The first time Lee cried about dead animals was in fifth grade, when it was well past her bedtime. She was bundled in her bed sheets, flashlight in hand as she scoured the pictures of one of her massive zoology tomes.

One of these pictures was a famous painting of a dodo. The text described how the animal went extinct after Dutch colonizers came to its island, their dogs and pigs making quick work of the flightless, predator-less birds—millions of years of specialized evolution, erased in a decade or two.

The dodo brought young Lee to tears that night. It was a beautiful bird. Innocent. All it wanted was to exist, but it would never exist again because of humans.

Twelve years later she thought about that dodo as she stood over an amphibian that had been pancaked under the wheel of her University’s pickup truck. The toad must have been crossing from the nearby creek, its mud-colored skin blending with the dirt road. She didn’t see it until it was too late.

“Eh, don’t blame yourself,” Michael told her as he kneeled to examine the roadkill. “It was an honest mistake. Besides, I think we’re in the clear. Boreals have a different color, and a different gland pattern on its back—see here?”

Lee lowered her hand from her mouth and leaned forward. “What species?”

“This one’s Anaxyrus hemiophyris. Canadian toad, I’m pretty sure.”

“Yeah . . . I think you’re right.”

She had no clue if he was right. Amphibians weren’t her niche, but she knew enough to know that the Canadian toad was a species of least concern. Had it been the boreal toad, Anaxyrus boreas, however . . .

The dodo flashed in her mind.

What would Jane do?

She shrugged it off. Even it had been a boreal toad, what else could she have done? She’d come a long way since she was a little girl crying over extinct animals. Animals went extinct every day, became roadkill every day. Extinction was a part of her career, how the world worked. It would remain so for as long as humans existed.

* * *

Aside from the road itself, the last evidence of civilization was an old wooden sign about four miles back, barely distinguishable from the shadow of the woods. In self-serious font, the sign read:

IN THIS LOCATION IN AUGUST OF 1984, BILL STEINHORST ENCOUNTERED A CREATURE RESEMBLING A SASQUATCH.

THIS SIGN HAS BEEN ERECTED FOR PUBLIC AWARENESS AND SAFETY.

Signs like this were a common sight in northern Idaho. Hikers got a kick out of them—scientists, too—but that particular sign was curiously remote, as far as tourist traps went.

Eventually the pair reached the end of the road, departing the truck to begin their trailblaze into the mountain. The first section was steep enough to be called a climb, with ferns and huckleberry shrouding the hill and fallen cedars and saplings acting like steps of a ladder, helping offset the burning in their legs. After a hundred meters, the slope relented into a rolling cedar forest much more traversable for large mammals such as humans. A quarter mile deeper, ferns became skunk cabbage, shrubs became sedge, and the great coniferous canopy succumbed to a pristine and expansive wetland.

As Lee switched out her hiking shoes for rubber boots, she took in the precious pocket ecosystem: a biome within a biome, among the last of its kind. The peatland’s rarity made it amenable to forty rare plant and animal species, including a certain elusive amphibian.

Lee and Michael sloshed cautiously through the water toward the camera one’s coordinates, finding the device mounted low in the nearby brush. Michael removed the SD card and handed it to Lee, and while he inserted the new card and changed the batteries, Lee sat on a log and set up the field laptop.

“Any hits?” Michael asked.

“Lots of exciting videos of grass. Oh, and would you look at this!” She pivoted the laptop in her colleague’s direction, showing him one of the 352 files. “More grass.”

Michael turned his focus back on the batteries, mumbling as usual about how he wished he could adjust the cam’s sensitivity. Sometimes, it was a good sign when the batteries were drained because it meant the camera had caught lots of footage. But this was not one of those times.

Camera two was also depleted of its batteries, but at least not without something to show for it. The device’s SD card contained several clips: some field mice, an adorable saw-whet owl stopping for a drink, and hours of footage of a mother deer and two fawns using the area for bedding. The final clip on the card was a true score: an adult mountain lion ambushing the deer family as they slept.

Lee had once read how some large cats took between ten to sixty minutes to suffocate their prey. This cougar didn’t need nearly as much time, her teeth pinching tight around the unlucky fawn’s tiny windpipe for barely two minutes until her prey was dead. She knew exactly where to squeeze.

This wasn’t data they could use for their study or for conservation purposes—cougars and blacktails weren’t exactly species of concern—but any biologist would have been thrilled to nab that footage, the next best thing to witnessing a hunt firsthand.

Little did Lee realize, what she was about to find on camera three would eclipse not only the mountain lion footage, but all wildlife recordings in human history.

* * *

Something about nighttime footage always haunted her: the foreground of glowing monochrome before a backdrop of inky black, the way creatures would pass spontaneously into the frame like ghosts with their prowling nocturnal gait, their spectral pelts and white ember eyes making them appear more spirit than animal.

But this—a pit formed in her stomach the moment she saw it, the bulwark of fur entering stage left—this was no black bear.

Its legs were like tree trunks, thick with hair or muscle or mud. Its body filled the screen like an encroaching wall of dark fur, too tall to make out anything resembling the head or even an upper torso. The beast took two tremendous steps, stopped far ahead of the camera, dead center of the screen, and lowered to its massive haunches in a crouched position, resting its thick forearms on bent knees, undeniably simian. A block-shaped gorilla face sat atop broad, matted shoulders. Two enormous eyes shined like flashlights in the infrared, and not in the way some curious cats or bears do, but as if it knew what the device was. When those eyes blinked, Lee flinched. There was intelligence in those eyes, intention, sentience. After a moment more of staring, the animal pivoted its head in a curious tilt, pushed up from its squat, and strode out of view in two effortless strides opposite where in entered.

