The Chimera Secret

23

‘How old is it?’

Ethan crouched alongside Dana Ford as she indicated a row of 17-inch-long depressions in loose soil climbing a hillside less than a mile out of Dixie. The trail crossed a canyon wash where runoff from the hills swept down toward a creek a quarter-mile behind them. The long, slender prints were capped with toe marks and what might have been three or four nail-prints where the toes had dug into the soft earth.

‘Three days, maybe four,’ Dana replied. ‘There hasn’t been any heavy rain for the last week or so, so the prints have held up. But they’re too faint now to cast.’

Lopez and Proctor looked on as Dana traced the outline of the print with the tip of a pen in her right hand. Her long mousy hair was pinned back in a ponytail tucked beneath the hood of her waterproof jacket. Tall and slender, she wore fashionable square-lensed glasses that made her look a bit like Sarah Palin. The big difference was her Ph.D. and the excitement sparkling in her eyes as she pointed with the pen.

‘Look at this,’ she said in wonderment. ‘Seems like a huge human print, right?’

Ethan nodded. Dana smiled at him.

‘Well, it isn’t,’ she explained. ‘This was made by a three-hundred-pound bear.’

‘How do you know?’ Lopez asked, glancing furtively around them at the soaring hills wreathed in thick banks of swirling cloud.

‘Because we see this all the time,’ Dana replied. ‘People take photographs like this and pin them up on Internet sites claiming them to be evidence of bipedal creatures wandering the woods, but it’s nothing of the sort.’ She gestured to the depressions. ‘There’s only four toes, for a start, which kind of gives it away. The toe scratches are caused by claws, and the length of the print is caused by the bear’s paw sliding backward in the soil as it climbed out of the creek, probably foraging for fish.’

Ethan pictured the scene for a moment and figured it out.

‘The creek was flowing at the time, enough that the bear was sliding slightly on the surface soil under the water.’

‘Bingo,’ Dana grinned. ‘Mystery solved.’

Proctor gestured to the hills as they stood up from examining the prints.

‘History is full of these kinds of genuine mistaken identities,’ he explained. ‘You ever see all those photographs taken by climbers in the Himalayan Mountains, with the trails of huge footprints crossing snowy valleys?’

‘Sure,’ Lopez agreed. ‘The climbers always lay their pickaxes alongside the prints for scale.’

‘The same,’ Proctor confirmed. ‘Thing is, those shots are always made at dawn, when the climbers wake up and come outside. It took investigators years to realize that the prints were made by wonderful but normal animals like snow leopards when they had walked past at night. As the sun rises it strikes the tops of the prints in the deep snow, melting the edges and expanding them to gigantic proportions. When somebody tracked the trail into the shadow of another mountain, the prints returned to their normal size, betraying the illusion. Of course, that inconvenient fact never makes it into the reports.’

Ethan hefted his bergen onto his back as they set off again, heading north into the wilderness.

‘So you guys are sceptics?’ Lopez asked Dana, confused.

‘All scientists are sceptics,’ Dana replied. ‘That’s our job, to not take things at face value but to test them to ensure that they are real. A lot of people talk about having faith, about believing. Scientists don’t want to believe, they want to know, so the criteria for evidence that has to be met is much more demanding.’

‘You came out here, though,’ Ethan pointed out.

A drizzle hung like a fine mist of rain so light that it could not fall, only float on the cold air. It enshrouded the forests as they tracked alongside the edge of an icy stream winding between the soaring hillsides.

‘Because being a sceptic doesn’t mean you have to be an ass,’ Dana replied. ‘Wanting to test evidence is one thing. Writing it off before you’ve even looked at it is another entirely. Most scientists wouldn’t dare put their name to a study like this because it would be virtual career suicide. I don’t think that’s the most productive way to advance human knowledge.’

‘Is this an official visit then?’ Lopez asked.

‘Not exactly,’ Proctor admitted. ‘We were made to sign non-disclosure agreements.’

Ethan chuckled and shook his head.

‘So if you come out here and you find what you were looking for, you can’t tell anybody about it.’

‘No,’ Dana agreed as they hiked up between boulders littering the side of the creek. ‘But what we learn here can go into our next study. I figured that if the government wanted advisors out here who had some knowledge of cryptozoology and were insisting that we sign non-disclosure agreements, then there had to be something juicy waiting to be found.’

Lopez nodded as she glanced across at Dana.

‘Oh, there’s something out here all right.’

Ethan was about to put his foot down as he walked when he heard a faint metallic snicker from within dense trees to his right. He froze with his boot inches from the ground and turned his head fractionally to the right.

The dark maw of the treeline stared back at him, the misty dew-laden air drifting past in silence above the soft gurgling of the creek. Lopez’s voice reached him.

‘You smell somethin’?’

Ethan squinted into the woods for a moment longer.

‘We’re being watched,’ he replied.

‘By what?’ Lopez asked.

‘By whom, you mean,’ Ethan replied, then called out into the woods. ‘You guys want to come out or are you just going to sit there watching us all day?’

The voice that replied came from behind them.

‘We’re here.’

Ethan turned in surprise and saw seven soldiers now standing in plain view behind them, all wearing full battle-kit and cradling M-16 assault rifles. He turned back to the treeline and saw a single soldier stand up and make his way toward them. Caught in crossfire, he realized, an easy and deliberate way to distract the attention of enemy troops to a supposed error while the real danger emerged from behind them.

