GIANT and OBESE BIGFOOT is CAPTURED, IMAGE SHOCKS EVERYONE!
The Treaty of the Hidden Ones
Chapter 1: The Photographs
The rain had been falling for three days straight when the photographs finally reached Dr. Marcus Webb. They came in a weather‑stained manila envelope, edges softened by too many hands, forwarded through six outdated addresses before someone at the Pacific Northwest Cryptozoology Research Institute bothered to tape on a new label and drop it on his cluttered desk. It was late; the building hummed with the quiet of old pipes and fluorescent lights. Marcus slit the envelope open with a scalpel and slid out a stack of glossy prints and a thumb drive. The moment he saw the first image, the fatigue he’d been dragging around for months evaporated.
.
.
.
The photos were trail‑camera quality—grainy, muted, distorted slightly by lens flare and motion blur—but the subject was impossible to mistake. Something massive had stepped into the frame and triggered the sensor. Something upright. Something that dwarfed the saplings around it. Marcus zoomed in on his monitor, watching pixels break down into squares of color, but the shape stayed stubbornly coherent: a hunched, heavy torso; arms like fallen tree trunks; a head set low on a bull‑neck. He checked the EXIF data. The coordinates pointed to a remote section of the Cascades, roughly forty miles northeast of Forks. The timestamp put the encounter at 2:15 a.m. eight nights ago.
He’d been there before—years back, chasing reports of strange calls echoing through the timber. That trip had yielded nothing but wet boots and another file folder of “unsubstantiated claims.” The region, however, had a reputation. The local Quino elders had shared stories over coffee and hesitation: tales of mountain giants who walked like men but possessed the strength of twenty. They were not monsters in those stories, not exactly. They were neighbors, dangerous ones. Intelligent. Territorial. Best left alone.
Seventeen years of chasing shadows weighed on Marcus as he scanned the pictures. He’d poured half his life into footprint casts that always turned out to be misidentifications, hair samples that returned as elk or bear or “unknown ungulate,” eyewitness accounts that collapsed under scrutiny. At forty‑two, with a divorce behind him and a career viewed as mildly embarrassing by most “real” biologists, he’d begun to wonder if he’d built his life’s work on wishful thinking.
These photographs were different. The first thing that struck him was scale. Even crouched, the creature’s head reached higher than an adjacent cedar limb he knew sat about nine feet off the ground. The second was body composition. This was not the lean, athletic figure of the Patterson–Gimlin film etched into pop‑culture memory. The thing in the photos was massive in every dimension, thick with what looked like heavy subcutaneous fat that created folds along its flanks and belly. Its shoulders were absurd—broader than a commercial refrigerator. The arms hung past mid‑thigh. The head seemed almost too small for the body, topped with a low dome of dark hair.
He searched for signs of hoaxing: inconsistent shadows, odd pixel artifacts around the outline, evidence of compositing. The lighting matched across all frames. The vegetation in the background showed natural depth‑of‑field blur. The creature’s fur reflected ambient light the way it should. If these images were fabricated, whoever had made them was more skilled than any “gotcha” skeptic documentary maker he’d ever dealt with. Marcus sat alone in his office, rain whispering against the windows, and realized he was at a crossroads. Either he was looking at the smartest fake he’d ever encountered, or someone had finally captured genuine photographic evidence of a creature biology had politely dismissed as folklore.
By the time he shut his computer down that night, he’d already made his decision. He would go back into those mountains. He would find whatever had walked through that camera’s field of view. And this time, he would not go alone.
Chapter 2: Assembling the Team
The first call he made was to Jimmy Kovach. James “Jimmy” Kovach was a wildlife photographer and backcountry operative rolled into one—a broad‑shouldered thirty‑six‑year‑old with a wrestler’s build, a black beard, and an easy grin that vanished whenever the conversation turned serious. He’d grown up in Montana, learning to track from a grandfather who believed in reading sign like scripture. He’d worked with Marcus on three prior expeditions and had an uncanny ability to move through dense forest without making a sound.
“Trail cam?” Jimmy asked after Marcus finished his breathless description of the photos. “You’re sure it’s not just forced perspective and a guy in a suit?”
