I am NARD the “Story Teller”, a crow, and I am going to tell you a story.
At the beginning of time the great golden gyre spun, and the fires burned, and the light of the eternal realms glowed brightest. There was a silent harmony to all things, as the rock, the stone, created a chorus of emptiness. GREAT was the desolation, POSSIBLE was the coming dawn – when time was new.
When the first song was heard, it was the voice of a crow, crying out in the night, telling the world: “wake up”.
And so, life sprung from every corner, green and red and blue. Water flowed upon the wastelands, and the world became a garden and alive with possibility. This is what the crows believe, WE were here long before the funny apes, the humans.
The forest people or sasquatch were around long before the humans as well.
The BIGFOOT were intelligent, but in ways humans didn’t understand. They were kind and loving, they were passionate and sometimes possessed by a boiling rage. The forest people were dimensional travelers, not limited to the simple forms of experience humans enjoyed. They, the sasquatch, conceived of all things as much as was possible, they told stories and kept track of the stars. They were the explorers of portals, vortexes, and passageways between worlds, and the guardians of these “doorways”.
This might not be well known to many humans, but the bigfoot or sasquatch are capable of limited invisibility. The BIGFOOT are carbon based, but their carbon is old, crystalline, strong and yet flexible. Their molecules refract and redirect light, like an octopus or squid. They could be standing in front of you, in the woods, and you wouldn’t notice; they might be quietly observing you, “funny apes”, as you trounce and talk and prattle and pick and prod.
You funny apes “pack it out” from the woods, and then move back to your toilet cities to pack it in to the sewers, the rivers, the sea. THE SASQUATCH PEOPLE watch you. They sometimes visits your cities, they have been curious about humans, and observing them, for tens of thousands of years. There is probably one watching you right now, and you couldn’t tell – lucky for you they hate your smelly cities, and your cocaine nightmares.
For a long time, human and sasquatch lived side by side, and knew each other. The crow didn’t care about any of this.
The crows are above the ground level thinking, beyond scant concerns.
Our time is different, steeper, closer to infinity and yet too brief.
You don’t understand the crow, because you’re “funny” and not to be taken seriously. Your life appears long, but it is quite boring and dumb to crow folk; we do love your garbage.
The crow lives for about 7 or 8 of your human years, that’s those of us that live in sector-34-hotel or what you “funny apes” call the United States. We would probably live longer, but did I tell you we LOVE your fast food garbage? – we do.
In simple terms, one crow year is like 50 human years. We live in one day the bounty of a season of life, we breathe fast the air of freedom and coarseness. We were the whisperers for great authors and artists, thinkers and other human wanderers and rebels. Humans pretended to know our wisdom, Nietzsche got the closest, but he was too soon.
But, as I said, I am Nard, and I tell stories.
This story is the tale of how one day, after a long term set of grievances and insults, the sasquatch people had enough. They were curious as much as tolerant, and the “funny apes” were often hilarious, their antics, their inventions, their means of achieving a kind of sublime laziness only a crow could appreciate. But the “funny apes” weren’t always so funny.
Humans loved war, and then learned to build even BIGGER BOMBS for war. They, the humans, built bombs big enough that the earth shook when they exploded. One day, the day before Halloween 1961, the humans went too far.
Some of these clever and funny monkeys figured out a way to capture the sun in a bottle, and others decided to make the biggest BANG ever. The blast from that explosion shook the world, the forest people, everywhere on Earth came alive, awake, from late autumn sleep. They could smell the metal of the Earth dissolving, they felt the cry of the frozen lands, the Yeti, cohort of the ICE, cried a scream that was heard from Nepal to Newark, NJ (where I live). This triggered a calling of the FIRST WAR COUNCIL.
At the meeting of the FIRST WAR COUNCIL the forest people argued, discussed, drank mead and tried to find balance – balance is everything to the sasquatch. They do not expect perfection, “perfection is for funny apes who go nowhere” as so many would say. The BIGFOOT believed “balance” or the acceptance of equilibrium and normal give and take of life was possible, if a being had the wisdom for it. They knew the world was terrible and amazing, it could be quite beautiful, but that doesn’t mean it is beautiful.
