Cold Trail

By Ric Daly

In this third book in the Rift series, Nate and his team find themselves helping investigate a series of murders But are they modern-day or are the once-believed-extinct hominids responsible? What happens when they encounter a creature that was believed to have been extinct for a million-and-a-half years and what they encounter is nothing less than a nightmare? How are they affected when their experience, which began in the East African Rift in "The Rift", takes them to northern California in "Willow Creek" and now to Alaska. There, they find themselves entangled with a series of murders, revealing evidence, but no real proof, of the hominids' existence in Alaska. And what does the existence of supposed-to-be-extinct hominids mean to the world of paleoanthropology, creation and individual faith?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ric Daly
• Release date: Mar 28, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311317506

Ric Daly

Ric Daly wrote "The Rift", "Willow Creek" and "Cold Trail" following a thirty-year career teaching high school sciences (physics, chemistry, earth/space, oceanography, biology, research), geography and algebra in Minnesota, Arizona and Florida. He has been recognized as a leading authority on science education, presenting workshops in that capacity at national, state and district levels. He is also an accomplished artist in various mediums and photography and has displayed his work in galleries in Arizona, Florida, Iowa and Minnesota. When he’s not writing or painting he may be found riding his bicycle or in his car traveling America’s highways. While home is the Florida coast, he currently resides in northern Minnesota. He is a committed Christian and is currently writing an inspirational collection of autobiographical essays, "The Road Behind Me".

Book preview

Prologue

The Bering Land Bridge, 19,000 years B.P.

A low bank of dark clouds had begun to rise in the west, promising some relief from the dry days of the past weeks. It was late summer on this Pleistocene steppe, not particularly hot, but rainfall, while occurring, had been minimal. A small band of hominids had spent the afternoon sitting among the barely moving grasses on the landscape that had been laid down over several thousand years of glacial advance and retreat. Today, they rested before setting out across the mostly flat terrain, punctuated by rocky deposits and small, drying pools of water. The pools were temporary remnants of past rains.

Around the hominids much of the landscape comprised a vast outwash plain and was littered by occasional gravel ridges and numerous erratics – misplaced boulders of varying sizes – left behind by the retreating glacier. The hominids stood nearly upright and faced into a rising breeze across the steppe. They began walking stealthily along the low glacial ridge The sky was beginning to darken with the late-afternoon storm clouds now building faster across the western horizon. Had anyone been there to watch, the humanoid shapes of the mysterious beings would have been merely a suggestion as they made their way through the rustling grass. At times, they could only be detected by the movement of the tops of the grasses through which they moved, all but invisible. They would occasionally stand above the grass and sniff the air and their presence was highlighted only intermittently by the intense flashes of lightning behind them that announced the approaching storm. With each burst of electricity from the clouds the sky grew darker, the charged atmosphere more ominous. The rain had not yet begun and the slight, but rising, breeze carried the scent of a potential meal. They were on the hunt and their senses were finely-tuned to read what was carried on the breeze – a very light breeze, but only until the storm was to reach them. The small band of creatures, human-like but not human, rounded a small scattering of erratics and climbed a low ridge. There they stopped and gazed down from their vantage point at a thin column of smoke rising from behind a large mound of boulders and drifting toward them as it was caught by the breeze above the ridge. As they looked around, one of them, the largest, cautiously raised its almost five-foot frame above the ledge and sniffed into the breeze, testing the air. There were plenty of animals to eat here in the grassland. Many were too large or too fast to be an easy kill, but they could scavenge the kills of other predators if they had to. And there was one, a two-legged creature much like himself – but with much less hair – that was easy prey, though it stayed in groups, protecting themselves by their numbers. As the creature stood there he recognized the promise of fresh meat. His well-developed senses had been a key to the survival of his kind for countless generations since their beginning a continent away, where his ancestors had risen out of the African Rift more than two thousand millennia ago. Over those two million years since that ancient birth they had dominated the Rift and then slowly, over those countless generations, made their way across Asia, adapting and surviving. They had learned to read the wind and see almost undetectable clues. Today those senses brought his attention to the smoke rising and drifting over the grass. Though the smoke and the fire that produced it were alien to the creatures themselves, they were a sign that the humans were there. And he was hungry.

