A rapid-fire series of ultra-serious vignette shots play across your screen featuring Montague Cervantes in various states of investigation. Pouring over dusty tomes in a library. Scrolling through grainy microfiche featuring indecipherable photos. Peering curiously through an ancient copse of trees on a green slope with the occasional rocky outcropping. Examining a wood or stone carving of some misshapen beast in a side-of-the-road curio shop.
Finally, a graphic plays over a stylized, slow motion gif of Monty with a half-unbuttoned brown shirt pushing aside some foliage. It reads:
Astro-Cryptids
With Montague Cervantes
The view changes to a slow, aerial pan of some alpine forest, heavy with snow and stillness, devoid of any wildlife. The silent stillness is ripped to shreds when a guttural roar echoes from somewhere unseen, shaking armfuls of snow from branches and flushing hiding creatures from their burrows.
A namecard appears: “Voice of Doctor-Professor Montague Cervantes; Cryptozoologist and Folklore Expert”
Montague: Michê. Dzu-teh. Migoi. Bun Manchi. Manbearpig. Mirka. Kang Admi. Xueren. Chuchuna. Yeti.
Said to exist somewhere on the evolutionary chart between ape and man, it is a relic out of time, thriving in the most remote regions of the globe where man rarely dares to interfere.
Classically, the Abominable Snowman originates in the Himalayas, but accounts have ranged the world over. Tribes, sherpas, monks, and indigenous peoples have recorded sightings, painted depictions on cave walls, and cast impossibly large footprints as keepsakes and proof. China, Russia, Scandinavia…
And here. The Shawnee National Forest.
Montague mills around a cabin tucked in between two rocky bluffs near a road badly in need of repaving. He muses doubtfully over a wooden crate with glass walls, within which a patch of dirty, graying hair clings to a leathery dome of skin. The brass plate on the side is engraved with the words “Abominable Snowman Scalp: 1978.”
Montague: You caught this?
Behind him, a gray-haired coot in a deerstalker hat and dirty coveralls reclines in a wooden rocker behind the ancient cash register.
Clerk: My dad did. Great beast nearly iceinated him on the spot.
The Showman scrunches up his face, setting the crate down and turning to regard the clerk.
Montague: Iceinated?
Clerk: Turned him to ice. Ya know, iceinated.
Montague grimaces at the word choice.
Montague: Do you mean froze?
The clerk cocks his head in confusion, scratching his pot belly under the coveralls as he tries to make sense of the conversation. Montague sighs and gives up, returning to peruse the relics on display. He picks up a lump of something that could be a great hunk of beef jerky with what looks like a rose thorn pressed into it.
Clerk: That one's a mummified toe. My grandad pulled it from one of them back in nineteen fifty six.
Montague: Pulled it? Do you mean he physically yanked the toe off of an Abominable Snowman with his bare hands?
The old man nods confidently.
Clerk: Grandad didn’t believe in hunting with weapons. Said it was unfair, dishonorable. The prey doesn’t have weapons, ya know? He’d go out into the forest with just his rations for days, and drag back some game he’d beaten to death with his bare hands.
Blinking rapidly, Montague stares at the clerk incredulously.
Montague: You’re pulling my leg.
The clerk chuckles.
Clerk: Nope, though grandad might have been able to pull it right off. He was a kind and respectful man, but he could lose his temper. When he needed to, he could use his aggression to take down wild brutes twice his size.
Montague suddenly flicks the “mummified toe” back onto the shelf, not bothering to watch it ricochet into a rack of yeti-themed keychains and knock several from their hooks.
This had been a waste of time.
The Doctor-Professor had had a glorious vision for this year. In his mind, he’d use the resources he now possessed to take up a trial he’d always dreamed of. Travelling the world to investigate legends and myths which had fascinated him since he was a boy. It was a global challenge, if you will.
The Astro-Cryptids would be a labor of love, being both entertaining and informative, expanding the reach of something that has endured as a fringe niche for all of living memory. When the strange and unusual made inroads, the AstroCreeps thrived.
Now he’s beginning his journey saddled with some doofy, icy joke who’s legend is mostly bunk and wishful thinking.
Wistfully, he thinks about an apartment where his partner in crime is sequestered with an electronic anklet anchoring her to one place. How much more enjoyable would this farce have been with her unique brand of mischief to spice it up?
Already Montague can imagine the yokel behind the register trussed up and terrified by whatever mayhem would have unfolded. He simply lacks the beautiful impulsiveness that leads to the unpredictable and perfect outcomes they’ve enjoyed.
Frustrated, Cervantes marches out of the shop without filming anything.
Montague: This week I expected to begin an odyssey, taking on a new monster each week and proving myself greater than all of them. What a way to begin…
From what I can gather, the Abominable Snowman barely lives up to what meager hype still remains around it. It’s brother, the Sasquatch, would have been a much more fitting target.
Instead, I start my journey with half a joke, a foe which might have seemed a challenge for children fifty years ago, but is mostly forgotten and inconsequential at this point.
So, here’s what I have to say about the Bumble.
Everything about you is a fairy tale. One story overlaps another, each contradicting the one before until no one really knows if there’s a grain of truth from which your tangled narrative grows. You’re an unhinged rage beast with self-control issues. Or maybe someone was paid to come up with that explanation. You’re a benevolent guardian upholding a sporting and fair balance. Or maybe you are triggered by and abuse the females of your species. You have to seclude yourself from the public’s eye for their safety. Or maybe it’s just easier for you to have kooks speak on your behalf because you have no idea how to promote yourself.
Who’s to say, honestly? The more I study you, the more I realize that the course of the experience for everyone runs from bemused curiosity, to infuriating annoyance, and ultimately to long-suffering boredom.
I’m already prepared to move on. But this week I'm Hermie the Elf, a real misfit ready to defang this abominable snowman. I dare him to bounce back.