“I’m as sure as I’ve ever been,” Marcus said. “Look, I’m not calling it proof. But it’s the best lead we’ve had in years. The size, the proportions—they don’t match any known animal. The local guide who took the photos is solid. And the Quino stories put giants in that exact drainage.”
Silence stretched on the line for a beat too long. Then Jimmy sighed. “If these shots are real, we’re not just trying to prove a theory anymore. We’re walking into the home range of an eight‑hundred‑plus‑pound animal that’s managed to evade detection for centuries. Something that big isn’t just hiding—it’s actively avoiding us. That means smart. Smart enough to be cautious. Maybe smart enough to be pissed off. What happens if we find it and it decides it doesn’t like being found?”
Marcus knew the question wasn’t rhetorical, but his excitement overrode the back‑of‑the‑skull warning that had been whispering since he’d opened the envelope. “We go in carefully. We go in prepared. We observe, document, and if we’re lucky, we build enough evidence that even the most arrogant peer reviewer can’t shrug it away.”
“Not ‘if,’” Jimmy said. “If we go, we go with someone who knows how to keep us alive if things go sideways.”
That led to Sarah Chen. Former Army Ranger, now a wildlife conservation officer with a PhD’s mind tucked behind combat‑honed reflexes. Marcus had met her at a conference on predator management, where she’d given a presentation on tracking techniques that made half the room look at their own field work with embarrassment. He’d recognized in her the rare combination he needed: tactical discipline, backcountry toughness, and a scientist’s brain.
“I’m in,” she said as soon as he laid out the broad strokes. Her voice through the phone was flat, calm. “But we do this smart. That means firearms. I’m not talking about hunting your mystery primate. I’m talking about being able to stop something very big from turning us into red mist if it decides we’re trespassing. We also need an extraction plan, scheduled check‑ins, and someone on the outside who will raise hell if we miss a call.”
The fourth member came as a surprise. When Marcus mentioned the expedition to Dr. Robert Yamamoto, it was more to ask for help with potential DNA analysis than anything else. Robert, sixty‑one, silver‑haired and compact, had made his career as a large‑animal veterinarian, consulting for ranchers and zoos from Oregon to Alaska. His wife had died three years prior; his grown children were scattered across the country. Retirement sat on him badly; he still kept his hands busy with farm calls.
“If you’re going after an unknown large mammal,” Robert said, “and you’re even considering a tranquilization, you need someone who understands physiology. You tranquilize a thousand‑pound primate with the wrong cocktail, congratulations—you’ve just killed the most important specimen in modern zoology. I want in. Consider it my last big field job.”
Marcus hesitated. Bringing a sixty‑one‑year‑old into steep, wet Cascades terrain felt irresponsible. Then he remembered Robert’s steady hands on bison shoulders, the way he could palpate a joint and tell you more than an MRI. “Okay,” he said. “But you understand this isn’t a safari. It’s not safe.”
Robert’s laugh was dry. “Son, I’ve been kicked by bulls and bitten by lions in cages I welded myself. I’m aware.”
They met in Forks under a sky the color of dull pewter, rain coming down in lazy sheets. A rented F‑350 sat in the motel lot, sagging slightly under the weight of packed gear: four people’s worth of food and shelter for two weeks, satellite phone, radios, GPS units, solar chargers, first‑aid kits, plaster for casting, night‑vision optics, trail cameras, and a small arsenal.
Sarah’s contribution to that arsenal turned Marcus’s stomach even as he grudgingly admitted its logic: two Remington 870 shotguns loaded with slugs and her personal Winchester Model 70 chambered in .375 H&H Magnum, a caliber designed to stop African buffalo and things that thought they were invincible.
Marcus frowned at the rifle’s heavy barrel. “If we show up in the literature as ‘the people who shot Bigfoot,’ we’ll go down in history as villains.”
“If we show up at all,” Sarah said evenly, “it’ll be because we didn’t let something the size of a car get within arm’s reach without options. We don’t shoot unless we have no choice. But pretending we won’t ever need that choice? That’s how people get killed.”
In the motel room that night, with wet gear steaming on shower rods and maps spread across both beds, they planned a route. The coordinates from the trail cam placed them near a nameless creek, ten miles as the crow flies from the nearest logging road, in a basin deep enough to swallow a town. The man who’d placed the camera—local guide and lifelong hunter, Tom Breswick—had agreed to lead them in. But he’d been clear: he had no intention of staying.