FUN FACT: another name for “human” in the language of the sasquatch is stoogis (pronounced: stew-giz), roughly translated “messy folk”. The messy folk were, to the sasquatch, a curiosity. For most of the Age of Stoogis, the messy folk mainly built cities, piling themselves upon each other, building mountains of stone and brick and filling some local river with their stoogis waste – it wasn’t pretty, but it was limited in scope, restricted, and often doomed in the end.
It was roughly 300 years ago that the sasquatch people noticed something new. The stoogis began building machines – machines of black and smoke, machines of noise and clatter, machines that moved faster and faster. Sasquatch understood machines, they just didn’t need them. If a bigfoot needed some amazing gadget or thing-a-ma-bob, they had allies in nearby dimensions, a portal jump away; those other peoples were wiser, more advanced than stoogis.
It was during the “Great Smoke” as the sasquatch called it, or World War two, that the bigfoot began noticing a greater and far more dangerous eventuality – the creation of technology for undoing all of creation. There were forest people at Hiroshima and Nagasaki when those cities were destroyed with the first atom bombs in 1945. All the sasquatch remember the clamor and screams, not just of the other bigfoot, not just of the stoogis being burnt alive, but of nature crying; they, sasquatch, from all over the world, could feel the tears, the sadness, of nature. Nature cried for several months.
At the FIRST WAR COUNCIL there was heated debate about “what to do” generally, the bigfoot eschewed WAR. They were okay with limited engagements for limited goals, but they did not understand the blood thirsty side of stoogis or what the funny apes called “total war”.
Side note: “funny” doesn’t really translate for the bigfoot people. In their language it usually means two things – a) pathetic and b) tricky. And to be “tricky” among the sasquatch is to be not trustworthy.
The forest people remember what happened to the Neanderthal – how “funny apes” were really good at lying. Bigfoot understood lies, and I can tell you crows have always told the best lies – for fun. But the human lies ran deeper, uglier, and they were so believable.
The Neanderthal people were kind, connected, much like the bigfoot and the other sentient creatures that lived on Earth tens of thousands of years ago. But stoogis would trick them, they would tell tales of the moon and the sky, they would claim power over the tides and the volcanoes, they were gifted “counters” as the bigfoot would say and it was the stoogis who created mathematics. And so it was, long ago, piece by piece, village by village, the stoogis or homo sapiens killed and raped the Neanderthal out of existence. Gentleness or kindness was a mental obstacle for stoogis, many saw it as weakness; the few stoogis who knew kindness to be strength were forced to hide, to cower, to watch as this atrocity was carried out. These events transpired over a few centuries of time, 65K years ago, as the crow folk recall.
But I am getting off topic …
The FIRST WAR COUNCIL lasted 12 days – because the bigfoot had never called a war council, they were unsure as to the agenda.
The CLEEVUS or jungle bigfoot of Africa and South America demanded justice.
The Tagan-Clan of Canada were not clear on what the outcomes would be, and they tended to worry a lot.
The few forest people left alive from Europe were battered and worn, filled with distress. The war had been over for almost 20 years, but they were still recovering and then there had been Stalin, and his secret wars to destroy the sasquatch. The European bigfoot chose to remain silent at the meeting, they wanted no more pain.
The most respected bigfoot there was Bordo – Bordo was a sasquatch from California, near Eureka. He had fought skirmishes with loggers and hunters, so he knew something of human violence and their weapons. Towards the end of the council, when nothing would be or could be agreed upon – these councils required unanimous consent – Bordo stood up to speak, it was June 14, 1962:
The world is built upon life and the kiss of the Moon and stars. The world is made of movement and dance, and we know this, we’ve always known this.
When we first met the stoogis, they were what they still are: small and cold and frightened and tricky. Our compassion led us to help, and to nurture. We even stood by as the yoog-folk (Neanderthal) were wiped out, all of them, their men killed, their treasures stolen, their women defiled, their children eaten. We thought, didn’t we, as a people ‘they will learn’, because WE SEE THE LINE OF TIME and we know the depth of eternity.
