The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac

by Sharma Shields

  Finally, it was Ginger’s turn. She was one of the youngest performers, too young yet to read or even learn a real song, but the crowd applauded her anyway. The teacher came onstage and informed them that Ginger would be performing a very short piece, called “Dad,” in which she played only the D and A notes for about one minute. She stood at the edge of the stage for a moment, looking out and, finding her parents in the crowd, happily waving. Eli and Vanessa waved proudly back at her.

  “She is too precious,” the wife said to them approvingly, and Eli saw that his daughter’s sweet goodness had restored their standing in the world.

  Her performance began, and Eli noticed that his thighs were sweating horribly, droplets of sweat running from the backs of his knees, behind his trousers, and into his socks. He tried to open up the folded coat a little to allow better air circulation, but in the attempt he unfolded it too wide and the couple beside them gasped, catching sight of the menacing device and its contents.

  “My God,” the dentist said to his wife. “He’s got a goddamn weapon in there. It’s not a bone at all. Just a weapon.”

  The dentist’s wife hushed him. “Christopher,” she said. “The children.”

  The dentist scowled for a moment, crossing his arms over his chest. His beeper sounded. He checked the number, resettled it into the back of his waistband, and re-crossed his arms. Then, after a bit more of listening to Ginger play, he stood and shuffled away from them.

  “Excuse me,” he said, as people slanted their knees, making room for his passage. “Sorry. I have to make a phone call.”

  A few moments later he returned, taking his wife by the elbow and pulling her to her feet.

  “Nice to see you,” Vanessa whispered, and the woman bade her a friendly goodbye. The dentist kept his eyes averted, tugging his wife along.

  “Must have been an important call,” Vanessa whispered to Eli, and he shrugged indifferently.

  Ginger had finished playing. They whistled and cheered for her, Eli loudest of all.

  It wasn’t a bad evening. Eli felt fine as they left the church and filed outside with the other parents and children. Ginger came to them and accepted their congratulations and hugs. Eli had to set his trap down on the sidewalk to hug her, but he did so willingly.

  “Eli,” Vanessa said then, her tone tight. “I think this man would like to speak to you.”

  Eli turned. A policeman stood at Vanessa’s side.

  “We received a call about a weapon,” the officer said. “Would you like to show me what’s in that jacket?” He pointed at the trap, where it sat on the sidewalk.

  “It’s nothing,” Eli said. He lifted the trap and opened his jacket, presenting it to the officer, who wrinkled his brow in confusion. “It’s not a weapon at all. It’s a trap. See this bone? I’m a scientist, and this bone is very important.”

  “I wonder if you shouldn’t hand it over to the authorities,” the officer said.

  “I am the authority here,” Eli said. “I’m a scientist. This is what I do for a living.”

  “That trap is illegal in this state, you know.”

  “I didn’t set the trap,” Eli said. “I only found it. Besides, it was in Idaho, not in Washington.”

  The officer sucked on his teeth. He stared off into the cloudless sky for a moment, thinking, or pretending to think, very hard. “I’m gonna let you go with a warning. But next time you want to frighten a church full of kids, you’re gonna have to answer to moi.”

  “Okay. Yes, I see. Thank you, Officer.”

  The officer looked over at Vanessa and Ginger, who were playing hopscotch off to the side of the parking lot. Ginger threw a stick and then bounded—one leg, two legs, one, two, bend, pluck!—and the officer softened and said, “Cute kid.”

  “Thank you. Yes. Thanks.”

  Eli was angry with Ginger. It was an irrational anger, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that her recital had dampened a triumphant day. Why did children always force themselves into the center of everyone’s attention? Why did they demand the sum total of one’s affections and abilities? Sometimes he wondered why he’d agreed to another child, when he’d known how much work it would be.

  He forced himself to smile as he approached his wife and daughter.

  “Ready to go?” Vanessa asked, and Eli reminded her that he had his own car and that he planned to stop by the office so that he could lock the trap and the metatarsus safely into it for the night.

