Creature: Shadow of the Sasquatch

By James M. Vesely

What begins as the yearly fishing adventure of four old friends into the vast Ontario wilderness becomes a bone-chilling ordeal of terror so intense that one of them vows never to return again.
In the company of his best friend, and with beautiful anthropologist Monica Weller, a Russian scientist, a Cree Indian guide named Archie Crow and Archie's daughter, Lorena, both of whom know the eerie truth, millionaire Lucas Tanner returns to the Canadian wilderness to seek the strange and terrifying secret of what lives and roams that dark and tangled forest.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: May 9, 2012
• ISBN: 9781475918502

James M. Vesely

James M. Vesely has written "Seasons of Harvest," "The Awakening Land," "Shadows on the Land," (THE CORRALES VALLEY TRILOGY) "Journey," "Unlike Any Land You Know," (NON-FICTION) "Coon Creek," "Lonesome Whistle Blow," "Cadet Gray," and "Creature." Jim was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. He and his wife now live in the small, rural village of Corrales, New Mexico, just outside Albuquerque. Jim is a member of the Western Writers of America.

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For my son-in-law, Jim, whose unwavering certainty

in the creature’s existence, and whose steadfast support

encouraged me to write this book.

CREATURE

Shadow of the Sasquatch

…when you have

eliminated the impossible, whatever remains,

however improbable, must be the truth.

SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

THE SIGN OF FOUR (1889)

1

Lucas Tanner stared out the aircraft’s side window, feeling the vibrations in its airframe and listening to the loud, pounding throb of the old Norseman’s powerful Pratt & Whitney radial.

Seated in the right seat next to the pilot, Lucas studied the dark, endless Canadian wilderness passing below. From time to time, out of reflex, he’d rub the clean, smooth stump of his left arm, which ended two inches below his elbow – the result of a North Vietnamese landmine in the A Shau Valley in November of 1970. An hour after the mine went off, an army surgeon’s knife took even more of what was left of his arm at a busy field hospital near Phu Bai.

On occasion, Lucas reluctantly wore a plastic and metal prosthetic device – more of a mechanical thumb and forefinger than anything else, but after two or three hours of enduring this apparatus, it became uncomfortable and annoying. Today it was packed at the bottom of his khaki duffel.

Watching the thick carpet of trees drift past below took him back to Vietnam, reminding him of too many tense flights in HU-1As – the famed whumping Hueys that carried them incountry, edgy and frightened, on early morning air assault missions, often putting them down into vicious little firefights – memories that still woke him from time to time, sweat-soaked and trembling, in the middle of the night.

Now a thin, tight smile crossed his face – as it did every time he realized that Vietnam was a long time past and those days were gone forever.

A dark and nasty blow had crept in from Manitoba a day earlier, and their pilot, flying by dead reckoning, was taking the dependable old seaplane over the trees, rocks, and water of the Ontario bush. From time to time, he’d climb above the clouds, and then lose altitude to fly below them, trying to keep out of the soup and the turbulence.

Hunkered down behind Lucas and the pilot, cramped and squeezed in among duffel bags, tackle boxes, cases of beer, a few quarts of scotch, a seven-day supply of canned and frozen food, and three 55-gallon drums of outboard fuel, were three of his closest friends – fishing buddies who’d known each other since their days together in high school.

Storm’s a damned frog choker, the pilot had observed as they stood on the dock in Red Lake earlier that day. He was a thin, wiry little fellow named Hubert Graves. Everyone in town called him Gravy. Today, like most days, Gravy wore an old pair of oil-stained Carhartt coveralls and a tattered, red baseball cap with Disneyworld-Orlando stitched on its front.

Lots of rain and wind, Gravy said. Figure it to let up in a day or two – I believe you fellows’ll get plenty of fishing.

It’s blowing like hell now, Phil Crain pointed out, staring at the granite-gray clouds scudding in from the south. And it’s starting to rain again. Jesus Christ, I’m surprised you guys are even flying today. Phil was a jumpy sort – the worrier of the group.