Ethan turned back to the seven soldiers, one of whom stepped forward. Tall and square-jawed, his face smeared with camouflage paint, he looked every inch the infantryman. There was no rank insignia on his fatigues, but his steady gaze and age marked him out as an officer. He offered Ethan a leather-gloved hand.

‘Ethan Warner? Lieutenant Jim Watson, Idaho National Guard,’ he introduced himself with a shake of Ethan’s hand. ‘We’re here to baby-sit you on your little camping trip.’

The line was delivered with a genuine smile and Ethan found himself warming to the officer immediately. Watson introduced his men to them as they stepped forward. His sergeant was a man named Kurt Agry, a couple of inches shorter than Ethan and maybe twenty pounds lighter, but he was stout and compact and his features had been hewn into hard lines by the axe of military training. His hair was shaved down to a gray stubble that stained his almost square head. The corporal was a younger guy called Jenkins, tall and rangy.

The rest of the soldiers were amiable but reserved toward their civilian charges. He caught their names; Milner, Simmons, Archer, Klein, Willis. Most wore black basketball-style caps over their heads and generally kept their faces vaguely concealed as though concerned about their identities. Ethan smiled inwardly. National Guard soldiers were occasionally prone to inflating their appearance to mimic battle-hardened front-line troops. Ethan didn’t care much: what mattered to him was that they had firepower, and plenty of it.

‘You guys got a game plan here?’ Lieutenant Watson asked Ethan. ‘Our brief was exactly that: brief.’

‘Fox Creek,’ Ethan replied, and showed Watson the position on the map. ‘This is the closest we have to a location for the disappearance of a man named Cletus MacCarthy. Finding him is the key to proving the innocence of his brother Jesse, who is currently facing trial for his murder.’

The lieutenant frowned at the map. His sergeant, Kurt Agry, shot Ethan a confused look.

‘Civil case?’ he guessed. ‘Why are we down here and involved in it?’

Ethan decided not to beat about the bush.

‘Because whatever killed Cletus was strong enough, or mad enough, to decapitate a park ranger with a single blow.’

The soldiers glanced at each other, their interest piqued. Ethan folded the map away as Watson shrugged and smiled.

‘Well, no sense in standing here debating. We’d best move out.’

Kurt Agry raised an eyebrow at his lieutenant.

‘You got any idea what could do that to a man? There was nothing in the brief about bear-hunting.’

‘We’re not sure,’ Ethan replied. ‘The suspicion is that it might have been a sasquatch.’

Watson and Kurt stared at Ethan for a long, silent moment. ‘Seriously?’ Watson murmured.

‘Apparently so,’ Lopez replied. ‘Hence you guys and the heavy weapons.’

Ethan scanned the soldiers. All carried M-16s, probably service pistols too, but he saw no grenades other than ‘flashbangs’, designed to stun and blind unprepared opponents. Each man carried a bergen, filled with equipment and extra ammunition. Two of the troops carried Mossberg 500 pump-action, 12-gauge shotguns.

The sergeant did not look impressed.

‘We’ve been deployed to hunt down a sasquatch?’ Kurt Agry asked. ‘What’s after that, werewolves?’

The soldiers behind him chuckled. The voice that replied didn’t.

‘That might be safer.’

The group turned as from the forest walked an old man and a young woman. Ethan recognized Duran Wilkes and his granddaughter Mary as they walked toward the group.

‘We can track animals,’ Kurt Agry murmured to Ethan, suddenly changing his tune. ‘There was no need to bring in the rednecks.’

‘Local knowledge,’ Ethan countered him. ‘No amount of training can equal that.’

The old man and his granddaughter stopped in front of the group. The man spoke in a voice imbued with the confidence of a man entirely at home in the wilderness.

‘Duran Wilkes,’ he announced. ‘This is my granddaughter, Mary.’

‘Welcome aboard,’ Lieutenant Watson said. ‘More the merrier, I suppose.’

Kurt Agry thrust himself into the conversation.

‘Thanks for coming, but from what Warner here says it’s probably best if we take point right now.’

Duran Wilkes raised an eyebrow at the soldier. ‘How’s that, son?’

‘Experience and training,’ Kurt replied. ‘We’re kitted out for this whereas you’re not. This is a big group to move through the hills without being detected, and we’ve already had a chance to get a lay of the land since we arrived so we’ve got a bit of a head start on you guys.’

Duran Wilkes stared at the soldier for a long moment and then chuckled.

‘Sure thing, mister,’ he replied. ‘You boys go ahead and take the lead.’

Kurt Agry nodded, and with a brief flick of his head gestured to the other soldiers.

‘Let’s move out!’

Ethan watched as the soldiers fanned out into a loose phalanx and turned north to follow the stream up into the mountains. He turned to Duran.

‘Thought you weren’t coming out?’

‘Change of heart,’ Duran said. ‘Doesn’t mean I like bein’ here.’

‘You’ve got local knowledge,’ Lieutenant Watson said. ‘That counts for a lot. Don’t mind my sergeant, he’s old school. Personally I’m glad you showed up here today.’

Duran looked up at him and a twinkle of light gleamed in his ancient eyes.

‘We didn’t get here today, we turned up yesterday evening. Been watching your troops all night.’

Lieutenant Watson grinned beneath his heavy camouflage paint, looking at the old man with new respect.

‘I’ll be damned,’ he replied. ‘Sergeant Agry didn’t spot either of you.’

Ethan hefted his bergen onto his shoulders and gestured for Duran to lead the way.

‘Looks like we’ll be following you after all.’