the crickets were chirping, and though I
was closer to civilisation than I had been in a week, my sense of danger was
suddenly alerted. I was a woman travelling alone, after all, and I hadn’t
hitchhiked before. I wished it hadn’t been so dark, or so late. The road was
deserted; I couldn’t be fussy about which ride to take. I turned on my mobile,
which had been dormant for the last week. Even here by the main road, there was
no signal. If I got into trouble -
I hadn’t had very long to worry about this when a pair of
headlights pierced the gathering gloom. It was a pickup truck; the kind you
really don’t want stopping for you at night. At first it didn’t look as though
it was going to slow down, in fact it blew right past me before juddering to
halt. After a moment’s hesitation, I picked up my backpack and strolled towards
the vehicle. What choice did I have?
I heard angry words from within the cab as I approached. Two
men were arguing. It sounded as though one of them hadn’t wanted to stop for
me. I got closer, and I saw that they were an older man with a beard, and a
younger man who was probably his son. Both were wearing trucker hats and
flannels: the kind of guys you really don’t want stopping for you at night. In
the back of the truck was something bulky and dark, covered with a tarp. As I
approached, I noticed something long sticking out from under the tarp.
A foot. A big ’ol
foot, with five splayed toes, shining in the moonlight.
I knew now that something was very wrong. A yell escaped
from my mouth as I stepped backwards. I leaned on my bad ankle. A wave of pain
shot through me and I almost fell over. The cab door swung open and the younger
man, his eyes wild, charged me, wrapped his arms around me. I screamed, but
pain and surprise prevented me from taking any more effective action.
The man shoved me into the cab, bashing my head off the side
of the door and squeezed in beside me. Inside, it stank like an abbatoir. Both
of them yelled; the door was slammed shut and the older man gunned the engine.
And then something huge and monstrous came out of the woods
towards the truck, its claws stretched out towards the window, inches from my
face, and the lonely road was filled with a sound that I’ll never forget. A
roar that was neither beast nor man. I saw its furious face for a second, then
we were away, and the white lines of the road flew under us, taking us farther
and farther from that horror.
I screamed and sobbed until my heart stopped hammering, and
I realised that the two men had saved me. They told me that I was in no danger.
The next town was fifty miles away; we’d be there in a little while. They’d
find a motel, or a hospital if I needed one. They were Taylor and his son Buck.
They were locals, just back from a hunting expedition. It was clear from my
accent that I wasn’t from around here, so what in the hell had I been doing out
alone in the woods like that?
I started to explain, my sense of normality returning, and
then I remembered the monster, the shape from the woods, and I grew excited.
That hadn’t been a moose, or a bear, or any such thing. It was bigfoot. The big guy himself! Hell, we’d
just had a damn sasquatch encounter, and we’d live to tell the tale. Surely, I
said, that was something worth getting pumped about.
But my two rescuers remained subdued. And then I remembered
the foot sticking out of the back of the truck. The absurdly big foot.
You killed one, I whispered.
They explained. Just an hour before they met me, they had
been returning from a two-day hunting trip in the Eagle Cap mountains. In the
early evening gloom, something big had run out in front of their truck, denting
the fender pretty bad, but doing more damage to itself. It stumbled about on
the road, bleeding from its forehead, then collapsed. They measured it: the
thing was eight feet tall. It was broadly simian, and covered with brown hair,
but it had a wide forehead like a man, and its eyes held the light of an
intelligent creature before they went out forever. Choking on the stench, I
reached behind me and lifted the tarp a fraction. There wasn’t much space to
move, but I caught a glimpse of a hairy, domed skull.
For a moment I was sad, but a new thought filled me with
excitement. This was huge, I told the others. You’ve got a bigfoot body. They
were going to be the ones to finally prove the existence of this mythical
creature. And I was a part of their story. Everyone in the world was going to
want to hear about this. We could be famous.
I couldn’t believe
it. After all the years of speculation. All the hoaxes, faked footprints,
blurry 8mm film-reels. After all the dumb TV shows about middle-aged guys
scaring each other in the woods, knocking sticks against trees and finding
nothing. Earlier, before my hike, I had met a hunter who told me why he didn’t
believe in the Big Guy: because though parts of the Pacific Northwest seemed remote, the truth was every inch
of it had been picked over by hunters and rangers at one time or another, and
we’d never even found so much as a skull. Now these two guys had actually had a
corpse in the back of their truck. It was earth-shaking.
Only, why didn’t they seem as cheerful about this as I was?
