by Thomas Page
Jason waited. Then he said, “Kimberly, I can’t help feeling you’ve thought about this more than you’re letting on.”
Kimberly laughed and folded his arms tightly. “Of course I have. At three in the morning in my heart of hearts. Suddenly I get an attack of theories. It’s sort of like hives.”
“Can I get in on one or two?”
“Why not?” Kimberly straightened up and faced him. “I’ve been putting together a kind of idea that would explain why your beast would have a misshapen head and Patterson’s beast would be such a mess. I think this hundred-year gap in sightings is the result of a behavior change caused by a certain type of . . . event.”
“What kind of event?”
“A kind of disease. Nothing like a common cold or a pandemic that would leave carcasses all over the place. Something much more insidious, much slower, that would cause them to become less active for a long time.” Kimberly lowered his voice. “A disorder, Mr. Jason. A genetic disorder.”
“Genetic!” Kimberly was even further out than Jason was. “Like what?”
“Oh, something simple. Congenital arthritis. Bone degeneration, even a kind of primate Hodgkin’s disease. It would explain the varieties of footprint you see. And why Patterson’s would not match any other known animal.”
“I thought animals killed off or abandoned deformed infants!”
“It might not be so obvious a deformity, Mr. Jason. It might be a very gradual process that appeared only every couple of generations. Their numbers could never really have been so big in the first place. If a species is limited in numbers to begin with, successive generations and interbreeding would concentrate it to a point after a hundred years where the whole species is threatened. A recessive gene would become a dominant one. Births would become fewer, infants would be more obviously deformed, and of course they would die right after birth. By the time the 1960s roll around, it is a continual menace and their behavior changes a second time.”
“Why?”
“Desperation, Mr. Jason. They’re like an endangered species. Their numbers are diminishing every year, so they have to take chances to get any kind of food.” He tapped the photo envelope. “Maybe one of these prints belongs to the original species, and the others are arthritic variations of it.”
Desperation. Maybe Kimberly was right. Maybe Jason’s quarry was the sick or starving remnant of a band that had once been numerous in the deep forests of the Northwest. If it were one of the last of its kind, its behavior would be erratic. Dangerously, unpredictably erratic.
After some hesitation, Jason told Kimberly about the Indian.
Kimberly’s face reflected absolute amazement. “Mr. Jason, I must say . . .” But Kimberly did not know what to say. He glanced at a shelf full of skulls. “But why would he attack you?”
“I don’t know. It makes no sense. Is there any reason why a gorilla would steal heads?”
“It’s the easiest way of making sure one’s quarry is dead. Ancient man did it to neutralize the power of an enemy. It removes the danger from the spirit. You’re sure it wasn’t the Indian?”
“Indians weren’t headhunters,” said Jason, gathering up his envelope. “They took scalps a lot, but rarely heads. Thanks for your help, Kimberly.”
Kimberly cleared his throat. “Mr. Jason, what do you do?”
“I run a pet-food company. Why?”
“What are your plans now?”
“That’s obvious, I think.”
“Don’t do it.”
Jason was surprised. “Why not? I’ve got nothing but time. I’ve got plenty of money, the company practically runs itself.”
“Drop it, Mr. Jason. Forget it.” Kimberly’s face was solemn. As with most men of cheerful demeanor, his seriousness was almost comical. “It never appears to those who search for it. There are people who’ve tracked Bigfoot for twenty years and never laid eyes on it. One swings hourly between poles of elation and discouragement. It’s a shortcut to manic-depression. It’s not a healthy thing, Mr. Jason, really it isn’t.”
“It is for me.”
“How so?”
But Jason could not explain that to Kimberly. How the quest made him feel young again, how his life had coalesced around something for the first time in years. He felt a bond to the beast, strong and tight, which he could not explain and could not sever. Kimberly would never understand. His psychiatrist might, but not Kimberly. “All I plan to do is run down sightings as they happen.”
“It could be years.”
