Cosmos greene wasn’t in any mood to believe me about what I’d seen in the woods. I needed to talk to Alice. Alone. So, I told Cosmos we’d take the first shuttle bus back to town, and he could go on ahead. He put up a bit of a fight at first, but soon he gave up.
As we watched him drive off, Alice turned to me.
“You really think you saw it, Dylan?” She was staring into my eyes.
I nodded.
“Then we have to find it! We have to. We can’t miss this chance!” Her face was lit up.
I was really torn. My pulse was racing. I wanted to do this…and I didn’t. A big part of me wanted to go home and curl up in my bed.
“But we’d need an adult to come with us,” I finally sputtered. “One who has what it takes to track it…who understands, who will listen to us. Seen any of those around lately?”
We looked at each other. We were both thinking the same thing.
Uncle Walter.
Then Alice sighed. “But he’s retired…from everything.”
At that moment I realized what I really wanted from my uncle. I wanted him to be what he once was. I wanted him to lead me on this amazing adventure.
“Let’s un-retire him,” I snapped.
“But we don’t even know where he is.”
“Oh yes we do.”
“We do?”
“Think about it. Where do you think he’d go if he wanted to be alone?”
I could almost see the light bulb turn on above Alice’s head.
We weren’t far from the spot where Walter had driven into the trees with his Hummer while we’d hidden in the trunk. We were sure we could find it, and then all we had to do was follow the tracks through the bush.
But when we got to where he’d entered the forest, his vehicle wasn’t anywhere to be seen. What did that mean? Worried, we kept going.
It must have taken us an hour to find the hideout.
By the time we arrived the sun was almost setting over Harrison Lake. The trees were waving gently in the darkening sky, like giants warning us. It took us a while to actually find the stump, even though we were standing right near it. I hadn’t realized how perfectly it was camouflaged. We couldn’t even see the tree fort, high above us.
We pulled up the stump and went underground. Not long after, we were climbing up the spiralling staircase and then stepping out onto the wooden floor. At first, we thought the place was empty. It was very dark. But at the far end of the room, in the shadows, we could make out a faint light, candlelight. And soon we could see Uncle Walter sitting there, just staring into space.
“Dylan?” he asked quietly, without even turning around.
“Yes?”
“Alice?”
“Yes, Mr. Middy.”
“She fell off my back,” he said out of the blue, very quietly.
I knew what he was going to tell us. We sat down at his feet.
“That’s her picture that you saw in my hallway. I suppose I was old enough to know better…carrying her on my back across a high wire. She waved at the crowd, just waved, and then she slipped, fell more than a hundred metres. To her death. I didn’t really do anything wrong: it was that wave that caused it. But you know, if you play with fire, you get burned. I haven’t been on a high wire since that day. It’s been more than ten years.”
“Dad said something about it when he was mad at me, something about your dead wife.”
“They hate me for many reasons. But that’s the biggest. And they’re right. She was a friend of the family. They think I lured her into the circus. But she wanted adventure. And I loved her. I really did.”
He grabbed an oil lamp on a table beside him and turned it up. A glow filled the room. I could see a tear rolling down his cheek.
“A thrilling life? Thrills get you killed.”
I knew it was time to tell him something I’d wanted him to know ever since we met.
“I got scared too, you know, very scared,” I said, “last week.” I swallowed hard. “Me and my friends got lost in a park in Alberta and some weirdo came after us. It freaked me out. Really freaked me out. More than I’ve told anyone.” Alice looked into my eyes.
“At first, I didn’t want to do anything. I just wanted to get away from everything. But you can’t. Can you?”
“No,” said Walter, “not from everything.”
“I got so down that I wondered if I’d ever get back up. But these last few days, I’ve made up my mind not to be afraid any more. It started when I met you…you weren’t what I thought you’d be.”
Walter shifted uncomfortably in his chair and remained silent.
“There’s danger in lots of things, Uncle Walter. But if you give up on adventure then you might as well be dead.”
There was silence in the room.
“I’m for adventure,” smiled Alice, “big time.”
“We were out in the forest today…with Cosmos Greene,” I said.
Uncle Walter looked surprised.
“There was a sasquatch sighting. But it was a hoax,” explained Alice.
“But then…” I hesitated.
“Then what?” asked Walter.
“I thought I saw something.”
“He knows he did,” explained Alice. “And he saw a footprint too, one that was way bigger and wider than the fake ones.”
“A bigger footprint?” asked Walter. He looked interested for a second, then dropped his voice again. “You were dreaming, Dylan. The sasquatch story is a folk tale. It’s for children. And even if it were real, getting anywhere near it would be incredibly dangerous.”
“Cosmos Greene says he thinks you’ve seen one,” said Alice.
Walter shifted uncomfortably in his chair again.
“No,” he murmured.
I stared at him until he looked up and met my eyes. “You told me once that you don’t like to lie.”
Walter sighed. “I came to Harrison Hot Springs to get away from things.”
“But you knew about the legend,” said Alice.
Walter didn’t answer.
“We want to see it!” continued Alice. “Come with us!”
