by Thomas Page
At mention of the word Bigfeet, John Moon turned toward Helder. What did white men know about spirits? His spirit had returned for him at last.
He looked back at Jason, his hand resting on his belt midway between his medicine bundle and the knife.
13
Duane Woodard was stuffed against the rear door of the van with his legs crowded up by the luggage piled in the center. The van was being boxed violently around the road by wind bursts. He could barely see through the little wedges carved out of lashing snow by the windshield wipers. Delbert was hunched over the wheel, trying to see the road through this cauldron of ice.
This whole thing is arranged exactly bass ackward, Woodard thought in disgust. The bears aren’t half as dangerous as this storm. The van lurched, and his overnight bag fell from the top of the pile to his feet.
How they got down the road without tumbling end over end was something Duane Woodard would never understand. The road leveled out, and presently he glimpsed the two red bridge reflectors.
Now that bridge is covered with ice. It’s like a skating rink on top there. He wondered if he should close his eyes, as some of the other passengers were doing, but decided he might need to see what was happening.
All the passengers had slipped on their overcoats. Duane pulled his pile jacket from the luggage and angled one arm into it. He was straining for room to get the other arm in when he saw something dark, lit for a fraction of a second by the brake lights, scurry past the rear window.
A man, he thought in amazement. There’s a man out there!
The reflectors slid to both sides of the van and they were on the bridge. Duane zipped his coat up.
The windshield cracked into thousands of starred frosty fragments held together by safety gum. Delbert touched the glass. The ventilator window by his head exploded inward, and a rock hit his skull.
Delbert slumped over the wheel, throwing the passengers out of their seats and sending luggage tumbling in every direction. Duane Woodard grabbed the door handle and pushed it down. He opened the door, letting in wind and snow and the rumble of the river far below.
In the red glare of the taillights he saw a long crack break the mantle of ice and snow on the surface. The bridge is going, Duane thought dully. Goddamned bridges, nobody knows how to build them any more. The van hit the railing, tumbling the passengers to the floor as they tried to climb out the door. Duane Woodard popped out to the ground with a heavy impact that knocked the wind out of him.
The rest happened so fast that Woodard was unable to reconstruct the events in order. The rear wheels were churning fountains of snow on him as he crawled past the widening crack in the road. The railing crumpled like tinfoil, its stanchions breaking loose. The van flipped over the side; the wheels, deprived of traction, screamed for a second in mechanical agony; then there was a metallic splash, followed by the drumming of metal struts, concrete blocks, and railings falling into the river.
Duane scrabbled, like an ant trapped in an ant lions’ collapsing cone, to the highway as the serrated crack became a chasm in the center of the bridge. Under the twin forces of wind and swollen, rushing river water, it crumpled in on itself and flew to pieces. It was not until Woodard had caught his breath and turned around, expecting to see more escapees climbing to their feet, that he realized he was the only one to get out.
The speed of the catastrophe benumbed him. He looked down at his feet, his torn jacket and ungloved hands turning into frigid lumps of marble in the cold.
A final hunk of concrete gave way and tumbled down into the gorge. The bridge was not just weak. The bridge had been sabotaged.
Being a hopeless optimist, Duane was certain that somebody must have gotten out through a window after the van hit the water. He tramped around the ground, looking for a path leading into the gorge.
With a furious yapping, a ball of snow-fuzzed canine fury surged out of the wind.
“Hey, boy,” said Duane Woodard, kneeling down and coaxing the dog. “Who do you belong to?”
Feet crunched through snow off to his side. A black cloud burst out of the storm, a boulder held high above its head. Woodard did not have time to wonder why it looked like a bear or smelled so ghastly as the rock slammed down. Adrenaline triggered by the ferocity of the attack impelled him to jump sideways as the boulder socked into the snow. The figure closed long fingers over its rough edges and picked it up again.