Chapter 3: Threshold
Tom met them in the gray drizzle at six a.m., pulling into the lot in a battered Jeep that rattled like a toolbox full of wrenches. Up close, he was all sinew and weathered leather. Sixty‑something, Marcus guessed, with eyes that scanned the tree line even when they were still in town.
He led the way east on Highway 101, then onto a series of progressively smaller roads until the pavement gave way to gravel, then dirt, then something that only generously qualified as a logging track. The forest pressed in, a wall of Douglas‑fir and hemlock knit together by salal and sword ferns. Water bled out of every fold in the terrain, running down ruts and across the road in cold, tannin‑brown sheets.
At a wide spot where the road simply ended, Tom killed the engine. “Beyond this,” he said, “your truck’s just a paperweight. We walk from here.”
They shifted weight from truck to back, the ritual of lashing down straps and double‑checking buckles bringing a familiar focus. Tom’s pace into the timber was brisk and sure‑footed. He pointed out landmarks as they went: an odd basalt boulder shaped like a sleeping dog, a lightning‑scarred snag, a creek crossing where bedrock glistened under a skim of water. It struck Marcus that these silent, wet forests were as much Tom’s home as any house could be.
At the small clearing where the seasonal creek cut through, Tom stopped. A cedar trunk bore the scar of a camera mount, seven feet up, metal bracket bent like a paperclip someone had worried between fingers. “Trail cam was here,” he said. “Pointed that way.” He gestured to the game trail paralleling the water. “Triggered eight days ago, two‑fifteen in the morning. I came back three days later and found that bracket twisted. Lens smeared with…something. Mud. Maybe scat. I wiped it off, pulled the card, and decided I was done up here alone.”
“What else have you seen?” Marcus asked.
Tom’s jaw worked for a moment. “Been thirty‑five years I’ve hunted these ridges. There are places up there,” he nodded uphill, “where the animals don’t act right. Elk herds that move like something’s dogging them. Tree structures—logs stacked in ways no storm could manage. Heard…calls. Not cougars, not wolves, not anything I can name. Couple kill sites where an elk or bear got taken down. Bones broken, marrow cleaned out. Patterns don’t match any known predator. Whatever’s up there doesn’t want company. It’s been better at avoiding us than we’ve been at finding it. You folks want to poke that bear—or whatever it is—that’s your business. Mine is knowing when to walk away.”
He pointed out the ridge where he’d heard the strange vocalizations, showed them a few claw marks far too high for any black bear, then stepped back. “I’ll be three miles and one Jeep ride away. Good luck. Try not to piss it off.”
They watched him disappear into the green, his presence leaving a Tom‑shaped hole that let the full weight of the wilderness press in. Sarah picked a camp site two hundred yards back from the creek on a slightly elevated knoll. They pitched tents, strung a tarp, hung food in bear‑proof containers, and set a ring of motion sensors that would chime on their handheld receivers if anything larger than a raccoon crossed their invisible line.
Then the work began.
Within an hour, Marcus and Jimmy found the first track near the creek: a mud depression partly washed by rain but still clear enough to measure. Nineteen inches long. Nine wide. Five toes. The plaster cast they made of it weighed more than some of the “definitive” casts Marcus had seen paraded on talk shows.
They followed sign upstream and found more: bark stripped high off trees, dental impressions in exposed cambium bigger than any bear’s; scat piles the size of dinner plates, packed with plant matter and fragments of small bones. Half a mile up, they stopped dead.
A dead Douglas‑fir, long since stripped of bark, had been snapped off twelve feet above the ground. Not sheared by wind. Not rotted at the base. The break showed fresh, raw splinters and torsion—twisted fibers radiating outwards as if some enormous hand had grabbed, twisted, and leaned. The top section, a log that must have weighed several hundred pounds, lay thirty feet away, deliberately wedged across the creek to form a crude bridge.
Jimmy ran his palm along the break. “No storm did this,” he murmured. “And no black bear I’ve ever seen is playing lumberjack.”
