Bigfoot

by David Michael Slater

Grandpa Joe turned to Maddie with hopeful eyes. She turned to her brothers to find them looking at her in exactly the same way.

  It took a few moments, but Maddie made a decision that changed the fate of the Mattigan family forever. “Yes,” she said to Betsy. “Grandpa Joe will be staying with us for a few days. We’re helping him prepare a surprise for our dad.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE BICKERING

  “Then I’ll just go right back upstairs and prepare a room for him,” Betsy said. And with that, she was gone again.

  “Bless you!” Grandpa Joe said to the kids. “If there was a page in my journal for angels, the three of you would be on it!”

  “It doesn’t mean we’re going to help you look for those silly monsters,” Maddie warned.

  “You wouldn’t deny an old man’s dying wish, would you?”

  “Dying!” the kids all gasped.

  “Soon,” Grandpa Joe said. “I don’t know how much time I have left, but I fear it’s not much. But never mind all that: It’s the Sasquatch we must find. The Bigfoot! It has been seen in the Northwest many, many times. I have tracked it here! To Forest Park! That is why I have come!”

  “We’ll help you get upstairs for some rest,” Maddie said, eyeballing her brothers into action. “That’s all we can promise right now.”

  Grandpa Joe nodded. Max and Theo helped him up, and then they got him to the second floor bedroom that Betsy was making up for him. Then they rushed back down to Maddie.

  That’s when the bickering began.

  “He’s awesome!” Theo proclaimed, already turning pages in the monster journal, looking for the Bigfoot entry.

  “He’s crazy,” was Maddie’s opinion.

  “He’s dying,” Max pointed out.

  “Wow!” Theo cried when he found the right page. “‘A giant, ape-like creature covered in thick hair!’ Kinda like us! Except for the giant part. And it’s here, in our forest!”

  “It’s our duty to carry out his last wish, even if he’s crazy,” Max argued. He didn’t believe for a second that any of the monsters in that journal were real, but since their dad wasn’t around, he couldn’t think of a better way to spend a Saturday afternoon than trying to find one. He felt the crouch coming on.

  “Teachable Moment,” Maddie declared. “It’s our duty to take care of him.”

  Theo kept staring at the Sasquatch entry. “It can weigh up to 500 pounds!” he read. “I want one!”

  “Teachable Moment yourself!” Max shot back. “Searching for Sasquatch would be taking care of him. It’s his final wish!”

  Maddie was exasperated. “We’re not running around the woods looking for Bigfoot!”

  “Why not?” Max demanded. “Just for fun! Just to make him feel better!”

  “Because — it’s — absurd! Besides, what would we tell Betsy? And Dad would — !”

  “He’ll leave if we don’t help!”

  “So?”

  “We need him to stay until Dad gets home! So they can make up!”

  This stumped Maddie. She wasn’t convinced, but that was the most genuinely thoughtful thing her brother had ever said. In fact, now that she thought about it, that might have been the first genuinely thoughtful thing he had ever —

  “Where’s Theo?” Max wondered, interrupting Maddie’s thoughts.

  “What do you mean?” Maddie asked. “Oh, no — ”

  The littlest Mattigan was no longer there., and the front door was wide open.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE WRONG HUNT

  Maddie sprinted to the door and desperately scanned the edge of the woods. “Theo!” she shouted. “Theo!” She looked around, unsure of what to do. “He took Grandpa Joe’s video camera,” she said, seeing it was gone. “And the monster journal! And I still have his phone!”

  Max opened the bench his brother had been hiding in. “The little bugger took his sandwich sack, too,” he said. “Spilled a bunch, though.”

  “Come on,” Maddie sighed. “We need to track him down before he gets lost.”

  “On it.” Max scooped up his spy kit and rushed straight outside.

  “Betsy!” Maddie shouted up to the second floor. “We’re — we’re going out for a walk in the woods! But not very far! Don’t worry! We do it all the time! We’ll be back soon!” Before Betsy could say anything — like no or that she wanted to go with them — Maddie hurried outside. Max was already crouching for the tree line. She sighed, then set off after him.

