Hairy Man (Zack Tolliver, FBI Book 12), page 12
"Hmm," Susan thought, picturing the swatch of reddish-black hair Isaac had found. She called Zack.
"Any news from the lab about the hair sample?" she asked.
"Not yet. Why?"
"It's just that I've come across reports of legendary giants with red hair who lived in western Nevada before contact."
"Western Nevada? Like, just over the Sierras from the Tule River Indian reservation?"
"That's right."
"How reputable are these reports?"
Susan chuckled. "How reputable are legends generally? Who knows? However, the cave where their bones were supposedly found did draw enough interest from the University of California that they sent two expeditions out there to investigate. They did not report finding giants, but did find one very large human femur."
"Well, that's more substantial than most legends," Zack said. "Why don't you dig a bit deeper?"
=
Zack's phone rang again before he could pocket it. This time the caller was Eagle Feather.
"White Man, we have an interesting situation."
It was seldom good news when Eagle Feather began a conversation this way. Zack braced himself.
"Go on."
"I have tracked the beast as far as I could."
"And...?" Zack waited for the inevitable shoe to drop.
"The creature wounded or killed the occupant of a vehicle, took the body, and drove away."
Zack had no response for this.
"White Man, are you there?"
"Uh...yeah. So you must now believe this creature is a human in some kind of costume."
"No, I do not. No human, especially one in a heavy, furry costume, could leap from tree to tree like this one did."
"Ok. I'm waiting..."
"I followed something that traveled through the trees like an ape, then walked on two feet into a large valley where it lay down long enough to flatten the grass. I found blood on the grass. It must then have entered a vehicle, which then drove away."
"Okay. So there must have been another person in the vehicle; say, perhaps, a driver. This driver came to meet the beast unless the vehicle had been left there previously by the ape-costumed superhuman."
"The vehicle had not been in that place long enough for that," Eagle Feather said.
"Could you deduce anything about the vehicle from the tire tracks?'
"Yes. The imprints in the dirt were made by large, all-terrain tires. The size suggests it probably was a pickup truck or a van."
"This case is turning into a large pain in my ass," Zack said. "Louis just found another report of a Bigfoot-type creature crossing the Central Valley ten years ago at the same time two other creatures were seen in distant localities."
"Are you trying to tell me there are three of these beasts?"
"Maybe."
=
Susan drove Zack to a nearby hotel in his Jeep, then drove to the library where she used the online resources to dive deeper into the red-haired giants' legend. She learned that one of the guano mining engineers, John T. Reid, who was also an amateur anthropologist, had attempted to get professors from the University of California to investigate the large femur and other bone fragments found in Lovelock Cave. One university expert eventually arrived, accompanied by another from New York. Although they expressed great interest in potsherds and basketry, and later published an article on the subject, they had less interest in the bones. In 1931 skeletons were discovered in the Humboldt lake bed near the cave. These skeletons were reported to be 8 feet and 10 feet long, respectively. They had been bandaged in a gum-covered cloth, like Egyptian mummies. Then in 1939, still another specimen, this one seven feet seven inches long, was discovered on the Friedman Ranch near the current town of Lovelock.
The collegiate world had never shown interest in the discoveries and Reid became the de facto local expert. In 1925, two men had brought skulls to him, skulls with a curious high ridge inside. The skulls were inspected by local ardent amateurs who pronounced them Neanderthal. They in turn took the skulls and after asking the opinions of various other authorities, submitted them to the Museum of Natural History in New York City. Dr. Clark Wissler, at the time the Curator in Chief, Division of Anthropology, believed them to be a type of early man.
Susan mused. Were these the red-haired giants of Paiute legends?
Reid had kept copious notes, and much of this body of work was available online. His notes included stories told to him by local Paiutes, handed down within their families, in which their antecedents described the war with large, red-haired intruders, the Si-te-cah. The stories, which varied in some details, all shared certain commonalities: the intruders were warlike, they were very large and strong, they had red or reddish black hair, occupied caves, and were eventually driven away to the northwest.
The apex of this war seemed to center on Lovelock Cave. The Paiute ancestors, in a unified effort, trapped the intruders there, and set the cave afire, killing them as they staggered out. Escapees were hunted down and killed where they were found. In support of this legend, archaeologists later found a strata of ash while digging in the cave.
But what of the giant-sized bones and skulls?
Susan now turned her attention to Reid's journal notes and found that while some of the skulls still resided somewhere in the depths of the Museum of Natural History in New York, most of the bones, including the mummified skeletons and the Friedman Ranch specimen, had simply disappeared.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Zack realized that chasing these creatures through the woods was a near-impossible task. He was beginning to believe these beasts were no myths; Zack's sore ribs told him that much. A single blow to the torso had knocked him senseless; no human possessed that kind of strength.
To his mind, the brazen attack itself was another inconsistency. Of all the Bigfoot stories he'd heard, none involved a physical attack upon a human, other than throwing rocks in their general direction.