Her hands were pressed against her mouth. When she looked up from the laptop, she saw Michael still next to the camera, business as usual, fumbling through his backpack for the replacement SD card. She rubbed her eyes, watched the clip again, a mere twenty seconds that felt like hours.

She noted the timestamp: 11:08 p.m., June 29th, the same date they set up the camera three weeks before. Could the animal have seen them place the cameras?

Could it be watching us this time, too?

Lee watched the video a third time, pausing at the ten-second mark. The creature was crouched in the center of the screen, its long, flat feet planted firmly in a patch of peat moss between two clusters of sedge. The creature looked more real as a static image, and this made her nauseous.

Finally able to peel her eyes off the screen, Lee looked up at the patch of peat before her. She placed the laptop aside, then sloshed across the water, scouring the peat for tracks—footprints, she supposed.

Nothing. It was possible three weeks of weathering could have evened the terrain back to equilibrium, but in the dry season that was unlikely.

“Find something?”

Lee looked up, dazed, to see her colleague looming over her. When she failed to immediately conjure a reply, Michael took it upon himself to meander over to the laptop. After one second of looking at the screen, his curious smile turned to dread: the face of a scientist witnessing an impossible creature, realizing everything they thought they knew about the animal kingdom was being called into question.

* * *

“Someone’s messing with us,” Michael said as he pressed play for the umpteenth time. “No way it isn’t some freak in a gorilla costume.”

Lee spoke as if complaining, “You can see its face moving. And tell me what kind of costume has fur that realistic.”

“Could be edited. CGI. Someone at the school probably read our research plan, found the camera locations. They brought their own laptop out here and edited one of the blank videos. That’s the only explanation. Has to be.”

“I guess that would explain why there’s no tracks, but . . .” She paced over to her partner and glanced at the laptop. “I mean, look at it. If that’s special effects, someone deserves an Oscar.”

“People have gone way further for way less. You wouldn’t believe what an amateur editor could do these days given enough time. Have you seen some of those fan-made videos online?”

“But that’s the thing, they didn’t have time. If someone edited this, they did it in a single afternoon, the same night after we placed the camera.”

“They could have edited the timestamp, too. That stuff is easy to do these days. For all I know, you’re the mastermind behind this stunt. You in on this, Lee? Am I being filmed?”

She shot her partner a crooked smile, saw he wasn’t smiling back. “You’re serious?”

“Look,” he slapped the laptop shut, “if this was real, and I’m not saying it is, it would mean an animal that size has gone undiscovered all this time.”

“I mean . . . to be fair, there have been sightings, photos, videos. Unverified, I know, but I’m just saying—”

“And I’m just saying, you need to think about this. If a species of megafauna has avoided science for this long—if it dodged the hundreds of millions of North Americans who’ve spent centuries ripping up every square inch of this continent—then that animal would need to be fully evolved for evading humans. I’m talking every gene. It doesn’t leave prints, poop, bones—not a single hair. It can hide from satellites, helicopters, not to mention”—he wiggled his wrist toward camera three, still on its mount—“the thousands of trail cams left out in the woods. But the thing in that video didn’t look like it was trying to evade anything. It literally sat and stared at the camera.”

“Okay, that’s all the more reason to believe it’s intelligent, right?”

“All the more reason to believe it’s fake. Remember that guy from Georgia who swore up and down he had a dead one in a freezer? Turned out he was just flat-out lying? My point is, we still have no hard evidence that what’s on that card is real or not.”

Lee shot her colleague a glance, unable to read him. Every time Michael denied the evidence, it had the unscientific byproduct of making the footage more legitimate in her eyes.

* * *

On the way back to town, it was Michael’s turn to drive, while Lee sat in the passenger seat with the laptop open and the camera-three clip on repeat.

“I tell you what, as soon as my dad down in Texas gets a whiff of this footage . . .” Lee mused. She had been pausing the clip occasionally, looking for any sign of tampering, for evidence of a costume or digital artifacts, but all she observed was how real the fur looked, the minute twitches in the beast’s muscles, the thoughts in its illuminated infrared eyes. “My dad had a thing for Chupacabras. I wonder if those are real, too.”

“Your dad’s a believer, huh,” Michael said as if bored.

“I feel like most dads are Bigfoot believers.”

Michael didn’t immediately respond, not even taking his eyes off the dirt road for a second—keeping an eye out for toads, hopefully.

“So, listen,” he changed the subject, “I don’t think we should tell Corey about this.”

Lee let this register, then engaged with a sharp smile. “Oh, so you think it’s real now?”

“Didn’t say that—definitely not—but let’s assume for a second it is. Be honest: What would your dad do if he saw that footage on the news, or the internet or whatever?”

“Easy. He’d drive up here and try to find Bigfoot.”

“Find? Is that all he’d do?”

Her mind went to it immediately. Guns.

“He wouldn’t try to kill Bigfoot, if that’s what you’re implying.”

“Maybe not, but how many whackjobs in this country would?”

“But . . . if we can prove this thing exists, it could be exactly what we need to protect the wetlands. We could prohibit anyone from entering these mountains. We could help turn half the panhandle into a preservation, not to mention our names would go in the history books. I mean . . . come on, this would make our careers—right?”

Michael shook his head as if to erase all his previous comments. “Whatever—none of that matters, because Bigfoot isn’t real. I don’t know about you, but I’m more concerned about the animals that do exist. You know how Corey is. He’s probably a believer himself. His career is already in the shitter, he has nothing to lose. He’ll milk this conspiracy for everything it’s worth so he can get on some cheesy internet documentary or something, and when that happens, every camo-wearing redneck this side of the Rockies will come and invade these mountains on a wild goose chase.”

