Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre

by Max Brooks

Like the rest of the country, I needed facts, not sensationalism. Staying grounded had been the focus of so many op-eds, because of all Rainier’s human failures—political, economic, logistical—it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria, that had ended up killing the most people.

Selfless suffering feels good for short crusades, but as a way of life, it’s unsustainable.

Yvette explained that Oma was a spirit of the First Peoples, a gentle giant that arrogant Eurocentric white men have perverted into the name “Bigfoot.”

Is Sasquatch the same as Bigfoot?

“Mosty’s got a right to feel what she feels, and she’s right about us all needing to take care of each other. That’s the”—he paused, licked his lips—“that’s the unspoken social contract,” he emphasized the last three words, “that every community agrees to. People helping people when times are tough because it’s the right thing to do. Right?”

To me, Greenloop was the Titanic, right down to the design flaws and the lack of lifeboats. They were extremely isolated, miles from the one public road which was miles from the nearest town. And, of course, that was the idea. With modern logistics and telecommunications, the world must have still felt very small. But then Rainier cut those connections, and the world suddenly got very big.

if the USGS had been properly staffed, funded, and heard, if the local services hadn’t been gutted by the last recession, if FEMA hadn’t been folded into the Department of Homeland Security, if the Defense Logistics Agency hadn’t had to buy most of their supplies from the private sector,

Kind of New Orleans during Katrina

Those poor bastards didn’t want a rural life. They expected an urban life in a rural setting. They tried to adapt their environment instead of adapting to it.

It’s great to live free of the other sheep until you hear the wolves howl.

All animals are competitive by nature and cooperate only under specific circumstances and for specific reasons, not because of a desire to be nice to one another. —FRANS DE WAAL, Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape

It didn’t occur to Facebook that the Russians might hijack their platform to hijack our elections, even though they’d been doing it to other countries for years. It doesn’t occur to Google, still, that while they’re racing, balls out, to corner the market on driverless cars, terrorists could hack those cars and drive them into crowds.

I could think of a few. I raised my hand and asked, “Isn’t it possible for someone to hack that suit once you put it on, force you to pick up your perfectly legal assault rifle, and walk down the street to the local preschool?” He looked like I’d just kicked over his sandcastle. He hadn’t wasted one neuron on that thought, because, in his mind, it was just that. A waste. All positivity all the time. Learn to fly, even if it’s in the Hindenburg. Move fast and break things.

There’s something called a “lahar,” a boiling mudslide. According to the radio, it’s what killed thousands of people at a place called Armero* in the ’80s

Then the howl, faint, distant. Not a wolf, or, at least, not like the wolves I’ve heard in movies. I know what coyotes sound like and I’m pretty sure that wasn’t one of them.

The Bigfoots (Bigfeet?)

Afghan guerrilla leader who fought the Russians and then the Taliban. I don’t expect you’ve ever heard of him. I didn’t until the day he died. I’d just gotten into New York. It was a late flight, like one or two in the morning? The cabdriver at JFK was listening to the BBC World Service. They were talking about how Massoud had just been assassinated by terrorists pretending to be journalists.

That was September 9, 2001, and I only learned later that killing Massoud was the opening act of the World Trade Center attack.

lie will gallop halfway round the world before the truth has time to pull its breeches on. —CORDELL HULL, secretary of state to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt

The whole country rests on a system that sacrifices resilience for comfort.

Mrs. Holland’s probably too young to have seen Fantasia, but that’s what went through my mind when I saw the animals migrate…and freeze. Remember that scene, the plant-eaters smelling the T. rex?

“Injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you. That’s why most weapons of war are designed to injure instead of kill. Wounded are more of a drain than the dead.”

“Need. That’s what makes a village. That’s what we are now, and what holds us together is need. I won’t help you if you don’t help me. That is the social contract.”

There is evidence to indicate the possible existence in Skamania County of a nocturnal primate mammal variously described as an ape-like creature…and commonly known as “Sasquatch,” “Yeti,” “Bigfoot”… —Ordinance No. 69-01, Skamania County, Washington State

You’ve got the Almas in Russia, the Yowie in Australia, the Orang Pendek in Indonesia, and a bunch of Sisimite stories from Latin America. And that’s just today. The Judeo-Christian Bible has Esau, the primitive brother of Jacob. And the Epic of Gilgamesh, the first written story, has “Enkidu,” the wild man. Show me a culture anywhere on this planet, and chances are, they got something.

I’ll be the first one in line to see that newly discovered Bili ape. I’m open to any discovery, as long as it’s based on hard, physical evidence. Facts are supposed to banish monsters… She sighs. …not invite them in.

Point is, public skepticism dissuades qualified experts from searching for physical evidence, and lack of physical evidence only fuels public skepticism.

That is why the “blitzkrieg theory” has been used to describe the mass extinctions of large animals that were slaughtered by early humans. Like the Polish cavalry and the French Maginot Line, the wildlife of Europe, Eurasia, and finally the Americas, were caught completely unprepared.

