In the second episode of our Sasquatch series you'll find out if Roger stayed quiet or said hello to the creature. If you haven't listened to part one, start there and then follow along to see what happens next...
Our third full season of Camp Monsters will start in September, thanks to our sponsors at YETI. In the meantime, we figured we'd give you a handful of stories to tide you over. And while you think you might know everything there is to know about Sasquatch, this is a personal account. A story that'll have you crawling under the covers questioning whether or not you really believe in monsters.
Season sponsor: YETI
Artwork by: Tyler Grobowsky, @g_r_o_b_o
This is an REI Co-op Studios Production.
No matter how dark the night…
No matter how fast you run…
No matter what is chasing you…
You’ll be safe if only you can make it to the campfire.
There it is, up ahead, through the trees.
We’re waiting for you, but…
Will you make it?
This is the Camp Monsters Podcast.
Our third full season will begin in September, thanks to REI and our sponsors at YETI. But once a month between now and then we thought we’d tell a story that we’ve been saving since before our very first season. A story about Bigfoot-- Sasquatch-- that we’ve been saving because it’s too long to fit in a single normal episode… and because it happened to me. And like any incredible experience that you live through, some moments are seared with perfect clarity in my memory-- what it felt like to breathe the night air… what it smelled like… the feel of soft rain on my face. And then there are other moments I can barely remember at all… blurs of disbelief and terror… memories I can hardly accept are real.
Last month you heard the first part of this experience. If you haven’t heard it yet I’d recommend you go and listen to it now. If you don’t want to take the time I can tell you that in it we meet Roger, an aging, straight-laced computer engineer, in a used bookshop some years ago in San Francisco. The only odd thing about Roger is his frightened reaction to an off-hand mention of Sasquatch. Our discovery of this oddity leads Roger to tell us a story from his unconventional youth… of an encounter he’d had on a commune in Northern California where he lived in the 1970s.
One warm night in late spring he’d left the circle of the campfire and climbed the hill beside it, sat quietly in the darkness under an old fir tree. After awhile he noticed the dim outline of a figure striding toward him through the forest, moving quickly and casting long shadows in what remained of the distant glow of the firelight. As it approached him, he had only an instant to decide whether to speak to the figure, or to let it pass by.
When Roger got to that part of the story he was telling, he turned his old eyes to me with a question in them: What would I have done, if I had been in his place that night? And I passed the question on to you. Would you have called out? Or stayed quiet and still?
Well, according to the responses we tallied up in the comments and from emails we received, the majority of you would have…
1) ...spoken to the passing figure. And as it turns out, that’s just about what Roger did. Except, he realized that a sudden, disembodied “Hello!” emanating out of the darkness might startle whoever it was coming up through the trees toward him, so Roger decided on giving a low whistle instead. Then the person who heard it would stop, and look around… except, the instant Roger’s soft whistle hit the air, instead of stopping the figure in front of him doubled over into a low crouch, and with a speed and swift smoothness that seemed… impossible to Roger, it crossed between him and the fire and disappeared into the shadow of some trees just beside him…
2) ...remained quiet. Very cautious of you, very prudent… just like Roger. On a last-second impulse, an instinct, a sub-conscious sense that something wasn’t right— Roger stayed quiet, and let the figure walk right past him. And as it passed between him and the distant fire, two things struck him: first was the silence. The figure made no sound as it moved. Listen to yourself walk across a room-- your clothing rustles, your feet make sounds on the floor. Now imagine walking through the woods at night with only the dim light of the stars and some faraway firelight to go by-- you’d sound about as subtle as a rhinoceros. But this figure seemed to glide past, so quiet that Roger could scarcely believe it was real.
The second thing Roger noticed just as the figure passed between him and the fire, but it took him a few moments to come to grips with what he’d seen…
(stories rejoin) For an instant, as the figure crossed the firelight, it was surrounded by a… a sort of halo of light, around its entire body. But that didn’t strike Roger as strangely as it sounds, because he knew he’d seen that same thing happen before… many times… he just couldn’t place it. Did people always look like that, passing in front of a fire? No… no, but suddenly Roger remembered what did: the big, shaggy mutt mix, one of the dogs that hung around the place. It liked to stay warm beside the fire, and if it happened to stand up between you and the firelight… its thick fur glowed like a halo all around it.