“Hey, watch the redneck bashing.”

“You know what I mean. Is that what you want? A bunch of idiots clomping around these mountains, spreading the chytrid fungus all over with their muddy boots, setting up camp, literally shitting all over the pristine ecosystem we’re trying to protect? How would that be good for the boreal toads in any way?”

Lee eyed her partner as he drove. The thought of tents set up around the peatlands like some sort of music festival made her wince. She pictured the biowaste, the poaching, the dogs—a modern equivalent of what a certain flightless bird faced a few hundred years ago.

What would Jane do?

“Okay,” she said. “You have some good points. I’m on board with this. But if we can’t tell our own prof, then who should we tell? Anyone in the department?”

“Nope. I’m saying we don’t tell a soul. None of it.”

Lee turned back to the laptop screen. The video was paused at the fifteen second mark, with the animal halfway through standing up, head already out of the frame as it prepared to walk off-screen, its massive thighs sporting greater girth than a human waist. In this moment, Lee believed with a degree of 99% certainty that what she was not looking at a costume—not unless the world’s tallest basketball player had commissioned the greatest gorilla suit money could buy—but an undocumented species of primate, and the acceptance of this thought made her sick to her stomach.

“If what you’re saying is true”—Lee hovered a finger over the delete key—“and we can’t show it to anyone, then I should just delete the footage from the card right now.”

The bluff worked. Michael lunged—“No!”—as he reached with his right hand, nearly swerving the truck off the side of a switchback. Lee flinched and clung to the passenger door. Michael immediately corrected the steering wheel, but paused a moment before fully sinking back into his seat.

“Okay, fine,” he said. “There is a very, very small chance the footage is real. Come on, you can’t blame me for being skeptical. Look at the situation we’re in, Lee. We have to be smart about this.”

Lee was still clinging against the passenger door, cradling the laptop. “Smart, how?”

“Smart for conservation. Whatever that thing is, there’s a way we can go about this that will both help our project and not create a panic. Maybe it involves us deleting the footage. Maybe it involves us putting out more cameras so we can get more footage. Surely you can agree we need more data before we go making conclusions, right? One thing I know for sure, whatever we decide to do, it absolutely does not involve telling that dingbat Corey.”

Lee nodded as her colleague spoke, staring at him a moment longer before relaxing back into the seat and retreating her hand from the keyboard. She couldn’t read Michael’s mind, but she agreed with him on one thing: The situation was bizarre. It was only logical to take a step back, to walk the fine line between science and secrecy, if there was such a thing.

* * *

When the cat pounced, Corey stood from his chair in celebration. “Oh, damn! Fucker came outta’ nowhere, didn’t he?”

“We’re, ah . . .” Lee’s gaze wandered toward the doorway of her professor’s office where Michael was leaning, keeping a cool head. “We’re pretty sure the cougar is a female.”

Corey settled back into his office chair. He pulled a medium-sized piece of beef jerky from a bag, then started waving the jerky at the screen as if commenting on a football game. “Little guy just keeps squirming, huh? Kick, little buddy!”

Lee side-eyed her professor. Mammalian predation was fascinating, but it was odd to see someone with a PhD in biology treat it like a spectator sport. Then again, this was a man who already had one foot out the door of academia.

Corey took a swig from his soda can, swished the liquid in his mouth before swallowing. When he glanced up from his computer, he must have seen Lee gulp.

“What’s wrong, buds?” the professor asked. “You two feelin’ alright?”

Lee stuttered. “Ah, we—”

“I guess we just feel a little bad for the deer,” said Michael, tagging in from the doorway. Not a bad lie. It was a good move to let the prof think he was the smartest biologist in the room.

“Nature’s brutal,” Corey said. “Lion needs its weekly deer, yeah? That’s why mommy makes twins, so she’s got a backup.” He pulled out another piece of jerky and extended it in Lee’s direction. “Want a piece?”

Lee didn’t even look at the meat. “I’m good.”

Corey shrugged and flicked the jerky into his mouth like popcorn. On the screen, the fawn’s gyrations became twitches, then stillness. When the mountain lion was certain its prey was dead, it lifted its catch by the neck and dragged it out of view of the camera, likely to a nearby den of hungry cubs. When the clip ended, Corey pivoted from his laptop with a grin. “That was some good god-damn television right there.”

“It’s neat,” Lee said.

“Just neat? Did we watch the same video?”

“I, um—I guess I just saw it plenty of times in the field. And it’s not really much to use in terms of conservation. But if we can go back out there, maybe if we can get funding for more cameras, we could spot some boreal toads before fall. Maybe even some bog lemmings. A little more data could help us get the lemmings listed.” As in, listed under the Endangered Species Act. Like the boreal toads, the northern bog lemming was one of the many animals waiting in limbo to gain protection, a victim of either too little data or too much bureaucracy.

Corey continued as if he hadn’t heard a word Lee said. “I’m just going to go ahead and copy this file onto my computer. Man, this’ll get so many views.”

“I kind of doubt—wait, views?”

“Oh, you betcha. Kitty here’s begging to go viral.” Corey shook his empty soda can over his mouth before continuing. “This is from camera two, right? Did you move it or leave it in the same spot? I was thinking the mom could bring its babies through one day, maybe give us some cub action. Internet loves cats, right?”

Michael butted in. “We’ll let you know if we find anything, boss.”

“Cougars aren’t a part of our research proposal,” Lee protested anyway. “If we’re planning on getting the footage we are looking for, we—”

“Hey, that’s fine,” said the professor. “I’m not gonna micromanage you. I just figured we might as well get something out of this snipe hunt of yours—”

“Snipe hunt?”