The ability to elude humans would not have been exclusive to North America’s great apes. According to the human paleobiogeography hypothesis, present-day Africa enjoys such a plethora of large animals because their ancestors evolved alongside ours.

“People only see the present through the lenses of their personal pasts.”

But given what happened to Greenloop, what if…what if…they weren’t just co-migrating along with us? What if they were hunting us? Isn’t that why we came over? Following the grazing animals across the Beringian land bridge? What if we were stalking the caribou while they were stalking us? It wouldn’t discount any of the adaptations, just give them a different purpose. Nocturnal hunting would catch us at our most vulnerable. Camouflage skills are ideal for an ambush. And broad running feet would give them the speed to chase us down.

They saw what we did to the saber-toothed cat, the dire wolf, the giant bulldog bear. They saw what we did to enough of them to realize that they were on the wrong side of evolution. At least until Rainier.

But maybe there was also some latent gene that woke up in those creatures when they stumbled across Greenloop and found themselves facing a herd of cornered, isolated Homo sapiens. Maybe some instinct told them it was time to swap evolution for devolution, reach back to who they were to reclaim what was theirs.

Whatever Vincent was going to say, Dan’s words shut him up. Carmen too went into reset mode. Mostar kept quiet, maybe waiting to see how that truth would land. She might have regretted it a second later when Reinhardt raised a questioning finger. “I’m sure,” he said in this very professorial tone, “that we all think we saw something other than an ursine family, but…let me remind everyone that given this poor light, the stress we’re all under, the human mind’s ability to fabricate—”

heard a theory once that if aliens ever do come calling, they may very well be hostile, because the same brains that mastered spaceflight learned to think by hunting.

Most accounts tell of giant boulders being hurled against the cabin, and say some even fell through the roof… —FRED BECK, I Fought the Apemen of Mt. St. Helens

The philosophy, the justification. Somehow Vincent and Bobbi had convinced themselves that the rocks were meant to scare us away. Our land was the goal, the shelter of our houses, possibly, as well as the food inside. They still weren’t ready to cross that mental line, to admit what those creatures really want.

And maybe it’s silly to assign names, but that’s where my mind naturally goes. The two smaller, younger brothers from the compost bin fight, Twins One and Two, flanking their, what, father? The first male. Alpha’s mate? What’s that term for Philip in The Crown? “Prince consort”? And there was thin, tall Scout to his right, with the older male, “Gray,” between him and the old female, “Granny Dowager,” at the end.

Nasser, which I maintained justified my point. Sadat, in order to prove that he was not a clone of his predecessor, had to prove to his people, the Arab League, and the world at large that he could accomplish what Nasser couldn’t—driving the yehud into the sea. Wasn’t this strategy, painting victory over defeat, the motive behind so many past wars? In

“You claim to defend our traditional homeland yet the method of your defense is exactly what lost that land to begin with.”

It’s not! It’s a last resort, always! If there’s any other way to solve problems, any way to avoid bloodshed…but when they’re coming for you, when you know they’re coming, when they won’t listen and it’s too late to even run, you have to defend yourself. You have to fight!”

Many people are horrified when they hear that a chimpanzee might eat a human baby, but after all, so far as the chimpanzee is concerned, men are only another kind of primate…. —JANE GOODALL, In the Shadow of Man

Do you know that more people are hurt by bison in North America than by sharks all over the world? Do you know why? Because they try to ride them. Tourists from New York or Tokyo, whatever urban bubble, literally try to jump on the buffaloes’ backs. Feed them, hug them, take selfies with them. They think they’re at a petting zoo, or in a Disney movie. They’ve never learned the real rules, so they think they can just make up their own. This is called anthropomorphizing.

Then: “We have to kill them.” That was me. And it wasn’t. I hadn’t planned on saying those words, or the ones that followed. Someone else was talking, a part of me I’d never met. “Kill until they’re too afraid to hunt us, or until none of them are left.” All eyes were on me. No pause. No debate. One by one they silently nodded. I looked down at Dan, then over to Mostar’s face. “We have to drive them off or wipe them out.” I felt Pal’s arms slip around my waist, her head nodding into my stomach. “We have to kill them.”

The ahaa warrior moment

According to Darwin’s Origin of Species, it is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is best able to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.

but not in a tragic way. I’m glad you used that word “tragedy,” because it exemplifies what I believe is the critical danger of negative remembrance. Most humans are not masochistic by nature. The human heart can only absorb so much pain.

I found a way, I found a way to survive with them. Am I a great person? I don’t know. I don’t know. We’re all great people. Everyone has something in them that’s wonderful. I’m just different and I love these bears enough to do it right. I’m edgy enough and I’m tough enough. But mostly I love these bears enough to survive and do it right. —From the video diary of TIMOTHY TREADWELL, self-proclaimed “Grizzly Man,” recorded right before he was eaten by a bear