By dusk, camp was ringed by the day’s discoveries—plaster casts drying under the tarp, vials of scat sealed in alcohol, GPS‑tagged waypoints marked on digital maps. That night, as Marcus lay in his sleeping bag listening to rain drum on nylon and Robert’s steady breathing in the next bag over, his excitement simmered uneasily with something else. For the first time in all his years of chasing legends, he wasn’t sure if he wanted the myth to step fully into the light.
Chapter 4: The Clearing of Skulls
The days settled into a rhythm: grid search by daylight, tense watchfulness by night. Sarah divided the area around camp into sectors on a laminated map. Each morning, they split into pairs, checked radios, synchronized watches, and fanned out.
On the second day, Marcus and Robert followed a spidery game trail up a steep hillside and walked out into a small clearing ringed by firs and tumbled rock. The smell hit them first—old blood, bone dust, and something strange underneath. At the base of a large boulder, bones lay scattered. Elk, mostly. Rib cages cracked open like seed pods, femurs split lengthwise to expose marrow that had long since been sucked out. That alone would have been notable. Predators are messy; scavengers mess them further. This was…organized.
On a ledge about four feet off the ground, six elk skulls sat in a neat row as if placed there by careful hands. Each had its lower jaw removed. Each had a precise break in the cranium where the brain would have been accessed. They were aligned, frontal bones facing outward, empty sockets staring across the clearing.
Robert crouched, old knees popping, and ran his fingers over one skull’s margins. “These breaks aren’t random,” he said softly. “Consistent force, same location. Whoever did this learned a technique and repeated it. This isn’t just feeding. It’s…display.”
Marcus photographed everything—wide shots, close shots, detail shots. His heart hammered as his mind tried to categorize what he saw. Tool use? Symbolic behavior? This wasn’t the work of an animal stumbling on a carcass. This was a pattern. A ritual, maybe.
Sarah and Jimmy joined them later, their faces tight as they took in the scene. Sarah’s eyes went to the periphery, scanning the treeline, mapping angles instinctively. “This spot is perfect for an ambush,” she said. “Clear lines of sight downhill. Boulder at your back. One way up, one way down. Whoever feeds here knows no one’s getting the drop on them.”
They set camera traps overlooking the clearing, angling lenses toward the skulls, the bones, the approach. Then they withdrew as the day faded, feeling eyes on their backs the whole way down.
That night, as they huddled under the tarp, the first vocalization rolled through the forest.
It came from the north—a low, subterranean rumble that climbed into a sustained note that was neither wolf howl nor elk bugle. It was lower, bigger, filled with lung power no native predator could muster. The sound vibrated in their chests and died slowly against the hillsides. The forest followed with a silence so complete it felt like the world had stopped breathing.
Fifteen minutes later it came again, closer this time. A third call answered from the northwest. A fourth, fainter, from the east. Not random. Not lone. They were triangulating.
Jimmy’s knuckles were white around the radio in his hand. “They’re talking,” he whispered. “To each other. About us.”
Sarah checked her motion‑sensor receiver. All units were green. Nothing had crossed the perimeter. Yet. “They’re staying just outside our fence line,” she said quietly. “Curious enough to ping us. Cautious enough not to break the line. For now.”
Sleep, that night, was an exercise in pretense. Every crack of a branch, every gust of wind that rattled the tarp, pulled all four of them out of their thin blankets of rest. Around three a.m., one of the perimeter sensors beeped twice in rapid succession, indicating movement along the northeastern arc. Another chimed seconds later to the north. Something was moving the circle, testing each point, never crossing fully in.
Morning revealed the proof: a series of immense, five‑toed footprints pressing deep into moss and loam just beyond the little grey boxes of their sensors. They’d been there, walking the line, aware of the human devices and choosing to stay just out of range. The message was clear: we know where your edge is. We’re letting it stand. For now.
Chapter 5: The Giant
On the fifth morning, the forest handed them what Marcus had spent seventeen years chasing. It happened nearly quietly.
He and Jimmy were following a fresh line of tracks that led upslope from the creek, deeper into a shadowed fold of the ridge. The prints were crisp, edges sharp, suggesting they’d been made within hours. They moved through huckleberry and fern, weaving among trees in a way that showed intimate familiarity with the terrain. The tracks led them into a small basin where a huge cedar rose like a column. At its base, built into the curve of the roots, was a nest.