And now, according to Eagle Feather, the creature he had been tracking escaped in a vehicle. What was going on here? He decided to find out. His first task was to call Janice.
"Are you resting, Zack?" she asked.
"I am, I promise. I'm in a hotel room and my greatest exertion so far has been lifting this phone."
"Hmm," Janice said, unconvinced.
Zack got right to the point. "The creature Eagle Feather was following boarded a truck or a van on a forest service road and escaped. But the vehicle may still be in the National Forest. Once it reaches a paved road, we won't be able to identify it."
"So! Not a beast after all. No surprise there! A human faker, an athlete, maybe a circus performer."
"Actually, no. Well, actually, I don't know. But we might still catch it and find out if we act quickly. The forest service road the truck is on leads south toward the Santa Maria River valley or north to State Highway 166. The road is unimproved in both directions, slow going, and gated in places. We may be able to catch the vehicle if we move quickly."
"Do I hear you angling for another helicopter? You're already my most expensive agent."
"If we catch the truck, we can solve this thing."
Zack heard her sigh. "Okay," she said. "Give me the coordinates."
Zack did. He waited while Janice consulted a map.
"Zack, given the elapsed time, we've got just one shot at this. We must make a choice. Did the vehicle go north, or south?"
Without hesitation, Zack said, "North." He knew the epicenter of all the beast's activities lay in that direction.
"Right." She rang off.
Zack called Susan next.
"We may need to move out," he said. "Bring my Jeep back."
Then he called Eagle Feather.
"How long will it take you to get back to your truck?"
"Maybe two hours."
"Make it an hour and a half. It's a long shot, but we may still be able to catch that vehicle. Those forest roads are rough and go all over the place. The one you are on is Old La Brea Road. There are only three ways to get back to Route 166 from there. The closest to you is Pine Canyon Road. Once you're back on Rt. 166, head east. It's the first turnoff on the right. Get there as quickly as you can and block it. I'll send Ranger Browning over to help out. No one in, no one out."
"Whatever you say, White Man."
Zack smiled to himself. He could read the excitement in the Navajo's laconic reply.
Ten minutes later, Susan knocked on Zack's door.
"What's up?' she asked as he let her in.
Zack explained the situation while pulling a shirt on over his trussed ribs, a slow, painful task.
"You are in no shape to go anywhere," Susan said.
Zack waved a deprecatory hand. "You'll drive, I’ll just navigate." He grabbed a heavily marked topo map from the desk. "We're going to try to catch a vehicle attempting to escape the National Forest. There are three ways out from the service road it was on. We must guard the nearest two. Eagle Feather will guard the third."
"How far apart are the two?"
"Just a few miles."
"So how will we know...?"
"Janice is sending a helicopter. With luck, they'll spot the vehicle and be able to tell us which road they are on. Until then, we'll split up."
He slipped his handgun out of the desk drawer and holstered it. "We're a little over two hours from the first road exit. We might already be too late. Let's get going."
They crossed the Central Valley on a field boundary road; narrow, potholed, but oriented straight west. Susan pressed the speed, passing lumbering oil tankers and produce trucks with inches to spare and blowing through stop signs.
"I didn't know you could drive like this," Zack said, after a close encounter with a super-sized tractor.
"I didn't either," Susan said through tight lips.
They reached Maricopa at the western edge of the valley, a seemingly uninhabited town straddling the intersection with Route 166. They headed west.
"From here on," Zack said, "We need to watch every vehicle approaching us."
"What are we looking for?" Susan asked. "An ape driving a pickup truck?'
Zack grimaced. "If you see one, let me know. We know it has to be a vehicle with enough clearance and power to manage that forest service road. I'll try to get the license numbers on each one."
The traffic on the road, just a two-lane route through the Cuyama Valley to Santa Maria, was greater than Zack expected. By the time they neared New Cuyama, they had already met sixteen vehicles, most of them white, mud-splattered pickup trucks, all of which met their requirements. Zack was kept busy, frantically scribbling down plate numbers when he could read them, in constant pain from twisting his torso to glimpse the rear plate as the vehicle passed.
"I should be driving and let you take down the plate numbers," he grumbled.
Susan glanced at the navigation screen. "It's not long now. We're almost to the first forest road intersection."
They had slowed to pass through the tiny town of New Cuyama. Susan pointed to parking lots near a restaurant. "Shouldn't we check all of those?"
"No time," Zack said. "We'll just have to assume the beast isn't hungry."
They passed two more vehicles beyond the town. Neither looked promising.
"Here we are," Susan said. She pulled the jeep onto the shoulder where a narrow paved road left the highway.
Zack climbed out. "I'll watch this one," he said. "You go on to the next one. Stay in the vehicle. Don't block the road. I don't want you to force a confrontation. Use your camera to take pictures of all vehicles and their license plates, both going in or coming out. I'll keep in touch."
"But what about you? They'll just run you over."
Zack patted his holstered firearm. "I'll manage. Now get going!"
