The Last Conference of the Great North American Wood Apes
A Substack-only short story about Bigfoot, bad genes, and the unbearable indignity of being scientifically impossible.
The meeting was held at Old Faithful because everyone knew where it was.
This was itself controversial.
“We have survived for twelve thousand years by not meeting at places everyone knows where they are,” said Harold, who was eight feet three inches tall and had one arm significantly longer than the other.
“We needed somewhere central,” said Ruth.
“Central to what?”
“North America.”
“Yellowstone is not central to North America.”
“It is emotionally central.”
Nobody knew what that meant, but Ruth was the oldest living Sasquatch and had killed a grizzly bear in 1987 by repeatedly banging its head against a tree, so no one was willing to take it up with her.
There were twenty-seven of them, although the number depended on whether Dennis counted.
Dennis had two heads, but only one set of legs. The heads disagreed about nearly everything except snacks. For census purposes, the western head considered himself a separate individual, whereas the eastern head saw this as “identity politics.” To further complicate things, the western head firmly considered himself Canadian, while the eastern was on team U.S.A.
They had gathered after dark in a lodgepole pine basin beyond the boardwalk, close enough to hear the geothermal plumbing knock beneath the earth. Steam drifted through the trees. Tourists occasionally shouted in the distance.
The last twenty-seven Sasquatch in North America sat in a rough circle and attempted to save their species.
Ruth opened the meeting.
“We all know why we’re here.”
“Parking?” said Dennis’s western head.
“Genetic collapse,” said Ruth.
“Oh,” said the western head. “Right.”
The eastern head ate a pinecone.
For most of their history, Sasquatch had lived by three principles.
Remain hidden.
Avoid the humans.
Never cross an open field during daylight unless a human is holding a camera with manual focus.
These principles had served them extremely well. No clear photograph had ever been taken. No body had ever been recovered. Genetic samples were limited to hair from other creatures: bear, deer, and once a scientist spent years studying a bit of squirrel pelt.
Unfortunately, remaining hidden had required living in small, isolated family groups.
Very small.
Very isolated.
Extremely family.
The consequences now sat around the clearing.
Gary’s knees bent backward. Linda had no visible neck. The twins from Alberta had been born joined at the beard and had spent forty-one years facing one another at a distance of six inches.
One of them had become a poet.
The other had become very tired of poetry.
Young Matthew, who represented almost seven percent of the species’ remaining reproductive future, had translucent skin and a whistle where his voice should have been.
He raised his hand.
“We should contact the humans.”
There was immediate uproar.
Harold slapped the ground hard enough to startle a bison half a mile away.
“Contact them?”
“They have genetic technology,” Matthew whistled. “They clone sheep. They revive extinct horses. They put jellyfish genes into rabbits.”
“Exactly,” said Harold. “You want to glow?”
“We already glow,” said Linda.
Everyone looked at Linda.
“I do,” she said.
She did.
Ruth waited for the noise to settle.
“We have discussed humans before.”
“No,” said Matthew. “You have rejected humans before. That is different.”
Ruth considered his statement and decided it was accurate.
At the far end of the circle, Uncle Walter shifted beneath a blanket woven from stolen sleeping bags. Walter didn’t consider them stolen, however, as the humans left screaming and certainly didn’t seem to want them back. Those were the good old days.
Walter remembered everything.
“In 1743,” he began, “you could walk from Quebec to Oregon without seeing a road.”
Nobody corrected him. Walter had never been east of Idaho.
“There were thousands of us then,” he continued. “Great herds.”
“We did not travel in herds,” said Ruth.
“We did in my valley.”
“You were not alive in 1743.”
“Time was different.”
The younger Sasquatch groaned.
Walter raised one immense finger.
“We had room. We had dignity. We had proper chest hair. None of this patchy modern nonsense.”
Matthew’s chest hair grew in the shape of Florida.
“Humans ruined everything,” Walter said. “Roads. Towns. Trail cameras. Podcasts.”
At the word podcasts, several Sasquatch muttered darkly.