The dog lunged at him, and Duane kicked the beast onto its back. He scrambled to his feet with a rock of his own and flung it at the thing, affecting its aim as it threw the boulder a second time. It landed clear, and Duane put away all thoughts of rescuing passengers. He ran for the road.
Another rock hit his thickly padded shoulder, and he slipped over the tarmac. The snow was up to his knees, slowing down his movements.
He heard snow crunching off the road to his left. The thing was pacing him. Thing? Why did he think that? It was some psycho local boy who liked auto accidents, wasn’t it? Big, though. Farm guy.
Duane instinctively stopped and jumped backward. Another rock made a hole in the air where his head had just been.
He was good with those rocks. He was better than Duane with a football. He had a fur coat, didn’t he? Had to. Arms and legs and everything.
Duane broke into a run, chewed up a few yards of road, and stopped to listen again. The psycho made a growling sound. Ahead of him! He had run clean past Duane and headed him off. Duane cut off the road into the crumpled, ridged meadow, where dead trees swayed and branches covered with snow humped the ground. He heard the guy coming after him.
A tree branch propellered through the air against the wind and clawed up the ground, entangling his feet and tripping him. Duane rolled over as whoever or whatever it was bounded up. He jumped to his feet and ducked past a mountain of fur and gristle back toward the road.
That was not a man!
Fear rose like smoke from Duane’s vitals up through his chest and permeated his head. He zigzagged his way back to the highway through clumps of buried grass and weed as the snow whirled around him. The ground formed ripple-shaped hummocks, their lee sides banked with deep, soft snow. That was when Duane had his idea. It was not a good idea, but ideas of any kind were hard to come by in this particular situation. That thing was a living snowplow, as unheeding of lumpy ground as a locomotive was of stopping. Duane turned back off the road, doubled around a few times, and managed to put some more yards between himself and the thing. He turned off the road one final time and body-flopped deep into a snowbank slanting up the side of a hummock.
With luck the storm would cover up his traces in seconds. He would be buried completely. If not that, at least his form would be indistinguishable from any of the branches lying around the meadow.
He felt the growing weight of snow on his back. He breathed shallowly, so as not to crack the precious mantle as it built up. Driven by the wind, the snow piled against every crevice of his body, the separation of arm and legs, the gentle rise of his back, past his ears and over his head, sending his consciousness into a limbo of unearthly frozen quiet.
It was not a bear, he thought. He wished it were a bear, so it would kill him quickly. More wind. More wind, more snow, let the storm burst open, let the heavens fall.
A foot sank down into the snow six inches in front of his head.
Jason put his fingertips together and said, “Moon? I will make you an offer. I will give you ten thousand dollars cash for the toe in your medicine bundle.”
“Sir,” Moon answered. “If you come near to me, I will cut your guts out and string them over that fireplace there.”
Helder wheeled around in his chair, a Scotch glass in his hand. “None of that, you two. Be nice. Be nice.” He sipped his Scotch, then said, “I say. What toe?”
“Moon’s got a Bigfoot toe in his medicine bundle.”
Th
at detonated in Helder’s booze-fogged brain like a slow-burning phosphorus grenade, growing hotter and hotter until its heat broke through his drunkenness. “That leather thing?” He looked at the Indian, mouth open. “Moon, is that true?”
Moon’s jaw muscles bunched up. If looks were daggers, Jason would have been sliced to pieces.
Here we go, Martha groaned inwardly as the Indian slipped out his knife. He advanced toward Jason, flipped the knife, and caught it by the tip. Flipping it again, he pointed the blade at him. He smiled so broadly that his face cracked into hundreds of wrinkles, into which his eyes disappeared. “You’re making a mistake, mister.”
“I don’t think so,” Jason said, slipping out his pistol and holding it loosely in his hands.
“Yeah, you are. You know why? ’Cause he’s your spirit, too.”
“How do you figure that?”
“ ’Cause you’re following him, just like I am.”
“Hardly for the same reason, Moon!”