“—but if you’re fine with pictures of grass, keep at it, sport.” As he said this, his hand was fishing through the beef jerky bag only to find crumbs and the silica packet. He pulled out a pinch of meat dust then stuck it in his mouth, fingers and all. “So what was on camera three, then? Anything good?”

Lee froze. She did a double take to Michael, who was vibrating his head as a barely discernible “no.” Meanwhile, Corey had taken his beef jerky bag in one hand, soda can in the other, and tossed both simultaneously into the trash can under his desk. Lee saw this, hesitated a moment, then offered her thoughts:

“You know our school has a recycling program.”

Corey looked at his trashcan as if he’d forgotten it was there. “I’ll sort it all out later.”

No you won’t. Her face scrunched with disdain, and Corey must have noticed this disapproval.

“I’ve seen it myself,” he continued. “The recycling truck mixes it in with the trash. It all goes to the same place, the landfill.”

“I’ve been to Coeur d’Alene’s recycling center. What you just said is completely untrue.”

“Plastic recycling is a scam, Lee. You want to know where that stuff really goes?”

“I’m not talking about plastic,” she said. “I’m talking about cans. That can, specifically, which will take up space in a landfill unless you take it out of the trashcan and put it in one of the recycling bins in the hallway.”

At this moment, every trace of the professor’s usual cartoonishness had vanished from his face. He adjusted his cap, raised his voice, “Jesus Murphy, what’s with the fixation on the can?! Why is what I eat and throw away your business all of a sudden? Did I miss something here?”

Lee’s frown curled to a grimace as she considered for the third time that day: What would Jane do?

But the next words that came out of her mouth were not quite what Jane would have done.

“Do you care about anything?” she asked.

Her professor sighed, suddenly as exhausted as he was bored. “I study river otters, Lee. Not sustainability, not—”

“I’m not talking about the recycling anymore; we’re back on conservation. My next question is, do you care about the boreal toad? Do you care about the northern bog lemming? Do you care about the impact we have on biodiversity, or are you like every other childish human piece of trash on this planet?”

Corey stared as if unsure whether to respond with anger or laughter. He leaned forward on his desk and spoke with a hiss. “Now look here, ’cause I’m about to tell you how this whole thing works. I got my own research going on. I’ve supervised countless useless projects aside from yours, and I’ll tell you, ninety-nine percent of this is bullshit. All the data we break our backs trying to get? Bullshit. Honestly, I’d be surprised if there’s a single boreal toad left in Idaho, and if you think recycling is going to do anything to fix that, to fix anything, then you’ve got a lot left to—”

“Those are entirely baseless statements.”

“Who cares? This whole thing we’re doing here is just an excuse for you to write your thesis, for me to get my name on a few more lousy publications no one will read, and then for you to run off to the barista job of your dreams. Now do you want that degree or not?”

Lee broke eye contact about halfway through Corey’s spiel. Michael was watching from the doorway without a peep.

“Nothing but grass and deer butts on camera three,” she finally said. Then she did an about-face, walked past a stunned Michael, and left her professor’s office for the last time in her academic career.

* * *

Does Bigfoot have breasts?

Lee went on to have a sleepless night—not because of the argument with her professor, but because of that simple question.

For any dedicated enthusiast (and she had found there were many very dedicated enthusiasts online), it was given that the original Bigfoot seen in the 1967 Patterson-Gimlin footage was a female, affectionately named “Patty,” mostly based on the observation that Patty did, indeed, have breasts.

Though the Patterson-Gimlin clip was infamously brief and blurry—impossible to prove, impossible to disprove, non-scientific by its very nature—Lee was able to find some edits where the shakiness had been removed through digital stabilization techniques. Through the graininess, she could see it herself: the pair of furry, swollen breasts hanging from the creature’s chest as it performed its iconic over-the-shoulder camera glance.

This observation was consistent with reports by one of the men present for the original filming, Bob Gimlin, who dubbed the subject a female based on the claim that he saw “mammary glands” as the animal walked away. In Lee’s mind, this added to the footage’s credibility. Why would two former rodeo cowboys in the sixties with no knowledge of primatology go to the trouble of adding boobs to their gorilla costume?

Some members of the research community even went to such lengths of comparing the beast’s movements to real human models, concluding that the movement of Patty’s breasts were consistent with those of a human. Either way, those breasts were the only noticeable physical difference between the subject in the 1967 footage and Lee’s specimen from camera three. This suggested Lee’s Bigfoot might have been a male. Head shape, facial structure, and limb thickness appeared nearly identical between subjects, as well as fur color, coverage, and density.

The breasts did, however, raise new questions. First off, if her breastless subject was a male, then why didn’t it have a visible penis? Non-human primates possessed phalluses of all shapes and sizes (many notably small in proportion to body mass, especially compared to humans), often concealed by fur, but Lee had studied every pixel of the front-facing subject from camera three and noted nothing. It was worth noting that Homo sapiens was the only mammal whose breasts were permanently enlarged outside of lactation. This brought up the next big question, which was on the subject of taxonomy: Was Bigfoot a species of great ape, or it was a species of human?

Some non-scientists on the internet posited this bipedal primate as a relative of extant human species, a descendant of Homo neanderthalensis or Homo heidelbergensis, perhaps, hardened and enlightened by fifty-thousand years of natural selection allowing it to persist in the Anthropocene. They dubbed it many names, including Homo sylvestris, or the common “Wood Ape.” Alternatively, the Bigfoot could have been a North American migrant variant of Gigantopithecus blacki, the ten-foot-tall ancestor of the orangutan that went extinct one hundred thousand years ago. If this was true, and Bigfoot was a closer relative to the orangutan than Homo sapiens, the implication was a rather exceptional instance of convergent evolution: one in which upright bipedalism had arisen a second time to allow the Bigfoot species to traverse its coniferous forest biome.

