“It was not the Indian,” Jason said emphatically. “I told you that. He wasn’t around when Nicolson was killed.”
The policeman smoothed down his hair and checked his watch.
“And the hole in the copter was a bullet hole, not a branch, like you said. I heard the shot.”
“Quite. You suggested the Indian was hunting the beast and you got in the way.”
Jason touched the turbanlike bandage on his head. He had been warned about dizzy spells. “Yes.”
“We must be especially critical of the incredible, Mr. Jason. We will keep an open file and all that. Do get your rest, and we will keep you informed of developments.” The policeman looked carefully at Jason’s pallid face. “And if I were you, sir, I would forget this business. Your friends are dead. It is over and done with.”
When Jason boarded the plane, the policeman wondered if that faraway look in Jason’s eyes was the result of his head injury or if he had always been like that.
The Kansas City Primate Research Center was located hundreds of miles away from any primate other than man. The director himself, a Mr. Kimberly, said he would be delighted to see Raymond Jason and examine his footprint photographs.
Kimberly’s office was filled with shelves, on which were displayed skulls, bone fragments, teeth, and other oddments from his jungle work. He spread the photos out on his desk and studied them intently. “Quite impressive. Not bad at all, Mr. Jason. Have you heard of the Bossburg prints of 1969?”
“No.”
“Those were quite impressive too. There were one thousand eighty-nine of them going along a river, over a fence, through fields and all. The right foot was crippled. Whoever faked those really knew his business.”
“Faked them?”
“That’s what I said. How about the Patterson film? Have you seen the Patterson film?”
“Day before yesterday,” Jason replied. It was the most famous piece of motion-picture film since Zapruder’s strip of President Kennedy’s assassination. Filmed in Bluff Creek, California, by a sometime rodeo man named Roger Patterson, the short movie depicted a six-and-a-half-foot-tall female Bigfoot walking across a dry riverbed with one enigmatic glance back at the camera. Whether it was authentic was debatable. Patterson had forgotten at which speed he filmed the beast, which was a crucial point. At twenty-four frames per second, the walk could have been human. At a lesser speed, the beast had a gait that was distinctly nonhuman. Patterson died vouching for the film’s authenticity, a fact which did not seem to impress Kimberly.
“What a mess that was. A gorilla head on a more-or-less-human body? A bare pink heel? The Russians examined the print and thought it was a Neanderthal man. Now, whoever faked that didn’t know anything.” Kimberly sat in a swivel chair and blew out his cheeks. “All these so-called sightings. All these prints. It’s really such an embarrassment, Mr. Jason.”
Jason tapped the photos. “These are not fakes, Kimberly.”
“Oh?”
“I see I’ve come to the wrong place.”
“You say you saw this creature?”
“Yes. At night.”
“Exactly what do you think it was?”
“Some kind of gorilla,” said Jason. “A very strange one.”
“There are no gorillas or chimpanzees or hominids of any kind in North America, Mr. Jason. Never have been. There’s no fossil evidence of anything older than modern man, not even Neanderthals.”
“You mean you haven’t found any,” Jason retorted. “Kimberly, I’ve knocked around a few museums in my time, and they’re full of bones in cardboard boxes shipped in by every digger in the Western Hemisphere. Folsom Man’s skull was kicked around for seventeen years before being identified. I wouldn’t be surprised if a whole skeleton weren’t rattling around some museum, waiting to be pieced together.”
“Mr. Jason, really! Where are his bones? Surely Bigfoot dies occasionally, leaving bones!”
“There aren’t any bones in the woods, Kimberly, what’s the matter with you!” Jason’s voice rose. “Birds eat them, insects, predators! They weather away after a week!” Jason reached for the pictures. Kimberly slid them a bit closer to himself. It began to dawn on Jason that Kimberly was using a dry kind of sarcasm to draw him out.
“But how does he eat? Really, when you come down to it, a beast this size has to eat tons! There are long winters up north, which kills off food for half a year, even for an omnivore. He can’t migrate or we’d see them all over the place. And primates don’t hibernate.”
“Kimberly—” Jason began.
Kimberly continued talking, more to himself than to Jason. “And you may be sure it takes more than just a male and female to keep a population going. Ecologically speaking, there’s a minimum population which must continue to exist for the species to survive. Life is too hard for just a male and female to continue the whole line. I’ve heard estimates that a minimal population of two hundred of these creatures is necessary for survival.”
“They’re not surviving, Kimberly,” said Jason.
“Oh?”
“They’re in the process of dying out now. The Indians say there were whole groups of them that fished the Columbia River. The white man’s diseases wiped out most of them.”
Kimberly clasped his hands and rested them on top of his head, rocking back and forth in his swivel chair. “You’ve done your homework.”
“A bit.”
“Then explain one last thing to me. Why is it that all the sightings of Bigfoot come together in the 1960s and 1970s? The Indians said they were all around in the early nineteenth century. The white man arrives, they begin to die off, then suddenly a hundred years later they seem to be popping up again. Does that make sense?”
It was one of the things that had bothered Jason in his preliminary researches. “Many people just feel more inclined to report sightings these days than they did a hundred years ago. I don’t know, Kimberly. I do know it’s real. I saw it.”
“It appears I can’t convince you otherwise.”
“Not a chance.”
“What did it look like, then?”
“It was a good seven feet tall. It was covered with black fur. It ran pretty fast on two legs. And it was mismatched, too, like the one in the Patterson film . . .”
“In what way?” Kimberly had become very still.
“I had the distinct feeling its head did not match the rest of it.”
“How!”
“The hair was too long. And I think it had a more-pronounced neck than apes usually have. It . . . it . . .” Jason rubbed his bandage. “It’s nocturnal.”
“How do you know that?”
“I just realized it. He could have examined the Land Rover any time during the day while we were gone. And that musk ox was about ten hours dead, which means he was killed at night. I’m certain he’s nocturnal.”
Kimberly doodled on a memo pad. “Let’s understand each other, Mr. Jason. I have a certain professional standing which necessarily excludes the existence of giant hairy apes in the great north woods. So long as we agree officially that Bigfoot is impossible and everyone who’s ever seen one, including yourself, is a fool or a liar, we can safely proceed to a higher level of irrationality. Is that clear?” He smiled. “The academic world can be very incestuous when it comes to such creatures. Too many sword fights with hatpins, if you know what I mean.”
“If I get him, I’ll leave your name out of it.”
“Thank you. What can I do for you specifically?”
“I want your professional opinion of those prints.”
“You mean besides being fakes?” He peered at the black-and-white photographs, turning them about as if to shed sunlight on them. “Well, there’s something that jumps right out at me, Mr. Jason. So far they’ve classified two separate and distinct types of Bigfoot prints, which clearly indicates this nonexistent creature exists as two entirely different species. And I do mean different, as different as trolls and unicorns.” On his memo pad, Kimberly drew a rectangle with five circles on top. “This is the print left by Patterson’s creature. It’s called the hourglass print because of the shape of the shank. Hourglass prints have long toes lined up horizontally, like marbles in a rack. He walks from the outer side of his foot. It’s a very clearly nonhuman stride with a nonhuman configuration.” Then Kimberly sketched a more-or-less-human foot, with toes that slanted forward toward the big toe. “It’s called the human print for obvious reasons. Not to imply it’s made by a human, but he walks like one. He comes down on his heel and takes off using the big toe. There’s an arch there, too.”