The Borrego Sandman

The desert’s white-furred bigfoot: eight feet and 400 pounds in the tellings, red eyes in the dark. Prospector Turner Helm traded words with one near Deadman’s Hole in 1876 and answered its charge with a rifle; in 1888 Cox and Dean shot one and shipped the body to San Diego, where it never arrived; a 1939 camp by the Borrego Sink reported a ring of them at the firelight’s edge; plaster tracks were cast in 1962 and 1964, fourteen inches, no claws. The casts survive, the bodies never do.