The structure was larger than a king‑sized mattress, layered with ferns, moss, and cedar boughs, all arranged in a circular depression. The center was flattened, the vegetation stained and matted. Several pieces of weathered elk hide were woven into the walls, fur side in, providing insulation. The smell here was thick—a musky, earthy funk that rode high in the nose.
They were photographing the nest when a branch cracked upslope in a way no human would mistake for wind.
The sound was heavy, deliberate. A moment later, a low rumble rolled down the hill toward them. Jimmy’s hand closed around Marcus’s arm. “Don’t move,” he breathed.
It stepped into view fifty, sixty yards above them, partially veiled by undergrowth, yet utterly undeniable. For years, Marcus’s encounters had been smudges at the edge of perception—distant shapes, clever misidentifications, traces. This was none of that. This was real.
The creature stood easily nine feet tall, maybe more. Its hair was dark chocolate brown, wet and clumped in the drizzle, longer along the arms and legs, shorter across the broad chest. Folds of flesh and fur rolled around its midsection; this was not a gaunt wild thing starving on the margins. This was an animal of surplus and strength. Its shoulders looked like they’d been assembled from truck tires and rebar.
The face was the worst of it and the best. It wasn’t a gorilla’s and it wasn’t human, but it echoed both: heavy brow ridges over deep‑set dark eyes, a wide flat nose with flaring nostrils, a jaw that jutted forward just enough to show power without caricature. Its lips were closed. The eyes were not. They were open and looking directly at them.
For a span of ten, maybe fifteen seconds, the world narrowed to that gaze. Marcus felt pinned to the hillside, his years of theory and debate shriveling in the presence of something that simply was. It wasn’t just looking at them; it was sizing them up. Ashamedly, he realized that the feeling wasn’t far removed from the way he’d studied animals under anesthesia: curious, clinical, detached.
Then the creature broke the moment. It turned slightly toward a dead standing tree beside it, lifted one arm, and brought its fist down.
The sound of impact was like a rifle shot. The twelve‑inch‑wide snag shattered at the blow point, the top half cartwheeling away downhill. The display was so calculated, so deliberate, that Marcus flinched more at the implied message than the noise itself.
This is what I can do. This is what I choose not to do to you. Yet.
It stared at them once more, then turned and walked away, that rolling stride carrying it into shadow without any hint of haste. The forest swallowed it. Sound returned in gradual layers: a drip of water, a jay somewhere complaining, Jimmy’s ragged exhale.
“Did we both see that?” Jimmy asked, voice raw. “Please tell me that wasn’t a hypoxia hallucination.”
Marcus’s fingers fumbled on his camera, heart hammering as he scrolled. The LCD lit up with frame after frame. There it was, captured in pixels: the hunched bulk, the arm lifted, the tree exploding in a halo of splinters. He laughed once—a sharp, almost painful bark. “We got it,” he said. “We actually got it.”
They returned to camp half running, half tripping over roots, the images like a hot coal in Marcus’s mind. When they showed Sarah and Robert the shots, the room—or the tarp space that served as a room—shifted. Skepticism died. Something else took its place.
“We need more than photos,” Sarah said after the first wave of holy‑shit had receded. Her voice was steady, but there was a new tightness around her mouth. “Photos can be faked. Even good ones. If we want this to stand in front of peer review, we need biologicals. Tissue. Blood. Measurements. And we need them done by someone qualified, which”—she nodded at Robert—“we fortunately have.”
Robert didn’t like it. His objections piled up along the edges of the lantern light: unknown physiology, unpredictable drug response, the ethics of tranquilizing a sentient being that had done nothing more than display. Marcus heard every point, agreed with half, and still knew what he was going to say.
“We do it clean,” he said. “We don’t keep it. We don’t ship it in a cage to some lab. We sedate, document, tag, and release. Minimal harm. Maximum knowledge. We’ve spent our whole lives trying to answer this question. If we walk away now, all we’ve proven is that we’re cowards.”
Silence stretched. Jimmy’s fingers tapped his knee. Sarah’s gaze was on the map, not his face. Robert rubbed his temples like he had a migraine.