Moon shook his head, the smile stamped on his face. “It don’t matter shit what your reasons are. Everybody’s got different reasons. Every day I said to myself, that’s it. I’ve had it. One more day and if he don’t give me my name I’ll quit. But you never quit. You just keep after him, and you find out one day he’s taken over your whole life.” He pointed the knife again. “That’s what a spirit does to you. That’s what he done to you and me.”
“He’s got you there,” said Martha, wanting to defuse the tension.
“Bull,” said Jason.
“It’s no more incredible than what you suggested.”
“I am following a flesh-and-blood creature, Martha. Not a ghost. That’s all.”
“But that’s just what spirits are to the Indians, Raymond,” said Martha, walking over to the fire. “They were alive. They ate and slept and hunted and made fools of themselves. They were so real you couldn’t tell them from animals. Maybe there never was that much difference.”
Moon was wary of her. She was leading off into tracks of her own. “There were differences, ma’am.”
“Yes, but how could you tell a bad one from a good one?”
“You were taught.”
“But didn’t they sometimes work the way the devil did? The Christian devil? Didn’t the bad ones ever convince you they were really good and get you into a situation where you were trapped and didn’t know it till too late? That’s how the devil works, you know. He comes on like a saint. Or like a poor, misguided, pitiable little bird that everybody feels sorry for. Treachery, John! Didn’t the Indian spirits know treachery? Did they betray humans?”
The Indian studied Martha with profound interest as firelight flickered off his knife blade.
“Moon, did you know there’s another of your so-called spirits up here?”
Something thumped at the door of the Grizzly Bar. A slow, measured scratching grated, then stopped. “That’s probably my dog,” said Moon, walking into the bar.
He stopped as the scratching began again from close to the floor. “No,” he said slowly. “That’s not him.”
Jason rose from his chair, cocking his pistol. “Hold it, Moon. Helder, do you have that rifle handy?”
“It’s in my office.” Helder sidled away and returned with the rifle.
“There’s no need of that, sir,” said Moon. “He won’t hurt nobody.” He yanked open the door.
A thousand pythons of wind and snow gibbered in blowing chairs off tables, toppling liquor bottles from shelves and swirling snow into every corner.
Jason crouched behind the bar with his gun.
Nothing there?
No. A hand lay just inside the threshold. Moon grasped it and pulled the body inside, shouldering the door shut. The man’s face was scratched by branches, his red hair was clogged with congealing snow, and his skin was pale white, setting off blue lips. His mouth stretched in a smile.
“Hi,” said Duane Woodard. “Hot out there.”
Woodard sat before the fire, tented in a blanket Helder kept in his office. His clothes steamed on the hearth. He cupped a brandy glass, which looked ridiculously small in his huge hand, and shivered. “Bigfoot!” he exclaimed to Jason. “Ain’t that something? I thought they weren’t supposed to hurt people.” He looked at the Grizzly Bar, struggling to digest this revelation. “He just stood there in front of me for five minutes, then let out a howl that would have broken glass a mile away. I was sure you’d heard it.”
“It actually attacked the van?”
“You better believe it. And sabotaged the bridge. I’d put money on it. I never knew they were supposed to be so damn clever.” Woodard swallowed the rest of the brandy and lowered his head into his hands as the enormity of it all seemed to hit him in a delayed reaction.
Jason noticed that Martha Lucas had gone white. His quarry had a shape now, a shape, form, and malevolent personality. It was human, too human, in fact, nothing like the other two species of Sasquatch. Those mountain men, those pioneers who had been idolized by generations, had inadvertently created a monster.
He came out of his thoughts. “They’re sealing the valley off,” said Jason. “The only other road goes back through Oharaville, and I bet they’ve been there, too.”
Helder’s arms dangled limply over the arms of his chair. He seemed to have shrunk a little. “Mr. Woodard, you don’t recall how many people there were on the van, do you?”
“Eight. Nine.” Duane shrugged, his head still in his hands.
“Is there the slightest chance anybody else could have gotten away?”
“Not with that thing running around down there.”