Gravy leaned over and spit, aiming for the center of a small oil slick floating near the dock. Hell, we fly in this stuff all the time, eh? He offered with a practiced lack of concern. His employer, Chimo Air, had told him long ago that it didn’t do to make the customers nervous. Red Lake ain’t Miami Beach weather – but hell, so long as we can see to taxi, take off, and land…

Lucas knew that aside from turbulence and some discomfort aloft; the buffeting winds and rain presented little real danger. Norseman aircraft were built to handle much tougher skies than these.

The remote Ontario mining community of Red Lake was gray and chilly for early August, with the weather turning dark and overcast just thirty miles north of Duluth on the American side. Once they’d cleared customs at Fort Frances and drove the remaining 250 miles of gravel road to Red Lake, they stepped wearily into the offices of Northwoods Fly-in Fishing, Ltd. to settle their bill with Evelyn MacDonald, who ran the float plane and outpost cabin operation.

Evelyn wasn’t encouraged by the squally weather either, and even though Gravy was predicting an early end to the wind and rain, all of them knew that a blow like this could last a week or more, turning the year-long anticipation of a week’s fishing trip into one soggy, boring day after another with little to do but drink their whiskey, play cards, and read whatever dog-eared magazines other crews had left laying around the cabin. But after driving more than a thousand miles north from Chicago to hear Evelyn complain about the weather, too, they’d just have to make do with whatever cards the rain gods dealt.

Gravy Graves didn’t look like anything extra standing on the dock in Red Lake, but he was all business once he finished loading his passengers and cargo and then settling his skinny frame behind the yoke of the Norseman.

Raising the flaps to their takeoff position of twenty degrees, he briefly scanned the instrument panel and taxied out into the dark chop of Howey Bay. After checking the magneto, Gravy raised his water rudders, positioned the aircraft into the whipping wind and gave it full throttle.

Along with five aging Norsemen, Chimo Air in Red Lake flew a variety of small Cessnas, a De Havilland DHC-6 Twin Otter, and a few Beech 18s.

For pure nostalgia, Lucas favored the Norseman – it was what most people envisioned a bush plane to be, and the old workhorse they were in shuddered and shook as it plowed through the water. Built by Noorduyn Aircraft Ltd. in the 1930s, the Norseman first appeared in the Northwest Territories, northern Quebec and Ontario during the latter part of that decade – making a name for itself wherever pioneers were cracking the Canadian frontier by air. It soon proved to be the aircraft of choice, making its name and reputation by doing the job for which it was built – supplying all the small settlements scattered throughout the sprawling Canadian bush. Evelyn had once told Lucas that there were thirty or forty of them still flying in the Canadian backcountry.

Lucas had always thought the novelty of a floatplane rising off the water to be an interesting exercise in itself – it was as if the machine went from submarine to boat to hydroplane to airplane in a matter of seconds.

Now there was a sense of raw exhilaration as the roaring, shuddering seaplane clawed itself onto the step of the float. Gravy eased pressure on the stick until he found that sweet spot that allowed them to accelerate most efficiently. After a short run over choppy water, the aluminum pontoons broke free and they were up and airborne – flying northwest out of Red Lake.

Glancing at the altimeter a few minutes later, Lucas saw they were flying low – a little less than three hundred feet – over the sprawling patchwork of shimmering lakes and dark forest that made up western Ontario’s immense Canadian Shield. Below stretched an endless landscape of sameness – water, bog, pine, spruce, fir, and tamarack – all of it conceived by the slow, steady creep and crush of glaciers that began more than two million years earlier and created everything that was passing beneath them out of Precambrian granite crust.

The sky had turned even darker now and every few minutes they were shaken by turbulence as Gravy flew through brief sheets of heavy rain. The old Norseman had no windshield wipers and the rain was pushed off the glass by the wind. The raindrops sounded like hail – thousands of liquid BBs peppering the windshield.

Turning his head as they lumbered along beneath low-hanging clouds, Lucas saw Bud Steiner, Mike Stapp, and Phil Crain happily peering out the side windows, intently searching for that first enjoyable glimpse of the old familiar lake on which the pilot would put them down.

