The Dark Divide
By Michael Carter (C) Nov/Dec 1996, 2012
This free ebook may be copied, distributed, reposted, reprinted and shared, provided it appears in its entirety without alteration, and the reader is not charged to access it. Any similarity to persons or bigfeet living or dead is purely co-incidental.
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(Reproduced text from the article “Let The Legends Lie”, a feature letter by Michael Patterson, as originally printed in The New York Times, Evening Edition 103,254, dated 14 May 1996. Material copyright by The New York Times, 1996. Reproduced here for posterity by Michael Carter.)
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There is an area of vast coniferous forest and idyllic mountain veldts in Washington state, USA, approximately 100 miles south-west of Seattle, known for decades as The Dark Divide, where a long forgotten tribe of hominoid creatures dwell. It is in the Olympic Mountains of that area that these friends of the forest gather, every year, on the eve of the fourth moon, and pay homage to their species which is now in irredeemable decline. Living in lush tropical scenery in family groups of not more than half a dozen, they journey over mountain and across lake in the month of March in order to resume their ancient tradition and appear at tribal gatherings. Where once across these wide lands, there dwelt thousands of their kind, their number now less than two hundred individuals. For even a race that is older than the tar-encrusted fossils of the mammoth, and prouder than the foundations of prosperous Mesopotamia, will one day meet its match and wither away into the distant smokes of history. The ever increasing foe for this race is man. Not directly, for a change, but mankind is still administering their kiss of death, albeit unknowingly, with the growth of technology and the conquest of development. Many of this ancient race’s number were killed by the disaster that was Chernobyl, as thick acrid radon and air pollutants settled on the leaves and forest shrubs that they use as a digestant. Slow and lingering death cursed any creatures who unknowingly consumed the invisible toxics. Indeed, it is the unnatural gases which hazard through the atmosphere, which is also lowering their numbers, and as a more caring breed of man is not fully aware of the creature’s plight, then he can do nothing to protect it from extinction.
The creatures call themselves the “Ee-gor lar-gor”, but humanity, in the state of uncertainty in which we are now muddled, attach them with the adjectival, slightly mocking title of Bigfoot, or the local addresses of Sasquatch, Yeti, or Almasti. Under whatever name, they are a dying breed.
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My name is Michael Patterson. I am a forest ranger working for the Patooka Wildside Commision, of Patooka County, Washington State and my occupation allows me to spend much of the year in high, remote areas of the Olympian mountains. For the twelve years that I have worked in this position, I have devoted much of my off-duty time to searching for clues of the elusive creature mentioned in the paragraphs above. That, of course, is only speculation, but it is based upon 12 years of practical and academic research, and, the apex of this work, a single chance encounter, face-to-face, with one of the animals of which I write. On several occasions in the past I had spotted the Almasti (which I am used to referring to the creature as, so I will use that term here) through binoculars from a distance, but until that fateful night three years ago, on 5 June, 1993 I had only imagined what it might look like under close scrutiny. The point and reason for this letter is to hopefully inform those of your readers that are interested, that there is indeed, as rumour and half -baked investigation has had it, an unidentified species of hominoid still living, surreptitiously, in the lonely spaces of the world. Those that may scoff at my writings are welcome to do so, but in my pursuit of the truth, if I lift the scepticism or deter just one potential redneck ‘Bigfoot hunter’ from his ideas, then my scribing has been worth the effort. Here then is the story of the day that I met the Almasti. I have taken the liberty of changing the names of the family involved to protect their identities.