  The Mattigan kids knew the woods around their house very well, since they played there almost every day in the summertime. Maddie and Max sprinted up and down their familiar trails, calling their brother’s name. Max scanned for Theo with his spy-nocular, but soon enough, it became clear that Theo had gone farther into the woods than he was allowed.

  Tears filled Maddie’s eyes as she and Max left the trails and wove through the trees, jumping over fallen branches and shoving aside bushes. It had been her decision to let Grandpa Joe stay. She shouldn’t have let her brothers even consider going on such a ridiculous wild goose chase. And now, her baby brother was gone. She would never, ever be able to face their father if anything happened to Theo.

  Up ahead, Max suddenly stopped running. “Keep going!” Maddie yelled. “We have to — !”

  But now Max was kneeling down with his magnifying glass, looking at something on the ground. Maddie stopped when she reached him, panting. “What is it?” she asked, trying to catch her breath. “Did you find some kind of clue?”

  Max picked something up and showed it to her. “A bite-sized bit of peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich,” he said.

  “He’s eating even while wandering the woods in search of Sasquatch?”

  “Look!” Max hurried a few paces ahead and knelt down again. He’d spotted another sandwich bit. He stood up with it. “What’s that kooky kid doing?” he asked, turning back to Maddie. “Maybe there’s a hole in his bag.”

  For a moment, he and his sister just stared at each other, wondering. Then they got it.

  “A trail of breadcrumbs!” they cried.

  “It’s from Hansel and Gretel!” Max realized. “Theo’s leaving a trail so he can find his way back!” Max was incredibly relieved, because even though he loved a good spy search, he didn’t love a good spy search for a lost little brother.

  “But this is the woods!” Maddie complained. “Real woods, not fairy tale woods!” The excitement of solving the mini-mystery had worn off almost immediately. “There are animals out here! Doesn’t he realize his trail is going to be eaten?”

  Max and Maddie knew they had to hurry, so they searched wildly for more sandwich bits. Fortunately, they weren’t hard to find. The little chunks created a long, zigzagging path through the trees. Max led the way in his crouch, following the trail.

  At the top of a steep hill, they finally spotted their brother. He was at the bottom on the other side, standing still as a statue in a small clearing.

  “Theo!” Maddie called, but his back was turned, and he didn’t react. “Theo!”

  “If that’s your real name!”

  “I’m sure he can hear us,” Maddie said. “He’s just being stubborn. Stay right there!” she hollered to Theo, wishing she could Eyeball the little chump. “We’re coming to get you!”

  Theo still didn’t react. He was just standing there like he’d been turned to stone, looking at his feet. Actually, they realized as they picked their way down the hill, he was pointing Grandpa Joe’s video camera at his feet.

  “He probably found some disgusting bug or something,” Maddie guessed. When they reached the little troublemaker, she grabbed the camera out of his hand and put its strap over her head. Then she launched right into Lecture Mode. “Teachable Moment, Theo Mattigan!” she ranted. “You had us scared to death! Do you know how worried we were? Who do you think you are, going off all by yourself like that? Do you realize what could have happened to — ?”

  “Uh, Maddie?” Max interrupted.

>   “What!”

  “Look.”

  Max was pointing to the ground around Theo’s feet, at the same thing Theo hadn’t stopped staring at even after his camera was snatched away.

  “Crikey,” Maddie said.

  Theo was standing in a gigantic footprint.

  CHAPTER SIX

  EVIDENCE

  “Is that what it looks like?” Maddie whispered. “It can’t be.”

  “Are there any more?” Max asked, whispering, too.

  Theo pointed. There were lots of gigantic footprints — lots and lots of them. They were all over the little clearing.

  “It just can’t be,” Maddie whispered again. But there they were, in plain sight: footprints several times too large to be human. Maddie wasn’t ready to believe her own eyes, so she turned back to Theo. “Don’t you realize that animals will eat your sandwich bits?” she asked, already forgetting the urge to keep her voice down. “If they’re gone, who knows how long it’ll take us to find our way back!”

