I went back down to the house, got in my old beat-up Chevy
pickup and drove to the Monroe Police Station, which in those
days was a dinky office next to the Fire Department. Felix
Sinsley was there, already swearing out charges against me:
assault and battery, theft, anything he could think of.
So I swore out the counter charges: murder, trespassing and
threatening me with a deadly weapon, etc. The police didn't
know quite what to do in the situation, not certain if killing a
sasquatch was actually "murder" or not, and most of all skeptical
that such a thing even existed.
The cops seemed to suspect that Sinsley and I were attempting to
pull off a Bigfoot hoax together. Or that we were both crazy.
But there was definitely a feeling that if this WAS real, Sinsley
might have done a bad thing, legal or not. The police were not
being friendly to him. "Bigfoot" is a popular mythic character
in the Pacific Northwest. Sinsley soon became less vociferous,
more defensive.
I was hoping to keep it all as quiet as possible, but the cops
started making phone calls, to the Snohomish County Sheriff, the
Monroe Fire Brigade, the local newspaper, King TV, their friends,
so the word was out. We ended up driving back out to the scene
of the crime in a convoy of about 8 vehicles.
But first I too made a call: to the Biology Department at the
University of Washington. I wasn't going to let Sinsley claim
the sasquatch as his prize and take it away to earn money off
it, or stuff it and put it on display. She was still on my land
and I was claiming ownership, at least until I could get the
body into the hands of some responsible biologists or zoologists.
Quickly, before there was too much deterioration of tissue.
It took me a few minutes to convince anyone on the other end that
we were really and truly about to bring in a dead Bigfoot, but
when the Sheriff confirmed my story, they promised to send a team
and refrigeration equipment out to Monroe at once.
As yet, nobody had mentioned the runaway baby sasquatch. I
certainly wasn't going to, not wanting to set off a massive Baby
Bigfoot Hunt, although I'd feared that Sinsley had already done
so before I'd arrived at the station. But he never said a word
about it either, for reasons of his own.
One deputy Sheriff called Bud said, "The body won't be there."
Sinsley accused him of calling us liars, as if he and I were
partners in the telling of the story, to which the deputy
replied, "Oh, I believe you--I believe in Bigfoot! But they've
been shot before and the body is always gone when you go back...
I guess the other Bigfeet come and spirit it away, like to the
Elephant's Burial Ground, y'know."
What he said was consistent with other sasquatch stories I had
heard. One of the most valid arguments against the existence of
Bigfoot had always been that no bodies were ever found--neither
recent nor ancient, no graves, no bones, no traces at all.
So even Sinsley and I were wondering if the body would still be
there or not, as we trudged up the hill to the clearing. Just
before we arrived, Ed the deputy said once again, "Just watch,
it'll be gone."
But she lay there still: huge, magnificent and dead. Her people
had not come for her. I felt sorry about that for her, as if she
had deserved better, but relieved that my own story had proof to
back it up.
The deputy was confused. He had believed our story before, but
now he thought the body must be a hoax. This broke all the rules
of Bigfoot lore, the bodies were always gone.
The other men in the retrieval party were also stunned by what
they saw, really the first concrete evidence of the existence of
that mythic creature. They were also stunned by the smell: most
had to cover their noses with a cloth, one man vomited.
Sinsley tried to act proud of his achievement, but whether it was
a good thing or not was widely disputed. Some, as myself, saw
it as a violation of nature, or even agreed with me that it was
murder; others considered it a fantastic scientific find; and
some thought it was just one hell of a hunting trophy.
There were many of us and it took most of us to roll the body
onto a stretcher and bear it down to the road. We brought the
body back in a pickup truck and parked in front of the police
station, where it drew a crowd of monster-seekers.
By that time it was already old news: "somebody got hisself a
Bigfoot!" Television cameras arrived among all the professional
and amateur photographers taking countless photographs, it became
a media circus.
The UW's ambulance and biology team was waiting for us, I acted
as if I had some authoritative connection with the UW and made
sure the body went into their ambulance, where they hurriedly
swathed it in plastic sheets packed with crushed ice. Nobody
argued about that, it seemed like the right thing to do, this was
a scientific find, after all.
By the time Sinsley was aware that he was losing his "catch" it
was firmly in the possession of the scientific community and
they weren't about to give it back. I had meanwhile signed a
waiver that the "specimen" found on my property be bequeathed to
science, so they even had documentation.
