Songs of the Sasquatch

By Savage Feral Hornpoke

It's a brave new world--the Sasquatch music odyssey.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Nov 29, 2019
• ISBN: 9781528959902

Book preview

Epilogue

Dedication

For my son, Mahasamatman.

Copyright Information ©

Savage Feral Hornpoke (2019)

The right of Savage Feral Hornpoke to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781528911795 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781528959902 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published (2019)

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Prologue: A Sasquatch Dwindling Habitat

The mountains of Doddridge County are two and three tiered… as a general rule—although rules are meant to be broken by God. A three-tiered mountain has three flat-ish rings around it before it peaks at the top.

Mountains that peak at the second ring area usually leave a flat top that makes what is called an upper meadow. Meadows that occur at the third tier or peak are called ridge meadows or top meadows.

In the 1900s, bulldozers came for the timber and oil, and left flat scars that served as roads on just about every mountain. Over time, these roads healed, filled with forests, and went back to being animal footpaths. These ‘old roads’ make accessing wilderness areas easier—easier than having to climb straight up the side of a mountain…resting on one of the tiers before beginning again. Often creeks formed in, or along, these roads. So a mountain may have a natural creek bed erosion from the beginning of time…but it may also have a creek that runs down a road that was made, both…and both active creeks.

Mountains group together and tend to form ridge lines, but ridge lines are rarely sharply formed—rather well rounded and easily navigated. Some may have bluff stone outcrops on top which can be easily navigated around. Sometimes these bluffs have cave-like ledges in them, filled with sandy bottoms. Often the rocky bluffs are fully hidden by the trees.

Often two mountain ridgelines will come together at one end, leaving a ‘hollow’ between the two ridgelines. Sometimes the mountain ridgelines come together at a pinch point so that the make two hollows on each side of the pinch point. If the pinch point happens at the first tier of the mountain base, it usually forms a flat place called a ‘saddle’. If the pinch point happens at the second tier of the mountain side, it becomes a ridge. Red clay roads tend to follow ridges and saddles when they can.

Ridges tend to form clusters of two and three. What delineates one cluster from another is the bottomlands that surround a group, where you find streams and rivers. So often, an explorer can walk all the way around a group of mountain ridges due to the bottomlands that encircle it. On an average, that walk might be thirty or even fifty miles.

In a ridge, one mountain is divided from the next where the two form ravines between them. Ravines are usually steep enough in places that climbing down them could be dangerous—but not always. At the bottom, ravines coalesce in a winding creek between ridges, called a ‘gulley’. A gulley, as a general rule, occurs between two sets of ridges at the base—where there is just room for a trail alongside it. There is little open land on either side of it. When there becomes open land on one side or both sides of the creek, at the base between the mountain ridges, the ‘gulley’ is called a ‘stream’ or ‘creek’. And the open area, a meadow of sorts, at the base between two mountain ridges, is called a ‘hollow’. A meadow here is called a ‘hollow meadow’.

However, the open, flat land at the base, between and surrounding ridge clusters, is called ‘bottom land’ or ‘bottom meadows’ or ‘valleys’. And ‘streams’ (from hollows) coalesce into ‘rivers’ that cut through bottom lands. As a note, some streams can be navigated by automobile as a makeshift road. But rivers have to have fording areas—a shallow area where a vehicle can cross through it, or it needs a bridge over it as a crossing.

During flood season, sometimes entire bottomlands are under water of one grand and powerful river…a river in every sense of the word. However, during dry spells, a river may seem to be no more than the size of a stream tributary that comes from a hollow. It may be a mistake to try and navigate a river with a vehicle though, because during dry seasons, there are still standing pools along a river that drop off to depths deeper than a step van—these are called ‘swimming holes’. Smaller versions of swimming holes sometimes are found in streams and creeks, but they are called ‘watering holes’ or ‘pools’.

It is in the bottomlands or valleys that you find most farms, or houses, towns, cities of the modern world. It is where you would find railroad tracks and highways and paved or graveled roads. Ridge roads and oil well roads which are still in use, are all red clay and muddy, with ruts when it rains. When it dries out, it all becomes smooth, cool and friendly to bare feet. The natives rarely explore the mountains, they generally keep to the ‘shadow lands’ of the valleys.

Before roads and railroads, people were just as likely to build on first tier or even second tier areas on mountains. You can find some houses on mountain peaks, but most avoided this as a building area due to folk lore about lightning strikes. There are many sites where you can find the sandstone piers that a house once stood on before it burned. And there are many abandoned houses that were built in the late eighteen and early nineteen hundreds—most so dilapidated you could not bring them back from their deteriorated state.

There are clusters of hollows that are nothing but abandoned farm after abandoned farm. Houses tucked away on this ridge, or that hollow, or that upper meadow, or that saddle of the ridge—the properties all ran together to form one big wilderness area where people of the modern age never bothered about anymore—at least since the invention of the cheap automobile and the modern paved road. Men and women can have much an easier access to one another if they stay down in the shadows of the mountains.

Even when a large, mountain farm is not abandoned, there are large portions of it that are wilderness, overgrown, steep, and unused, and otherwise difficult to navigate—even on foot.

