The Big Game

by Sarah Jaune

  He was kind of cute, in that baby sort of way. “Do you want me to take him?”

  Before she could answer, the baby, who wasn’t like a human baby, swung an arm around Eli’s and nimbly climbed up onto Eli’s back.

  “Well,” Ivy said as she shook out her arms. “If I’d known he could do that, this would have been easier.”

  The baby Sasquatch held firmly to Eli’s back like a very warm, heavy backpack. He laughed and glanced over his shoulder. “This is Yul’s baby?”

  “Yeah, hers and Pak’s,” Ivy confirmed. “Were you guys okay last night?”

  “Fine,” Eli shrugged as they moved around to the fire. The baby’s fingers were long and dug into his shoulders, holding tight. He wasn’t heavy for Eli, but he knew that the baby still weighed a good forty pounds or more. “Actually, I just interrupted a meeting with—”

  A bellow of rage blew through the camp as everyone jumped and spun. Instinctively, Eli braced the baby as he turned to see the furious Pak barreling towards him with murder in his eyes.

  Eli’s stunned disbelief was quickly replaced by the realization that he had Pak’s son on his back and that Pak was going to tear him limb from limb. There was no good way out of this, plus the baby had frozen in fear at the sound from his father and wasn’t holding on as well. Moving at super speed, Eli swung the baby around to his front and shot his hand out to slow the gigantic Sasquatch down. He didn’t put up a wall. He would never put up a wall, but in halting his momentum, it gave Eli time to act.

  Pak stumbled under the assault of the magic and slowed to a walk when Eli set the baby down on his legs. He held his hand for a moment until Eli was sure he was stable, then the baby scampered over to his father. Eli smiled and took a step back, holding out his hands for peace as Pak plucked the baby up. “I won’t hurt him,” Eli promised easily. “He wanted me to hold him.”

  Ivy shifted nervously next to him. “It was my fault. Yul asked me to bring him out, and he jumped from me to Eli.”

  Yul came out of their hut a second later and barked something at her husband. He answered back, looking more contrite than Eli would have imagined. Her dark eyes flashed in warning and temper as she pointed over to them. Pak nodded and stomped off, taking his son with him.

  “You’re going to be a great team,” Ivy said dryly as she stared after Pak. “I can already tell.”

  “I dunno why he distrusts me,” Eli admitted quietly. “I didn’t even fight when they snatched us in the forest.”

  Ivy’s expression turned to bemusement. “I think he can sense your power. It’s probably threatening to him.”

  That seemed stupid, but he didn’t say anything. He was a runt compared to the huge Sasquatch.

  She read his skepticism easily. “In his small pod, he was probably very secure, but here he’s holding onto power by the tips of his fingers.”

  “Oh,” Eli said shortly. He understood that. Insecurity made people irrational, hot-headed, and sometimes unpredictable. If Pak had felt secure, he wouldn’t have felt the need to try to silence Eli. “But that’s only if he can sense my magic like you can. Otherwise I’d just be a jumble of powers.”

  “I don’t know if you’re serious or not, but from the look on your face, I think you are,” she told him with a shake of her head. “You’re unbelievable, Elijah. You really are.”

  With that, she walked away.

  He wanted to shout after her, to ask what she meant by that, but after a moment’s reflection, decided to let it go.

  They had bigger things to worry about.

  As it turned out, Pak wasn’t a pain to deal with. Once they were on the trail headed for the first river that would need to be dealt with, Pak basically ignored him in favor of Pablo.

  “I’m the alpha,” Pablo explained with a chuckle.

  “I’m not sure I buy that,” Oliver told him with a straight face.

  “Let me ground you and we’ll find out,” Pablo offered back as Eli and Ivy laughed.

  It was a long, hard trek through thick forests, much like they’d been doing for the past several days. This time, however, the pod of male Bigfoot knew exactly where they were going, and knew how to navigate through the worst. They didn’t leave many footprints. It was an impressive sight to Eli, who watched them take steps to never leave tracks. When they stopped for a water break at a place where Ivy found a small hidden pocket that she could pull from the ground, Eli asked one of the other males about it.

  This one, who was called Ban, seemed happy to talk to Eli. Talk wasn’t the right word, though. He gestured and drew pictures, but what he drew gave Eli a clear picture.

  In and around the forests were men. Human men. These men were the ones causing all of the problems, and Eli knew it was these men that they would have to stop. But for now, the Sasquatch didn’t want them to know where they were. More importantly, Eli was sure, they didn’t want to be tracked to their encampment where the females and younglings stayed behind.

  “We aren’t far,” Ivy said just as the sun hit the highest point in the sky. “I can feel the water now.”

  “Are you feeling any better?” Eli asked curiously as they walked side by side, sometimes hopping from rocks like the Sasquatch did.

  She nodded gratefully. “The closer we get to the water, the better I feel. It’s weird, too, because in the desert I didn’t feel off, but I think that’s because it’s how it’s supposed to be. The world was in balance there. Here it has been off.”

