The Spirit

by Thomas Page

  The Indian slumped to the ground again and dug, meaninglessly, furiously, at the earth with an arrow. Words continued sluicing out in a venomous despair that made the dog cringe.

  “All he thinks about is food! I’m sick of this shit!”

  Tail down, the dog snuggled up to the Indian’s foot. That did it. The dog’s bootlicking affection, its favor-­currying streak, was the final insult. The flaming emotional force of the spirit quest was dissipated now. The Indian closed his eyes and reached for some noble memory, but all he saw was that man in the stupid bathrobe and the spirit tangled in laundry. The bond was broken, its snapped ends frayed by exhaustion, frustration, and garden fertilizer.

  “I’m going home. Get away from me.”

  It was so abrupt a severing of this peculiar friendship that the dog whimpered around in circles, unable to actually leave. The Indian finally threw an apple at it, which sent the animal scampering down between the apple trees.

  The Indian lay down and closed his eyes. He had just torn a bloody hole in his psyche. There was no pain. That would come later, when the numbness wore off. He would digest his despair piece by piece, lest the whole sudden weight of it overwhelm him. He would wake in the morning, go to the road, and hitchhike, rejoin the human race and this puzzling world.

  After all, his memory was already a tattered garment. One more rip in it would make no difference. But he did not know what would happen now. His grandfather shook his head sorrowfully at him. He was more faded than ever, more shrouded behind darkness than the Indian had ever remembered.

  Maybe the Indian would just dry up under the pitiless light reserved by the sun for the lost and useless, his skin and bones rendered into food for plants.

  Ten hours after a humorous news dispatch reported that a twelve-­foot-­tall, fire-­breathing ape had attacked the Happy Hunting Ground Trailer Park, Raymond Jason arrived in a rented car. He had spent the summer running down a dozen sightings that had panned out into nothing. He was always a day late at least, and the spontaneous trips, as well as his mounting frustration, were disrupting his life.

  The trailer park was close to the border between Washington State and British Columbia, hundreds of miles southwest of where his experience had occurred. Whatever footprints might have been left were long since stomped to mud by the campers as they blundered into one another the previous night, and the locals who were now photographing the vegetable garden. It looked as if a plane had crashed into it.

  After some inquiries, Jason’s spirits rose a trifle. This was not a fake. Something really had gone through the vegetable garden, and a man named Frank P. Stone had gotten a clear look at it.

  Frank P. Stone opened a bourbon bottle and poured a shot for himself, his wife, and Jason. Around his neck was a collar bandage. His wife’s stiff posture and drawn face were evidence of the tension caused by the event. Stone was politely wary of Jason’s interest. “Can’t really say folks have been very understanding about this business, Mr. Jason.”

  “I know the feeling. I saw one in Canada.”

  “No shit!”

  Stone’s wife’s eyes lit with hope. “They all think it’s funny. Funny!”

  “It’s not funny. And if I were you, I wouldn’t talk about it any more than necessary. For your own good, you know?”

  “Amen.” Stone took a fervent gulp.

  “I was wondering if there was anything you could tell me that you didn’t tell anyone else. Just between us.”

  Stone and his wife exchanged looks. Then he poured out another shot. “Why not? Its head was wrong.”

  “Oh?” Jason became very still. “Deformed, maybe?”

  “It didn’t hit me till later, when I tried to describe it. I think its head was a different color from the rest of it. ’Course, I only saw it two seconds, so I can’t say what color the rest of it was. The hair was different. Longer. I think.” He looked at his wife, turning his whole body so he didn’t have to turn his neck. “But that’s not the big one. You heard the news saying the thing had thrown a tree at me?”

  “No,” said Jason.

  “Well, it’s a load of bull. Some snotty kid made that up for some snotty, crappy paper.” He touched his bandage. “Somebody cold-­cocked me just as I was about to shoot it, Mr. Jason. It wasn’t that ape. How could I get the back of my head hit when he was in front of me?”

