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a mongoose’s pawprint in the mud with his knuckles, then drawn it to their attention and speculated whether it might well belong to the animal they were looking for. Both Joey the cameraman and Ahmed the sound guy had fallen for the ploy, as had production assistant Mary-Anne, usually the sceptic in the group. All three became a little more agitated, a little more panicky. Upping the crew’s anxiety levels was part and parcel of the show’s appeal. If Chase could get them spooked and apprehensive, their excitement transferred to the viewers. Result: subscription channel gold. An audience of four million, domestic, on average. Double that, worldwide.
    Chase Chance was US television’s premier cryptozoological adventurer. As the show’s credits voiceover put it, “He chases the animals that are rumoured to exist, that aren’t supposed to exist, that should not exist.” Over three seasons so far he had gone after yetis, lake monsters, giant earthworms, outsized felids, pterosaurs, owlmen, mothmen, apemen, prehistoric fish, flightless birds, every conceivable kind of cryptid. Wherever one reared its head, or allegedly did, there he and his crew went. Nepal, Mongolia, the Australian Outback, Congo, Cambodia, Cornwall – Chase and team crisscrossed the planet, racking up thousands of air miles in their ceaseless quest. Every time, they came home empty-handed, with nothing to prove conclusively that any such beasts were to be found. That, it seemed, was the abiding message of Monster Hunter : there are no monsters. Chase would say as much in his to-camera piece at the end of each episode. He would deliver a spiel about hoaxes, misunderstandings, wrongly interpreted evidence, over-credulousness, the human love of a good mystery. He would say he continued to want to believe, but he hadn’t yet found anything to make him believe.
    It was pure baloney.
    There were monsters.
    And Chase had dedicated himself to eradicating each and every one of them.
    Often his investigations turned up nothing whatsoever; the cryptids were genuinely bogus, just local folklore or tourist board flim-flam. Still, he got an episode out of it, airtime filled, no harm done.
    Then there were the occasions when he happened upon a real cryptid. Something outside the standard taxonomy. Something anomalous. A throwback to a bygone age.
    And he would destroy it.
     
     
    T HIS WAS ONE of those occasions.
    His prey was a chupacabra.
    For two weeks, Chase had gone to great lengths to disprove the existence of the legendary “goat-sucker”, which had first been spotted in Puerto Rico in the mid-1990s before cropping up elsewhere in the world. A rash of recent sightings by villagers living on the periphery of El Yunque had drawn the Monster Hunter team to the region. A couple of goats had turned up dead, their throats torn out, which seemed to put the matter beyond doubt. A chupacabra was once again at large, slaughtering livestock in its trademark fashion. The wounds were large and ragged, so it was impossible to judge whether or not vampirism had taken place, but the goats’ bodies were sufficiently bloodless that it seemed likely.
    Chase had got Joey to shoot footage of a feral dog wandering between houses in one village. Through deft editing and use of commentary, it could be implied that the dog, or another like it, was responsible for the goat deaths. It helped that the animal was stricken with mange. Traditionally a chupacabra was hairless, with spikes on head and back. When people as far afield as Maine and Russia thought they had seen one, what they had in fact seen was a disease-ridden hound with patches of spiky, clumpy fur.
    Then, for Chase, it had simply been a case of misdirection, keeping his crew keyed up and jumpy in the rainforest after dark, while artfully avoiding places where they stood any real chance of running into the chupacabra.
    The three of them – Joey, Ahmed, Mary-Anne – were presently on their way back to Burbank, to start