There was a half hour while people photographed and gawked, then
the UW team insisted that they had to get the body to the campus
biology lab for deep freezing as quickly as possible, they drove
off to Seattle and the local show was over.
But the Media Event had just begun. The female sasquatch was
7 feet 2 inches tall and 393 pounds, if you're interested. It
was in all the papers, evening news, along with my name and
Sinsley's. I let him have all the credit for the kill--he was
worried that I wouldn't.
The legal questions became even more muddled in the pandemonium,
so finally the police just took our names and addresses and sent
us home.
I was living in the Seattle University District just then, so I
had almost an hour's drive home. It was just after midnight when
I arrived, it had been a long day. Elaine was there, just home
herself from the evening shift--she was a computer systems analyst
for Boeing Aviation in Renton, where there had been lots of night
work at that time.
Elaine and I had been living together for more than a year and
were still the most compatible couple we had ever heard of, so
neither one of us wanted to spoil it by getting married. We were
planning to move out to the house on the land when I got it ready
to live in.
As I came in the door she turned to look at me. "Woah, you look
beat, what's happened?" Our eyes met, locked.
And WHAM, the déjà vu again: her eyes, translucent golden brown
irises, cautiously curious. The sasquatch mother, Elaine, same eyes.
I simply froze, my heart stopped, time stood still, pick your cliché,
I was stunned.
She frowned, asked "What is it?" and the moment passed. I could
see that Elaine's eyes were nothing like a sasquatches...just
the color maybe.
So I told her about the incidents of the day. She was horrified,
amazed, etc, but her first concern was: "What about the baby
sasquatch?" Elaine had always been a dedicated animal lover.
"I don't know," I told her, "I searched for it, didn't find a
sign. And then all those police and people out there probably
scared it out of there for good."
"Do you think it can care for itself?"
"Really don't know. It was pretty young, one or two years old
maybe."
"Let's go now," she insisted.
I was tired. Physically beaten up and worn out and emotionally
weary of this whole thing, so I wanted to resist, but instead
said, "Right." Call it another whim.
We grabbed sleeping bags, flashlights, some food, got into the
car and drove back to the house in the woods in the middle of
the night.
There had always been something magical about our relationship
from the very start. For example, neither of us knew how we
had met--or rather, how it was that we woke up together inside
one sleeping bag, actually our own two bags zipped together,
without either of us remembering having met the night before.
It was at a Rainbow Festival on the Olympic Peninsula, one of
those huge counterculture gatherings of musicians and artists
and vegetarians and yogis and free spirits. We had each come
with friends and neither of us had been drunk or stoned--okay,
maybe a little high, but definitely not blasted, not blacked
out. But no one believes us about that.
We were lying outdoors, along with many other people, since it
had been a nice warm summer night. We awakened together to a
spectacular sunrise over the Cascade Mountain Range, cuddled up
naked inside our common sleeping bag and that seemed to be the
most natural thing in the world until we realized that we were
actually total strangers.
We looked at each other in amazement, absolute bewilderment, but
both liked what we saw, each liked being where we were. And then
saw that we DID know each other--we'd just never met before.
That was my first déjà vu with those golden brown eyes. So we
made love, later we introduced ourselves and have been together
ever since.
We often still talk about that because it was so strange: Destiny In
Action? Reincarnation? Karass? Conspiracy? We had been given
each other. We were a perfect couple and yet there had been no
courtship, no considered choices made, we hadn't even fallen in
love--we simply were in love when we awoke together. Like
Adam and Eve. A miracle. A mystery.
And then the Land, the House! Also simply given to us, another
bizarre "lucky coincidence" profoundly affecting our lives, taking
us in a direction we had never thought to go. We had been looking
for property out of the city, but couldn't find anything we wanted.
And then my crazy hermit uncle, Old Wallace, showed up at a
family gathering and just gave us the century-old log cabin and 80
acres. He hadn't lived in it for 20 years but wouldn't sell it and
we couldn't sell it either, that was the deal. We accepted with
vast humility.
Upon arrival we hiked up through the woods in the dark, following
the creek with our flashlights, up the hill to the meadow.
There was no baby sasquatch waiting for us there. Only the
red-stained grass where his mother had died. But that was what
we expected as long as we used flashlights, so we rolled out our
sleeping bags and lay down under a cloudy skies with some stars.
