Chapter 1: The Photoshoot
The wind on the ridge was a biting, incessant thief, trying to steal the warmth from June’s freckled skin. She adjusted the strap of her backpack, the well-worn green canvas digging into the shoulder of her dirt-smudged flannel. Her long red hair, escaped from its practical ponytail, lashed across her face like fiery whips. Beside her, May shivered in her short blue jean shorts and thin tank top, her dark, curly hair a wild corona around her head. “Remind me again why we’re looking for a ghost cat at the ass-crack of the world?” May grumbled, her septum piercing glinting in a sudden slice of sunlight.
June shot her a grin, her green eyes crinkling. “Because you get the cover shot, and I get the data. It’s the circle of life, Sharma.” Their friendship was a decade-old thing, forged not over cocktails but over shared cans of beans and mutual rescues from mudslides and bureaucratic hell. June, all relentless drive and raw physicality, was the engine; May, with her intuitive eye and quiet patience, was the compass. It worked.
May crouched, her hiking boots scraping on the granite. “Over here,” she whispered, all business now, her finger tracing a faint, partial impression in a patch of soft earth. June was beside her in an instant, her lean frame casting a long shadow. She measured the print with a calibrated ruler from her vest pocket, her movements efficient, her breath held. “It’s fresh. Maybe an hour.” The hope in her voice was a tangible thing.
June’s gloved finger traced the impression in the damp earth. "This is probably our cat, May. Clean, deep pad, no claw marks. Seems to have gone this way, along the ridge." Her assessment was swift, authoritative; a decade of tracking everything from snow leopards to tree frogs in three separate mountain ranges had honed her instincts to a razor’s edge. She was, by any measure, a prolific and notoriously stubborn field researcher, known for bringing back data from places that ate GPS signals for breakfast.
"Wow, groundbreaking," May muttered, pushing herself upright with a soft groan. She brushed dirt from her toned thighs. "‘It went that way.’ Truly, your powers of deduction astound.” Her sarcasm was a well-practiced counterbalance to June’s unshakable certainty. May Sharma, at thirty-one, moved with the economical grace of someone who’d spent years contorting herself into impossible positions for the perfect shot. Her dark, close-cropped curls were tucked behind her ears, showing off the intricate linework of a fern tattoo that coiled up her neck. A tiny, silver Ganesha pendant hung beside her collarbone, a quiet nod to her Hindu upbringing amidst all this untamed wilderness. As a staff photographer for National Geographic, her eye was legendary for capturing not just an animal, but the quiet, fleeting soul of a moment.
They moved in practiced silence, June leading, her gaze locked on the ground. May followed, her own eyes scanning the sweeping vista of the hidden valley below for any movement, her photographer’s mind already framing shots in the golden-hour light. The sparse tracks led them along the jagged spine of rock for another hundred yards. Then, as if the mountain lion had simply vaporized, the impressions in the gritty soil ceased. June stopped dead, hands on her hips. "Shit."
"Did it grow wings?" May whispered, squatting to examine the unbroken lichen on the rock where the last print had been.
June scanned the surrounding boulders and stunted pines, her frustration a silent, simmering heat. "Help me look. There’s got to be a turnoff, a scrape, something."
June scrambled further along the ridge, her boots scraping against the jagged stone as her sharp eyes scanned every fissure and shadow. The wind snatched her breath away as she peered over a sharp drop-off into the valley below, her gaze sweeping the treeline.Movement.
Not the fluid, low-slung gait of a cat, but something upright, massive, and profoundly wrong. Her brain, cataloging a lifetime of known fauna, short-circuited. It was a manlike figure, but built on a scale that made the ancient pines look like saplings. It emerged from the dark fringe of firs with a startling, quiet grace for its size, entering a sunlit meadow just below them. Every instinct in June’s body screamed. She dropped, her knees hitting the granite with a thud that sent pain shooting up her thighs, and she flattened herself behind a weather-beaten hunk of basalt. Her heart wasn’t just pounding; it was trying to karate-chop its way out of her ribcage.
“May,” she hissed, the word barely more than a sharp exhale. She didn’t turn her head, her eyes locked on the creature below. “Get over here. Now. Stay low.”
