The next morning, I loaded my old camera, mic, and other gear into the battered pickup truck I’d inherited when Dad passed. I was on the road before the sun rose to an old fire road the Park Service maintained that would take me to the trails I knew led up the mountains and into prime bigfoot scouting areas. Some of the cave networks about ten miles in were big enough to shelter sasquatches, humans, and other large mammals. I’d found promising scat and prints up there just a few weeks earlier, though the results from testing were still pending. Sending samples away for genetic sequencing because I couldn’t afford my own equipment really put a damper on my productivity, not to mention the hole in my bank account.
The rifle in the rack on the back of the truck was already cleaned and loaded, ready to use in case a bear started sniffing around my camps, and my pack held enough supplies for twice as long as I planned to be out. Just in case. I’d left the first part of my planned hike with Betsy and logged the GPS coords of where I left my truck.
As I pulled my pack on and started to regret how much equipment I brought and how heavy the damn specimen preservation supplies were, I figured a dog or a mule would have been useful for lugging all that shit around – although that would have meant finding a way to shelter and feed the damn thing. Unless the dog was a far better hunter than me and could feed itself, having a useful pet would remain a pipe dream. I couldn’t justify diverting resources away from my research, and the only way I would eventually make enough money to find Jamie was to prove everyone wrong, which meant the continued use of all available funds to show cryptids existed. The first person who found irrefutable evidence would be rich and famous and have a platform to reach the entire world.
With that kind of reach, that kind of money… I could find Jamie. I could convince Mom to come back and we could all be together. Things would be just like they were.
Cryptids linked me to Jamie more than anyone else knew. We hunted them together every summer and into the fall, and every time we had a break from school. He’d been trailing something related to the Ozark Howler, a cat-bear hybrid with horns, when he disappeared in the park. If I found what he’d been chasing, then maybe I’d find him.
And the more cryptid hunters I could draw into the woods, the better chance I stood of identifying where he disappeared and what took him. All it would take was enough evidence to convince the bat-shit crazy cryptozoology community I’d found a real Sasquatch or Mothman or Black Shuck and they’d find Jamie for me. Easy peasy. Just a few simple steps and everything would be tidied up.
If only it were actually that easy.
I swallowed the knot in my throat and locked up the gate on the truck, leaning to get the rifle from its rack. The fire road had been the starting point for almost every trek Jamie and I made into the interior of the park since it was the fastest way to the wildest corners of the mountains. The ruts in the road got deeper and the trees got taller with each passing season, but it still felt the same as it had ten years earlier. Most days I still felt like the sixteen year old who found out her big brother was gone and no one could find him.
They searched for a week or two, but everyone figured he’d been killed by a bear and nothing would be found. The weather kicked up and snow blanketed everything, and instead of using it to find tracks in the deep woods, they assumed the weather and temperature did him in. Dad and I kept looking — every day, all day, until Mom said it turned into obsession. I didn’t know how it could not be an obsession. I needed Jamie back. I needed him. I’d never give up.
I checked around the trail for any sign of bears or cougars before I set out and scanned around for boot prints and other human tracks. Sometimes moonshiners used the road to get out to their stills; they were more dangerous than the bears most days. I’d briefly considered setting up my own still to help fund my research, but distilling good ‘shine was too labor intensive and I didn’t find that sort of chemistry particularly interesting anyway. Plus there was the illegality of selling it and the lingering threat of a grand explosion that increased the risk relative to the gain.
As I started hiking, grumbling already under the weight of the pack and the rifle, I pondered who the executives wanted on their show. I'd run into some cryptid hunters who were an embarrassment to cryptozoology. Some believed in temporal bends that allowed Bigfoot to jump through multiple realities, some insisted Bigfoot could teleport to avoid being observed by humans, others argued he was a military experiment gone wrong that the government covered up. The network couldn't possibly want some lunatic using pseudoscience and rumors to defend conjecture and wild-ass conspiracy theories. That wouldn’t last more than a season on television. Two, tops.
I used science. I wasn’t like the majority of cryptid hunters. I tested genetics and logged migration patterns and weather fluctuations. I set up a network of motion-capture cameras throughout the park at strategic locations and stitched together footage to track mysterious movements in the trees. I studied evolutionary tables to identify possible distant relations to the cryptids of all kinds. Hell, I picked up all manner of animal poop, hoping it would indicate something other than a wolf or puma. I didn’t spend my time running around at night shouting “Did you see that?” and waving a rifle around like some of the more… unique members of the cryptid community.
But then again... maybe the producers did want that. I'd done my own research on the network's other reality shows when I first heard from them about filming a series about tracking cryptids in the mountains, and some of their ghost-hunters made me snort so hard I gave myself a headache. The ghost-hunters clothed themselves in pseudo-scientific terminology, enough to confuse people who had a high school education in physics, but the hunters used little more than infrared camera work chasing specks of dust as ‘proof.’ They used coincidence and some of the stupidest equipment I’d ever seen in my life to identify changes in temperature and notional EMF signatures. They heard ghosts in static and saw wraiths in night vision shadows. And somehow that translated into good television.
I rolled my eyes at a squirrel lingering on a nearby tree trunk. The little nut-hoarder had a more sophisticated grasp of metaphysics and natural phenomena than the majority of people claiming expertise in explaining the unexplained. Instead of questioning whether what they heard and saw could be explained by natural phenomena — or was even relevant to their search — they believed everything immediately. Their teams were the very definition of intellectual echo chambers. No scientific method at all — just rumor and darkness and lots of yelling and heavy breathing on infrared cameras.
Not me. I’d spent years collecting samples and cataloguing anomalies, building my case. Axiomatic truths built and built into a solid foundation until I could show evolutionary diversions and the most likely ancestors of wildmen or sasquatches or Bigfoot. I needed one to two more pieces and the puzzle would be complete – irrefutable, unquestionable. Contestable but reproducible when other researchers challenged me. Good science. Solid experimentation. A case built on hair samples and blood smears, hunting patterns and tracks observed over seasons, broken branches and lairs with signs of habitation. The findings would open doors to so many grants and research universities and professorships that I’d be set for life, after I found Jamie.
I never lost sight of it: Jamie was the goal. The cryptids were just the fastest way to get there. I didn’t need more proof for the sake of my own belief. I needed it so everyone else would be convinced.
But Betsy’s caution the night before made me hesitate. I’d never thought about not finding Jamie alive. It was not a conclusion I could accept, even if most would have considered it the most logical explanation. Just like they believed the absence of cryptids was more logical than multiple species having hidden at the edge of human habitation for centuries. What if I found the irrefutable proof I needed, but didn’t find Jamie?
I swallowed the knot in my throat, then brushed the thought aside. I’d find him. Jamie was out there.
The thought rejuvenated my energy and determination, and I pushed my legs to move faster as the trail started to climb. It was the perfect time of year to find the right evidence to complete the picture. Even though I didn’t believe in hunches or premonitions, I still had a good feeling about the trip. Something big was about to happen.