At least it wasn't drizzling then.
"Maybe we should call to it, let it know we're here to help it,"
she whispered after we had waited and listened for an hour.
"Probably just scare it farther away if it heard voices speaking
White Man's Forked Tongue."
"You don't speak any sasquatchese, by any chance?" She was being
funny, of course. But that's when it hit me:
"Uh...holy shit, yes I do! One word: the kid's name!"
"Huh?"
"D'adam, da dam, da adam, something like that. The mother said
it twice: once calling the child to her; and again when she seemed
to be introducing it to me."
"You're kidding! D'adam? Okay..."
She raised her face to the night and called that word out loud,
again and again. So did I, for half an hour.
Nothing. Then we waited. I slept, but Elaine did not.
She woke me silently before dawn, to hear the not-so-distant sound
of a child crying. It was a wheezing sound, but unmistakably
expressing grief and fear and loneliness. We waited carefully
as the sound came nearer.
Then I could smell it; that same stink as the mother, weak at
first, it had to be upwind from us. Then it sounded like the
little sasquatch was over by the apple tree, beside the water
where his mother had bathed him the day before.
The sky was becoming blue instead of black and then we saw him.
And he saw us. He gave a little gasp and was silent, ready to
run, frozen in a moment of indecision.
Elaine took a banana out of her backpack and held it up for the
little sasquatch to see, as if she were luring a monkey. "Come
here, little baby," she chanted very softly.
He had probably never seen a banana in his life and there were
too many apples on the ground for it to be desperate for any one
particular piece of fruit. It started to back away.
I called out softly my one sasquatch word: "D'adam." Then,
"come here to us, Adam," in my own language. He stopped and
looked at me, as if surprised.
"Why are you calling him Adam?" Elaine whispered.
"D'adam could be a phrase containing his name. I...feel
that his name is Adam."
Elaine called "Adam" as well. The little guy was looking back and
forth at us, then at the woods, back at us, unable to decide what
to do.
Elaine nodded and began to softly sing a lullaby to see if he
reacted. He did: his head bobbed up and down excitedly, but he
came no closer. It was I who reacted most, slapping my head and
exclaiming "Holy shit!" Elaine glanced at me wonderingly.
"Just got reminded," I whispered to her, "that his mother was also
singing to him. Just not that melody..."
"Well, I don't ACTUALLY know any Bigfoot lullabies," she said with
some sarcasm,
"It wasn't a lullaby...something else that sounded familiar..." I
wrenched my feeble brain for the memory that was evading me,
"...la laaa la la laaa...something like that."
"You're calling that familiar? Never heard of la laa...wait a
minute!" Something had obviously gone click inside that beautiful
head of hers. She faced the baby Bigfoot and began to sing:
"The hills are alive with the Sound of Mu-u-usic..."
I was about to say "that's just stupid, it couldn't be", when we
saw the baby come running toward us, crying "Mamamamama!" Elaine
was so startled that she stopped singing. The baby stopped running,
but waited.
"It works!" she said in amazement. "Oh crap, I don't know any
more lyrics..."
"I doubt that he does either, just sing la la la. Hurry, before
he changes his mind!"
Elaine has a nice singing voice and the clearing seemed to quiver
with it as the daylight waxed. Without drama the little sasquatch
resumed approaching us, waddling slowly but resolutely, as if
hypnotized by the sound of her voice. Music and savage beasts, it
may all be true.
Because the baby sasquatch bought it. He came all the way to us,
afraid but trusting. He was avoiding our eyes, as if pretending we
weren't really there and therefore no threat to him, but as long as
Elaine was singing he was listening intensely.
Elaine stopped singing and said "Hi, Adam" with a mother's voice.
The little guy stood there, perhaps deciding whether to run away
again or not, but stayed put. We remained perfectly still, not
about to grab or scare him and simply waited. Elaine sang a little
more, very softly now, so that it WAS a lullaby.
Finally he looked directly at her face and then--I think-- saw that
Elaine's eyes were so much like his own mother's. He certainly saw
something that surprised him, because he froze in wonder.
Whims? Coincidences? I doubt it, neither for us nor for him.
Elaine reached carefully out to him, ignoring the rancid stink and
touched his hand. He took hold of her finger. Tears sparkled on
his face in the dim light and he was still sobbing slightly, but
was very calm.
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