But our sense of importance and beauty never really worked with them, the tricky apes, the hairless monkeys, the stoogis.
Our tribes and clans taught, and some humans found balance – but so many were impatient, wanting to know things that they were not prepared to know.
The CREATOR says ‘make your home a garden’, the stoogis say ‘MAKE YOUR HOME BIG’ … we took pity and laughed, and then not so long ago, as our own people were destroyed in THEIR WAR, we stopped laughing and took notice.
They are clever, they are counters, they have means of recording all and yet no means of understanding or remembering beyond the ‘it is mine’ perspective. And when their leaders attempt justice? - it ends in murder, rounding up other stoogis and killing them without honor, without respect, we saw this in the last war too and our people among the CLOB-TRIBES (USSR/communist Russia) are still being put in places of murder TODAY!
So I understand the heat of CLEEVUS clans, and their voices are heard, but I am going to offer a compromise and a pause. I say we give them more time – perhaps a humpton-age (about 40 years). They have young and the young can often learn where the old are too scared to learn. THEREFORE, we must give their brood time to think, to meditate, to consider.
If in the next humpton-age these tricky apes do not change, then we have no choice – I WILL NOT HEAR THE EARTH CRY AGAIN AND BE SILENT AND REFLECTIVE, I WILL NOT FEEL THE TEARS OF THIS GARDEN AGAIN!
There is no balance in needless murder.
The other members of the council heard this, they stood up and cheered.
Bordo preached caution against war with the stoogis, but he also set conditions.
Bordo’s words touched most, and the CLEEVUS were assuaged, knowing that “their time will come”, for they didn’t expect the tricky little people to change. The CLEEVUS had long memories, and as bigfoot they lived a long time, so they would wait, see, and prepare for WAR.
You may not know this, but crows know this: there are many thousands of sasquatch tribes, covens, claggit-gangs and strob-armies on Earth at any given time.
The total number of sasquatch living on Earth, or traversing dimensions near Earth, can be measured in BILLIONS. Billions of 12-15 foot tall hairy creatures, capable of sprinting up to 50 MPH, and jogging, for hours, at 25 MPH. They can hurl a three hundred pound rock a third of a mile, and toss a tree spear up to a full mile. They can see as well at night, in pitch black, as during the day – and their hearing is considered better than bats. They use echo location to find their way sometimes, and can carry on low-frequency “hum chats” with other sasquatch around the world. All without technology, all given to them by the CREATOR.
BTW: a “claggit-gang” is a group of 400-500 sasquatch that roam the remote parts of this world and other desolate planets. They are foragers and hunters, often hunting ceremonially, and sometimes they hunt people. When someone disappears in a forest, and another clever monkey says “holy crap, where’s Uncle Harold?” – this could have been another victim of a claggit-gang. These gangs were formed after the FIRST GREAT INSULT, when the humans tricked and stole and murdered the Neanderthal peoples, and were on the first rung of shunning. Many rungs on that ladder would follow.
Strob-armies are YETI ARMIES, primarily in Siberia and Asia.
Strob-armies are motivated by honor and adventure, and seek after gold and silver and spice and rubies and tasty meals.
There are thought to be, according to crow reports, millions of yeti in these armies, hiding in seclusion, nestled in the Himalayas. It is possible that some of these forces fought along side Chiang Kai-shek during the Chinese Civil War. It is thought that Mao Zedong had special arrangements with these strob-armies and they protected him during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Hard to say – but these are the pirate sasquatch, the adventurers, soldiers for hire in more than one dimension.
The FIRST WAR COUNCIL ended with a decision to WAIT. And so, time passed.
It was after Fukushima in 2011 that the high council of the sasquatch people was called to meeting AGAIN, at the SECOND WAR COUNCIL. The meeting was held at Tyg’s Bluff in South Dakota, not far from an abandoned gold mine. Tyg’s Bluff was a old boom/bust town from the Old West, and now it was just several dilapidated buildings along a dirt road, surrounded by forest and stone.
“All to order”, cried the high-lord of forest wardens.
“ALL TO ORDER! Take your spot …”, screamed his assistant.