The creature, though he would normally stand and walk on two legs, now dropped down to all fours and began to slowly creep through the grass, soon joined by the others. They moved stealthily, patiently and unseen toward the humans. Because the humans used strange weapons, the hominids had to rely on stealth to surprise them. As they reached the edge of the small clearing around the fire they stopped and studied the prey. There were only three individuals sitting around the fire, still unaware that they were being stalked. The long sharp sticks with which they would fight back against the hominids were there, beside them. The creatures didn’t fully understand what they were – just that they represented a danger when they were hunting the humans, who, more often than not, fought back. Not every hunt was successful, but they sensed this one would be, with the storm aiding their secrecy. The creatures quietly picked up the rocks they would use to kill. They’d used the rocks this way since a long-forgotten time, as their generations had made their way across the vast continent to the west, gradually moving into a new world. Now, their further movement was blocked by the great ice sheets that stretched across the land to the east. For the moment, though, their attention was focused on the prospect of a meal. They had to eat. They held the rocks. They waited. There was no evident communication among them – no sharing of visual clues, nothing verbal – yet, they moved together, almost as one. Then, after another few minutes of patient waiting and watching, they stood quickly, still as if they were a single being, long arms raised overhead, now emitting grunts, growls and screams. The sounds may have been to startle the prey and keep them off-guard or perhaps they were part of a hunting ritual that bolstered their own boldness and resolve. They rushed at the surprised humans and the rocks were brought down hard. With the briefest of encounters, the prey fell, lifeless, and the creatures began to eat. In past generations in the Great Rift, their ancestors had learned to butcher the prey, quickly carrying the meat away to avoid conflicts with other animals that would take it. There, they’d often been at the mercy of the great cats that stalked the prairie and to survive they’d had to rely on quickness and cunning – inventiveness, even. They’d learned to use the sharp volcanic fragments, ubiquitous throughout the Rift, to butcher their – and others’ – kills, to be carried away and eaten in safety. But here there were few other predators, besides the occasional saber-tooth cat and the large but slow short-faced bear. And the creatures here did not have the sharp stone blades their ancestors had used. They’d eat while they could and carry off the meat when it was necessary. But the rocks, here in abundance as part of the glacial terrain, had remained an effective tool for killing.

The clouds continued to build and soon the rain would come, and with it the floods that would swell the streams that drained the broad steppe, bringing changes to the terrain, potentially presaging an uncertain future for the creatures that had occupied this particular plain for thousands of years. The humans that shared the land knew often the terror of encounters with these beings that had survived through countless generations by sheer determination and unfeeling savagery.

Then they heard it – the incongruous swish of the grass, subtly different from the sound made by the breeze as it began to stir the prairie. They stopped. They listened, acutely tuned in to the sounds and smells around them. They sat motionless, only the occasional blink of an eye to indicate they were living beings. Then the warning came, the low rumbling from the cat’s throat as it crept closer, the scent of danger having been concealed from the hominids, preoccupied now with their feast, until it was too late. With a sudden roar, the large predator leapt out of the grass onto one of the hominids, pinning it to the ground. The apelike creature screamed its defiance before it was silenced by the crushing force on its throat. The creatures were small, but they were also strong, agile and bold, and they jumped onto the cat, clawing, biting and pounding it with the rocks they used as weapons. The cat fell, bleeding and too weak to eat its kill. Then, with a final deep sigh, it, too, died, continuing the harsh cycle of life on the steppe, the struggle to eat, to avoid being killed, to survive.

The remaining creatures stood and looked at the grisly scene, perhaps contemplating what living and dying and eating and being eaten were all about, or perhaps not comprehending at all what their existence meant, seeking only to survive. After several silent minutes, they brought closure by using the rocks to pound the cat’s skull into oblivion, but whether out of rage or frustration or as an ill-defined instinctive ritual, perhaps even they themselves did not know. Then they picked up the remains of their own kill, added the carcass of the creature that had been killed by the cat, and carried the bounty away. They wouldn’t starve. In the face of the approaching storm they made their way through the tall grass toward the cliffs that overlooked the ocean far below. There they would find shelter with the others of their kind among the rocks and crevices at the edge of the land. They would eat. Perhaps one of them would even look out across the waves and wonder what lay beyond. Some day in the distant future, unknown to them, the ice wall to the east would slowly vanish and the creatures would continue their long migration from the Rift to the conifer forests of the continent stretching out beyond. There they would settle into a new home. There, too, new generations would again find their world invaded by the humans.

But for now this was their world and they walked, on two legs, carrying their provision back to the others. Then, as if it had been waiting for this drama to play out, the rain finally began, a gentle shower at first, quickly building into a wind-driven assault, a symbol of the brutal, unforgiving fight for survival in this rugged land. The creatures walked on into the storm, toward the edge of their world and to an unknown future, knowing only that for now they would survive another day, with no comprehension of what lay in the future and never having a concept of what was behind. They only knew what was now.

