The Big Game

by Sarah Jaune

  “No,” Pablo answered quietly. “You and me. We need to talk.”

  They walked for close to thirty minutes, silently tracking through the forest as Pablo followed a scent that Eli couldn’t detect.

  “Moose,” Pablo grinned as they continued on. “Twenty feet away.”

  He nearly asked how they were going to take down a moose, since they were huge, but Eli’s stomach rolled as he realized what was going to happen. He spotted the animal through the trees and took the knife that Pablo held out.

  He saw his father mouth the words, “Right into the skull.”

  It was the fastest way. It was the most humane way. It was the shortest death. Eli held up the knife and lowered his hand under the knife until it floated at his eye level. He narrowed his eyes, focused on the moose’s head when it raised up to scent the air.

  He sent the knife flying.

  It was over in a second, and the moose dropped to the forest floor without knowing what had happened.

  Pablo put a hand on his shoulder. “I know that was hard.”

  “It’s over,” Eli shrugged it off, and wished it could be another way. “This is a lot of meat for us. It’s necessary.”

  “Still…” Pablo’s voice faded. “Before we head back, I want to explain about Ivy. They think you two are a couple.”

  Eli stared at his father blankly. “What?” he asked in astonishment.

  “They wouldn’t pick her up without your say-so because they think she’s yours,” his dad explained with a sigh.

  “I…” he was speechless. Stupefied. Horrified. “She’s not a possession, Dad! I can’t own her!”

  “I didn’t mean it like that,” Pablo countered immediately. “They think she’s your girlfriend, for lack of a better word. That gives her a certain status in the pod. They gave her a nice bed the first night because they wanted her help, but also to show their respect. You’ve seen how they are with their females. They’re very careful. Family is important to them. They just have a different way of looking at it than we do. They aren’t going to understand those differences, so I stopped trying to argue.”

  It left him feeling off balance and more than a little disconcerted. “But she’s not.” Then he remembered the pod in Yellowstone. “They did the same thing when we stopped before, the other pod I mean.”

  “Tell me exactly what happened,” Pablo said carefully as a muscle twitched near his eye.

  “I don’t know that I can explain it to you, but looking back I can see that they assumed the same,” Eli told him quickly. “They just left me to care for her. I...” he hesitated for a moment and wasn’t sure he wanted to explain it. But as he looked into his dad’s understanding eyes, he let it go. “They put us next to each other to sleep. I didn’t think of it as weird, because we were all sleeping in one place. They left me to care for her when she was sick. I just thought they were staying out of the way since we weren’t one of them.”

  “Maybe that was part of it, but I find it strange that this has happened, Eli,” Pablo said with a grimace. “You and Ivy are close. You’re good friends, and you seem to connect. It honestly surprises me that you two aren’t attached.”

  Eli shook his head. “I don’t see her that way. She doesn’t see me that way. She doesn’t get jealous when I have a date, and it’s the same in reverse. We’re just friends.”

  He felt like he’d been saying that a lot lately.

  “I understand if—”

  “You don’t understand anything!” Eli shot back as he turned away, inexplicably furious over the whole thing. “Ivy is… she’s…”

  Pablo moved behind him, and he felt his dad’s hand on his shoulders. “You want to protect her. She’s been through a lot. I get that, Eli, I really do. It took me forever to convince Mom I wasn’t going to hurt her.”

  “It’s not the same,” Eli reminded him as he picked out a leaf and stared hard at it, willing his mind not to drift to things he didn’t want to think about.

  Pablo turned him around and met his gaze. It startled Eli to realize that his dad wasn’t towering over him anymore. It seemed to strike Pablo at the same moment. “You’re getting tall.”

  “Hardly,” Eli grumbled as he flicked his eyes away. Unfortunately, he caught sight of the moose, which didn’t help settle him.

  “I need you to hear me, Elijah,” Pablo said firmly, in his most ‘dad’ of authoritative voices. Eli nodded and waited. “They value family. They think Ivy is your family. If you do not treat her well, or treat her in a manner that they expect, they will think badly of you. They evict their males who do not put the pod first. They probably won’t treat Ivy any differently, but I do not want to take that risk. Am I understood?”

  Eli swallowed hard at the spurt of panic and nodded. “I get it.”

  He did. He understood now why Ghan had been so accommodating to them. He saw clearly why things had gone the way they had. Eli had been free and relaxed with Ivy, the way that he struggled to be when around other people. They had a rhythm when it was just the two of them. It was something that the Bigfoot saw clearly, but interpreted incorrectly.

  “Good,” Pablo said with a final squeeze to his shoulders. “Now, let’s get this moose back so we can eat.”

  He didn’t carry the moose, mostly because it was filthy and Eli didn’t want any more dirt on him. Instead, he floated the dead creature back to the cave so it could be skinned and eaten.

  “Wow,” Oliver whistled when he saw it as they came up to the cave. “That’s massive.”