Jason leaned closer to him, a hard, metallic, disturbing smile on his face. “You said it yourself. Food, Kimberly. They—or it—have to find food or die out. When autumn comes and the vegetation starts dying out, he’ll become desperate. He’s different, don’t you see? He takes chances. He invades a campsite full of people, he attacked the pilot holding a gun. . . . Kimberly, in Oregon a bunch of kids reported shooting one of these beasts with a shotgun. What did he do? He ran away. What did mine do? He attacked. He’s fighting for the survival of the species. He’s as different from your normal Bigfoot as a tiger is from a house cat. Maybe he’ll hit a farm or—”
“Decapitate somebody else. I see your point, Mr. Jason.” Kimberly shook his hand. “Keep in touch. In case you need any more technical advice on unicorns.”
Nice fellow, Kimberly thought after Jason left the room. One of these driven businessmen, though. You could see it in his face.
Kimberly filled his pipe and sucked on cold tobacco. He looked up at the eye sockets of a gibbon skull on one of the shelves.
A very ferocious creature, the gibbon, especially when aroused by food. A very ferocious creature, the human being, Kimberly added to his thoughts, especially when aroused by food of another sort.
3
Summer passed.
After the Rockies, the Indian entered a horizonless plain of grass slashed with wildflowers in profuse rich colors. Days were long, nights were short. Many times their passage stirred a watchdog in some farmhouse to lonely whines. Then the Indian could imagine the people within stirring in their sleep.
The Indian was skin and bones, an engine whose entire purpose was placing one foot before the other and propelling himself forward. A long ash bow was slung lengthwise across his chest and back. From a deerskin he had made a quiver, in which he placed six arrows, also made from ash, their ends furred with feathers. He was so adept with this weapon now that he could bring down a quail at twenty yards.
The dog rested with the spirit during the day and led the Indian at night. Sometimes the Indian complained to the dog. “Where’s he taking me? It don’t make sense how he walks, he goes in circles! He drags me up some goddamned mountain and down again. Spirits are supposed to know everything, but I swear he’s acting like he don’t know where he is.”
The dog agreed. The dog always agreed. The dog was a whore.
In the southwest a ragged line of mountains appeared. He watched them running southward. Some of them were strange mountains, with dry east slopes sliding down to wheat fields, and west slopes thickly jungled with vine maples and spruces of such density that sunlight barely penetrated their depths. Where the Rockies were sharp, these escarpments were smooth and slightly conical. Their heights were slit by fog layers and snow, which streamed into the wind like pennants.
Summer drained into fall. The wildflowers withered as the nights became cooler. Hot sun, cold air. The horizon climbed to the sky and fitted tightly under the curved bowl of the heavens. The spirit became bolder. He walked close to roads where campers scurried on their way to get berries, while the Indian and the dog hid in ditches. He paused at farms for dangerously long periods to steal fruit and potatoes.
The Indian was of two minds about this phantom who never ventured more than a mile from him yet whom he never saw. The rational half recognized him as a forager and hunter so shy of
humans that he was apt to take the most tortuous route to avoid settlements. Before this thought could go on to a conclusion, the irrational half of his mind stopped it. The spirit was divine. The journey was a ceremony that he must complete. His name was locked in that great shaggy soul somewhere. The universe was a cipher which the Indian could never hope to fathom, but at least a name would place him firmly in his allotted place in that cipher.
But even the strongest faith requires encouragement. The Indian was all too human, and he knew he was losing ground. His sleeps became deeper and his body shrank. He expended more energy than he replaced with food. In the midst of farmlands and game he was in real danger of starving to death. Something had to happen soon. Winter would be on them. If the Indian did not receive his name before long, he would have to give up.
The gorge was filled with swarming mosquitoes. It was dim and greened by the sunlight passing through the trees on the top. Halfway up the cliff was a cave. The Indian knew his spirit slept within. It was hard to avoid climbing up and looking at the spirit as he slept.
The gorge was in the midst of thick cottonwoods just off a minor highway. The Indian followed the bottom of it into the trees again, with growing worry. He did not like where they were heading. Too many people were around.