Podcasts had become a serious threat. Humans no longer needed evidence. They could produce six hours of content from a broken twig and a feeling.
“We can’t keep doing what we’re doing,” Matthew said. “There are three females under fifty.”
“Four,” said Linda.
“You’re glowing.”
“That does not make me infertile.”
“No, but the antlers might.”
Linda touched the small antler above her left eyebrow.
“It’s decorative.”
“It is bone.”
“It can be two things.”
A young female named Skylar stood. She was six feet eleven, unusually symmetrical, and therefore regarded with suspicion.
“We need a breeding program.”
Silence.
Harold narrowed both eyes, though not in the same direction.
“What kind of breeding program?”
“A managed one. We map everybody’s genome. We identify the least-related pairs. We stop pretending attraction is more important than survival.”
Dennis’s western head nodded.
Dennis’s eastern head said, “Government.”
“There is no government,” Skylar said.
“That’s how it starts.”
“We could establish one.”
“See?”
Walter began laughing.
“A breeding program,” he said. “In my day, you saw a nice set of shoulders across a ravine and nature took care of the rest.”
“In your day,” Ruth said, “you married your second cousin.”
Walter considered this.
“She had excellent shoulders.”
“She was also your aunt.”
“Families were closer then.”
“They certainly were.”
Matthew stood again.
“This is the problem. We’re making jokes while our species dies.”
“We have always made jokes,” said Ruth.
“No. You have always made the same six jokes.”
Walter looked wounded.
“The marmot joke is a classic.”
“There is no future here,” Matthew said. “Look at us.”
Everyone did.
This was discouraging.
One of the Alberta twins was quietly reciting a poem about moss. The other had begun chewing through their shared beard.
Gary’s backward knees had locked.
Linda’s antler had snagged a moth.
Dennis was arguing with himself about whether he qualified as a diverse mating pair.
In the middle of the circle sat Baby June, the youngest Sasquatch alive.
She was eleven.
She had been born without feet.
This was less of a problem than it sounded because she had four hands, but it remained symbolically unfortunate.
“What do you want us to do?” Ruth asked Matthew.
“I want us to stop hiding.”
The steam shifted through the trees.
Old Faithful erupted in the distance. Tourists cheered.
Matthew continued.
“We reveal ourselves. We walk into the visitor center. We ask for help.”
Harold made a noise usually associated with logging equipment.
“They’ll cage us.”
“Probably,” Matthew said.
“They’ll dissect us.”
“Possibly.”
“They’ll put us on television.”
Matthew hesitated.
“That is the main concern.”
“They’ll sell little stuffed versions of us in the gift shop,” Linda said.
“They already do,” said Skylar.
This landed badly.
Ruth looked toward the lights beyond the trees. Through the steam, the lodge windows glowed from within. Humans moved about.
For centuries, the Sasquatch had watched them from the margins.
Humans were loud, destructive, dangerous, and almost miraculously fertile.
They spread across continents while eating food from plastic bags. They survived wars, famines, industrial accidents, gender-reveal parties, and an astonishing commitment to putting gasoline in inappropriate containers.
They had no right to be doing this well.
“We could steal genetic material,” Dennis’s western head suggested.
Everyone turned.
“From whom?” Ruth asked.
“Humans.”
“We cannot breed with humans,” Skylar said.
“Have we checked?”
“Yes,” said Ruth.
The group was silent.
Nobody asked how.
Harold cleared his throat.
“There may be other populations.”
“There aren’t,” said Skylar.
“British Columbia.”
“Gone.”
“Alaska.”
“Two brothers. Both sterile.”
“The Appalachians?”
“A man in a bear suit.”
“Florida?”
Everyone laughed.
Florida was not a serious suggestion.
“What about the Yeti?” Walter asked.
“The Himalayas are far away,” said Ruth.
“We walked here.”
“You walked from Montana.”
“It felt far.”
“The Yeti may not even exist,” Skylar said.
This produced another silence.
It was considered rude among Sasquatch to question the existence of cryptids.
Matthew looked around the circle.
“We are not going to solve this ourselves.”
“We could broaden the gene pool,” Harold said.