“But he wasn’t down there, was he?” Jason cleared his throat. “He was chasing you. Or at least one of them was chasing you. If somebody got out of the bus to the meadow . . .” He swallowed and his voice died. The silence weighed down the room. Even the fire seemed subdued.
“You said there were two of them, Raymond,” Martha murmured. “One to chase Duane Woodard, the other to get whoever got out of the van.”
“No,” said Jason. “The other one would have gone after Woodard too. The other one must be up in the mine or something. At any rate, somebody’s going to have to check out the van. Right now.”
“Christ,” said Helder.
“There’s five of us . . .”
“And only two guns. Yours and mine,” Helder said.
“Besides, a man on a snowmobile is a sitting duck,” said Woodard. “So it’s ridiculous. He could pick you off before you got to the river.”
“Two snowmobiles isn’t ridiculous,” said Jason. “Two men backing each other up. We can leave the rifle here and I’ll take the pistol.”
“Very well,” said Helder, hiccuping as he climbed to his feet.
“Helder, you’re so drunk you can’t see what you’re doing,” said Jason.
“The blizzard will sober me up.”
“I have a better idea. Moon?”
The Indian had been leaning by the fireplace, well away from them. If Woodard’s story had made any impact at all, it was not visible on his face.
“Can you drive a snowmobile?”
An almost imperceptible nod.
“That gives us three weapons. Two guns and Moon with a bow and arrow. Okay with you, Moon?”
The Indian looked away from them. Martha thought for a moment that he was contemplating the stuffed grizzly by the bar, but his eyes were turned inward. His fingers played with the tasseled flap of the medicine bundle. “I will come.”
They stacked two snowmobiles with blankets, brandy, bandages, and heavy coats. Jason and Moon wore fleece-lined nylon riding suits with helmets and faceguards. Jason slipped his pistol into a zippered pocket. Moon tied a quiver of aluminum arrows to his back and slid the bow around his chest. Heavy flashlights completed their gear.
Helder shouted through chattering teeth over the wind that rattled the snowmobile shed, “I’ll try to raise Drake on the radio. Maybe he can meet you down there.”
“Okay.” Jason pulled on his helmet and motioned Moon to precede him.
“You first,” said the Indian. “I don’t want you behind me.” He wore his medicine bundle under his coveralls. Tonight he would need it.
Helder slid open the doors of the shed. Jason tested the accelerator on the handlebar, inched forward a few feet, then got the feel of the overloaded machine. Cautiously, adjusting for wind, he drove steadily out to the parking lot and entered the road. Moon followed behind him, guided by Jason’s taillight.
When Helder returned to the lodge he found Duane Woodard slipping into his partially dried clothes. Martha sat in the bar, discreetly averting her face.
“I could use about six steaks, Helder,” Woodard said.
“Don’t you want any sleep?” asked Helder in awe. Physical people tended to intimidate him. After Woodard’s experience, he would have taken to his bed with enough aspirin for three days.
“Hell no. I feel great. Little brandy. Little food . . . Ain’t you got anything to eat?”
Helder took him into the shop, where Duane Woodard gobbled down six Hershey bars. One two three. Pause. Four five six. He licked chocolate from his fingers. “That’s a start,” he said, fingering a bag of potato chips.
To Martha’s disgust, Jack Helder helped himself to a full glass of undiluted Scotch. If this was the way he reacted to emergencies . . .
“Woodard, maybe you can help me with the radio. I’ve got to call the Ranger station.”
The radio was in a small pine cabinet adjacent to the gun rack. Drake had given him an emergency frequency when he began construction, and he rifled the desk, looking for it.
Duane Woodard switched on the radio, filling the office with a skull-piercing static that seemed to drive nails through their ears. He dampened the volume, but even at low level the fuzzy whine was uncomfortable.
Helder handed him the band number and Woodard set the tuner directly over it. He gave the microphone to Helder. “Here you go. Press the button to talk, release to listen.”