  Jason’s mind lurched. He glanced out the tiny curtained window to the slope and woods. “Cold-­cocked by whom?”

  “I don’t know. He was real quiet about it. I didn’t hear a thing.”

  Stone’s wife said, “That’s what’s so bad about this business, Mr. Jason. Somebody must have been trying to break in here when the ruckus started and Frank and his gun and that ape scared him off. It all happened at once.” Her lips trembled slightly. “Maybe that thing saved our lives.”

  “Oh, come on, Joyce . . .” Stone shook his head, the pain making his wince. “Jesus, what a night!”

  “Did anybody see who hit you?”

  “Nobody saw nothing!” grumbled Frank P. Stone. “Real good neighbors. Just me and Perkins’s shepherd. I thought he’d bark himself into a cardiac. Dumb city dog, scared shitless of everything.”

  Jason found a squashed-­up paper bag lying near the trailers, close to the woods. The top was stapled with a receipt from a store called “The Picnic Place.” Someone had been up there.

  He held the paper under the dog’s mouth, keeping a good grip on the leash. The dog sniffed, then growled and tried to pull away. Obviously, the bag belonged to a stranger.

  Within the woods was a rocky canyon, the floor littered with fallen leaves. Here they had more luck. The dog growled unhappily and tugged at his leash. Wedged in the rocks, next to a small pile of dog feces, was a plastic wrapper for sandwich meat.

  The feces were not Buck’s; the Perkinses did not allow the shepherd off his chain. Jason poked at the feces with a stick. The outside was a crust, the inside still moist. Very recent. No more than twelve hours old.

  He looked around the cliffs and saw a cave high up near the top, accessible by a slanting ledge leading up from the floor. “Let’s go, Buck.”

  The dog did not want to go onto the ledge. Jason dragged him, snapping and howling, up to the cave, then tied the leash to a boulder by the entrance. He slapped at mosquitoes swarming about the cave threshold.

  It was small and empty of even insect life. The floor was silted with mud. Leaves had been piled into the back wall, then depressed downward by great weight. Jason scooped up a handful of these leaves and carried them to the dog.

  He shoved them under Buck’s nose. Buck went crazy with rage and almost bit Jason’s arm. He soothed the animal with a silky, stroking rub behind the ears. “It’s them, isn’t it,” he whispered to the animal. “And you’ve got the scent, haven’t you.”

  That afternoon he bought the dog from Perkins. He paid exactly one thousand dollars for him, in hundred-­dollar bills peeled from a roll he carried in his pocket.

  He pulled the rented car up to The Picnic Place and let Buck out, still holding the leash.

  The woman behind the counter looked up as the bell tinkled. “How do?” she said to Jason. “Come to find the Bigfoot?”

  “Isn’t everybody?” Jason looked over the counters, uncertain about how to get her to talk without sounding like a private eye.

  “The real nuts all went home already,” said the woman. “Some folks say it tried to rape some woman down on Route Nine.”

  “People are crazy,” murmured Jason.

  “Well, it was down at George Fraser’s apple orchard,” she protested. “George found his trees stripped about an hour ago. Good thing the nuts are gone, or they’d all be down there too.”

  Jason laughed politely. “Where’s this orchard?”

  “It’s about four miles down that way.” She pointed down the h
ighway toward the trailer park. “He run through the woods after he got to the park and spent the night eating there. They say.”

  “How can anybody be scared of a gorilla that eats apples?” Jason laughed with an effort.

  “The things that happen in this county. There was an Indian in here yesterday morning . . .”

  It came down on Jason’s head so fast that he could barely coordinate moving the mustard and the sandwich meat on the counter.

  “. . . scariest man I ever laid eyes on. He weighed about twenty pounds, and every ounce was plain meanness.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Had an Army jacket and a mangy little dog. Bet his pockets were full of razor blades. He was on the run, if you ask me.”

  “What from, I wonder.” Jason opened a bag of potato chips and shoved several into his mouth. He had forgotten the dog until now. So it belonged to the Indian after all. He had wondered if it was wild or not.