That’s us, dead ahead, Gravy shouted, pointing through the streaked windshield and over the cowl. Stretching to look out the window, Lucas could just make out the cabin’s green metal roof nestled among the darker green of the surrounding trees.

The four of them had been coming up here for almost thirty years, and except for the big, comfortable new cabin Evelyn built after taking over the operation, nothing had changed from one year to the next. This remote body of water, long ago mapped by the Forest Service and assigned the name of Murdock Lake, was as timeless and constant as the turning of the earth.

For Lucas and the others it had always been a magical place of shared adventure – a source of great sport, good food, humorous stories, and remembered laughter that through the years had added to their lives and built layers to their friendship.

Along with the usual array of small mammals and birds, the surrounding bush held aeries of bald eagles and dens of black bear – along with moose, whitetail deer, and wolves. Near the waterline, at the base of sheer, black granite walls that defined a portion of Murdock Lake’s east narrows, there still existed faded petroglyphs – rock images of geometric symbols, familiar forest creatures and even stranger beings, painted by Neolithic hunters for reasons long lost to time.

The Norseman circled the cabin and turned into the wind for a final approach. Looking down now, they could see six men packed and waiting anxiously on the dock – this was the crew from the previous week.

Well, the rain’s quit and it’s good we got some chop today, Gravy yelled over the roar of the engine. He nodded at the whitecaps. When I brung that bunch in last Sunday, she was flat as a damned mill pond. I had to drop a rock out the window to put ripples on the water so’s I could judge my height. He shook his head. It’s a damned bitch to put this airplane down on flat water.

As he taxied toward the dock after landing, Gravy opened his door and cut the engine. He scrambled down to a steel pontoon and tossed a line to one of the waiting fisherman. Once the aircraft was secure, Lucas and the others climbed out and began to unload their own gear, along with a full drum of gasoline.

Well, how’d you fellas do? Gravy asked the men waiting to fly out. It was the standard question.

We caught our limit, one of the men said. At least until the wind and rain came through. We been weathered in the last few days. He was a stout, red-faced fellow, thoughtlessly smoking a cigar too close to the unloaded gasoline drum on the dock. When Gravy told him to put it out, the man grunted and tossed the cigar into the lake. He and his group were from Sheboygan, Wisconsin.

Well that’s bad luck, eh? Gravy said. But it happens.

Listen, that ain’t all, the Sheboygan man went on, and Lucas thought he sounded annoyed. There’s something kind of screwy happened and you ought to know about it.

What’s that? Gravy asked.

Come on over here, I’ll show you.

One of the camp’s fourteen-foot aluminum fishing boats had been hauled out of the water. Its transom was torn out, the wooden seats were smashed to pieces, and both sides of the hull were crushed inward at least a foot.

Jesus Christ, Gravy exclaimed with a whistle. How in hell did that happen?

Damned if we know, the red-faced man said. We can’t figure it out, but it happened night before last, about an hour after dark. She was raining like hell. Couldn’t see much, but we heard a racket and some weird kind of scream down by the dock. Found the damned boat nearly sunk the next morning. Whatever done it tore the outboard and transom off, too.

A scream? Gravy asked.

The man shrugged and nodded. Yeah, that’s the best I can describe it.

We fished the motor out of the lake with a rope, one of the others added. It’s over there by the fish table.

Jesus Christ, Gravy said again, shaking his head. You men expect me to believe a tale like that?

Hell, I don’t give a shit what you believe, the stout man said. That’s what happened.

As the six Sheboygan men began passing their gear into the aircraft for the flight back to Red Lake, Lucas and Bud Steiner gave Gravy a hand with the drum of outboard gas.

I’ll need you boys to help lash that bunged-up boat onto the floats, he said. And I got to haul that Mercury motor back to get torn down and rebuilt – Evelyn ain’t going to like this at all.

What could do that to a boat? Bud asked. A bear?

Gravy shook his head. Naw, I don’t believe so. There ain’t been a black bear born that could smash up a boat like that. It’s a Lund and they’re built tough. Double riveted with a heavy-duty transom. Evelyn buys the best.