  Vanessa looked ready to argue with him, but she stopped herself and then said, a little petulantly, “Fine. Whatever. As though it hasn’t caused enough trouble tonight. We’ll save you some pizza,” and Ginger shrieked in pleasure at the word pizza and skipped eagerly over to Vanessa’s car.

  Eli, frustrated, guilty, returned to his own car.

  He drove with the trap in the passenger seat beside him. God, was he insane? Everyone else seemed to think so. How many years had passed since he’d seen Mr. Krantz? He remembered it all so clearly: the hulking shoulders; the tufts of reeking hair; the cold, simian eyes. But doubt ate away at him, nonetheless. How was it that he had been the only witness to Agnes’s lover? How was it that even Eli’s own father could never bring himself to believe his son’s testimony, would assume only that Eli was an imaginative and traumatized little boy? What was true? It was quite possible, as the family doctor had said, that he had made the whole thing up, an elaborate fantasy that deadened the pain of abandonment.

  “To you,” the doctor had said, “it is very real. But, I assure you, it’s not real.”

  Couldn’t that explain life in general?

  Because, look, there is the bone! Proof! Lying right there! As clear as day!

  But other voices spoke to him, too. It belongs to a man, stupid, a man with a hereditary disease such as Marfan syndrome. It belongs to a bear. It is purely faked evidence, not even real bone.

  You were searching, endlessly, for this one thing, Eli told himself. And your mind cracked and then …

  Eli stopped himself. He had reached the SNaRL office. He unlocked the door and went inside, feeling numb. The lights were off. It was cool and quiet. It was peaceful.

  He put the bone, snare trap and all, in the cooler in his office, and before he locked the cooler for the night, he stood over it and looked down into it and saw reflected in the clean metal the hazy outline of his own face.

  The next day would be a flurry of excitement around the office. The trap would be opened, evidence would be carefully examined and reported, news media would be contacted, funding would begin pouring in from intrigued parties, and the doubting Thomases—far from being silenced—would cry foul.

  But for now the world was quiet and waiting. There was a patience in the air that was mimicked by the hum of the cooler, and Eli tried to enjoy it. He locked up the office and headed home, wishing only to be left alone, wanting to see no one, especially not his wife and his sensitive young daughter, who invested so much in him emotionally. He was drained.

  When he entered the house, Ginger was waiting for him. He could not have been more disappointed to see someone. She sat on the couch in a matchlessly bright mood.

  “Come read with me, Daddy,” she said, and patted the sofa violently beside her so that a sparkling flower of dust bloomed at her side.

  Eli wanted a drink. He wanted to take a long walk. He wanted to sink into his own dark heart, to shutter himself up with his hope and his exhaustion.

  He opened his mouth to tell her, Daddy’s exhausted, sweetheart. Another time.

  But then he looked at her, this little fragile creature, really looked at her, and he found himself moved by her wide, pleading eyes, which had already begun to glisten with fresh tears. He saw, horribly, that her hurt and her hope could be as wide and oceanic as his own.

  “Okay, sweetie,” he said, and then watched with breathless pleasure as her mercurial face lifted skyward, so easily infused with joy.

  Ginger was, Eli acknowledged, the most wonderful thing he�
�d ever seen. She put even Mr. Krantz to shame.

  The good doctor set his own longings aside, hanging them up with his coat in the hallway closet.

  He sat down next to his daughter.

  He took up the book she shoved at him, a boring tome about a family of pigs, and he began to read.

  1980

  THE MOUNTAIN

  It was a lovely May morning in the Selkirks, an hour or so after sunrise. Eli parked his wife’s beat-up old sedan in the small town of Rathdrum, next to Lakeland High School’s modest football field. The hiking trail threaded from the outskirts of town up Rathdrum Mountain, overlooking Highway 41. The woods smelled of lilac and water, fresh and still cold. Eli hiked away from town, uphill and then down and then up again. The trees swallowed up any signs of human life, but Eli could still hear a plane overhead, could make out the distant hum of the highway and the freeway to the south.