  Theo interrupted — by handing Maddie the monster journal, which was folded over at the Sasquatch page. “Teachable Moment,” he said, pointing to something on one of the pages without looking away from the footprint.

  “The best evidence of Sasquatch activity is large footprints,” Maddie read. “But there are other signs. The most important is that normal wildlife activity in the area will cease. Animals will have been scared away”.

  Max and Maddie looked around, listening hard. The woods were silent.

  “I don’t think we’ve seen any animals,” Max said. “Have we?”

  “I’m not sure,” Maddie admitted. “I don’t think I have. But that doesn’t actually mean — ”

  “Shhh,” Theo said.

  All three kids went quiet again, listening even harder. Max scanned the area with his spy-nocular.

  They heard something. A rustling.

  “Video camera,” Theo whispered.

  Maddie, her heart suddenly pounding, lifted the camera, which was still on, and pointed it briefly at the footprint he was standing in. Then she swept it over the ground around them to get the others. “I really can’t believe I’m saying this,” she whispered into the microphone, “but we seem to have discovered a whole bunch of Sasquatch footprints. They’re enormous! But I’m positive there’s a logical explanation for — ”

  “Shhh!”

  “Theo,” Maddie said, filming the tree line now, “we need to think this through. Like Dad always says, things aren’t always what they appear — ”

  “Shhh!”

  All three kids went silent one more time. Max scanned. Maddie filmed, looking for the logical explanation she was sure they’d find, if they would just calm down.

  Suddenly, they heard loud crunching in the underbrush.

  And then they saw it.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE CHASE

  “SASQUAAAAATCH!” Max screamed. He didn’t mean to — it just slipped out. Everyone saw it: a furry head in the distance, just visible through the screen of branches and leaves.

  But now it was moving away from them — fast.

  All at once, the three Mattigan kids lost their minds. Or showed their true colors. Or both.

  Whatever the case, they chased after it.

  Maddie took the lead. She was the fastest and had the camera, which she aimed at the bobbing head that sporadically appeared and disappeared from her line of sight.

  Max was in hot pursuit behind Maddie, and Theo did his best to keep up with him.

  At one point, Maddie lost sight of the furry figure altogether.

  The kids stopped to catch their breath.

  “Dad is going to be so happy!” Max panted, his hands on his knees. “We’re gonna catch a Sasquatch for him, and that’s gonna disprove the biggest lie in his life — that his father doesn’t love him!”

  “That way!” Theo screamed when a rustle sounded from their left.

  And they were off again.

  All three Mattigans got scraped and bruised barging through the brush. Maddie dropped the camera once, but luckily it only fell against her chest. Max dropped his spy kit and had to stop to pick it back up. Theo tripped and fell several times — though he never came close to losing hold of his sandwich sack.

  The three of them ran in frantic pursuit of that bobbing head of hair. But they just couldn’t catch up to it, and eventually they grew too tired to continue. Finally, they gave up, collapsing onto a pile of soft green leaves. The trio lay there until they recovered enough to sit up and look at each other.

  They grinned.

  “Did you get it?” Max asked Maddie. “Tell me you got it.”

  The boys gathered round as Maddie played the footage back. It was hard to see anything clearly with the camera shaking like crazy, but the hairy head was, at times, visible — sort of.

  “Not very convincing,” Maddie concluded.

  “I’m convinced!”

  “You can’t be convinced without convincing proof, Theo. Dad has told you that a million times. Major Teachable — ”

  “Humph! On yumpf!”

  “Kids,” Maddie sighed.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Max said. “Bigfoot is here — in Forest Park. And we’re going to find him.”

  “Tomorrow,” Maddie told him. “It’s going to get dark soon, and Betsy is probably freaking out right now. And I’m not even sure where we are. If we really think we saw — ”

  “We saw!” the Mattigan boys insisted.