May, hearing the undisguised urgency, immediately crouched and scuttled over, her Nikon clutched protectively against her chest. She pressed her back against the cool rock beside June, a flicker of excitement in her dark eyes. “Found our cat?” she whispered, already raising her camera.
“Not. A. Cat.” June’s voice was taut wire. She pointed a single, trembling finger down into the clearing.
May leaned forward, peering around the edge of the rock. Her breath caught in her throat, a tiny, choked sound as her dark eyes widened behind her glasses. The creature stood at least seven and a half feet tall, maybe more, its body a powerhouse of muscle sheathed in a dense pelt of dark, russet-brown hair. Sunlight glinted off intelligent, deep-set brown eyes that surveyed the valley with a calm, proprietary awareness. It wasn’t just some shambling beast; it moved with a deliberate, almost thoughtful purpose, the powerful muscles in its thighs and shoulders rolling beneath its fur with each step. It scratched its broad, flat nose with fingers that looked capable of crushing stone, then leaned down to inspect a patch of berries with what could only be described as curiosity.
“What the fuck is that?” May whispered, the words a dry, astonished rasp against the wind.
May’s instincts as a photographer overrode her shock; she silently raised her Nikon, the soft whir of the autofocus barely audible over the wind as she began capturing frame after frame. June, moving with a researcher’s controlled frenzy, slid her pack off and yanked out a waterproof notepad, her pen already flying. "Observing tool-use potential," she whispered, jotting as the creature below used a deft, thick finger to carefully pluck berries without crushing the bush. "Bipedal locomotion fully facultative, gait suggests minimal energy expenditure." Its feet were colossal, splayed things that left impressions like dinner plates in the soft moss, each step deliberate and balanced.
"Thermoregulatory adaptation appears to be a dense, possibly double-layered pelage, dark reddish-brown with silvering on the shoulders," June muttered, her voice a low monotone of focus. May’s camera shutter clicked rapidly, capturing the way it turned its head, alert and aware, its intelligent eyes scanning the tree line as if listening to a conversation the women couldn’t hear. "So, in other words," May breathed between shots, not lowering her camera, "we’re looking at fucking Bigfoot?"
"Gigantopithecus descendant, maybe a regional subspecies of Homo something-or-other, we won’t know until I get a hair sample and about a thousand more data points," June corrected, her tone absent, utterly clinical. The creature finished its berry snack, licked its fingers with a tongue that looked disturbingly human, then ambled to a large pine, leaning its broad back against the trunk with a sigh of contentment that drifted up to the ridge. It scratched its belly idly, then its large, fur-covered hand drifted lower, palming itself through the dense hair between its legs with a rough, familiar rhythm.
June’s pen stopped."Oh."
May’s camera kept firing, the mechanical sound now stark in the silent tension. The creature’s muscular thigh shifted, and from the thicket of dark fur, its penis emerged, thick and blunt, pushing into its own grasp. It was a shocking, flesh-toned column against the dark pelt, massively proportionate to the being it was attached to, thick as a substantial branch and already swelling rapidly to a formidable, veined length. The foreskin retracted with each rough, slow stroke, revealing a broad, dark-red crest that glistened in the afternoon sun.
The foreskin retracted with each rough, slow stroke, revealing a broad, dark-red crest that glistened in the afternoon sun.
Both of them were even more shocked at what they were seeing now. Pushing through her initial shock, June continued her scientific note-taking, speaking out loud as she documented the size of the creature’s large penis. “Subject appears to be engaging in… autocrotic stimulation. The genitalia are proportionally massive, consistent with a hypothesized Bergmann’s rule adaptation for thermoregulation in a cold climate… length estimating at… eighteen to twenty inches flaccid, with significant girth.” Her voice was a flat, professional monotone, but her knuckles were white around her pen.
May smirked from behind her camera, the shutter firing in rapid bursts. “Well,” she whispered, a low chuckle in her voice, “you know what they say about guys with big feet.”
June couldn’t help but laugh softly, a sharp, incredulous exhale that broke her clinical focus. “Correlation is not causation, May. But in this case… the data set is compelling.”
“Compelling? June, our new subject is hung as hell,” May breathed, continuing to take pictures of the creature stroking his massive penis. She zoomed in, capturing the way the thick shaft seemed to swell further in his fist, the precise texture of the skin where it transitioned from dark fur to ruddy, exposed flesh.
