Primordial Bigfoot
The following is a transcript from the Seven Hundred and Seventy-Sixth Pre-Deseret, Proto-Millennial, Post-Latter-day Conference (776 PDPMPLC), held on Lamoni Moon Conference Center, 25 Nep. 2209. The transcription comes from a panel on a recently discovered journal written by Erastus G. Snow, a famed explorer in the late 21st-century who helped discover and open up colonization of five consciously uninhabited planets. For more on the history of Erastus G. Snow, see the datapack forthcoming from the conference, "Ever Have I Fallen, Ever Will I Rise": Studies of Erastus G. Snow, Pioneering Planeteer.
Panel: "A Form of Cain": Erastus G. Snow and the Primordial Bigfoot
Presenters:
Dr. Jacqueline W. Hart, PhD, DPhil, PPhil, Bronze Deseret, the University of Kolob Circle (JWH)
Dr. Chauncery I. Ballard, MR, PhD, MP, Silver Deseret, Jeremiah University (CIB)
Dr. Jessica L. Bull, PhD, Golden Deseret, Planet University of Mars (JLB)
Dr. Vivian Q. Green, PPhil, Silver Deseret, Ammoni College (VQG), Moderator
VQG: Welcome to this riveting and exciting panel on Erastus G. Snow. We'd like to remind all conference attendees to please hold their comments and questions until the end, jotting them down on their tablets in order to remember them. Our hope here is to present some of the newest research on Snow and the newly discovered journal found—handwritten! yes, quite a surprise always—in the mountains on Hezekiah 14. The journal, as many of you I hope have had time to peruse it since it went out months ago, contains a gripping tale of Snow wrestling with new creatures and new phenomenon—all non-sentient, of course—and outlines his discovery of what he calls a Cain—emphasis on the article, a, rather than the. I get ahead of myself, though. I'd like to first welcome our three panelists. Dr. Jacqueline W. Hart, Dr. Chauncery I. Ballard, and Dr. Jessica L. Bull, each from respected universities in their various Deserets and each with a historical engagement to provide. Well, where shall we begin?
CIB: I guess we could first provide a brief overture to what we want to look at here, which is specifically Snow's discovery—or supposed discovery, since no being like he has described has ever been seen on Hezekiah 14—of what he termed a Cain, as Vivian has pointed out, and what we consider to be a primordial bigfoot, for lack of a more nuanced term to it.
JWH: Yes, Snow describes the creature as being humanoid and hairy, like those fairy tales from the twentieth-century that seem to relate all creatures of the wood in the American continent to bigfoot.
CIB: This bigfoot, it seems, scared Snow. Should we talk about his written reactions to the bigfoot?
JLB: I think better than his written reactions are his descriptions. "A tall, gangly creature, clearly over ten feet tall, able to smash boulders and trees with its bare hands." One can feel in these words that fear you want to bring out in the reaction, Chauncery.
CIB: Well-noted, it seems as though even when he first laid eyes on it, Snow was terrified of this creature. From his reactions: "I knew not where to sleep tonight, for if the beast actually were after me, I would not be able to hide. This might be the last time I pen words."
JWH: It's fascinating in that sentence, if I may, that he emphasized the penned words. Up until this point, we know Snow was using a live recorder to document his discoveries, yet there was a particular moment of a few hours when the recorder is dead the day before this entry is dated. That's when we believe he ran across the primordial bigfoot, a "form of Cain" as Snow puts it.
JLB: Yes, yes, exactly, what we haven't gathered is why his recording materials shut off. The originals are, sadly, lost to the annals of time, but in the archives, we see that something happened right before Snow's recorder turned off and Snow's recorder turned on, and thanks to the—
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I am participating in #Archtober from the ARCH-HIVE. They challenged creators to create something every day, or every other day, for the month of October and base it on a theme. I’m free writing for 30 minutes every two days based on the two-day schematic and theme rules they’ve established. So, the writing will probably not be super coherent, but it’ll be fun.
Primordial Bigfoot mimics, in a way, the end of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, in which I engage in a scholarly conversation about something that has happened in the past, in the future. It’s a way of narratively re-centering a piece and allowing characters to analyze what has happened before. I also wanted to have some fun with the end of it, since I only had 30 minutes to compose it. Hence, the frustrating end to which so many academics and researchers can, hopefully (and sadly), relate.