This story takes place on a road called Ramsey Ridge Road, which climbs from the bottom lands of Central Station…past some rock bluffs on the right side…up a mountain of the first ridge—winding up to the third tier of the mountain, where it levels off and winds around…then descends to the Saddle area between ridges.

At the top, level area of the road, you cannot see the peak, but there are offshoot oil well roads that do lead up higher. The easiest access to the peak is a natural gas, right-of-way. And at the peak are some large, flat stones the size of an automobile, hidden by the trees.

After the level off area of Ramsey Ridge Road, the road winds down through the ‘saddle’ first tier level…then up to the second ridge, third tier area and forks. The left fork is ‘Old Dodd Road’, which snakes down to a first tier meadow and descends to the bottom land of Long Run…and if you turn left on Long Run Road, you would end up in the town of Green Wood.

The other fork, snakes around the ridge up to a mountain meadow with dilapidated farm house known as the ‘Old Ramsey Place’ and past a farm house known as the ‘Hartman’s’ and then down to a bridge that crosses over Long Run at a point very far from Green wood—but near to Arnold Creek Road that can take you back to Central Station—past the Central Station Swimming hole at Arnold’s Creek Bridge and the old Natural Gas Pumping station, and the small, Central Station Candy Store.

Back at the saddle of Ramsey Ridge Road, there is an old civil war road, all grown over, that begins at the farmhouse known as the old Damascus place. It descends into an abandoned hollow, known as the ‘Clarke Place’ to some and ‘The Bears’ to others…with two abandoned farmhouses and log barns and a machine shed…and eventually it comes to Arnolds Creek Ford and Arnold Creek Road—at the old church and graveyard. Here, you can turn left to go to Long Run Road, or right to go back into Central Station…as said earlier.

The Saddle of Ramsey Ridge Road is the center of this world of wilderness area of abandoned farms.

On the left side of the saddle is a ravine that is not friendly to foot travel and winds all the way back to Central Station.

At the fork, there is another ravine, unfriendly to foot travel that passes the high cliffs of bluff caves on the left, on its way to bottomland meadows of the Old Spellman farm. If you instead, follow the fork of Old Dodd Road down to Spellman’s upper meadow, it also drops down eventually to Spellman’s bottomland farmhouse. The Upper meadow is made up of two large areas on each side of the old road—and the right side has an abandoned farmhouse.

And just as a note, if you follow Old Dodd Road and before you turn down toward the right to Spellman’s, you could go around the back side of the mountain and come to another abandoned farm house…or you could go up the old, ‘oil well road’ and at the peak of this mountain, continue into the woods…through and around the back side and come to an old chicken coop—a pole barn structure—wrapped in tin and a tin roof—tin held in place by big rocks and old tires—where the recluses, Duke and Ellie Damascus lived.

The entire abandoned area is a good thousand acres. And there are abandoned clusters of other hollows between bottomland towns…towns that consist of a church, a post office and a candy store, and a hundred people…abandoned and un-tread by human feet—outside of hunting season, for the last hundred years.

I hope the reader can make a picture in their minds of a fantasy map of the area from the description. It is the only reason I put this prologue chapter in. Originally, I just wanted to draw up a fantasy map depicting this non-existent place. However, the cost of printing of the book goes up for inclusion of pictures.

A Young Sasquatch and a Car Radio

It was a warm, breezy, moonlit night and a young, Sasquatch sat in the shade of the trees at a mountain peak. In human years, he was just ten years old…but then again, a seven-year-old dog is just fifty years old in human years too. Sasquatch mature much slower than humans by four to one.

It was the first mountain in the first ridge, where Ramsey Ridge Road winds its two-mile trek down to Central Station. The road is not visible from here, even in winter. But in summer, the leaf canopy hides what can’t be seen—even better.

In the moonlight, you can see the second ridge to the west and you can surmise where the saddle rises to it between ridges—just to the left of the western view.

He could hear human music. It was so amazing and new. This was not the first time he had heard human music. He had been hearing it since a family of Urinators had moved in to the habitat.

What he didn’t know he was listening to were songs like Killer Q, Carry On, Stuck in the Middle, Hotel C, Long Way from Home, Love is Oxygen, Mr. Skies, My Best Girl, and a whole lot more popular progressive rock music. It was yester-years music for that time…but still played on a certain FM radio station out of Chicago—and one of the only signals that could be received by radio on that mountain ridge.

At this spot, he could hear just about anything that was happening inside of the range of the Sasquatch habitat. This is the reason why he liked to sit here on this Ancient rectangle of stone out crop—that was much like a druid’s altar. It was huge and flat, and he could see some stars through the tree canopy…as the night wind rustled the leaves—in waves that travelled across the entire forest.

And now it was as if the music was coming from the stars.

But when he sat up, what he had been listening to…was coming from the saddle area of Ramsey Ridge Road…where a family of Urinators had moved in.

That farm was known among the Sasquatch as the Old Henry Damascus place. The farm had been lost to the Damascus’s from back taxes, way back in the 1930s, and had been abandoned since…until relatively recently, this family from