At the other end of the gorge were more trees, and after that a gradual cleared slope leading downward and cupping a trailer park on three sides. The highway ran along the fourth side. Because of the electrical wiring and cinder-block mountings, the Indian knew this was a permanent establishment. The trailers huddled together like a nest of bugs, with propane tanks fixed to their sides. Brightly colored laundry flapped on ropes. The trailers were in two rows, separated by an alley of vegetable gardens.
To the dog, the Indian said, “Unless he backtracks, he’s going to have to go right through them. He’s taking a hell of a chance. Near as I can figure, he’s going to make a dash through tonight.”
The Indian squatted on his heels and sniffed the air There was an autumn tang to it. He was homesick. Back home the leaves had long since turned gold and fallen to the ground. Wind would sweep them around the meadows. Spring had been underway only a couple of weeks when he left. The mountain sharpness of the air cleared his head and lungs.
That night he lay on his back, waiting for the dog to summon him. He sat up as the animal padded through the leaves. The dog yawned and lay down.
“He’s still sleeping?” the Indian asked.
That was a stupid question, the dog replied with a sardonic look.
The spirit slept all the following morning, as though storing up energy for some tremendous, exhausting undertaking.
The dog accompanied the Indian up the highway, where they found a small, tattered grocery store with a sign reading THE PICNIC PLACE. As the Indian closed the fly-specked door, a bell tinkled. Fluorescent light reflected off the polished steel-and-glass shelves, making him squint.
Behind the iron cash register sat a hefty middle-aged woman with red cheeks, silver-gray hair in a tight bun, and small eyes behind silvery steel-rimmed glasses. She looked at the Indian. Then she lowered her movie magazine and put one hand under the counter. The Indian guessed she had a gun there.
“Morning,” she said cordially enough. “Didn’t hear your car.”
“Ain’t got a car,” said the Indian with a rusty, unused voice. He had spoken aloud to no one but the dog in a long time. The dog bristled in the unaccustomedly tight surroundings of the store as the Indian gathered some chocolate bars and a plastic-wrapped package of salami. “I’d like some of this stuff.”
He poked through the medicine bundle until he found a greasy billfold. Dried corn clattered to the floor as he took it out. The woman stared at him as he counted out change. She kept one hand under the counter and ran the cash register with the other. “One seventy-five. There we go.”
“Thanks.” The Indian watched her put the food in a small bag and staple it shut, with the register tape around the top.
“You from around here?”
“No, ma’am. Montana.”
She became interested. “You from up around Browning?”
“No, ma’am. Stevensville.”
“Oh yeah. Flathead country. You a Flathead?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Within the woman caution struggled against a human need to break her solitude. Even an Indian was better company than nobody. “Now my husband, Jack, was interested in Indians right up till he died. He collected arrowheads.”
“Yes, ma’am.” The Indian headed for the door.
“He was good with a bow and arrow. You any good with that one?”
“I’m getting better,” he answered. “Thanks, ma’am.”
“Watch out for the Bigfoot. Bunch of kids say they saw one around the Nooksack River.”
The Indian’s hand was on the door when the word detonated in his skull like a bombshell. Big Foot! The legendary chief of the Minneconjou Sioux who died at Wounded Knee with Sitting Bull.
Was that his spirit?
The woman saw his expression change. Her hand went back under the counter. “It’s just a joke. Bunch of kids with more beer in their guts than brains in their heads.”
The Indian searched her whitening face for some clue to her character. Was she lying? Trying to separate him from his spirit? His grandfather’s spirit had been a human, after all. And when he had first seen the giant he had thought it was a man. The mission-school priests had solemnly warned him about the ways of the devil, who captured human souls and made them lie. He had had a bellyful of religion from them during all those years in school. But maybe they were right; maybe there was some truth to it.
Or maybe she was not lying. Maybe she spoke the truth and was giving him a clue of some kind. It was not the first time that he wondered exactly what his spirit was.