What then?

Well, if the man’s tellin’ the truth – I just ain’t sure, Gravy admitted, scratching his beard. I flew supplies in a Beech 18 out of Ketchikan and Valdez for two years, and even them big Alaska grizzlies couldn’t of tore the damned transom out of a fourteen-foot aluminum boat.

Just as Gravy predicted, dawn broke clear the next day and the morning’s fishing was good. By afternoon, they’d only been on Murdock for half a day and the wire mesh live box was nearly full with a four-man limit of two and three pound walleyed pike. With clear weather moving in, it seemed they’d lucked out and the lake wasn’t going to disappoint them.

Around noon, they brought the boats in to a small island and while Mike Stapp got busy frying some of the morning’s catch for a shore lunch, Lucas stood on a sloping granite point, eyeing the weed-filled shoreline across a deep narrows. He’d developed a method of casting with his right arm, then transferring the rod and reel to his prosthetic left hand as he worked the reel with the other. It wasn’t a graceful method, but it worked. Casting with the prosthesis had been awkward when he’d first tried the technique years before. But he’d gotten used to the feel of it and by now the series of movements were second nature to him.

His cast played out smoothly, and he felt the familiar sense of satisfaction as the chipped and worn daredevil spoon arched through the air and slapped down on the surface of the bronze-colored water. The classic old lure quickly fluttered and sank just forward of a weed bed, as Lucas began a slow, jerky retrieve.

By preference, he was using what his friends dismissed as antique gear – a four and a half foot tempered steel Heddon Pal casting rod that first belonged to his father before the old man packed it in and succumbed to the lung cancer that came with sixty years of smoking. The reel went along with the rod – an equally ancient Pflueger Supreme that Lucas’s father had used all his life – keeping it so well oiled and free of rust that Lucas suspected the old baitcaster was in as fine a shape as the day it was new.

Reeling in without even a follow, he glanced across the rocks to the small, crackling cook fire where Mike had a pot of baked beans heating while a frying pan sizzled with fried potatoes, onions and beer-battered pieces of their morning catch.

Circling overhead were a dozen swooping, screeching gulls who’d sighted something and were impatient to get at it.

The beer cold? Lucas called, over the gull’s raucous cries.

You bet, Mike called back. Help yourself.

Sounds good, Lucas answered, hooking the lure into one of the rod guides and making his way toward the cooler. The day’s getting warm.

After they’d helped clean fish, Phil and Bud wandered off to explore, as they liked to do, usually finding something of interest while poking around in the bush. They might come upon a broken, rusted old trap, or some Cree hunter’s abandoned snowshoe. One year, Bud stumbled across a mess of fresh mushrooms in a small clearing – toting them back to the cabin wrapped in his shirt. The four of them drank a lot of beer and debated for more than an hour before deciding not to take the chance of eating them.

Today they came back empty-handed, but Phil had a look of disgust on his face. Jesus, he complained, nodding toward the thick stand of woods behind them. Something’s dead as hell back in there.

What is it?

Couldn’t tell – stunk too bad to poke around much.

Worse thing I ever smelled, Bud agreed. Glad that stink’s not around here, too. How’re those walleyes doing?

Another few minutes, Mike estimated, turning the fish in the hot, crackling Crisco. He’d dubbed them face fish years before – maintaining that fresh-caught walleye pike was something just this side of Paradise – a delicacy to be stuffed in your face until you were as full as a tick on a dog.

Curious, Mike stood to stretch his legs and glanced up at the circling birds. It’s kinda funny though – those gulls making such a fuss, and being afraid to land if there’s a dead animal just off in the woods.

Mike had a point. A dead carcass, the ranker the better, was an easy meal for hungry gulls – and four fisherman eating their lunch shouldn’t pose much of a threat to them.

Lucas thought it was very curious.

2

Tired from the first day’s fishing, they all slept well. Once the Coleman lamps were out, the only sounds heard inside the cabin were those of four men snoring, the annoying buzz of mosquitoes, and the constant light skitter of mice across the wood planked floor.

