Page 1 of Mountain Man's Dream

1

FINCH

Fake.

That's what the so-called "experts" at the university said about the videos.

Fake.

I seethe as I trudge up the steep mountainside terrain.

The official word on the best video evidence in history of North America's most famous cryptid is that it's a hoax. My own professor at the university, the one who oversees my graduate program in cryptozoology and the man currently considered to be the leading authority on Bigfoot in the world watched three videos and declared every one of them to be fake.

My disgust at the university's ignorance fuels my pace, giving me the strength I need to get up the side of this mountain.

The last videos were shot down by Clawson's Crossing, that area doesn't get a lot of traffic and the cameras were set up to record whatever came down to the water. Ultimately, they caught three clear images of two different creatures at different times of the day.

OK, the videos were poorly lit and the creatures both blended surprisingly well into the forest back drop. It took some careful editing to get the end results that so clearly showed what was on camera-- but once you saw it, you couldn't unsee it, if you know what I mean.

I expected them to send a team out here. I thought we'd get a budget that would cover some high-end camera equipment and maybe a couple of photographers that know how to put it to good use.

I thought we'd finally be able to prove that Sasquatch exists. Not that there used to be a North American ape species living in these mountains that went extinct a long time ago, or that there's one or two lingering specimens that manage to elude modern humans despite us continually encroaching further into their territory, but that a genuine population of the creatures are thriving right here in these mountains surrounding the little town of Moonshine Ridge.

I thought I was going to be part of the most important scientific discovery of the millennium.

Instead-- the videos I had put so much hope into got dismissed out of hand as artificial intelligence-generated fakes.

So here I am, picking my way around boulders and trees, heading for an even more remote area where trails are few and far between and humans rarely travel-- thanks to rugged terrain and local superstition.

I've got five, motion-sensored, weatherproof, action cameras with night vision nestled in my pack and I plan to set them up and let them record till the batteries go dead.

Hopefully, being in an area that gets little to no human traffic will give me a better chance at catching whatever lives in this rugged mountain terrain on camera.

As I push myself up the steep mountainside, following the barely-visible remnants of what hasn't been a maintained trail in decades, I decide not to think about the fact that I'll have to come back up here in a few weeks to retrieve the memory cards from the cameras.

Don't get me wrong, I'm in damn good shape for a plus-size girl-- but I never planned to go into field research and I always thought that any time I might have to, I'd be traveling with a team.

I'm going to do what it takes to get evidence that they can't debunk, even if it means hiking solo into the desolate stretch of forest that the locals call the "weeping wilderness."

Glen

It's hard to believe I used to be scared shitless of these mountains back when I was a kid.

My siblings and I grew up in these mountains. Not the way most folks in Moonshine Ridge grew up in the mountains-- we grew up in the mountains.

Our parents run the camping resort that's been in my family for the last hundred and some years now, and we spent every summer up at the hot springs swimming, camping, running wild like only mountain kids can.

My older brothers, Vale and Mesa, they were always leading me and our sister, Meadow, off the property on overnight camp-outs.

Terra hadn't been born yet, so I was the youngest on those adventures.

My brothers would stay up late telling me and Meadow all the local ghost stories around the campfire, trying to scare us stupid.

Worked too. On me, at least.

Ironic that I'm the one that grew up doing all these solo hikes after all those nights hiding in my sleeping bag with my flashlight on till the batteries went dead and begging one of my brothers to take me home early.

When I hit my teens, I started pushing myself to wander a little farther, stay out a little longer. Got used to the sounds of the forest-- the angry chatter of squirrels and birds throughout the day, the rustles of skunks and raccoons investigating my camp at night.

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