The high-lord was named Kordos, he was a sasquatch from the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state.
Kordos was 13 feet tall, weighed 800 pounds, and had seen a great deal. A sasquatch can live up to 500 human years, and this can be a lot for any being to handle, if what they do is watch, listen, observe. He’d seen human wars, revolutions, and greed, he’d seen their beauty and their love too. He knew them to be mercurial creatures, dangerous, but also willing to sacrifice on occasion. He did not want war, but he knew that many bigfoot did and the stoogis had been given a chance.
Kordos had a stoogis or human friend named Debra.
Debra was an anthropologist from the University of Washington in Seattle, and had spent her time in graduate school studying the Salish people of the Pacific Northwest. Debra understood much of the sasquatch language, and their use of gestures to “fill in the gaps” of syntax. She also knew they had a spooky, if not explicable, way of knowing what some other sasquatch was thinking – mind reading? – not exactly. The sasquatch used gestures but also a kind of low frequency bone clicking – like a weird dance, they could send a pulse around the world, transmitting simple ideas of exceptional importance.
Debra and Kordos met while she was exploring the forests of the Olympic Peninsula, and they had what could only be described as a love affair, not impossible between sasquatch and stoogis, but exceedingly rare and thought to be disgusting by most crows. Crows can’t mate with humans and we are glad, we have songs about this joy.
“Are you real?”, was the first thing Debra said to Kordos.
“Are you kind?”, was his response – he did speak a little of the stoogis language.
They had no children, even though it was not impossible, and very disgusting to crows when it did happen.
The SECOND WAR COUNCIL was held in April 2012.
Debra was at this meeting, as an observer ONLY. Rarely were humans (stoogis) invited into the inner circle of the sasquatch. Debra was respectful and kind and generally ignored or tolerated by the bigfoot.
Debra listened as best she could; still not fully understanding the intricacy of sasquatch communication, but she got the gist. She knew they were talking about humans, and she could tell they were angry, angrier than she’d ever seen any person, human or bigfoot, ever become. Something about that primordial rage scared her, because she understood it was REAL and JUSTIFIED.
“… our children are dying, our waters are unclean … the salmon are covered in scars and illness, the seashores are becoming gray …” said Tuul of Oregon.
“… they know only filth and death and tricks … we’ve had 200,000 years of their tricks … I’m tired of their tricks.” – said Cur of England.
“… there is an intolerable smell to what they did, dark and sticky and overwhelming in its demons … our people who live near the GREAT SCAR (Fukushima) cry each night, for themselves and the wretched stoogis … the time for patience is over …” – said Xono of Japan.
A representative of the CLEEVUS was about to speak, when Debra broke into the conversation: “I know I have no privileges here, no right to be heard. It is not my place to defend the stoogis, though I am one of them. But I ask for more time. I think the recent events will awaken a spirit, a renewal, in my people and I only ask that you think on this a little longer before attacking the stoogis.”
“YOU SPEAK LIES TRICKY WOMAN!”, yelled Dirg of the CLEEVUS. Dirg was from South Africa, and had seen so clearly what humans do, to the land, to each other.
“I am not lying, I am touching the Earth.” Debra kneeled down and placed her left hand on her left knee, and her right hand palm down onto the ground – this is a sign of honesty and submission among sasquatch.
“TRICK, LIES, TRICK, LIES – she lay with Kordos in his forest wallow and now she pretends to be like you and I, BUT LOOK! She is dirty and tricky and filled with lies.”
“I speak my truth.”
“You speak as you can, you cannot help but to deceive …”, Dirg paused in his speech, knowing that the tricky apes were themselves susceptible to deception. “But I am an honorable and fair being, and I propose a trade Kordos! We give the dirty deceivers 14 more years, human years, for a price!”
Kordos knew Dirg was angry and himself a gifted speaker and conjurer of schemes, so he asked a question fearing the answer: “What do you propose?”
“I propose a FLESH-OFFERING!”
And the crowd gathered at that abandoned town in South Dakota screamed with joy, through Dirg’s clicks and hums and low frequency dance, they all knew what he was proposing, all except Debra.
“This is the stain of stoogis on you!”, responded Kordos.
