Golden (Notevember 2023, #6)
I’ve always found it difficult to sleep in the forest. It’s not the hard ground, or the cold, or even the wind tugging at my tent. It’s the noise.
I know, I know – how could a city boy possibly complain about nature being noisy? But it’s not the volume. I’ve lived above a nightclub, next to the el train tracks, even across the street from an emergency entrance to a major hospital. No amount of metropolitan cacophony can keep me awake.
Trees creaking, though? Or little creatures rustling through the underbrush? That shit creeps me out, for real. And if I somehow catch the train to slumberland and make it through the small hours, the dawn chorus will jerk me right awake. A whole congregation of crows, breakfast club of pigeons or a tree full of sparrows – they can chat away as much as they like, and I’ll keep snoring. But one – just one! – Steller’s jay starts laughing within a hundred yards of my campsite, and I am up.
And yes, in hindsight my choice of profession might seem a stupid one. But my research took me in unexpected directions. The Greater Pacific Northwest Woodland Restoration Project (we really need to figure out a good acronym, people) needed Norah, and Norah needed a research partner, and I needed a job. So I guess it wasn’t my research as much as my friend who set me on this path.
I don’t think anyone expected the Greenweaver program to be as effective as it was. But once the initial results came in, it turned out to be less proof of concept than proof of success. (Norah says one of the guys behind the first report – a mycologist out of Portland – was straight up accused of inflating the numbers. He almost got into a fistfight with another faculty member. There’s academics for you.) With that success came an explosion of financial backing from both the public and private sector. Which was good news, since they could hire me. Oh, and the ecosystem was offered a fair chance at regenerating – that’s important, too.
They took me on to monitor the decline of invasive botany. One hell of a rapid decline, but no surprise there – the trial run had focused on just that problem, so we knew to expect an accelerated extermination as the process went on. Norah’s group all said invasive fauna was having an equally bad time. And as the non-natives were kicked to the curb, the homegrown plants and animals made a tremendous comeback. The ripple effect was noticeable in just a few years; we had guys from the FWS tell us the sea otter population had tripled in five years, and kelp along the Oregon coast was back to what could actually be pre-colonial levels.
So far, so very good, and so expected. But what no one saw coming – except maybe a few nutcases, and even there I have my doubts – was the return of species we didn’t even know existed. Sure, a few birds that had been thought extinct now had breeding pairs in the multiple tens, and Greenweaver teams were opening bottles of champagne on a weekly basis as the reports came in. Good news, smiles all around, congratulatory calls from old colleagues and interviews in Nature.
No one was smiling, though, when the “men-of-the-forest” showed up. We collectively – and figuratively, I should emphasise – shat our pants. It wasn’t just Nature or tenured biology professors calling anymore. Every news outlet from A to Z (and some foreign letters I can’t pronounce) wanted to get hold of someone, anyone even tangentially involved.
Man, the headlines were insane. “Restoration Project Revives Bigfoot” was mild in comparison. A dedicated YouTube channel called “Sasquatch Watch” had something like 9 billion views on one of their videos (with footage taken from and by someone they didn’t credit, of course). The higher-ups had had the foresight to redirect resources towards extra security in a wide radius around the habitat. They knew people would try to get out there to see for themselves what had been believed to be a cryptid. Drones became a daily problem, until we managed to get local legislative assemblies on board. Then they just remained a weekly nuisance.
One would think, by the time actual sasquatches started showing up in British Columbia, that we wouldn’t be as surprised anymore. But now every biologist on the project was asking: if sasquatches are that big, brown and shy, what are these five-foot-two, black-furred, yellow-eyed primates who don’t seem to mind being observed? Their uniformly sooty coat (which I discovered owed its color to a heretofore unknown collective of symbiotic algae and lichen – you’re welcome) made them difficult to tell apart from one another, but I think we can safely say at least 150 distinct individuals have been identified.
Being the purveyor of hot gossip as always, Norah got me the inside scoop on the DNA analyses before they were published. These men-of-the-forest (again, we need to get more convenient – and less gendered – naming conventions) are only very distantly related to the sasquatches up north, and may have diverged from humans as early as 11 million years ago. If I recall correctly, that’s before our lineage split from that of chimpanzees.
Anyway, with the invasive problem all but taken care of, I was due to either lose my job or be reassigned within the project. So I volunteered to do closer observations of the men-of-the-forest. I guess my curiosity got the better of me, because I was genuinely scared of these creatures. Pitch-black, human-like things that roam the forest with such stealth that they had remained undetected by modern science for a century, and by Native Americans how long before that? And I would be on my own, on their turf, for weeks at a time? Yeah, that sounded like a horror movie just waiting to happen. Still, I didn’t really expect to be selected for this task.
Honestly, it’s amazing that that they picked me, when it isn’t even my area of expertise. Studies in anthropology? None. University credits relating to hominid evolution? Zero. Classes taken on the subject of primate behavior? One, but I slept through most of it. Turns out a higher-up pulled some strings, and I have Norah to thank for that. I don’t know who she slept with to make it happen (on second thought, I do – and she put a ring on his finger).
So here I am, roaming my sector of Habitat C/East, kicking ass and taking names hauling ass and taking notes. The latter because I am a man of science, duh. The former because, as we quickly discovered, the men-of-the-forest walk all day erry day. And they are quiet, and they are fast, and they give zero fucks if you are exhausted and can’t keep up. (Unless you’re one of their young, in which case you just climb on the back of any nearby adult and get carried. I do not have that luxury.)
On a good day, I would arrive at their night site – yes, we officially call them that – around dusk. The reason that’s a good day is because there is enough light to still see them – which, obviously, is required to do observations. I can hardly schlep an infrared camera around just to film them as they sleep. That would be: A) inconvenient, and B) fucking creepy.
However, the men-of-the-forest tend to reuse the same routes on the semi-regular. So I recently decided that, instead of trying to maintain a frankly ridiculous fitness regime, I will just set up camp along one of their paths. Now they are so used to me that they stop to take a look. The observer has become the observed. Most of them keep their distance, at least 60 feet or so. But one morning, I woke up to find one sitting on a log by my campfire, staring at me. Even in the pale dawn light, it looked like a mass of darkness. But those golden eyes… man, they always look so chill. Maybe if they were carnivores, I’d feel different.
It turns out that they don’t sleep every night. If the moon is full and there’s no cloud cover, the herd goes for a night walk. When that happens, they move more slowly, and the young are never carried. We haven’t figured out why they do it, but it could be some sort of ritual? They have near-human intelligence, for sure, so it stands to reason they have culture and something resembling language as well.
On night walks, they can pass just inches away from my tent. Even with twenty of them shuffling by, I can barely hear the footfalls. But I feel the dull vibrations in the ground. Sometimes I get up to follow them as best I can in the dark. I already feel like I’m intruding, so I don’t want to use a flashlight or anything. But most of the time, I just stay in my sleeping bag and let them do their thing in peace. I know I shouldn’t, but it’s one of the rare occasions when I can fall asleep and stay sleeping the whole night through, waking rested and relaxed.
It’s the singing. At first, I had no clue that’s what they were doing. I would describe it as the bastard child of grunting and humming, off-key and out of sync. And yet, somehow, it’s a deeply calming sound. Just like everything else the men-of-the-forest do, their humming is quiet. But the guys over in Habitat F have noticed that they sing just a little louder whenever they pass a Restoration Project member’s tent.
I might be guilty of anthropomorphizing them a tad much, but hear me out: I think they’re singing us a lullaby. And despite the wind buffeting my tent, and the cold, hard forest floor under my back, I am sleeping like a baby, dreaming of golden eyes in a deep black fuzz.