  Eli lowered his hands and the dead moose dropped quietly into the dirt. He saw Pak watching him, and a strange idea occurred to him. “Do you want my help in cleaning it?”

  Pak grunted and motioned for another of the Bigfoot to step to it.

  Understanding that he was dismissed, Eli ducked around everyone and moved over to Ivy.

  Her alert, green eyes met his, and he grinned in relief. “How long was I out?”

  “A while,” Eli told her as he dropped down next to her and felt her forehead again. “At least you aren’t sick or feverish this time. You moved that river and it did you in.”

  “I remember,” she said after a moment as her eyes flicked over to Oliver. Eli didn’t need to turn to know his brother was staring at them.

  Eli didn’t move back from her. “Ignore him,” he said under his breath. “I’m experimenting.”

  Her brows winged up in surprise as her lips twitched. “With what?”

  “Pablo has this theory,” he explained as he scooted close enough to put his arm around her. She didn’t resist, but neither did she relax. Eli met his brother’s calculating blue eyes and said, “Get lost, Ollie.”

  Oliver opened his mouth to likely tell him off, but Pablo appeared at that moment and dragged him away to help with the moose.

  “Seriously,” Ivy said as soon as Oliver was busy, even though he sent them annoyed glares. “What is going on?”

  “If Oliver and Pablo weren’t here, what would we be doing?” Eli asked her pointedly.

  Ivy turned her head and met his gaze levelly, their eyes only inches away. Then she sighed and put her cheek down on his shoulder. “I shouldn’t have tried to move the whole river. I think I’m so hungry that my head is hurting from it.”

  He hugged her close for a second, then reached for the pack that Oliver had been carrying and had left near Ivy. He pulled it open and retrieved some nuts they’d brought along. “It’s not much, but it will help you wait.”

  “Thanks,” she said as she dug into them.

  Eli knew that Pak was watching him before he even turned that way. He met the alpha’s dark eyes and saw that Pablo had been right. He saw exactly what he’d hoped to see when he’d sat down with Ivy. It was so strange, but it was clearly what he’d needed to do.

  Pak snorted and inclined his head. In approval. Then he went back to work.

  It all made sense now, even though it didn’t make sense in a human way. When Ghan had come to the cabin,
Eli had been out front. This time, when they’d been taken from the forest, he hadn’t placed himself between Ivy and danger. Pak didn’t see the fact that Ivy didn’t need him to protect her constantly. He saw it as a weakness on Eli’s part, a failure to put family first. Pak knew that Eli could take them down, but couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t use that to protect Ivy.

  He didn’t have any idea why the Sasquatch felt like they were a couple, but that wasn’t something Eli could change.

  “Why did Pak look at you like that?” Ivy questioned quietly, breaking into his thoughts.

  “He thinks we’re family,” Eli explained lightly. “He likes that I’m looking after you.”

  Ivy shook her head in bemusement. “Where do you get this stuff?”

  “I dunno,” Eli said heavily. “Dad suggested I change what I’m doing, which is basically what I’d do if he and Oliver weren’t here, and it seems to be working. Pak freaked when he saw me with his son, and I wondered why. The why is that if he sees me as a male that doesn’t value family, because I’m not treating you well, then I might harm his son.”

  Ivy’s mouth fell open. “Okay, that makes sense.” Her large, green eyes danced in merriment. “Too bad he couldn’t see you with tiny Lexi as she orders you about.”

  Eli grinned sheepishly.

  CHAPTER 23

  AN ITCH

  He stuck with Ivy for the rest of the evening and made a point to sleep next to her in the cave. Of course his dad and Oliver were right there as well, which further pleased the alpha. Oliver was still annoyed with him, but Eli didn’t care. His brother had started to say something just before they went to sleep that Eli was sure would have made him want to punch him, but Pablo kept Oliver in check with a quelling look.

  It hadn’t occurred to Eli before that point that he truly did treat Ivy differently when other people were around. Now, though, it seemed weird. He wasn’t ashamed of his friendship with her, so he didn’t know why he tried to hide how close they were.

  The next morning saw them trooping down to the river. This one had been blocked in the exact same manner as the first river, so they did the same thing that they had before. They gathered rocks to block the new river’s path, Ivy punctured the dam, and Oliver froze the river so it couldn’t continue down the new path towards the lake.

  “It was easier this time,” Eli mused as they started their hike back to the third river.

  “We’re getting to be experts at undoing the damage they did to the waterways,” Ivy replied bitterly as they walked together through the thick forest. “After we deal with the next river, we have to go after the men that are in the forest.”

  “We need to move fast,” Pablo said from behind them. “The men are less than two miles away. Their scent keeps getting stronger, but I think they’re on foot.”

  The big river, which they reached just before nightfall, was more of a challenge than Eli could have anticipated. Ivy’s father hadn’t just rerouted the river. That would have been too simple. Instead, he’d dug a canal that fed down into the valley.