  “He said he was from Stevensville, Montana. That’s up at the Flathead reservation, you know?” She counted up the food and rang the prices on the register. ‘That’s fifteen seventy-­five with tax. Going camping?” Jason had bought a carton of food and sandwiches.

  “I might. Your sign says you sell bullets. Do you have any three fifty-­seven Magnum shells?”

  “Nope. All the Bigfoot nuts bought them.” The woman shuddered. “Try Springer’s, in town.”

  4

  The Indian had awakened before dawn that morning. He wanted to get clear of the orchard as quickly as possible. A pink line separated the night from the eastern horizon as he munched an apple from the trees.

  The dog tried to follow him to the road, but he threw an apple at it. “Fuck you!” The dog barked furiously, trying to get him back to the orchard.

  The Indian found a road sign pointing out directions to Spokane, Seattle, and a host of small towns unknown to him. He was vaguely interested to learn he was in Washington. Very vaguely. He had no friends out here, and had never been to Washington in his life. Glumly he trudged down the highway, watching sunlight fill the air.

  The dog was extremely upset by this change in routine. It was not bold enough to approach the Indian and not smart enough to leave. It dogged the Indian’s footsteps, yapping in outrage, dodging rocks thrown at it.

  The Indian skewered a rabbit dashing across the road with an arrow, then took it into the trees to skin and roast it. The dog wagged its tail, expecting a piece for the spirit. Instead, the Indian ate the entire animal with deliberate thoroughness and threw bones at the dog. When he washed his hands in a stream and headed back for the road, the dog unleashed a thunderstorm of barks.

  “I know he’s sleeping!” the Indian roared. “I don’t care if he don’t wake up.”

  By seven the sun was high. The cold night was turning into a reasonably warm day. The dog became hysterical, walking in circles, making little jumps in place, rolling on the ground. The spirit was being left far behind. The road was a twisty ribbon that crossed streams. Finally the Indian rained rocks at the animal, with such ferocity that the dog ran yelping into the woods.

  And did not come out.

  Good, the Indian thought to himself.

  The Indian had hoped his disillusionment would give him a sense of freedom. Instead, he was more tired than he had been on the entire futile quest. He still felt the heavy presence of the spirit, and it was not pleasurable any more, rather like an unwelcome intruder watching him.

  Produce trucks hurrying food to market appeared on the road. They sped up at sight of him.

  By noon he had realized that no intelligent driver was going to endanger his life by picking up a skinny, filthy Indian with a bow and arrow, so he left the road and did some more hunting. He bagged three quail in a field, and another rabbit. For once he had the food all to himself, and it was a veritable feast that filled his belly and beyond. The heavy fatigue turned his limbs to iron.

  He found a patch of firs where he could lie down. The sunlight hurt his night-­sharpened eyes, causing a headache. He decided it was not a good idea to change his sleeping schedule so abruptly, so he decided to do some tramping that night.

  A twig cracked. The Indian saw the dog settling down a discreet distance from him. “Fucking beast,” he muttered at the persistent animal, but he was too tired to really chew it out. Let the beast sleep. He could always beat hell out of it later. He set his mental clock to awaken him around seven, when the coolness of late afternoon became the coldness of night.

  In town, Jason bought a small tent, a bedroll, a kerosene stove, and a gas lantern. At the sporting-­goods store he purchased a steel hatchet and a box of .357 Magnum shells for his Colt Python, a handgun so ludicrously deadly that six shots could sever a small tree. He was a better shot with this pistol than with a rifle, a skill gained by hours of practice at a Kansas City country club.

  He found a U.S. Army survey map of the county, with markings for the trailer park, the apple orchard, and various small farms. This map revealed a group of five streams just beyond the apple orchard. Jason remembered that the ape had escaped down a stream after killing Nicolson in Canada.