Beyond that, most other theories bordered on ludicrous, conveniently void of evidence. One fringe conspiracy dubbed Bigfoot as a traveler from the future who possessed the ability to appear and disappear, weaving through time at will. Others claimed Bigfoot was equipped with some sort of distortion or cloaking technology capable of obscuring its appearance on any sort of visual recording device. The craziest theories of all suggested a more paranormal aspect to Bigfoot’s origin: the lights, the voices, invisibility, the footprints that start and end suddenly, all hints that the creature was a force not of this world. Each of these theories shared a common theme: that Bigfoot was not a species, but an individual entity. This was in line with legends told by the Sts’ailes people, a Salish First Nation in nearby British Columbia whose ancestors honored a supernatural being known as Sasq’ets, or “hairy man.” This Sasq’ets—later Anglicized to “Sasquatch”—was said by elders to have possessed the ability to phase between the physical and spiritual realms.

That was a nice thought: a forest spirit who popped in and around the coniferous woods of North America at will—a protector of the woods. Someone who spoke for the trees.

Unscientific as those predictions were, they would have at least explained the creature’s elusiveness. Michael was right when he said how unlikely it was for a mammalian titan to have evaded modern scientific documentation. While this elusiveness was not an indication that Bigfoot was a tree-loving dimension-hopper from the future, it did imply the species had evolved or adapted to avoid human discovery in every tangible way.

As far as Lee was concerned, not a single credible footprint or hair existed. Possible explanations were that the surface area distribution of Sasquatch’s enormous feet was of such dimensions as to create no discernible track, and that the creature’s fur might have been non-shedding, diverging from the molting tendencies of humans and great apes. Even the animal’s biological waste would have needed to be concealed to avoid detection or tracking by other animals, and it would have needed to hide the remains of its dead in a similar manner, bones and all. Other animals employed similar practices to avoid predators; why couldn’t Bigfoot use them to preserve itself from the most dangerous predator on the planet?

These were all interesting prospects, but since the moment she saw the footage on camera three, a far more interesting evolutionary possibility had been swimming through Lee’s mind:

Intelligence.

To evade human discovery, a creature of that size would have had to do so consciously, to such a degree that the Sasquatch might have possessed greater intelligence than any other non-human animal on the planet.

The reverse may also have been true: The only explanation for why the Bigfoot would pop up so nonchalantly in front of a camera was that the species only appeared on camera when it wanted to.

But maybe none of those questions mattered.

Maybe it really was CGI. A costume. Some weird stalker pulling off an extravagant prank.

Worse, maybe it was all a meaningless diversion. The Bigfoot rabbit hole was just more mindless internet poison, killing her brain cells like any other click-harvesting pop culture phenomenon, distracting her from Earth’s critters that were verified to exist, and were elusive for notably less mystical reasons.

* * *

She slept in the next morning, late—a side-effect of her 2 A.M. internet binge. Texts and calls bombarded her silenced phone: concerns and questions from friends, colleagues, her professor. It wasn’t until she woke that she saw the notifications.

Most headlines read along the lines of: IDAHO STUDENT’S RESEARCH PHOTOS SPARK BIGFOOT CONTROVERSY.

Some clickbait took a more direct approach: INDISPUTABLE EVIDENCE: BIGFOOT PHOTOGRAPHED IN NORTH IDAHO.

Each thumbnail featured a familiar piece of infrared imagery: a hulking, crouched, hairy ape staring down into the camera with its flashlight eyes. The twenty second footage from camera three had become the most viral news on the internet, embedded in every article, clipped in every social media reel, a new modern iconic imagery to finally replace Patterson and Gimlin’s. Content spoke of “world-shattering developments,” “scientific revolutions,” and a graduate biology student named Michael Katz who captured the footage as part of a remote camera trapping research project in the remote bogs of northern Idaho’s Bonner County.

When she read that, Lee keeled off the side of her bed, nearly sick to her stomach. She bumbled off her mattress, over to the school’s laptop case to claw through every last pocket in search of the SD card.

The data was missing.

She called her colleague. When he didn’t answer, she sent a text instead—How much did you sell it for?—then read another article written by a mildly credible publication. The article quoted a Hollywood digital effects artist who specialized in computer generated animals, claiming the lighting of the creature was entirely consistent with infrared footage. She scanned another article after that one, then watched a quick video, noting zero mention of the boreal toad or bog lemming. There was a reason for this; small endangered animals didn’t get clicks.

Lee sent another text to Michael: Did you even bother to mention the boreal toad when you sold out?

Her phone started vibrating the moment she set it down. Michael was finally gracing her with a response.

“Of course I told them about the toads,” he said. “The lemmings, too. That was the whole point.”

Lee was seething. “You lied to me. You said we’d do this smart, get more data, but you just handed out the video, and now it’s on the front fricking page of Reddit.”

“I had a change of heart. Went with my instinct. You said it yourself, this will make our careers.”

“I’m not seeing my name in any of these articles. You think anyone will want anything to do with you after word gets out that you left your research partner in the dust?”

“Lee, I swear, I told them your name. I have no say in what these morons actually decide to write. Listen,” he changed tone, “I’ve got a video call with a network in about twenty minutes, I’ll see what I can do to get you in on it. Why don’t you—”

“Jeez, I appreciate the afterthought, partner.”

“I called because I’m trying to include you in this. Are you in or not?”

“Know what? I’m good. I don’t want anything to do with this. You’re no better than Corey. You’re not even a scientist in my eyes. Hope you’re happy, Mike.”

“Now hold on, if you think I’m just going to take—”

She hung up and hurled her phone into her bed.