Finally, Sarah nodded once. “One attempt. At the feeding site. With elk bait. In and out in under an hour. If anything feels off, we abort.”
Robert sighed, old and heavy. “If we’re going to do something this stupid,” he said, “we might as well do it right.”
Chapter 6: Capture and Consequence
The next forty‑eight hours blurred into logistics. Sarah drove back to Forks, operated out of the shadows of a hardware store and a butcher’s cooler, and returned with a field‑dressed elk quarter strapped to the truck and a crate of heavy‑duty cargo netting. Robert prepared three darts, each loaded with a carefully calculated cocktail of Telazol and Medetomidine. Tranquilizing a twelve‑hundred‑pound unknown hominid based on rough mass estimates and analogies to gorillas was more art than science, and his grim expression said as much.
They staged the elk carcass beside the boulder in the skull clearing at dusk on the seventh day, the air thick with the smell of fresh blood and wet moss. They retreated to a blind they’d built forty yards away, a low nest of branches and camouflaged netting tucked into a depression in the hillside. Night descended in layers, and with it came the familiar nervous quiet. Occasional tree knocks sounded in the distance, faint and probing.
Around two in the morning, the trail‑camera alerts flickered silently on Marcus’s receiver. Something had crossed the beam.
It stepped into view moments later, a darker shadow within shadow, moving with wary deliberation. The creature circled the carcass once, nostrils flaring as it tasted the air. Marcus could feel his own heartbeat in his throat. It paused, head tilted slightly, as if listening for a trap it couldn’t name but could sense.
After a long, awful moment, it committed. It moved to the elk, hooked its hands into the hide, and lifted. Four hundred pounds of meat came off the ground as easily as a duffel bag. The sounds of feeding were obscene in the quiet: ripping flesh, the crack of ribs, low grunts vibrating through the ground.
In the blind, Sarah’s eye stayed fixed to the dart gun scope. She waited for a clean shot—big muscle mass, shoulder or upper thigh—and exhaled. The hiss of compressed air as she pulled the trigger was nearly lost beneath the wet tearing from the clearing. The dart streaked across the gap and buried itself in thick fur high on the left shoulder.
The creature flinched, dropping the elk. Its hand shot back, fingers closing around the dart. It yanked the syringe free and held it up in the moonlight, studying it. Then it turned its head slowly until it was staring directly at the blind.
“Yes,” Marcus whispered hoarsely. “It knows.”
It roared then, a sound that seemed to shove the air itself away, and began to move toward them in a ground‑eating stride. Sarah was already working the bolt, loading the second dart. “Wait,” Robert hissed. “Give the first dose a—”
She fired. The second dart hit high on the thigh. The creature staggered but didn’t stop. Twenty yards. Fifteen. Its breath came heavy, loud enough to hear. At ten yards, its right hand slammed against a tree to steady itself. Its knees buckled. It dropped to all fours, panting, head shaking as if to clear it. For a terrifying moment, Marcus thought they’d under‑dosed it, that they’d only managed to enrage something that could shred them like paper.
Then its arms gave. The giant body rolled onto its side with a force that shook the ground. It lay there, chest heaving, eyes half‑lidded, a low rasping sound leaking from its throat.
“Now,” Robert said. “We have minutes, not hours. Move.”
The next forty minutes were the most surreal of Marcus’s life. They moved around the fallen creature like surgical staff around an operating table, each person slipping into their role: Robert drawing blood into vials, taking tissue biopsies, listening to the slow, thunderous heartbeat; Marcus measuring every limb and angle he could reach, calling out numbers Jimmy noted; Jimmy photographing and filming from every conceivable vantage point; Sarah standing guard with the .375, eyes flicking between the tree line and the rise and fall of the beast’s chest.
Up close, the reality of it was overwhelming. The skin under the fur was dark and thick, pitted in places by old scars. The hands were calloused and expressive, nails thick and blunt. The brow ridge, seen in profile, seemed heavy enough to be a weapon; the nose was wide and flat, nostrils flaring with each breath even in sedation. The smell was intense but not entirely unpleasant—earth, musk, animals, and something like crushed cedar.