  “He must have spent a year, and so much money doing this,” Ivy said as anger vibrated off of her. “What a complete—”

  Pablo coughed and Ivy shut her mouth. “We need to think this one through. He blocked the old river completely. It’s filled in for a good length of the river. I imagine he took the dirt from the canal and dumped it in the old riverbed.”

  “I agree,” Ivy replied miserably.

  “What about the underground reservoirs?” Oliver asked her. “We talked about that before for the lake. Can we do that with a river?”

  Ivy spread her hands wide. “I don’t know. There isn’t a reservoir right here, but even if there were, there are a lot of animals that depend on this water. We can’t take that away from them. What I’d like to do is dig out the old riverbed, or possibly reroute the new river back to the old one down before the fill dirt, but we do not have time for that.”

  “Only hours at most,” Pablo agreed as he turned to Pak. “Do you have any ideas?”

  The alpha studied the landscape, then grunted and bent to draw in the dirt. Eli watched as he drew a line, then veered it off like the current water flowed. Then he mounded dirt in the place of the old riverbed that was now fill dirt. Finally, he lightly drew his finger down through the mound, and then went back and did it again and again until all of the dirt representing the old riverbed was moved.

  Ivy knelt next to the depiction and stared at it for a long time. “What we could do is make a small channel through the fill dirt, and I could sit at the top and funnel a small amount of water down through it. I think what he’s saying is that we let the water do the rest to open the old river back up.”

  Pak grunted in agreement and bobbed his head.

  “We would still have a chute that leads off to the lake, though,” Eli pointed out.

  “If you pile up rocks there, then we can leave some Bigfoot here to push them in to block the channel,” Ivy suggested. “The good thing about this is that once it gets going, it will keep working away at the dirt. All of that dirt was loose from being dropped there. It should work free with the water running through.”

  Eli didn’t have a better plan, and this way Ivy wouldn’t have to put out a lot of magical energy to make it happen. “Okay, let’s do it.”

  They all set to work digging out a small trench through the fill dirt on the old riverbed. With several Sasquatch, and the four humans all working together, it was done in a matter of twenty minutes. They didn’t need anything spectacular, just a small foot deep trench. Ivy could do the rest.

  She settled herself down at the mouth of their trench, which was, unfortunately, a good two feet higher than the water level. Eli sat next to her on what he hoped would eventually be dirt that would wash away. “You ready for this?”

  “This is easy,” she assured him as she moved her fingers and sent a shower of water up the incline and let it flow down the trench. It went at about the rate of a bathtub turned on full, and at first the water just soaked into the dirt below them. Then slowly, unhurriedly, the water began to flow down the hill. They sat for two hours as Ivy carved away at the trench.

  “I think you guys should go after the humans soon,” Ivy said as they marched into their third hour. They’d moved back from their original spot because Ivy had told him that the dirt below them was more unstable due to the water saturation.

  Eli shook his head. “We’ll wait until you’re done.”

  She grinned, and her green eyes lit with amusement. “You don’t need me to take on a bunch of non-magical humans, Eli.”

  He opened his mouth to argue, but Pablo caught his attention. “The humans are closing in.”

  Eli wanted to say, ‘so deal with them,’ but thankfully he restrained himself.

  “I’m needed here,” Ivy pointed out. “You’re needed there.”

  Eli rose and hopped back up onto the bank. He faced Pak and asked, “Who is staying here?”

  Pak pointed to a group of three Sasquatch.

  He didn’t like it, but there wasn’t much of a choice. “Right, let’s go then.”

  They set off, all except Oliver who told them he’d rather stay and freeze anything that came close. Eli didn’t even bother to argue. His brother’s magic would be more useful to Ivy than to him, plus Oliver didn’t like to fight. It wasn’t his thing. He was trained to do it, but so were they all.

  Pablo took the lead, guiding them through the forest as they moved parallel to the old riverbed, but sticking with the trees to act as cover. They rounded a bend where rotting fish stank, but were slowly being washed down stream by the creek that Ivy was pushing through. His dad waved with his hand, motioning for them to get back. The Sasquatch blended into the trees, turning almost invisible, as he and Pablo took up a place behind two huge boulders. They had a nearly unobstructed view between the rocks towards the opposite shore of the old river.

  “It’s up to you,” Pablo told him in a whi
sper. “We need to subdue them without being seen. I don’t want them to identify us later.”

  But, no pressure.

  They waited as insects ticked the time and a few birds chirped in the trees overhead. The water picked up steadily with noticeable increases in the volume every few minutes. Eli wanted to laugh at just how easily Ivy was undoing all of her father’s hard work.

  They waited.

  “Minutes,” Pablo breathed the word out. “I can smell them. There are three.”

  They were some of the longest minutes of Eli’s life. Anxiety built with tension as he tried to think through what he wanted to do to restrain the men. They didn’t have rope. There was no way to secure them. He had to be in close to knock someone unconscious, which risked them seeing him.