Not only did that conversation mean the demise of her research project, it meant she had accomplished the exact opposite of what she and Michael originally set out to do: to provide data that could help protect the peatlands from the influence of loggers, miners, and whiskey-makers. Instead, Michael’s betrayal would single-handedly turn the entire forest into a tourist destination. The so-called Katz Footage would eclipse her whole career, her dream of becoming a conservationist made irrelevant before it even started.

* * *

Lee moped in bed, watching the news and social media stories multiply by the minute while she thought about extinction.

There had been a mass extinction going on since before she was born; nearly half of all animal species were in decline. This was far from the first die-off in Earth’s history, and it wouldn’t be the last, and one human’s overly optimistic meddling wouldn’t change any of that. Sometimes, she wished it would be done with already so she wouldn’t have to face the guilt of her own species anymore—for a giant solar flare to boil the Earth and all the microplastics with it.

At some point, her eyes migrated from her screen to her dresser. Atop the dresser rested some of her favorite science books from her childhood—more decoration than literature, brought to college for the sake of an ever-fading nostalgia and nothing more. One of these books managed to catch her eye, however. Across its worn, green, two-inch thick spine ran gold serif lettering, all caps: THE AMAZING WORLD OF ANIMALS.

She scooted out of bed to to nudge the tome from its decorative wedge, dusted it off, and hauled it back to her pillows. The spine folded on itself as it opened, dilapidated from all the times she’d opened and closed it as a child. Grainy, colored imagery filled the pages: a collage of black-and-white stripes cantering across a shallow watering hole; the blue silhouette of a sea lion beneath an ice floe; a pit viper indistinguishable from the vine its prehensile body was curled around. These images invoked memories from a more innocent time, back when all of Earth’s creatures were as new and mysterious as any cryptid.

As if by deeply subconscious muscle memory, she opened to a page near the back of the book.

Upsetting the balance of nature—that was the caption. These two pages described water and air pollution, invasive species, habitat destruction, all basic knowledge to her now, but to a fifth grader this was new: discovering the role modern Homo sapiens had in nature—how the species had taken the world and made it theirs.

She turned the page.

The dodo’s plumage was light and gray. Its tiny wings appeared useless even by flightless-bird standards, and its circular yellow eye was sad and innocent. The turkey-like hump arching from its back and the undulating curvature of its neck and beak might have been what gave the creature the comedic appearance it was often known for. Since extinction, the bird had been reduced to a colloquial insult—“you dodo”—a caricature in children’s cartoons, collectively blamed for its own extinction because it supposedly lacked intelligence.

Lee felt her eyes grow heavy. She sniffed as a tear fell down her nose and onto the page, joining the long-dried tears from sixteen years ago.

The next page listed dozens of critically endangered animals, with their estimated population from the year 1971 written in parenthesis: the Iriomote wildcat (150); the aye-aye (50); the Hawaiian crow (25-50); the California condor (probably fewer than 40); the whooping crane (about 50); the Puerto Rico parrot (about 100); Scimitar Oryx (about 500).

Some of those animals had gone extinct in the wild in the decades since the book’s publishing, while others had seen vast recoveries in the wake of the green revolution. Some populations were roughly the same as they were in the seventies—holding on.

The next page, captioned Actions for a better future, highlighted the importance of policy, research, and education, a retro perspective on conservation from back when the human population was half its current number and climate change had not yet proliferated its way into the zeitgeist. Accompanying this section was a small, now-iconic image of Jane Goodall grooming a wild chimpanzee she named David Greybeard. The text described how the renowned primatologist had lived in the jungles of Tanzania when she was just twenty-six to not only study chimpanzee behavior but to truly empathize with them. Jane’s findings—and her entire career—not only helped humans understand primates, but helped humans understand to care for and protect the animals they share the world with.

By the time Lee closed the book, her tears weren’t quite dry. Those were the very pages that inspired her to become a scientist and environmentalist fifteen years ago. Now that she could see it again, she realized it wasn’t the dodo that truly brought her to action; it was the photograph of Jane Goodall proving an individual can make a difference.

So she thought to herself, one more time:

What would Jane do?

* * *

First she needed data. One second, even a single frame of new Bigfoot footage would be all she needed to leverage the narrative in her favor.

She stuffed her backpack with water, food, the laptop, and a flashlight. She rode her mountain bike to the university, only to find the science building’s truck mysteriously absent from the parking lot. Maybe another student had already checked it out. Perhaps Michael had taken it to one of his interviews.

With no other options, Lee biked to the highway, dismounted, and stuck her thumb out heading north. She was lucky enough for a stranger with a pickup truck to take her as far as Bonner’s Ferry. Naturally, this man was a Bigfoot “expert” eager to discuss the news of the hour. At the risk of coming off rude, Lee repeatedly waved off the conversation by saying the footage wasn’t proof of anything.

The believer dropped her off in town at two-thirty in the afternoon. There, the local businesses were already gearing up for the inevitable influx of enthusiasts and media, preparing their roadside stands and gift stores with all conceivable Bigfoot paraphernalia. Some geared up with hunting and survival gear, with signs advertising services for Bigfoot guides.

From town, Lee would need to ride her bike west into the Selkirk Mountains—a grueling venture, but she had time. Based on the articles she had skimmed, Michael hadn’t yet given out the exact coordinates of the footage. This meant she could get to the peatland before the tourists did.

By the time she passed the Bigfoot sign, it was seven in the evening, still light out. She gazed upon the sign while she caught her breath, regarding the posting with a newfound respect. This alleged sighting was no longer a joke to her; it was a data point.

When she arrived at the end of the road, she saw the science school’s truck parked diagonally against the side of the road.

So that was where it went.