Walter stood up. “This time I walked, all the way. Left my Hummer at home. So I can’t get you two home tonight like I should, not in the dark forest. Here’s what’s going to happen: I’m going to bed, and so are you two—there are some sleeping bags and pillows around here—and in the morning I’m taking you back to your parents.”
He didn’t sleep any better than we did. In the middle of the night, he seemed to have a nightmare because he cried out. Not long after that, he got up and sat by a window, gazing into the starlit sky. I came over and sat beside him.
“I’m looking for Poe,” he whispered, smiling slightly.
We sat in silence for a while.
“Lance Bennett was there today. He was the one who made up the hoax, for publicity I guess.”
“I’m not surprised. In the circus, you learn to read a face, right through to the soul.”
“After, he heard me telling Alice about the other one and the big footprint, and then he just tore off in his car talking on his cellphone.”
Walter looked alarmed. He stood up and started to pace. “He did?”
“Yeah, so what?”
“Nothing.”
He sat down again. An owl hooted somewhere in the darkness.
“You saw one, didn’t you?” I whispered. “You saw a sasquatch.”
I really wanted to know.
Alice crept out of her sleeping bag and crawled towards us. Walter wasn’t saying anything.
“We’re going after it,” said Alice.
I had made up my mind too. I wanted to look this Reptile in the face.
“We’re going, no matter what,” I echoed. “And if we go alone, who knows w
hat will happen to us? We need you, Uncle Walter, to keep us alive. You have to come.”
He didn’t answer. But I could see he was thinking.
The next morning Walter had us up before the sun had even risen. He made us an amazing breakfast of pancakes with strawberries and whipped cream and maple syrup. I couldn’t understand how he came up with it all.
When we finished we all sat silently at the table for a few minutes.
Walter knew that he couldn’t force us to go back to our parents: couldn’t carry two fourteen year olds all the way back to Harrison Hot Springs, kicking and screaming. We had made it clear that we were heading into the forest after the sasquatch. But did he believe we’d do it? Would he come with us, or would he take the chance that we’d turn back after a while? Would Mom and Dad want him to abandon us?
I wondered what he had decided. And what was in his heart anyway? Was the spirit of adventure, the spirit that seemed to have died with his wife, still alive somewhere deep inside him?
“I think Lance Bennett believes you saw a sasquatch,” Walter said suddenly. “He must have seen the look in your eyes that I saw last night. His men made some pretty big footprints…and the one you saw was bigger. He knows you have no reason to lie.”
He paused.
“You know that stretch of land he has along the beach where he’s putting up his monster candy store and all the nonsense that goes with it?”
“Yes.”
“Word is he has five times as much property as that, all along the boardwalk. You think Harrison Hot Springs is a sasquatch place now?”
“Imagine if he could get an image of one!” I exclaimed, putting two and two together. “Or a video?”
“He’s thinking bigger than that,” said Walter darkly. “A man like Bennett could build an empire here.”
“What do you mean?”
“If you were him and you fell into some sort of reasonable lead that this creature existed, here’s what you might do: you might call some people, some expert people. Catching it is nearly impossible, so they hunt it for you, kill it, and drag it down out of the mountains. Then you have it stuffed and put on display near the beach—and you own this town, and half the tourism dollars in the best tourist province in Canada, the most beautiful place in North America. You would have solved one of the greatest mysteries in the world and have proof of it in flesh and blood…and the world would beat a path to your big, shiny door.”
It made perfect sense. Just filming a sasquatch wouldn’t be enough for a guy like Lance; maybe people wouldn’t believe him, maybe it would get away….
“Bennett was likely calling people in Vancouver on his cell.” Uncle Walter paused. “Someone has to stop them.” His voice was rising.
This sounded promising.
“Do you think Dylan really saw one?” asked Alice. Walter shifted his eyes back and forth, looking at us. Slowly his face lit up with an energy I had never seen before. It must have been the sort of glow that came over him when he walked the high wire.
“Which direction was the footprint pointing? The sun would be in the west.”
“Uh,” I thought back, “uh, west then, I guess…northwest.”
“If it’s real, then I know where it’s going,” said Walter to himself. He smiled. “We could track it.”
“We?” I asked. My heart leapt. What was he saying? “Well,” said Uncle Walter, “I can’t let you guys have all the fun.”
Alice started jumping up and down like a kid. “Where’s it going?” she cried.
“Towards Hell’s Gate Canyon,” replied Walter, his eyes narrowing, “where the water roars down the Fraser River like the devil has churned it, where Indigenous people and early European explorers lost their lives…where, long ago, I saw a sasquatch.”
A shiver went through me.
“It was about twenty years ago, in circus days…when I was a star. I used to travel all around the world. I’d look for things to exhibit. They were all fakes. But the sasquatch, that was different. I believed it was true. And I was desperate to find one. Then one night near Hell’s Gate Canyon I came to a clearing in the woods and I saw something in the distance—big and black, hands like a giant’s—with its back to me, eating leaves off a tree. It turned and saw me, and ran. I tried to convince myself that I was dreaming. But I know what I saw. I kept trying to find the time to get back here. I couldn’t. Then, when the accident happened, I stopped everything. After I retired, I moved here. I guess I just wanted to be close…to something amazing.”