“You are the stained one!”, replied Dirg.
Kordos looked at Debra, with sadness.
Dirg looked at Debra with blood lust.
Debra stayed in her position of submission, sensing that things were about to get dire.
“14 more years of human arrogance is a small sacrifice to be sure of our cause”, Kordos said. “And Dirg is right, the time of half measures is over – I have lived over 400 years and my time will be over soon enough. I agree with Dirg of the CLEEVUS – we cannot simply let this insult pass, so I accept the need for a flesh offering on one condition: that my final wish be law, and by law none shall question.”
“What trick is this Kordos?”, Dirg spoke with a noticeable hesitation.
“No trick, no joke, no smile, no more words, if a flesh sacrifice can be acceptable, then I, as high-lord, must be the sacrifice! It was under my watch that the GREAT SCAR formed, and it was my counsel that led us to this point.”
“What do you want?”
“That after I am dead you elect a WAR LEADER to prepare our people, and also watching, with sincerity, for any change among the stoogis and that Debra be allowed to return to her world, if only as a messenger, if only to give the stoogis a chance to change.”
Debra knew what the words meant, she leapt up and ran to Kordos, and held him, holding onto his right leg, crying tears of love and sadness.
“You can’t do this”, but she knew he must so her words were subdued. “I am responsible”, Kordos said, but he knew he had never loved anyone as much as her.
The sasquatch people allowed Debra and Kordos one final night, and in the morning, near the Stone of Wrath (a burial ground from older times), Kordos was sacrificed and his spirit returned to the sky. The SECOND WAR COUNCIL was over.
The elders spent their time, over the coming months, deciding, determining, and discussing who should be their war leader; eventually they decided upon Dirg of the CLEEVUS.
Debra returned to lecture at the University of Washington, she knew there were a dozen years that separated humanity from the worst disaster no human could imagine – something so ugly, that the mere sight of it would cause many to drop dead. She spoke at conferences, she wrote articles on the need to address Fukushima, but the humans played games and watched movies and raped and stole and invaded their neighbor’s lands. They committed greater crimes in order to steal the black blood of the Earth (oil), and they squandered the little time they had left, no knowing or understanding the Sword of Damocles that hung over them. Ignorance is bliss, and for humans ignorance is a deeply addictive drug.
One night Debra heard a song, an old song, that Kordos had loved “Just one of those things” sung by Frank Sinatra. She cried, as she remembered their time together. Debra did not give up trying to raise alarm about Fukushima, the state of the natural world, and the madness that led the human race to this point. Her colleagues mocked her, she barely made tenure, and was left with one freshman class “INTRO TO HUMANS” anthropology 101 and a basement office near the boiler.
And the sasquatch? – they prepared, Dirg prepared. They formed alliances with the orca whales and the raccoon and squirrels and coyotes. The wolves, like the crow, were neutral – they would be happy eating any of the dead. Other forest creatures also decided to stay out of it, and promised to not interfere with what must be done. Humans had no allies.
The years passed, and the humans grew dumber.
Human children were abused and sold, human old people were tossed into the streets.
Dirg, and others, saw no evidence that it was “getting better” instead, the stoogis piled one insult upon another. They were even teaching their machines now, brilliant machines, to be as tricky and evil as them.
Dirg sent out the WAR CRY on October the 1st, 2026, a hum, a vibration, heard around the world.
It was eerily quiet those days following the WAR CRY, even human newscasters reported a strange “calmness” among the intemperate masses of hairless monkeys.
And then there was Carl and Trevor.
Unbeknownst to Carl and Trevor – two men who lived in a camper near Port Angeles WA – there was a company or roughly 200 sasquatch organizing near the tree line, not far from their campfire.
Carl and Trevor were old friends – they worked on boats and crabbed and fished and drank and smoked. They would argue till midnight about the most obscure topics, to include aliens, monsters, ghosts, weird stuff, and BIGFOOT.
“Something weird is going on Trev.”
“Huh.”
“I get this feeling that the clouds are angry and the trees have eyes.”