Robert’s running commentary was clinical but tinged with awe. “Cranial circumference suggests a brain volume larger than a gorilla’s, perhaps approaching Homo sapiens range. Dental wear indicates omnivorous diet. Muscle mass is extraordinary. Even with this level of adiposity, it’s built for power. Respiratory rate is stable. Heart rate elevated but within expected parameters for drug profile. We can’t stay longer.”
They fitted the GPS collar around its neck. Even at maximum extension, the bear‑sized buckle barely closed. Sarah checked the transmitter twice, her fingers quick on the cold metal. “If we let it go,” she said, “this is our only tether.”
At fifty minutes, the breaths changed. They came faster, deeper, the eyelids fluttering. “Clear out,” Robert ordered. “Back to the blind. We do not want to be within arm’s reach when it wakes.”
They retreated, leaving the carcass and the giant prone form beneath the indifferent stars. From the blind, they watched as it stirred. First the hands twitched. Then a leg kicked weakly. It rolled onto its belly, groaned—a sound that contained confusion and fury—and pushed itself up to its knees. The collar glinted faintly as it lifted its head and looked around.
It saw the darts lying in the dirt. It saw the torn patch of fur where the collar sat. It saw, somehow, the blind. Even half drugged, its gaze locked on them with surgical precision. For a long breath, predator and primate shared eye contact, and Marcus felt something like shame.
Then the creature made a noise—a shorter, harsh sound that wasn’t quite a roar and wasn’t quite a word—but in it, Marcus heard something unmistakable: contempt. It turned away, staggered to its feet, and walked into the forest, shoulders rolling with residual drugs and rage. The GPS receiver in Sarah’s hand blinked, signal solid.
They’d done it. They’d touched the myth. They’d bruised it and tagged it and let it go. The euphoria lasted until morning.
Chapter 7: The Treaty
At dawn, the GPS icon was still moving. It tracked northeast, climbing into rougher terrain at a pace that no human, burdened and on two legs, could have matched. It kept moving all day. Then, in late afternoon, it stopped. The coordinates held steady in a deep, unnamed valley.
“Maybe it’s sleeping,” Jimmy said. “Licking its wounds.”
“Maybe it’s gone home,” Sarah said.
They opted not to follow. The blood samples in Robert’s cooler clocked time, their viability ticking toward expiration. The plan, such as it was, had always been to get the samples to a lab as fast as possible. They broke camp, shouldered packs heavier with vials and plaster and data, and trudged back toward the logging road.
On the drive out, as moss‑draped branches scraped the truck and puddles blossomed under the tires, Sarah watched the GPS signal. “It’s moving,” she said suddenly. “West this time. Fast. Fifteen, maybe twenty miles an hour.”
“Nothing that big should move that fast in this terrain,” Robert muttered.
They emerged onto Highway 101 as the signal reached the pavement, blinking on the screen like a little digital heartbeat. It sat there. Waiting. They pulled off on a side road while the collar pinged.
Minutes turned into an hour. The icon didn’t move. Then, suddenly, it did—darting northeast again, away from the highway and back into inaccessible folds of mountains. A half hour later, the signal cut off. Dead. Not “out of range”—the collar used satellites, not cell towers. It had simply stopped broadcasting.
Sarah tapped the receiver casing. “Battery failure’s not possible,” she said. “Not this soon. Either something smashed it, or someone removed it.”
Marcus was still turning that over as they rolled into Forks and checked into the motel. He’d just finished storing the blood samples in a portable fridge in Robert’s room when things began to unravel.
By noon the next day, the fridge and its contents were gone. No forced entry. No ransacked drawers. Just a missing cooler and a perfectly made motel bed. Out in the parking lot, Marcus opened his camera case and felt his stomach drop. Every SD card was missing, every external drive gone. The cameras themselves had been left untouched. Jimmy’s gear told the same story. Lenses sat where he’d left them. Batteries, tripods, bodies—all present. But every scrap of digital memory had been surgically removed.
They reported the thefts. The local police shrugged in apologetic confusion and wrote a report. Gear theft happens; coastal towns see their share of opportunists. But opportunists don’t leave thousands of dollars of equipment and take only the invisible, unsellable data.
Later that afternoon, a man showed up claiming to be from the Forest Service, asking too‑pointed questions about their time in the restricted watershed and whether they’d handled any wildlife. An hour after he left, a woman arrived representing some vague “wildlife conservation interest” and gently reminded them of the laws governing the handling of protected species. By evening, when the third visitor knocked, they were expecting something.