The Sasquatch’s breath began to fog in the cool air, rhythmic puffs accompanying his movements. His other hand braced against the pine tree, fingers digging into the bark. A low, rumbling groan echoed up to the ridge, a sound so deep and visceral it seemed to vibrate in their own chests.
“Vocalizations indicative of… effort, or perhaps pleasure,” June murmured, scribbling furiously. “Facial muscles are tense, brow ridge lowered…”
“Oh, he’s definitely into it,” May said, adjusting her aperture. “God, the lighting is perfect. The contrast of the red against all that dark fur… It's a truly beautiful dick," May whispered, her voice hushed with a mix of professional awe and sheer, stunned reverence as she kept her eye pressed to the viewfinder, the shutter firing in rapid, quiet bursts.
“It really is,” June breathed, the awe in her voice a thin, astonished crack in her professional demeanor. She caught herself, a flush warming her freckled cheeks. “I mean, objectively speaking, the proportional symmetry is… notable.” She was a little surprised, a faint, disorienting heat curling in her stomach, that she was even remotely impressed. Shaking her head, she bent back over her notebook, her pen scraping hurriedly. “Primary observation: genital display may serve a dual purpose in both thermoregulation and potential social signaling within a yet-observed group dynamic.”
The creature’s pace increased, his powerful arm pumping with a steady, relentless rhythm. The sheer, unabashed physicality of it was mesmerizing, a raw display of existence that was miles away from any clinical textbook. June found her own breathing had synchronized with the hulking figure below, her scientific detachment fraying at the edges under the relentless, primitive reality of the scene.
“He’s… gonna come…” May started, her photographer’s instinct catching the subtle shift in his posture, the tightening of his massive thighs. "I have to get a good angle of this."
May shifted her weight, the toe of her boot scuffing against the loose scree to get a cleaner side angle, just as the creature’s massive body shuddered toward its climax. The small cascade of dislodged stones skittered, then plunged loudly down the rocky face in a sudden, betraying clatter.
“Oh, shit,” she breathed, frozen, the curse whipped away by the wind as the Sasquatch’s head snapped up, its intelligent eyes instantly narrowing on the source of the sound before landing squarely on her, and then shifting to June, still hunched over her notepad. He didn’t roar or startle; he simply stopped, his great chest heaving, and tilted his head at them with a deep, unnerving curiosity.
He didn’t roar or startle; he simply stopped, his great chest heaving, and tilted his head at them with a deep, unnerving curiosity. A cold, electric jolt of pure animal fear shot down June’s spine, momentarily freezing her lungs, but it was immediately chased by a hot, desperate surge of academic fascination. May’s fear was less complicated; it was a raw, unfiltered terror that turned her brown skin ashen and made her knuckles bone-white around her camera. The creature’s intelligent brown eyes locked onto theirs, and then, with a startlingly smooth motion, he pushed himself off from the pine tree.
“Oh shit oh fuck,” May breathed, the words a thin vapor in the cold air, “he’s coming this way.”
He took one massive, deliberate step toward the base of their ridge. The ground seemed to absorb his weight without a sound.
“Stay calm,” June hissed, her voice low and forcibly even, her own heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird. “He doesn’t seem angry. Running might agitate him.” Her researcher’s mind was screaming two contradictory truths: predatory response and curiosity display.
Sasquatch reached the jagged rock face and, without hesitation, began to climb. It wasn’t the clumsy scramble of a bear but a swift, terrifyingly efficient ascent, his long, powerful fingers finding holds invisible to them, his thick limbs propelling his enormous weight upward with deceptive grace. Granule-sized stones and dust dislodged by his progress pattered down around the women.
“Oh shit oh fuck,” May whimpered, stumbling back a step, her hiking boots scrabbling on the loose rock. “How can I not run when a seven-foot-something beast is coming straight for us? He’s… he’s practically here!”
The sheer cliff face surrendered to him as if it were a staircase. He crested the ridge a mere ten yards from them, rising to his full, impossible height, blotting out the setting sun. He stood there, towering, studying them with that same deep curiosity, his scent—a powerful mix of damp earth, pine, and wild animal—washing over them.
June slowly raised her empty hands, palms out, her green eyes wide but fixed on his. “Because,” she said, her voice miraculously steady as the creature took one more step into their space, “he might want to communicate.”