Carl had just consumed 4 tabs of premium LSD he’d bought in Vancouver BC. Carl wasn’t a heavy drug user, and he hadn’t done LSD since he dropped out of college several decades earlier.
“I got this sensation, on my spine, of harbingers … bringers of destruction and pain.”
“What the fuck does that even mean Carl?”
“It’s like the world is our stage, and our work is a cage, and the monsters live in the cracks at work and they stare at me, and I stare back.”
“Did you just start your in-between job at Joe’s?”
“In-between jobs” were gigs these fisherman did between fishing. They chopped wood, logged, and sometimes did some grow work for a local cannabis farmer named Joe Slagan. Joe paid well, and Carl was a gifted handyman and hard worker; this was a Friday night, after work, and both men were satisfied with their oasis in the woods.
“Joe’s great … great … but the cracks in the world are widening, and the various realms are at odds.”
“Carl, you took too much acid.”
“I didn’t, I took the government recommended amount.”
The men laughed, and then Trevor heard a sound, like branches breaking, ground being crushed.
“Are the bears back?”, Trevor muttered.
Trevor and Carl’s place was near Hurricane Ridge, and periodically a hungry bear would wander into their camp and look for food. So it seemed the “bear was back”.
“Trev … that’s not a bear, that’s our chastisement”, Carl said these words, looking up to a clear night and a full moon.
“Sure Carl.”
“I mean it, the forest people are angry and we’ve given THEM reasons because we’re assholes, but we don’t think we’re assholes so that makes it way worse.”
“Forest people? What the fuck Carl.”
“The Wookie, the bigfoot, the forest people … you can feel it.”
“I don’t feel nothing, I’ve been drinking Jack all night and I don’t care if the forest people come by.”
“Don’t mock them Trev.”
“I will.”
“Don’t mock’em … they see you.”
“THERE IS NO FUCKING BIGFOOT! I GET SO FUCKING SICK OF THIS SASQUATCH NONSENSE. NO WAY SOMETHING LIKE THAT LIVES IN THE WOODS. WHAT’S YOUR FUCKING PROBLEM!”, Trevor was belligerent and tired. Trevor paused his ranting for a moment, and then peered with squinted eyes, past the fire, past the fog, into the woods. At that moment a tree spear, tossed by a lower level and younger sasquatch named Jiblis, hit Trevor square in the chest. Trevor’s last words were: “fuck”.
Carl, high on LSD and whiskey and weed, instinctively got on the ground and held his hands up. Carl didn’t have a driver’s license because he’d been pulled over a few times for intoxicated driving. He was lucky, what he did as a reflex saved his life.
THE WORLD WAS WAKING UP …
The sasquatch were storming out of the hills and woods and fields and swamps that night: from Seattle to Chicago, from Maine to Florida, from Tibet to Toledo to Chile and Siberia; everywhere on the Earth, the forest people were waging war.
Humans were shocked, caught off guard, paralyzed and stunned.
Many software engineers at Microsoft, in Redmond, who’d been working late, saw the armies, carrying torches and spears and hammers made from stone and steel, storming angrily out of the Cascade foothills. They, in their high tech world, saw as their cars were smashed, and everything was turned upside down.
On Wall Street, bankers and other kinds of grifters, were shocked and amazed at the sudden appearance of bigfoot from Central Park: “how could they be there? Where were they coming from”, questions too big for the tiny tricky lying mind of a human financial analyst.
The world was spinning the other direction now.
Trevor was dead, a giant spear sticking out of him.
Carl was captured, a prisoner, being led to a makeshift camp in the deep woods of the Olympic Mountains.
Governments were in panic, some were preparing to launch nuclear weapons; none too sure where to target the nukes.
Carl was right: “the forest people are pissed off, today is chastisement day”.
*****
NOTES:
Chapter 1 – Casus Belli
Chapter 3 – The Battle of Denver
Chapter 4 – The Song of Debra
Chapter 5 – Winter’s Touch
Chapter 6 – Queen of Seattle
Chapter 7 – Texas is Burning
Chapter 8 – Pine Barrens
Chapter 9 – Sacrifice
Chapter 10 – Crow Funeral
Chapter 11 – Armistice