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Eagle Feather put away his phone and turned and cast a weary eye back up the grass slope he'd just descended to the ridge rising beyond it that hid the basin of oak trees through which the beast had swung branch to branch, then in his mind's eye up to the long, bald ridge crest that eventually led to his truck and sighed. Lowering his gaze, he considered the arroyo nestled beneath, tucked between it and its neighboring ridge to the east, and thought there might be an easier way. Far up the ravine, patches of bright green foliage suggested water. All paths in the animal world led to water. He simply needed to find those paths.
He waded through knee-high meadow grass toward the arroyo and where the gulch walls grew close, he came upon the well-trodden path he expected, trampled into a dirt trail by feral pigs whose little cloven hooves carved and diced the vegetation into the earth. Before long, his trail met another and then another and became a highway. Wonderful trail makers, the pigs, Eagle Feather mused as he began to jog.
The animal highway steepened and the water trace below it deepened as he ascended the draw. Soon he was among juniper and stunted oak. After a half hour of climbing, he faced the headwall of the gulch, the penalty he knew he must pay for his choice of route. The wild creatures that had carved this trail were more agile and nimble than he and could scramble and leap up this craggy outcrop, but he could not. The wall was of crumbly sandstone that would certainly give beneath his weight, and the roots of sage and juniper visibly protruding from crevices would likely pull away as he grasped them. But Eagle Feather was patient and continued his study of the wall, knowing a fall here would cost him valuable time, even, in a worst-case scenario, prevent him from continuing at all.
=
Susan drove on with misgivings. She knew Zack was a courageous man, buoyed by company loyalty and a sense of duty, with an absurd quantity of moral righteousness, all of which would likely push him to stand his ground in front of a suspect's oncoming truck. But she knew he was not stupid, and hoped that particular trait would come to the fore.
At least she had the Jeep, a shell of protection she would use if necessary either to impede a suspect vehicle or to get the hell out of there.
She knew time was of the essence and the road here was one lane in each direction with limited passing. Every large, lumbering dump truck in the area seemed to have decided to frequent the westbound lane today. The road followed the twists and windings of the Cuyama River into the foothills and her speed dropped to forty-five miles per hour behind a line of trucks, all of which ignored her horn blasts, refusing to pull to the shoulder and let her pass.
There were a few oncoming vehicles, but her view was limited by the large truck she followed and wasn't aware of their approach until the last second, and even at her slow speed was unable to read any license plate numbers. And how many white pickup trucks could there possibly be? She began to realize the futility of this entire operation.
Her wandering thoughts went to Zack. How long had it been since they last worked together? Six years? Eight years? The time blurred. He looked no different; a little more solid looking, heftier in those places a man fills in as he ages, that willowy look gone, but still the same Zack. They were first brought together by a common interest in the descent of man, generated from altogether different perspectives, but united by the theory that an ancestral twin branch of Homo Erectus, thought to be extinct, might continue to exist, having evolved with the capacity to live simultaneously with humans, yet hidden from them within the dark depths of forests, jungles, or unexplored mountain heights.
Zack's interest was spawned by his own experiences during investigations among the more spiritually oriented indigenous people with whom he worked, where he sometimes encountered unexplained sights and sounds; things that shouldn't be yet were. Under Eagle Feather's mentorship, he'd learned to think more holistically and assume a perspective that if the only possibility was an impossibility, he should try to accept it rather than reject it out of hand, and proceed from there.
On the other hand, Susan's interest had come from a scholastic perspective, a purely analytical inquiry developed during her anthropological studies where she often saw established assumptions about human evolution crumble, in the face of more recent discoveries. It inspired her to think more critically about the currently accepted models and dates for human evolution, asking questions such as what happened to those beings who didn't obtain fire? who didn't relinquish hunting and gathering for agriculture, who hunted at night and slept by day? Might such people have evolved with better vision in the dark, additional body hair for warmth, greater bulk and strength for protection against other predators, and the skills to move with stealth through the forests, leaving no trace? Might they exist even today and the evidence of such hominids be the reports of sightings made frequently over the centuries but disregarded by an unimaginative scientific community?
Susan came out of her thoughts and jammed her foot on the brake. Caught up in her ruminations, she'd passed the turnoff to an unpaved road on her left with some sort of a sign. Finding her moment, she made a U-turn and went back to it. The sign read Old Sierra Madre Road. She turned in.
The road here was wide enough for two cars to pass. If she planned to block the road, she must find a narrower section where the terrain made it impossible to drive around her vehicle. She slipped the Jeep into four-wheel drive and went on.
The road ascended through a tree-studded meadowland with lazy switchbacks, then dropped down to a creek crossing, climbing again into a wooded area. She came to a place where the embankment on her left cut deeply into a steep hillside with a sheer drop on the right and she knew she had found the perfect place. She found a place to reverse direction and return to that place and parked the Jeep, now facing back the way she'd come. She had no desire to become trapped while faced in the wrong direction.