Walter stood up.
“I’m not letting you go alone,” he announced. “I’m not missing this chance. And I’m not letting Lance Bennett kill anything!”
He reached behind his chair and grabbed two bulky items in each hand. He threw one at me and handed the other to Alice. He seemed to suddenly have incredible energy.
“You each need one of these,” he barked. They were backpacks. He must have packed them after he got up. They felt really light, and yet you could tell there was a lot of stuff crammed into them. Moments later, after we climbed out of the hideout, he had a big pack on his own back. He also had an old video camera, much smaller and nicer than Cosmos’s, slung over his shoulder and the binoculars around his neck, but as far as I could tell, not a single weapon, at least not visible. It was still very early. The sun, barely risen, was shining through the tops of the trees in thick rays.
“Uncle Walter,” I stopped him. “What about Mom and Dad?”
In the flurry of excitement I had somehow pushed them out of my thoughts. But now, as the crunch came, they were speeding back in. I was burning with guilt. I had no way to contact them. Mom and Dad were old fashioned; I wasn’t allowed to have my own cellphone yet. “Next year” they both promised. Alice didn’t seem to have one either, which I thought was kind of weird.
“Thought of that, believe me,” replied Walter, who was definitely not a cell sort of guy. “I’ll send a note to them somehow…today.”
“Good,” I said.
Alice and I turned and looked into the wilderness. I wondered if I had the guts to do this. But Uncle Walter was standing bolt upright, his chest out.
He took a deep breath.
“Let’s chase the dragon,” he said, and started walking into the woods.
12
After the Monster
First we had to track our way back to the spot where I had glimpsed that figure in the woods. Walter led the way and set a pretty fast pace. It didn’t seem to take any time at all. We moved swiftly along the forest floor, stepping over fallen logs, almost running in places, our feet crunching on the ground, and soon the fake sasquatch tracks appeared. Many of them had faded, but Walter barely looked at them anyway. He just kept moving forward like a bloodhound on a trail.
Alice and I knew we were at the right place the minute we arrived.
“Which way, Dylan?” asked my uncle. This was the old Walter Middy, the one I’d only seen glimpses of. He was excited. He looked ready for anything.
“Uh…” I moved slightly, over to the same spot where I’d been when I looked through the binoculars and caught sight of that ghostly form. “Right…there.”
I was pointing to an area about thirty metres away. The trees looked very dense. So dense, in fact, that I was a little worried: images seemed to poke out of the green darkness, as if a million eyes were looking our way, shadowy and leering. Had I imagined it? Walter led us directly to where that towering dark figure had been.
It didn’t take him long to find the bigger track…then he found more. He looked at them and nodded his head. Soon he noticed something else.
“You see this?” he asked, sounding excited.
He was holding a small tree in his hand. It was about the width of a man’s wrist. It was broken off about two metres from the ground, like it had been twisted.
“Everybod
y who has ever seriously searched for a sasquatch says they have a habit of grabbing trees and twisting them in their hands until they snap.”
“Why would they do that?” I asked. It seemed like a strange habit.
“No one is sure. Some people think they do it when they’re angry.”
Gulp.
“Let’s track this way,” said Walter, motioning away from both the spot where I’d seen the figure and the twisted-off tree. He sounded pleased.
For an instant, I felt the Dylan Maples of last week coming back. What if we actually got close? What if it turned on us? What would an eight-foot, nine-hundred-pound animal that breaks trees with one hand do with my neck if I came into his territory? It seemed to me that if sasquatches really existed, then they must be desperately, desperately anxious to evade people. Maybe one reason no one had ever caught one was that anyone who had come really close had, uh, disappeared in the woods.
“Do you really think he’s angry?”
“Who knows?”
I realized that I’d very quickly painted myself into a corner. It was like one of those dreams where you end up with no choices and everything is getting scarier by the second. I couldn’t go back. And Uncle Walter sure wasn’t going to stop now. We’d uncaged a lion. My only option was to plunge forward, help find whatever we were after, and then see if we could survive.
The forest looked pretty spooky. It was really damp where we were, with moss all over the ground and hanging from everything too. It was like a carpet, the greenest place I’d ever been, like someone had put a green tint over the world.
I kept seeing things in the forest. Bodies and faces darted here and there. Any second I expected something to scream and leap on us from the trees, or dart out from behind a huge stump. But nothing came our way. And Walter was finding more evidence. You could feel the excitement rising in his voice every time he spoke.
First there were other snapped-off trees, then more footprints, now heading westward towards the upper part of Harrison Lake. Whatever we were tracking was moving back in the general direction of the resort, but pointing slightly northward.
Now that I had the chance to look closely at these tracks, I could really tell that they were different from the footprints the sumo wrestlers had made. They were deep, with clear toe marks like Cosmos’s casts, and so incredibly wide!
Monster in the Mountains Page 8