Game · tile solitaire
Sasquatch Mahjongg
The classic turtle: one hundred and forty-four tiles in five layers. Match two identical tiles, but only tiles that are actually playable, meaning nothing is stacked on top and at least one long side is clear. The thirty-six faces are the working vocabulary of the field, so if a tile puzzles you, the glossary has it.
All thirty-six tiles
The whole deck, with what each one refers to. Everything here tracks the fact-checked corpus, so where a famous item did not survive scrutiny, the tile says so.
✦ Cryptids Sasquatch
The word is younger than the automobile. J.W. Burns adapted it from Halkomelem in the late 1920s while teaching at the Chehalis Indian Reserve.
✦ Cryptids Yeti
Eric Shipton's 1951 photograph of a single track made it famous. The Pangboche relics were later identified as ordinary animal material.
✦ Cryptids Yeren
Hubei, China. The Chinese Academy of Sciences mounted serious expeditions in the late 1970s and came back with hair and footprints, not an animal.
✦ Cryptids Yowie
The weakest case on the board, for a reason that is hard to argue around: Australia has no native primates at all.
✦ Cryptids Almas
Caucasus and Central Asia. Genetic work on the descendants of Zana, held in 19th-century Abkhazia, pointed to human ancestry rather than a relict hominin.
✦ Cryptids Orang Pendek
Sumatra, and the most scientifically respectable of the set: a plausible size, genuine ape habitat, and reports from working field biologists.
✦ Cryptids Skunk Ape
Florida, named for the smell. The 2000 Myakka photographs are the best-known image and arrived anonymously.
✦ Cryptids Grassman
Ohio. The 1978 Minerva case is what gave it a documented file rather than a rumor.
✦ Cryptids Fouke
Miller County, Arkansas, 1971. The Ford incident became The Legend of Boggy Creek, which shaped the entire documentary genre after it.
▲ Evidence Cast
Hundreds exist. A cast faithfully records a shape pressed into soft ground, which is also exactly what a carved wooden foot records.
▲ Evidence Film
The Patterson-Gimlin film: 59.5 seconds at 16 frames per second, or 53 at 18. Which one it is decides whether the walk is humanly reproducible.
▲ Evidence Hair
Every anomalous hair sample ever sequenced has come back as bear, elk, cow, dog, horse, raccoon or human.
▲ Evidence Scat
A 500-pound omnivore would carry a distinctive parasite load and leave it everywhere. Nobody has recovered one.
▲ Evidence Audio
The Sierra Sounds, recorded from 1972 onward. The permanent problem with audio is that a recording cannot show what was in front of the microphone.
▲ Evidence DNA
Melba Ketchum's 2013 paper appeared in a journal registered to publish it. Bryan Sykes's 2014 paper went to the Royal Society and found known animals.
▲ Evidence Photo
As cameras became universal the pictures got worse rather than better, which is the opposite of what should happen.
▲ Evidence Nest
Bent saplings and stacked branches. Wind, snow load, bears and beaver all produce structures like these.
▲ Evidence Track
Length, width, depth, stride and step angle. Soft mud exaggerates every one of them, which is why substrate has to be recorded.
● Places Bluff Creek
Humboldt County, California. The 1958 tracks named the animal, and the 1967 film was shot a few miles away.
● Places Ape Canyon
Near Mount St. Helens, 1924. Forest Service rangers went into the canyon, found nothing, and concluded the miners had probably thrown the rocks themselves.
● Places Bossburg
Northeastern Washington, 1969. Over a thousand tracks in snow with a deformed right foot. The best pro-track argument there is, and Ivan Marx found them.
● Places Skookum
Gifford Pinchot National Forest, 2000. A 400-pound plaster cast of a body impression. The hair recovered from the site was elk.
● Places Willow Creek
California, and the capital of the subject: a Bigfoot statue, Bigfoot Days, and the China Flat Museum collection.
● Places Myakka
Florida, 2000. Two photographs mailed anonymously to a sheriff’s office with a letter about an ape taking apples from a porch.
● Places Honey Island
Louisiana, 1974. A swamp monster with casts, a television career, and an unresolved question about how the tracks were made.
● Places Minerva
Ohio, 1978. A cluster of reports investigated at the time, which is rare enough in this field to be worth a tile.
● Places Toba Inlet
British Columbia. Albert Ostman said he was carried off here in 1924 and told nobody for thirty-three years.
■ Field kit Wood knock
Two or three raps on a trunk, listening for a reply. Falling limbs, woodpeckers and freezing timber all do it unprompted.
■ Field kit Whoop
The long call. Barred owls, coyotes, elk and foxes account for most of what people hear at night.
■ Field kit Eyeshine
Reflected light from the tapetum lucidum. Deer, raccoons and dogs have it. Humans and other apes do not.
■ Field kit Trail cam
Millions are deployed across North America. They confirmed the wolverine, the fisher and cougars in the east within a few seasons each.
■ Field kit Thermal
Warm bodies against cold forest. It also finds every deer within a quarter mile, which is the practical problem.
■ Field kit Plaster
Dental stone if you have it. Pour low and slow onto a spoon or your hand, or the stream punches the detail out of the print.
■ Field kit Headlamp
Below a certain light level your color vision simply stops working. That is also when most sightings happen.
■ Field kit Bait
Fruit, usually. The Skookum expedition baited a mud wallow and got the most argued-over impression in the field.
■ Field kit Blind
Sit still, stay downwind, wait. The most productive and least filmable technique anyone uses.
Every board is dealt by playing a finished game backwards, so a deal is always winnable. The Shuffle button is the exception: it rearranges what is left and can genuinely strand you.