Michael must have come back, probably heading for camera three. He must have been up there for a while, too, because Lee hadn’t seen the truck pass while she was biking up.

Her stomach churned with anticipation as she neared the wetland, bushwhacking up the mountain with greater efficiency than any of the times before.

She arrived at the peatbog just as the late-July sky was softening with twilight. As she rounded the perimeter of the wetland to reach camera three, the movement of foliage rustled somewhere behind her—the unmistakable sound of an animal in the underbrush.

She froze.

Holding her breath, she moved only her eyes to scan above the bog’s waist-high grass, toward the perimeter of fir trees that surrounded the wetland: those endless trees, creeping in a wall of darkness. She was unable to shake the crippling feeling that something in those shadows was watching her, as if she herself was the subject of a trail cam, or another type of observation entirely.

“M-michael?” She barely got a sound out. Her body became petrified again when she heard a crack of the twigs and leaves of the forest floor, a brushing of the ferns—something big, absolutely not Michael. Movement blurred in the corner of her eye, from the direction of the peatlands where a dark brown hominid loomed over the grasses and shrubs, sloshing through the water in wide, slow steps. Her knees bent as she prepared to turn and run, until—

The figure spoke.

“Hello?!” A man’s voice. Familiar.

“. . . Corey?!”

The professor was nearly invisible in the wooded gloom. He was wearing a bulky camo jacket, but Lee could still see the man’s face in the low light, at which point her body relaxed in a single great exhalation.

“Lee!” Corey said. “The fuck, man!?” In his right hand, he was pointing something dark and metal at her.

Her heart plummeted to her stomach. “Oh my God—you brought a gun out here?”

He lowered the handgun halfway, still holding it with two hands. “Course I brought a gun, we’re fuck in the middle of the panhandle. There’re mountain lions out here . . .” His eyes were wide and scared as he glanced down at his drawn weapon, then back to Lee. “And other things.”

Lee sighed and took a few slow steps toward him. “Why is it so many people automatically assume Bigfoot is dangerous?”

“You gave me the runaround, kid.” The man’s face morphed from fear to anger. He hesitated to fully holster the weapon, still pointing the barrel toward the ground. “You two were out ’squatching this whole time and never told me. You have any idea how much trouble you’d get in for withholding data?”

“As if you ever cared about data.” Her comment made the professor angry; she paused her advance, raising her palms. “Corey, it was a tough decision. But can you understand why we did it? You saw the internet. This whole thing is a . . . a disaster! And it’s just getting started.”

“Yeah? So why’d you tell the press?”

“No, see—that was Michael.” She took another step. “He went behind my back, too. We agreed to keep it secret until we could get more data, play our cards right, but . . .” Her eyes lowered, close enough now to see the full shape of the metal in Corey’s hands. “Come on, Corey, we both know you shouldn’t have that thing out unless you plan on using it.”

The man froze—he had to think about it, apparently—then lowered the handgun all the way to finagle it into a black holster hanging at his right hip. Once secure, the two of them released a simultaneous breath of relief.

Lee lowered her hands. “I take it you’re having trouble finding the cameras.”

“I got the rough location.”

“Right. That’s why you’re sloshing aimlessly through a hundred square meter wetland.” The exact coordinates were in the data spreadsheet but, naturally, Corey wouldn’t have known to look at that file, or even where to find it. “Look, I’ll take you there. On one condition.”

Corey shrugged, prompting her to continue.

“We’re going to that camera as conservationists—not as hunters, not as social media influencers . . . Whatever we find on that camera, if we find anything at all, we’re not leveraging it to get famous, or to make a profit. Okay?”

Corey scoffed, his hand migrating toward his holster to rest on the handgun’s grip. “The hell do you think I’m setting out here to do?”

“I’m not sure why you do anything you do, but it’s not science, and it’s definitely not to protect the peatlands.”

“Man, this again—”

“I need you to promise me. Please.”

Neither spoke for a while. In this new silence, both scientists turned calm as they looked around, listening, as if they had noticed their surroundings for the first time. The sunset had bathed the peatland in a purple glow, the day’s final light reflecting off pockets of water. Grass and sedge bristled in the breeze, while the songs of insects and amphibians saturated the summer night air. Amongst the chorus, a soft, high-pitched series of plinks rang out like the call of a peeping chick.

“You hear that one?” Lee asked, wonderment in her voice.

Corey’s gaze wandered with a similar awe, as if somewhere in his head, somewhere in his past, another young child was enamored by the natural world, eager to learn.

“It’s . . . nice,” he said. “Some sort of bird.”

Lee chuckled. “It’s the boreal toad mating call.”

“Shit.”

“I didn’t know what they sounded like, either. Not until Michael taught me. He taught me a lot, actually.”

“Well, he won’t need to do much teaching after this. Lucky bastard.”

Lee lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “I don’t know about this Bigfoot stuff. I really don’t. But the boreal toad is out here, Corey. I want them to be able to keep singing like this for years to come. Will you help?”

Corey’s hand finally left his holster. For the first time since Lee had known him, he looked sincere.

By the time they arrived at the coordinates for camera three, the sky had turned completely dark. But even with her flashlight, she couldn’t find the camera. She was certain she was in the right spot; it was as if someone had walked up, plucked the mount right out of the ground, and made off with it all without leaving a single footprint.

“Oi! This it over here?” Corey hollered from the brush.

Lee waded over to her professor, who was pointing his flashlight at the camera. The camera was mounted in a patch of peat, perhaps twenty meters from where she and Michael had left it the previous day.

Corey watched as Lee set up the laptop inserted camera three’s SD card. There was one file on the card: a sixty second video, but nothing visible in the file image—only darkness.

Corey’s face leaned in, practically magnetized to the laptop screen. Lee gulped and double-clicked.