The woman who stepped into Marcus’s room this time didn’t bother with subterfuge. She was in her fifties, hair in a practical bun, clothes nondescript. Her presence stripped the motel room of its thin sense of safety. She offered a card with one word—Davidson—and a phone number. No agency logo. No title.
“What you think you found doesn’t exist,” she said calmly. “Officially. Unofficially, you went into a restricted area without permits, tranquilized an animal without authorization, took biological samples off federal land, and violated a number of environmental regulations. If you decide to go public with your…story, those violations will be the least of your problems.”
“So the samples?” Marcus asked quietly. “The photos? The video?”
“Confiscated,” she said. “For the protection of a sensitive species. The evidence you gathered has been reviewed. It’s inconclusive at best, fraudulent at worst. I strongly advise you to accept that. To chalk this up to over‑enthusiasm and move on.”
“And if we don’t?” Sarah asked, eyes hard.
“Then you will lose your jobs, your funding, and your reputations,” Davidson said without heat. “Some knowledge, Dr. Webb, is not meant for broad public consumption. Some truths destabilize more than they illuminate. You’ve touched something that cannot be un‑touched. Take that gift and go home.”
The threats landed. Not because they were subtle, but because they were true. Without physical evidence, they were just four more names on a long list of people who claim to have seen something unbelievable and have nothing to show for it.
They tried, briefly, to push anyway. Marcus drafted a paper that read like a fever dream without data; journals rejected it with varying degrees of politeness. Jimmy posted a write‑up online; it was torn apart by skeptics and scrubbed by moderators as “hoax content.” Sarah poked through old military contacts, looking for hints of a program designed to keep “wild men” in the realm of story. She found only raised eyebrows and subtle warnings to let it go.
They went home. They wore their silence like a bandage.
Months later, a package arrived for Marcus. No return address. Inside, a single photograph—one of his own, printed in high resolution: the creature at the boulder, mid‑swing, tree exploding under its fist. On the back, a short note in compact handwriting.
It’s better this way. Some mysteries should remain unsolved. — D
Marcus burned the photo that night. He hesitated only once, watching the inked image curl and blacken at the edges. Then he fed it fully to the flame. The plume of smoke that rose smelled faintly of cedar and something else that made his eyes water.
Years later, when Tom lay dying in a hospice bed and pressed a notebook of forty years’ worth of his own suppressed encounters into Marcus’s hands, the story widened. When a Quino elder told him quietly at the funeral that their people had had a pact with “the mountain giants” for generations—mutual avoidance, mutual respect—it shifted again. And when Davidson called one last time to tell him that the individual they’d tranquilized still lived, had offspring now, had moved deeper into the mountains and removed the collar on its own, leaving it on a rock where their camp had been, the narrative finally snapped into focus.
It wasn’t just a cover‑up. It was a treaty.
Somewhere high in the Cascades, in folds of land no map bothers to name, a population of tall, heavy‑bodied primates lives by an old agreement: they remain unseen; we pretend they do not exist. When curious humans creep too close, when cameras catch too much, a different kind of ranger steps in and re‑sets the board. Evidence disappears. Stories are discredited. The world slides back into comfortable ignorance.
Marcus eventually left cryptozoology. He took a position teaching wildlife biology at a small college, content to talk about deer and salmon and wolves, species the world admitted existed. In a bank vault, he kept Tom’s notebook and a single flash drive with a few recovered images and his own written account. Not as a time bomb. As a record of a decision.
On the tenth anniversary of the expedition, he returned to Forks, sat in the same motel, looked out at the same wall of grey‑green timber, and chose, again, not to go back in. In his rearview mirror, as he drove away, the mountains rose and receded, their secrets intact. Somewhere up there, a giant rolled onto its side in a nest of cedar boughs, its young pressing close, its eyes reflecting starlight no human would see.
He’d spent half his life trying to drag the unknown into the light. He’d learned, in the hardest possible way, that sometimes the highest form of knowledge isn’t exposure. It’s restraint. Some mysteries make the world smaller when you solve them. This one, left unsolved, made it vast.