Perched on heavy uprights ten feet above the ground, it was a spacious, well-constructed shelter with four sets of double bunks to comfortably sleep eight fishermen or hunters.

In one spacious room there was a sprawling dinner table and a wide screened window overlooking the lake. Standing in the center of the cabin – an old woodstove used during hunting season or when the late summer weather turned unseasonably cold. The hot water heater, range and oven operated on LP gas – as did the large Servel refrigerator that stood in the kitchen, along with a matching chest freezer out on the screened-in porch.

Along with the range and oven, the kitchen boasted shelving, cabinets, and a double sink for washing dishes. On one side of the structure, convenient to the bunks was a washbasin and a cramped, gravity-fed shower that was seldom used when the weather was warm, the lake offering a much more pleasant place to bathe.

There was a large screened porch off the cabin’s front door and surrounding two sides was a wide, rambling sun deck.

The commode was a traditional one-holer, reached by a thirty-yard walk over a path through the bush studded with roots and loose rocks. Its wooden door thoughtfully faced the lake and when held fully open, it gave the user a stunning view that was usually favored over privacy.

Lucas was always astounded at how a day or two in the bush quickly erased the pressures and concerns of life and work back in Chicago.

He’d always been an inventive sort and fascinated by the latest technology. Because of these talents and interests as a young man, Lucas Tanner had become a huge financial success. Working alone out of his garage after coming back from the war missing an arm, he invented and developed a remarkable apparatus which he patented as the Omega Meter – a state-of-the-art device designed to perform extremely accurate cleanliness testing on printed circuit boards and assemblies.

It very quickly became the industry standard for ionic testing, and within three years of developing the first test model, Lucas sold all his patents and custom equipment to an aggressive Silicon Valley conglomerate, becoming a multi-millionaire before he was forty-two – a station in life far beyond his wildest dreams.

Phil Crain was enjoying a successful career as a prominent tax attorney in Chicago – a full partner in the Michigan Ave. firm of McDermott, Hastings & Emory.

Bud Steiner, in addition to coaching a hapless football team through their seventh losing season, taught high school English and literature at the private highly-ranked and well-endowed Morgan Park Academy on the city’s far south side.

After graduating with a master’s degree in Zoology from Oklahoma State, Mike Stapp came back to Chicago to take a position with the famed Brookfield Zoo. Twelve years later, he was appointed the facility’s director.

They were a close, but diverse group, with varying degrees of professional, financial and marital success. Lucas and Bud were both divorced and neither had children. Phil married a Berkeley girl he’d met at the University of California, Hastings College of Law, and while he’d made the choice to practice tax law in Chicago, she worked for the city as a public defender and was still firmly convinced that the country’s dismal failure to elect Hubert H. Humphrey in 1968 would always represent a monumental tragedy for the liberal soul of America.

Mike was a proud father three times over, long married to his college sweetheart, who’d grown up on her parents’ ranch near Honobia, Oklahoma.

The next morning, Lucas and Mike fried bacon and eggs for breakfast while Bud Steiner made his way down to the dock to clean out the live box of any dead fish. Ten minutes later he came back shaking his head.

One of our boats busted loose last night. It’s floating out there, about a hundred yards offshore. And have a look at this –

Bud dropped a short length of cord on the table. It was part of the bowline from the boat he and Phil were using. This end was still tied to the dock cleats.

The line wasn’t cut, but rather torn in two – with the other end presumably still tied to the loose boat.

Strong gust of wind could have done it, Phil suggested.

Maybe, Bud said. If the line was rotted. But it’s not rope, it’s nylon cord, and nylon won’t rot. Anyway, I didn’t hear any wind at all last night.

I don’t know, guys, Mike offered. After what those guys from Sheboygan said, I think we’ve got us a bear in camp – even though Gravy ruled it out.

If it was a bear, Lucas thought briefly, it was going to be a long, annoying week. A bear in camp was just a pain in the ass nuisance. They’d need to put extra effort into keeping the place clean, burn any edible garbage before leaving the camp, and be particularly careful about leaving food out – and even following these precautions might not keep a