Both their jaws dropped in the first few seconds of the footage. Lee’s heart filled with terror, and this terror compounded exponentially for fifteen seconds. Then the remaining forty-five seconds of the footage showed something entirely different.

“You’re shitting me,” Corey said. “Are those . . . ?”

Exactly what she needed.

When the clip was over, the two sat in contemplative silence for several moments.

“We can use this,” Lee said. “If we play the news cycle right, show this to the right people—”

“You can use it,” Corey said as if taking a great weight off his shoulders. “Damn. I’m starting to think academia ain’t for me, bud.”

Lee smiled, thinking the exact same thing for herself.

* * *

The next day, amongst the chatter still circulating from the story of the prior day, two new reports emerged: one from a local at Bonner’s Ferry, one out of Spokane, each claiming themselves the pranksters responsible for the Katz footage. The man from Spokane even had the costume to “prove” it, stilts and all.

Lee had no idea who those people were or if either of their stories were true. Either way, it worked in her favor by sewing doubt into the internet, forcing people to further question the legitimacy of the Katz footage and make way for a new story.

But before Lee could give that story, first she had to lie to the world.

“I falsified the Katz footage,” she told the news anchor through her laptop webcam. “I hired a digital effects artist and planted the SD card on one of our school’s trail cameras in the field, so yes, everything you think is Bigfoot on that clip is just CGI. I kept this from my partner, Michael Katz, because I wanted it to seem believable when he leaked the footage.”

The news anchor appeared almost annoyed at this revelation—the eyes of a disappointed believer. “I suppose the next question, then, is . . . why? Why would you try to deceive your partner and the world like this? Was this all some elaborate prank?”

“Unfortunately, we live in a world where people would rather spend their money on a Bigfoot bumper sticker than donate to a land trust or nature conservancy. People on the internet would rather learn about some mythical animal than ones that actually exist. I’m talking about animals who are real, and dying, and need our help. Our species is the cause of a biodiversity crisis beyond my ability to describe, and that’s why I created this footage.”

“So you wanted to raise awareness,” the anchor clarified. “I’m sure we can all agree that’s an admirable goal, but I can’t imagine you’re the most popular person on the planet right now. What do you have to say to the people who might be disappointed that you lied to them and got their hopes up of finally obtaining evidence of a real-life Sasquatch?”

Before she gave her answer, she took a moment to look into her webcam with all the empathy she could muster. “I’d ask those people to look into their hearts and question the Bigfoot mythos. I’m not asking them to question whether or not Bigfoot is real, but what Bigfoot would want if it is real. An intelligent, possibly sapient being, wandering the woods, clearly wanting nothing to do with humans. Would that creature want us to obsess over it while its woodland neighbors—our neighbors—die of habitat loss, human-fueled climate change, invasive fungi, roadkill . . . ? I don’t think so.”

A blip of silence followed, perhaps a lag in transmission as the reporter’s face was momentarily unreadable. “It’s my understanding that you’ve released some new footage of those woodland neighbors you’re talking about. This is a new clip from as recent as yesterday, which you obtained from the same camera, is that true?”

“That’s correct, yes.”

In a shift of tone, the reporter’s face became a visage of warmth and understanding. “We’re going to play that clip right here. Apparently this is already making quite the buzz amongst wildlife biologists in North America. Can you please describe what we’re looking at, and what viewers can do to help?”

This question caught Lee off guard more than any other; she was surprised the reporter cared—enough to ask why other people should care, too.

So Lee collected her emotions, smiled with all the earnestness in her heart, and went on to call for the State of Idaho to recognize all remaining peatlands in the Idaho panhandle as protected areas.

She requested the support of any scientists and members of the public willing to support her Endangered Species Act petition.

She asked the viewers to drive cautiously in the mountains, to tread respectfully when camping or hiking, and to donate their hard-earned money, when able, to causes that supported habitat restoration and species conservation.

She told the world that who they voted for, the decisions they made in their jobs, careers, and family lives, the products they spent their money on every day—these decisions were important, and she ended with a quote from her hero: “Every individual matters. Every individual has a role to play. Every individual makes a difference.”

Lee spread this message at six news stations, ten podcasts, and two video channels in the first week alone.

What she did not tell the world, however, was that she had lied to them, not once, but twice that day, for she had also cut some of the footage she’d just shared with them.

Nothing major—just the first fifteen seconds, for the sake of time.

* * *

The timestamp said 11:45 p.m. Infrared, glowing, and haunting. Camera three began in its original position precisely where she left it.

The lens budged; something had jostled the camera.

Suddenly the lens rose as if levitating—lifted not by something, but someone, six or seven feet above the ground, over the puddles, over the tall grass, bobbing with long, patterned strides. Moments later. the camera lowered to a new location where it inserted neatly into an inconspicuous patch of peat.

This relocation took fifteen seconds.

The camera became still, again. The lens took a moment to find its focus in its relocated position. Ahead, in the center of the shot, a small animal hopped lightly in the darkness—no, two rare animals, an amphibian and a rodent: Anaxyrus boreas and Synaptomys borealis; the boreal toad and northern bog lemming, side by side in a state of perfect calm as if mesmerized by a mystic force.

Lee had edited out the first fifteen seconds which would have proven there was a third species in that scene: the one behind the camera. It might have been a human; it might have been a dimension-hopping forest guardian from the spirit world. But none of that mattered. In the end, the decision of existence came down to Homo sapiens, the only beings on Earth proven to be empowered with choice—the wardens of their world.

Countless individuals throughout history had embraced this role; Lee was one of them. The toads and lemmings would have a home; the peatland biome was protected.

It would remain so for as long as humans existed.