“With what?”
Harold shrugged. “Orangutans.”
“We are not orangutans.”
“They seem nice.”
“They live in Indonesia.”
“Again with the negativity.”
Baby June raised one of her four hands.
Everyone stopped.
Children almost never spoke at councils, partly because there were almost no children.
“What happens if we do nothing?” she asked.
Ruth looked at her.
“We disappear.”
“Like the mammoths?”
“Yes.”
“Do humans know mammoths were real?”
“Yes.”
“Because they found bones?”
“Yes.”
Baby June thought about this.
“So if we disappear without leaving bones, they’ll say we were never real.”
Nobody answered.
That was the worst part.
Extinction was one thing.
Being smugly explained afterward was another.
In a hundred years, humans would stand in museums beneath diagrams showing minimum viable populations and say Sasquatch had always been biologically impossible.
They would mention inbreeding depression.
They would mention founder effects.
They would mention the Habsburg jaw.
They would point at the Windsor family.
They would be correct.
This was intolerable.
“We should leave evidence,” Walter said.
“Evidence of what?” asked Ruth.
“That we were here.”
Harold nodded slowly.
“A footprint.”
“They have footprints.”
“Hair.”
“They have hair.”
“A clear photograph.”
The circle recoiled.
“Let’s not become hysterical,” Ruth said.
Skylar walked to the center.
“We have three choices. We remain hidden and die. We reveal ourselves and possibly survive. Or we remain hidden and leave behind enough evidence to make the humans feel terrible.”
The third option immediately gained support.
“How much evidence?” Dennis asked.
“All of it,” said Skylar.
The plan came together quickly after that.
It was the most productive fifteen minutes in recorded Sasquatch history.
They would raid ranger stations for cameras.
They would leave hair with roots attached.
They would provide blood, teeth, scat, fingerprints, and several complete family trees, though the family trees would need to be drawn in a circle.
They would pose beside recognizable landmarks.
They would hold newspapers.
They would submit saliva directly to multiple laboratories under assumed names.
Walter wanted to mail his foot to the Smithsonian after death.
Ruth approved this, provided he waited.
For the first time that evening, the group seemed almost hopeful.
They could not save themselves.
But they could make the scientific community feel like absolute idiots.
Matthew remained standing at the edge of the circle.
“This is not a future,” he said.
“No,” Ruth replied. “But it is a legacy.”
“It’s spite.”
“Spite is a kind of legacy.”
Baby June crawled over on her hands and took Matthew’s.
“We could still go to the visitor center,” she said.
Matthew looked down at her.
Behind them, the elders debated camera angles.
Harold wanted to be photographed walking away because he felt his shoulders were his strongest feature. Linda proposed appearing beside a Geiger counter. Dennis wanted one head photographed in Washington and the other in Oregon to confuse the geographic record.
Ruth watched the younger two.
Then she sighed.
“Fine,” she said. “We vote.”
The final tally was thirteen for disclosure, thirteen for spiteful extinction, and Dennis abstaining because his heads canceled each other out.
Everyone looked at Ruth.
As eldest, she held the deciding vote.
She gazed through the trees at the human lights.
Then she looked at Baby June, Matthew’s Florida-shaped chest hair, Linda’s antler, Gary’s knees, the twins joined at the beard, and the remains of what had once been a large, vigorous, magnificently elusive population.
Ruth stood.
“We go to the visitor center.”
Harold groaned.
“But first,” Ruth said, “we take one clear photograph.”
The entire species assembled in front of Old Faithful.
A stolen camera was balanced on a trash can. Skylar set the timer and ran into position.
For ten seconds, the last twenty-seven Sasquatch in North America stood perfectly still.
Then Old Faithful erupted.
Steam engulfed the group.
The camera clicked.
The resulting image showed a brown blur, some glowing eyes, and what YouTube vloggers would later identify as either a malformed bear or twenty-seven people in an unusually ambitious costume.
The Sasquatch examined it.
Ruth nodded.
“Perfect.”
Then they walked toward the lights.
For Calvin and David, keep on believing.