  “Okay,” Maddie allowed. “Okay. But we need to go home and come up with a plan, a real, thoughtful, organized plan. We need to sleep on it.” She always thought more clearly after a good night’s rest.

  “How will we find our way back here?” Max asked. Then he and Maddie turned to their little brother. “Theo?” they prompted.

  “If that’s my real name!” Theo said, beating Max to the punch. He took a sandwich out of his sack and started tearing off bits of it.

  The kids immediately began picking their way back through the woods, leaving a long trail of peanut-butter-and-banana bits behind them. It took almost an hour, but just as it was starting to get dark, they stumbled on Theo’s first trail and followed it back to the mansion.

  Despite how tired they were, the kids ran up onto the porch and then into the house. They sprinted straight up to Grandpa Joe’s room, where they found him awake, but looking drained. He was sweating as profusely as they were, if not worse.

  “We saw it!” Theo blurted. “We chased it! We saw it, and we chased it all over the place!”

  Grandpa Joe’s grin was so big that it made all three Mattigans smile right along with him. “Did you — did you — the camera?” he croaked.

  “We got some shots of his head,” Maddie said. “No real proof — but we’re going to make a new plan in the morning. Are — are you okay?”

  “Yes, dear. Just running a slight fever — nothing to worry about. Please, tell me more.”

  “We’ll find him,” Max promised. “And we’ll show Dad when he gets home. And you’ll be friends again.”

  “Bless you children,” Grandpa Joe said. “Do you think you could leave the camera with me? I would so dearly love to see what you saw.”

  “Of course,” Maddie said, handing it over. “It’s your camera, after all. I just wish the footage was better.”

  “No matter,” Grandpa Joe said. “It sounds wonderfully promising.”

  “We’d better go make sure Betsy knows we’re okay,” Maddie said, certain their sitter must be furious with them by now. “We’ll see you in the morning, okay?”

  “Actually, kids,” Grandpa Joe said. “Betsy left.”

  “She left?” all three kids asked, unsure they’d heard correctly.

  “She got an emergency call from another family she sits for,” Grandpa Joe explained. “Of course she said she was booked, but I told her that I was perfectly capable of watching you. I promised her I’d be feeling much better by morning, so she
took the other job. They were really quite desperate.”

  The kids looked at each other, each thinking the exact same thing: their search for the Sasquatch would be much easier now.

  “Our search for the Sasquatch will be much easier now,” Grandpa Joe said.

  “True story!” the kids all agreed.

  “Good night, then, my angels,” said Grandpa Joe. “We’ll get on it first thing in the morning.”

  “Good night, Grandpa Joe.”

  The kids slipped out of the room. In the hall, they looked at one another in a way they never had before. Then they all hugged. It was a first. Then they headed off to bed.

  Even though it was barely eight o’clock, the Mattigan kids were asleep almost before their heads hit their pillows.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  BIG-TIME TROUBLE

  Maddie woke up the next morning and looked at her clock, amazed to see how long she’d slept in. It was almost eleven o’clock. She found her brothers in Max’s room, hunkered down on the floor in the midst of his piles of books. Max’s prized possessions were always spilling off his bookshelves and lying all over — everything. He and Theo had made some space for themselves to pore over a map of the woods that they’d drawn. They were making plans for a hunt.

  “I’ll go check on Grandpa Joe,” Maddie told them, then headed to his room.

  Max and Theo continued swapping theories about where Bigfoot’s nest would be. They found some helpful information in the journal. It said Sasquatches would look to bed down in hidden gaps in an area’s densest growth.

  “Max! Theo!” Maddie called. “Come quick!”

  The boys jumped up and ran.

  “Is he okay?” Max cried when they burst into Grandpa Joe’s room.

  Maddie was just standing there, looking worried. “He’s gone!” she cried.

  “What do you mean he’s gone?” Max asked. The bed was empty and unmade, but that didn’t seem like a big deal. The bathroom door was open, though, and he could see that was empty, too.

  “I don’t understand,” Maddie said, mostly to herself. “I checked around the whole floor — downstairs, too. Why would he leave without telling us?”