  They reached the destroyed valley fifteen minutes later. Eli stared in horror at the scene before him. Old, ancient trees were ripped from their roots, blown by a blast of what he assumed was dynamite. On one side of the blast, the right side, a river flowed peacefully, meandering away from them in an unnatural arc. To the left were dying plants, ruined river beds, and the bodies of decaying fish that stank so badly Eli had to fight not to cover his nose.

  “This is…” Ivy began, but she shook her head as she took a step towards the wreckage. “What a monster.”

  Eli couldn’t have agreed more. “How do we fix this?”

  “Give… give me a minute,” she said as she reached for his hand. He linked their fingers and ignored the knowing stare of his annoying brother. Ivy guided him closer as the Bigfoot hung back towards the edge of the forest, at least the parts that hadn’t been demolished.

  She walked with him, down the banks and stared up at the wall of mud, rocks, and debris. She pointed to the banks on the other side. “They had bulldozers in here, or something. Can you see the tracks?”

  “Yeah,” Eli confirmed as he waited for her judgment. She’d know, better than any of them, how to get the water flowing a different way.

  Ivy sucked in a deep breath and said, after a minute’s contemplation, “We need to breech this part of the wall first.”

  “What will happen then?” Eli probed.

  “I’ll pull the water down this way,” she told him as she swept her hand along the path of the old river. “From there we’ll need to move the dirt back up to the new path and block the new river. The bank will be a pain to build up. You might need help with this, but the problem becomes getting back over the river if we do this. We might not be able to get back if there isn’t any sort of land bridge.”

  Eli shrugged that off. “I can always move a couple of big trees so that we can walk across.”

  Ivy opened her mouth, possibly to protest, then she laughed. “You’re right. That’s an easy fix, but let’s do that first a bit upstream.”

  He didn’t question her, nor did any of the Sasquatch as she had Eli magically move one of the huge, ancient Redwoods across the stream about fifty feet up from the blast sight. He’d known her long enough to know that she’d have a reason, and he trusted her. Eli moved the log with magic, lifting the immensely heavy log up to float the short distance. He didn’t rush it. He didn’t want to use more of his magic than he needed to, but this was one of the heaviest things he’d ever attempted to lift, and the job wasn’t
even started.

  “Okay,” he said with a pant like he’d actually physically lifted the log. Eli set it in place and climbed up to walk across to the other side. “It’s stable,” he told them.

  “If I fall,” Oliver yelled over to him, “I am never letting you live it down.”

  “That’s only a problem if you make it,” Eli called back to him.

  Oliver told Eli exactly what he thought of him with a simple hand gesture. Pablo ignored them as he and Ivy crossed next. Pak followed behind, along with two of the other males.

  Unbelievably, since Pak had been so hostile towards Eli, the alpha waited patiently for Ivy to explain her plan.

  Oliver added a twist that would work even better. “I can freeze the water to dam it up while they work on a new bank on the other side.”

  “That is brilliant,” Ivy agreed quickly.

  The whole thing was like an upside down ‘y’ or a sideways ‘t’ and it left Eli feeling like they’d done this before, which he knew they had. That time, though, it had been with an underground water source that he couldn’t see. Now he could see what was happening. The water had gone in a straight line, but Ivy’s father had diverted it sideways to flow to his manmade lake. It was an impressive bit of engineering, but it was also wrong.

  They didn’t waste time. Eli moved huge, heavy rocks over to the bank on their side along with the Bigfoot. As soon as they had a big enough pile, Ivy pointed out the spot she wanted Eli to move. “Right there in the middle where that branch is sticking up, but just a bit to the left. I want it to be closer to the opposite bank.”

  Eli zeroed in on the spot she wanted and focused hard on the rock. He felt it bend to his will, to slide with the magic until it tumbled down onto the dry side of the old river. Eli didn’t hesitate to press his advantage. He kept pushing and prodding until it popped with an audible gush and a geyser of water shot out, pulling more rock and dirt along with it. He grinned and stood back for Oliver.

  Oliver held out his hands and slowly built an ice wall along the path that led to the lake. He didn’t push it which Eli was thankful for. If they were going to get the dam built behind the ice wall they’d need Oliver to hold his magic in place while the water sloshed along on the other side, trying to melt the ice.

  “It looks good,” Pablo told Oliver while Ivy focused on keeping the water flowing downstream. Eli wasn’t needed anymore for that part. Water was so powerful a shaper of the land that once it had its weakness, it would continue to erode until there was nothing left of what the Overseer had done.

  Eli kept his eyes on the ice wall and the second it was long enough for the first rock to be moved into place, Eli moved it to shore up what Oliver had done. Water still rushed around the wall towards the lake, but slowly, painfully slowly, they carved away at the river. Every three feet that Oliver covered, Eli moved another rock. When one of the Sasquatch went to carry a rock, Pablo stopped him. “Let Eli do this. If something breaks loose, you could be killed.”