Chapter 1

Nunivak Island, Alaska, Bering Strait, 2021

The cold mist did nothing to ease the dismal feel of the muskeg stretching across the island, with its scattering of dwarf tamaracks and black spruce. As Andy Stevens studied the landscape, his eyes saw little beyond the low-growing scrub and stunted trees, the dwarf tamarack and black spruce. But his mind was forming images of what the land would have looked like twenty thousand years ago, when the island had been part of the southern shore of Beringia. He envisioned the great Pleistocene glaciers making their final retreat, leaving behind a new landscape. Then the land was a vast expanse of grassland steppe and, with sea level much lower than today, the Bering land-bridge was a migration route between Siberia and Alaska. Andy was seeing the herds of large mammals, the mammoths, bison and elk and the sabre-tooth cats and gray wolves that preyed upon them, moving across the ice-age land, followed and hunted by the early humans. And he saw the mysterious hominids approaching the end of their migration across Asia, a journey of a thousand millennia or more out of the Great African Rift. And he considered what they might be getting into. Andy had been part of the ill-fated expedition to Lake Eyasi in Tanzania back in 1999. There, five of their seven-person team had died, and he’d seen the encounters in Shasta County just six years ago. That was when their colleague, Scott Norwood, had been killed in the encounter near Willow Creek. He certainly did not want to see any of that repeated here, and was hoping this expedition would turn out to be, as had been anticipated, a documentation, with their only encounter to be the ancient corpse they were here to investigate. He wanted nothing beyond that and an on-paper-only encounter. Andy had been the one most traumatized by what they’d seen at Eyasi and that had kept him out of field work from then until now.

Nate Brandley stood beside him. Nate had been part of the expedition to the Olduvai Gorge thirteen years after Eyasi and had spent much of his professional career so far trying to understand the behaviors of the strange hominids. The team had encountered this creature, not as fossils, but as living beings, mysterious and deadly, a creature that should have been extinct long ago. That first encounter for Nate was on an expedition to the East African Rift – site of the Olduvai Gorge, where Leakey had found the fossil that seemed to be part of the history of the hominids in question. It was Nate who had first proposed that the beings they’d since named the Rift hominid, instead of becoming extinct, as anthropologists had thought, had migrated out of the Rift and across the Pleistocene ice age land bridge to North America. Nate had since devoted much of his career to understanding these creatures and their behaviors – and their learning curve. Nate had been fascinated by what the creatures learned, how they learned it and, perhaps most important, what they didn’t learn. They’d seen that the creatures’ learning was inventive only in terms of their survival, resolving a situation for a specific need, without a requisite understanding. There had appeared to be no discoveries just for the sake of discovery. They had never learned to use fire, for example, because there was evidently no need for it in their existence. It was that aspect of their learning that had convinced Nate and Corey Timms, another member of their team then, that this was not an ancestor of humans. They’d understood that even before the DNA evidence proved it several years later.

Now, knowing the beings had migrated across Asia and into North America was a fulfillment of his intense research, begun when he’d observed patterns in recorded sightings and encounters. As it turned out, there were many such records. He looked out across the scrub and said, Fifty-thousand generations, moving and adapting. And here they are. He paused, then said, again, Here they are, sounding just a little prophetic, perhaps even ominous, to Andy.

Or were, at least. You know, this is just going to prove what we already do know. We saw that with the DNA from the creatures in Shasta County, so we know the Bering hominids are the same as the ones from the Rift. Remember?

Nate turned to him and said, But it’ll confirm that they migrated across from Asia during the ice age. You remember when Corey Timms took the team back to Tanzania and we were wondering about the migration of the hominids across Africa then? Where they were going and why. Maybe those creatures were carrying a trace of a genetic program for something like this. Something that had led to a migration that brought them here. What I don’t know is why.