This realization had just crept into Roger’s mind when more and more facts crowded their way in. The figure had been tall-- impossibly tall, now that he thought about it-- as tall as that branch across the way, a branch that Roger would have to jump to touch. And the arms had been too long and thick, with huge hands swinging down past the middle of the creature’s thighs. And then there came the smell, following in the wake of the figure and flooding Roger’s nose with a scent sharp and strong, hot and overpowering-- an animal smell, unmistakably alive.
Roger sat up straight under his tree, and peered eagerly into the blackness of the bushes that the figure had disappeared into. What he’d seen replayed over and over again in his mind’s eye, the moment when the silhouette had crossed the fire-- frozen like a photograph in his imagination, he saw it more clearly now than when it had gone by: the glow of the firelight on the fur that covered it, the thick neck and massive head rising to an oddly-sharp ridge or peak, turned slightly toward him like it was glancing in his direction. The moment was so vivid in his memory that as he stared wide-eyed into the black thicket, the darkness seemed to re-assemble itself into the shape of the figure: standing still in all its long-limbed inhumanity; its shaggy, massive impossibility.
Roger moved to stand up, filled with excitement and a sudden impulse to get back to the fire, to tell the others of what he’d seen, to run with them down the length of the hill and see if they could head the creature off so that maybe some of the others would see it too. But even as he stood up he realized that would never happen. The thing had moved so swiftly across the rugged landscape, they could never hope to catch up to it. And then, Roger saw something in a chance glint of firelight.
There was a shadow within the shadows of the trees beside him, where the thing had disappeared. The darkness in there vibrated with the life of an innocent forest night, but outlined against that stood something perfectly still. Roger couldn’t see its outline except in his imagination, but as he moved to stand up the firelight glinted for a moment, high up, where a huge dark eye would be if it was staring back at him. And behind that eye Roger felt an unfathomable mind at work upon him, sizing him up… deciding how many steps it would take to cover the ground between them… whether Roger would have time to make a sound or not… what to do if he did.
When the eye winked out, and the darkness within the darkness under the trees began to move, all the excitement and disbelief and wonder that Roger had been feeling was replaced at once with a terrible, wild panic. What a rabbit feels in that instant when the snake begins to strike-- when it’s already too late. Roger began to run-- in slow motion, it seemed to him. But actually he was crashing full speed straight down the slope, ripping and fighting blindly through the undergrowth, tripping and twisting and tumbling down as fast as he could go.
Not fast enough. In his mind’s eye he saw the figure again, gliding noiselessly through the night forest, walking faster than he could ever run. And though he couldn’t hear it now behind him over the roar of his breath and the shattered snap of the bushes he plunged through, he could feel it coming… gaining on him… almost upon him in the instant when he stumbled over a root. Was that a branch he felt, ripping at his shirt from behind? Or was the next thing he felt going to be a huge, hard, earthy palm closing over his face?
In one last access of desperation, Roger screamed. And as he told this part of the story, there in the dim corner of the quiet bookshop, he looked like he might scream again. He was pale, he was shaking visibly-- his eyes brimming with tears and staring far beyond me, into the terrible past. His words in this last part of the story had come haltingly, and now they broke down completely and he sat silent, reliving the terror. When I touched his arm he jumped, and looked at me for a moment like he was surprised to find me there.
“But you made it,” I reminded him. “Here you are, sitting here with me. You made it back to the fire. You escaped.”
Roger’s eyes faded away from me as I watched. They let go of the present and began once again to see the things that shook him. He said something, in a hoarse mumbling whisper so low that I leaned forward and had to ask him to repeat it. “That’s the worst part...” he said. Then he snapped back to the present and glanced around the bookshop. “But I can’t tell it here. Will you… can I show you something? Will you come with me?”
I leaned back in my chair, staring at him hard. I didn’t like the idea of wandering out into the city streets at night with him in this state, but maybe if he could show me whatever it was… maybe his crisis would pass, maybe I could talk him back to reality.
What would you have done? Would you have gone with Roger, out into the San Francisco night? Or would you have tried to convince him to stay and finish the story there in the bookshop? Leave a review with your choice of action in the comments section, if you are using a service that allows comments, or send an email to podcasts@rei.com. And remember to subscribe so that you can listen in next month and find out whether we think alike.
As always, a special thanks to YETI for sponsoring the upcoming season of Camp Monsters. If only Roger had had a YETI cooler to keep his drinks and snacks so pleasantly cool in, he probably would have kept enjoying himself by the campfire and never had this terrifying encounter. So visit your local REI or go to YETI dot com and find your future cooler. Who knows? Someday it might save you from Sasquatch.