Because, Buck said when I asked, we’re not out of the woods yet, miss. Taylor squeezed the accelerator,
kept his eyes on the black road. And a chilling roar floated down from the
mountain, through the trees, and washed over us. My heart drummed. The sound
was primeval. It was the sound of a vast wilderness that didn’t care about man
and his doings. It was the sound of unbroken forests and wild, jagged peaks. It
was anguish and hatred.
It was revenge.
‘That’s the third one’, said Taylor. ‘First one happened
after we killed this thing. There was more of them out there, in the trees, and
we heard them roar then. That was twenty miles back. We heard another one just
before we picked you up.’
I gasped. ‘That’s why it was there, waiting.’
‘Yes,’ Buck said. ‘Now we’ve heard it again. They’re
communicating. Reckon they stand on a ridge somewhere, bellow as loud as they
can, and on the next ridge over, there’s another one, listening to the signal.
Sound carries up here. There’s no cars or skyscrapers or machines, only the
sounds of nature. Maybe one can send a message to another, ten or twenty miles away.
Who knows.’
‘There could be a whole network,’ I said, and at that moment
an answering howl from the other side of the road turned our blood to ice. Then
another, and another, till it seemed that the unseen hills all about us were
thick with the creatures.
A sick feeling in the pit of my stomach finally turned into
a rational thought. ‘The message is spreading faster than we’re travelling,’ I
said, gasping, 'they’re going to cut us off.’
The words were hardly out of my mouth before Taylor slammed
on the brakes. The truck was forced into a spin. The world tilted with a jolt.
I banged my head off the dashboard. Taylor and Buck groaned: they were alive,
but pretty smashed-up. One wheel still spun, squeaking on a bent axel. I saw
what had caused Taylor to jam on: a row of silhouettes blocking the road,
enormous, dome-headed shapes, ten or more of them. I saw them through blurry,
teary eyes, and through the cracked window of a vehicle turned sideways. A
smell like wet moss and grubs and dewy camping mornings crept in through the
broken glass. They moved as though in slow motion, with the artless grace of
animals. Some of them were small, shorter than me, and these younger ones
scrambled towards us first. I could not see their faces, but I heard huge
nostrils sniffing, grunting. The smashed cab rattled where their hands shook
it. This was it. Our time was up. We knew the truth, and we were about to take
it to our graves, our heads crushed by beings who could communicate over
hundreds of miles of forest faster than we could –
A roar shook the truck. One of the animals was closer that I
had thought. In fact, it sounded as though it was inside. Then a tuft of putrid hair filled my mouth as a gigantic
elbow pistoned, attached to a thrashing arm. The beast from the back of the car
bellowed again, so loud this time it felt as though it was rattling every tooth
in my head. It was alive. In the
confined space, the stench was unbearable. The arm plowed upwards, tearing the
metal like a knife through tinfoil. Injured, but furious beyond measure, the
nightmare beast pulled itself through the hole. All I could see was a heavy
brown bulk. The side of the truck crumpled as it crawled out, and I squashed
myself further into a corner to avoid being flattened.
Outside, a chorus of hoots and growls filled the night air.
Feet scraped, inhuman voices bellowed. And, I swear to God, someone or
something knocked on a treetrunk with
a stick. Maybe those middle-aged idiots
were onto something all along. The racket reached a frenzy, then a drop of rain
splashed my face, and quickly became a torrent, the kind of rainstorm the
Pacific Northwest is famous for. Soon I couldn’t hear anything except the hiss
of the rain. Even when it had finished, and silence yawned outside in the dark
woods, I waited a long time before I dared to call for the others, and climbed
out of the wrecked truck.
Turned out we were all OK, though none of us were too
sprightly getting out of there. The rain had turned the forest floor on either
side of the road to mud, but we found a single footprint and took some pictures
of it. We got out of there, limping and stopping frequently. About six in the
morning, a passing Chrysler picked us up. We told the driver we’d been in a
wreck, didn’t say much about anything else.
I never told anyone about what happened. My own pictures of
the footprint didn’t turn out so good. Blurry, like all the best bigfoot
pictures, I guess. I took contact details for Taylor and Buck, said I’d keep in
touch, but never did. A couple weeks later I flew back to Ireland, and my
bigfoot adventure seemed pretty irrelevant from then on. I occasionally check
out bigfooter websites: the communities seem to vary between well-meaning and
idiotic, though none of them strike me as being particularly well-informed.
Taylor and Buck have posted on the message boards of some of the bigger sites,
and I’ve seen a couple videos on Youtube ‘debunking’ their photographs of the
corpse and the footprints. I’m sure you can find them if you look. And if
you’re ever in the Pacific Northwest, be nice to any strange creatures you meet
there – in case they call their friends.
Love,
Claire Redfield
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