He and his team were now in a location twelve miles upstream from a Yup’ik village on the north side of the island. Most of Nunivak Island is part of the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge and Andy had secured the necessary permits from the administrative office in Bethel, allowing them to study in a limited area and only where their activities would not disturb the land beyond the target site. They would otherwise have been concerned about having only a few weeks to complete whatever study they planned to carry out, since they were already well past the middle of the short summer. But none of them thought they’d need more than a few days to remove the bones and examine and photograph the area around the burial to document the find. They were anticipating a short visit here. The site where they were going to be working was an apparent burial near where they were now standing, at the base of a low glacial ridge next to a small river that drained the summer terrain into Shoal Bay. It was a location that, on paper, had promised more evidence of the Rift hominids in what had been their transition to the creatures they’d faced in California. The site had evidently been exposed when a recent earthquake originating under the Aleutians had jolted the island. Andy had come across a report that a ranger with the Yukon Delta NWR had found what was believed to have been a Paleolithic burial on the island. The idea of a burial on this remnant of Beringia would have been an exciting find by itself. But what had caught their attention in the report was the description that stated that it was hominid, but not appearing human. Referencing the unusually long arms and extended big toe, it had fired the enthusiasm of these paleoanthropologists from Minnesota State University. When Andy had first brought the article to Nate’s attention back in Mankato, he’d suggested that it sounds an awful lot like our hominid. While there had been a Paleolithic Yup’ik culture spanning Beringia, with remnants still existing on both sides of the strait in both Alaska and Siberia, it was evident that what they were dealing with now was not part of that culture – probably not even human, in fact. The team were anticipating examining the remains of the strange hominid. Both Nate and Andy thought back to the events in Africa that now seemed, at the same time, like a lifetime ago and only yesterday.

The two were joined by Jason Adler. Jason – Jace, to the others on the team – had been a young student working with Wil Parker on a hominid study back in Humboldt and Shasta Counties in California four years earlier. With the exception of Jason, they had originally called themselves The Olduvai Six, from their experiences with the hominids at the Olduvai Gorge. Jason had eventually become part of that group. Now, though, with two of them deceased and Wil having departed for other pursuits following Scott’s death in an encounter with the creatures, the Olduvai Six were now four. The remaining fourth man was Dr. Corey Timms, still back at Minnesota State University in Mankato. Timms had been the only other survivor, besides Andy, of the 1999 Eyasi event.

Jason responded to Andy’s comment. We know the Rift and Bering hominids are the same. Seems to me that the big question now is ‘why?’ What made these creatures leave Africa and migrate to here?

Nate said, That’s something we may never know. There’re only so many things fossils and ancient remains can tell us, and motive isn’t one of them.

While Andy didn’t share Jason’s exuberance and energetic enthusiasm, Jason and Nate thought much along the same lines as each other and shared an inquisitiveness regarding the behaviors and potential learning of the creatures they’d been studying. For Andy, the question had always been ‘what?’. Nate and Jason were the part of the team that asked ‘why?’. The answers to both question would be need to complete the picture. Since the Olduvai experience, the ‘what’ question now appeared to have been answered. The ‘why’ was still open, and that, in itself raised another one – ‘how?’. How had these beings survived and made the transition to where and what they are?

By the time they’d surveyed the view and gone through their various thoughts about what they were and would be doing here, the drizzle had stopped, but the damp chill remained. The three removed their outer rain gear and began to set up a work area. Since they had lodging in Toksook Bay, there was no need to establish an actual camp – a consideration proposed – insisted on, actually – by the Refuge administrator in Bethel to minimize their impact on the island. Though most of the island was muskeg, some of it was covered with permafrost, which, at best, is a fragile environment, subject to long-lasting damage from the most trivial of invasions. Not wanting to camp in these conditions, the team had offered no argument. Andy looked at his watch – just after ten. We have six hours until our ride back, referring to the helicopter that was shuttling them back and forth each of the next few days. He pulled his glasses, a pair of round wire-rims, front his shirt pocket, where he’d put them because of the drizzle. To Andy, seeing with no glasses and glasses spotted with rain were about the same. He put them back on.

Let’s get started, then, Nate said, looking around for the marker the ranger had left by the site. With the low scrub growth and relatively flat terrain, except for the nearby ridge, it was easy to spot the orange strip tied to its six-foot stake standing on the bare and weathered bank, thirty yards or so upstream from where they were standing. They made their way carefully along the rocky streamside and approached the exposed burial. Their first sight of what was to prove to be an incredible find was of the left side of a skeleton partially visible in the side of the embankment, just about four feet above the edge of the stream. Nate looked appreciatively at the exceptionally long arm and the extended toe. Looks like our guy, he observed. Jason took several photographs of the embankment before they began to carefully remove the layers of rock and soil to free the skeleton. Andy felt an involuntary shiver as he stood there, but whether it was from the chill of the gray sub-arctic day that surrounded them or from the association with the living creatures in their violent confrontations in the past or even what this mysterious creature represented, he couldn’t say.

The three of them worked with little conversation, each with his own thoughts, as they painstakingly brushed away the matrix that held their prize, not yet seeing that there was more to be discovered than an ancient burial. And what they were yet to discover