“Yes, ma’am,” the Indian said, relaxing. “Kids are crazy, ain’t they.” He closed the door gently behind him.
Night.
It was ten o’clock by the stars when the Indian crumpled his last candy-bar wrapper, stuffed it into the sack, and threw the bag away. He watched the lights go off in the trailers. Somewhere a country-music station played loudly; the sound was punctuated by bursts of laughter.
The dog joined him at the top of the slope. The spirit was awake at last. He had summoned the dog an hour before, to issue instructions. The crickets were quiet, a sure sign that it was walking.
The Indian was still thinking about the encounter with the woman. “I wish he’d just let me close to him sometime,” he murmured to the dog. “Just to see him good. He’s big, you know. Maybe he was a chief or something. Maybe he was a man once after all.”
The dog growled. The Indian was keyed up. Tonight would be the first time in a long while that he had seen the spirit at all.
The moon surged from behind a cloud, flooding thin, cold light over the woods. The dog woofed.
The spirit was already in the trailer park. He was pulling cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, carrots, lettuce heads out of the vegetable garden and shoving them, dripping with dirt, down his mouth, in full view of whoever cared to look out a window.
For a few seconds while the grunting spirit gobbled away, the Indian was paralyzed with shock and disgust. He rose to his feet with a trembling finger, pointing at the trailers. “He’s—he’s—” Words slithered between the interstices of the Indian’s teeth. “Goddamn him! Get him out of there!”
The dog ran down the slope. A watchdog began barking in the trailer park. Lights came on in the trailer adjacent to the garden.
The spirit dropped the vegetables and blundered down the alley into laundry lines full of sheets. He had torn his way nearly to the woods when a door opened and a man in a bathrobe emblazoned advanced institute of sex, CLASS OF 69 came out with a shotgun.
The Indian d
ashed down the slope.
The man saw the giant and paused, then raised his rifle to his shoulder. The Indian chopped him in the neck with the edge of his hand. He saw the man’s stunned face before he crumpled up like a sack of potatoes.
The Indian grabbed, too late, for the rifle. It went off close to his face, the concussion dazzling and deafening him, the barrel burning his fingers.
More lights came on. Several women screamed, and doors flew open. The Indian’s dog added its sharp yelps to the other dogs’ as it chased the spirit into the woods.
The Indian heard a rising chorus of voices as he sprinted past the trailers to the road. His feet slapped the hard asphalt with a pain that surprised him. His feet had adjusted to soft earth, not concrete.
He was clear of the trailer park before turning into the woods again. Pandemonium, shouts, screams, conflicting directions—“He’s in the trees!” “Hell no, he hit the woods!” “No, I saw him on the road!”—added their uproar to the colliding bodies and flashlight beams. The Indian heard one more shot and a woman sobbing as the cottonwoods swallowed him up. The dog was waiting for him.
The Indian figured they had run three miles, following the spirit’s stench, which hung in the air like vapor, when they burst into an apple orchard—so suddenly that he slipped on a piece of rotting fruit and went sprawling.
Gasping for breath, he climbed to his feet. He looked at the trees. Branches were stripped of fruit. He looked at the dog. It yipped and danced around him.
The spirit whistled from the other end of the orchard. The Indian heard branches rustle as apples were pulled from them. After his breathing stabilized, the Indian said to the dog, trotting off in response to the whistle, “Go on!” He grabbed an apple and threw it against a tree.
Shocked at the Indian’s tone, the dog ignored a second whistle. The Indian stood up and, forgetting he wore only moccasins, kicked a tree and jumped in pain. “Go ahead! Let the scumbag take care of himself! Fuck him!” The Indian’s voice rose to dangerously audible levels. “You know what’s wrong with him? He’s stupid! I didn’t believe it till now. He is! His brains are in his belly. My name! He don’t know my name, he’s so stupid he don’t even know his own name! I been feeding him, following him, taking care of him, and I still don’t know what he wants or what he’s doing!”