  It was enough to have them all waiting. The second Eli had the huge boulders in place, though, he motioned them forward. “Do you have it, Oliver?”

  “Yeah,” Oliver agreed evenly as his focus stayed on his frozen creation.

  Eli and the Sasquatch went to work on shoring up the river’s path. They piled more rocks in place while Eli pulled up dirt from upstream to stick into the cracks between the rocks. “I’m not sure this will hold,” he told Pablo.

  A massive explosion of water and rock boomed through the canyon around them as the dam Ivy had been working to bring down vaporized and rushed, along with a gush of water, downstream.

  Ivy sagged down to the ground on the grass bank and stared at what she’d done.

  “Are you okay?” Eli asked her quickly.

  She nodded. “Tell them to get back up on the bank. We’re going to see if this thing holds.”

  The Bigfoot retreated back and Oliver stopped his magic. The ice melted quickly, washing away. Ivy rose unsteadily to her feet and walked over to the new bank that blocked the other path to the lake. “It’s holding,” she told them quietly as she studied their handy work. “There are a few cracks, but that’s going to go away once the river’s water level settles down. It shouldn’t be as high as it is now, but I want to wait just to make sure.” He barely heard the words. They weren’t what stuck out to him. Instead, he heard her exhaustion.

  Eli edged closer to her and put an arm around her waist. She leaned into him and said sadly, “I really hate my father right now.”

  In all honesty, Eli couldn’t blame her. He hated the man as well, but for a lot more reasons than this stupid river.

  CHAPTER 21

  EXCUSES

  After an hour of watching the water flow, while the sun dipped lower in the sky, Ivy declared that it was going to hold. “We should go,” she told Pak.

  Pak pointed deeper into the forest, away from the encampment. His tough, dark features looked wary and pinched in concern.

  “You want to move onto the next river?” Pablo asked him curiously. “You don’t want to head back?”

  Grunt, and point.

  “Okay, then,” Pablo agreed evenly. “We’ll keep going.”

  They walked for three hours deep into woods where humans didn’t usually wander.

  “Where are we going to camp?” Oliver asked no one in particular. Eli had been wondering the same thing, and hadn’t been sorry that he wasn’t the one in charge of finding the place.

  Pak pointed ahead and then cupped his hands in an arch.

  “I think he means a cave,” Ivy told them, to which Pak nodded once, then continued on.

  It was fully dark before they reached the huge cave that nevertheless filled quickly when one stuck seven Bigfoot in it. It appeared to be one that had been inhabited by one of the smaller pods, though, because there were skins in the corner, and a fire ring already prepared.

  “It’s going to drizzle some tonight,” Ivy told Eli as she dropped down to the cave floor in exhaustion. “I’m glad to be under cover.”

  Eli opened his mouth to offer to help with something, but Pablo waved him off. “You three used a lot of magic today. Sit and rest. You need to be at your best tomorrow.”

  “I’m not arguing with that,” Oliver assured him as Pablo mimed to Pak that he was going out to hunt. Pak sent along one of the other Bigfoot to accompany him.

  They watched, in fascination, as the remaining Sasquatch built up the fire ring and used two stones that they struck together to make a spark. It took patience and teamwork, but they managed it in only a few minutes. Soon enough the fire was roaring and filling the space with heat and light.

  Eli sat between Oliver and Ivy and stared, practically mesmerized by the dancing flames. He was so tired he could have just curled up and slept right there. He was even too tired to be hungry.

  Ivy jumped next to him, and he turned to see her rubbing her eyes. “Sorry, fell asleep for a second.”

  “Go lay down,” he told her as he pointed to one of the fur pelts. “I’ll wake you to eat.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t want to sleep yet.”

  Pablo came back twenty minutes later with three deer between himself and the other Bigfoot.

  “How did you manage that?” Oliver asked in awe. “I thought they weren’t around.”

  “These three were easy to sniff out,” Pablo explained as they went to work gutting and skinning the meat. “I’ve been smelling more animals all day, the closer we were to the water.”

  Eli turned to ask Ivy about fishing, and found her sitting up with her head on her knees, fast asleep. He grinned.

  “She had a lot to do today,” Pablo said as he inclined his head in her direction. “Why don’t you move her over there to get some rest, and we’ll wake her up when dinner is ready.”

  He rose and plucked her up. She didn’t even stir as Eli gently set her on the slightly softer bed. Ivy curled into a ball and slept on.

  “I really wish I
could sleep like that,” Oliver admitted begrudgingly. “Mind you, if you ever carry me like that, Eli, I’ll beat you senseless.”

  “I’ll leave you to rot wherever you fall,” Eli assured him as he went to help skin their dinner. It was harder than it had been a few days before. He still thought of the snakes biting at him as he used a knife to open the carcass.

  The Bigfoot closest to him took the skin and began to scrape at the inside with a rock. The sound it made, the wet squelch, and scrape so unnerved Eli that he had to force himself to tune it out.