  He walked the dog through the photographers and curious gawkers swarming around the orchard, entered the cottonwoods, and tramped up to the first stream. It was like the one in Canada, with a shallow run of water leading to deeper depths overhung with willows.

  Buck became nervous as he sniffed both banks for an hour. The scent was palpable, but there was no trail along the water’s edge. Instead, the scent led to deeper woods.

  “That’s weird, Buck. I thought he liked rivers.” Jason tried to ignore the small ring of alarm that went off in his mind.

  The second stream was half a mile distant. This water was deep and slow-­moving. Again the dog picked up faint traces of the ape’s passage leading farther into the woods. Jason’s alarm grew to a continual nagging itch.

  The third stream was hardly a stream. It was more a series of rocky ponds, chained together by rivulets. The smell clinging to branches and bits of moss indicated that the ape had passed by this water, too. Jason was thoroughly puzzled. The beast had crossed all three rivers and gone deeper into the woods.

  At the fourth stream, the shepherd howled mournfully, little piteous cries of terror. Jason pushed his muzzle against the ground and noted that the ape at last was moving along water in a westward direction. This river was deep and slow-­moving, gladed by spruce and moss. Deprived of the sunlight, the forest floor was clear of undergrowth, and the scent was embedded in the soft, wet gravel of the bank. Jason’s worry abated somewhat. He was on to something, but he did not know what. At least it looked like the beast was moving somewhere.

  He consulted the map. They were five miles from the orchard, in deep woods. “It almost makes sense, Buck. Almost. Except the logical thing to do is take the first river you come to, if you’re on the run. There’s something about this fourth one he liked.” Jason felt that he had been given the key to some kind of very important lock, which he would have to find.

  The soft, wet bank gravel did not hold footprints of either the ape, the Indian, or the dog. Jason noted how the scent always came from hard rocks or tight-­packed gravel, where footprints did not take. The thing concealed its tracks perfectly. And Jason suspected the beast had an inordinate love, maybe even a need, for fruits. There was no other reason for it to stop running before it was well clear of the pandemonium of the trailer park.

  He tied the shepherd to a tree and took out a ham sandwich. He laid the map on the ground and examined the squiggles of the rivers as if he could peel underneath the paper somehow and uncover secrets. The shepherd regarded him with sharp wolf’s eyes. Already he was homesick for his old chain.

  “Buck, old boy, here’s the situation.” Jason picked a piece of wax paper from the sandwich. “That scent’s going to be dead cold in another day. Unless we
trip over him, we won’t get anywhere following him like this.”

  He gave half of the sandwich to the dog. It was easy and comfortable talking to the animal. It was always easy talking to animals if you were a solitary man. “So we’ve got to put ourselves in that ape’s mind and see if we can’t get ahead of him somehow. Predict where he’ll go. Right? What do we know about him so far? We know he moves at night. We know he sticks close to the water. Best of all, we know he eats constantly. Night, food, and water are three walls of a cage, if you look at it right. Especially food. He always goes for food.”

  His finger hovered over the map. Bull’s-­eye!

  He punched down on an oblong lake called the Little Harrington, about twenty miles west of where they were sitting. All five streams emptied into it. The Little Harrington was surrounded by ink bristles signifying swampland. Swampland meant thick vegetation, birds, beavers, rodents, and insects. Swampland meant food.

  “Buck, I bet you anything he hits this lake! The way he eats, a swamp would be a feast for him! He hasn’t got there yet! It’s too far! But he’ll get there tonight or tomorrow night, and we’ll be waiting there.” Elated, Jason rose to his feet, rolling up the map. The beast was his, he was sure of it. He could almost reach into the leaves and touch it. “We’ll have him, boy! We’ll have him by the short hairs. We’ll nail him at the lake!” Jason burst out laughing as the dog’s hackles rose. “You feel him, boy? So do I. So do I!”

  Jason’s elation was not total. The mysterious lock in his mind remained sealed. He looked at the map again with the irresistible feeling that it was trying to tell him something terribly important about his quarry.