  He was sure he was alone, but he was not.

  * * *

  AGNES ROEBUCK, WHO now called herself Agnes Krantz, recognized her son immediately.

  She was returning to the shack from the creek bed, where she had enjoyed a zesty, teeth-clattering bath. Her clothes were over one arm and she held her tattered shoes in her left hand. She was an animal walking in the forest now, as quiet as a young elk—she moved silently, unseen, stepping with care but without being conscious of it.

  Mr. Krantz was off on one of his expeditions, gathering food. Sometimes he would disappear for days, but usually he returned within a few hours. In the old days, he would gesture lustily for her to remove her clothes. The hunt excited him. He didn’t make these urgent requests of her any longer; she had changed too much, and he had perhaps grown bored with her, but still he was enthusiastic about sharing his harvested goods. He would take her hand and drag her to the pile of stuff, gesturing at it excitedly, and she always made sure to thank him profusely. She truly was grateful. He returned with assortments of food, never paid for, only taken or stolen. Potatoes, berries, fresh fish (trout, usually, but sometimes, if they were lucky, a fat pink salmon), groundhogs, rotting loaves of bread, bleating lambs—once, to her horror, a large, handsome horse. She dressed and ate almost all that he brought to her, but the horse she refused. She released it with a spank on its rump the moment her husband fell asleep. When he awoke and found the horse missing, he was angry. He punished her by keeping his back to her for two days, but he never brought her another horse. He was a good, if aloof, husband. She didn’t mind the aloofness. If anything, she loved him more for it.

  On the best days, he broke into a local grocer or gas station and brought her hot dogs, bags of potato chips, fresh, cold milk. He usually dragged cold goods to the shack in a stolen cooler, filled with miraculous chunks of ice. Over the years he had presented her with other random gifts: wicker chairs, a patched leather recliner, even an oven, which she used only for storage, because of their lack of electricity (it held chipped, mismatching china and a plastic bucket she used to collect water from the nearby creek). Before their first winter, he gave her a woodstove. She had gathered his large, bearded face into her hands and kissed him passionately.

  Agnes was approaching old age now, and her life with Mr. Krantz grew more physically demanding by the year, but she remained content. She was even grateful for the difficulty of it. She fashioned their rattletrap home together energetically, and its constant wear and tear distracted her from past grief. It was a lovely if makeshift little house in the woods. When times grew hard—when she nearly froze to death, for example—or when she was almost suicidal from loneliness, Mr. Krantz would return to her with the perfect offering: a fancy down sleeping bag, for example, or a tiny, mewling kitten. That they ate the cat one night after being snowed in for twelve days was irrelevant. She had wanted this: an escape from the human, from boredom, from routine. Krantz gave her that, and she thrived.

  And, besides, even with the unpredictability of it all, they managed their own routines. Here she was, for example, returning from a springtime bath, as she would every other morning for the duration of the warmer days. She was glad it was spring. The days were longer, the leaves thrusting from the blossoms in a way that seemed to Agnes both pleasant and painful. Food would be easier to come by now. Her bones would no longer ache from the cold. In the evenings, she would comb Mr. Krantz’s matted fur with a broken brush, picking him free of ticks. She would chatter at him as she worked, and he would cock his head and listen sleepily. When she fell asleep, he would rouse himself and go out into the night, and she would be able to stretch her limbs fully and enjoy the private bed. He never slept longer than two or three hours at a time, but he napped throughout the day.

  Agnes tried her best to placate him. Sex had lost its pleasure for her. She was muscular and lithe but also lined and drooping. Her breasts and ass hung low now, and it seemed there was always a pain in her belly when he penetrated her. Lumps there, maybe, she thought, or just dryness. She felt she would live forever, but in what way? As a bag of floating bones? As an old bat in the woods? She liked the bats. She knew it was not such a bad life.

  The sex didn’t matter, she told herself. They were happy, in love. They enjoyed each other. Their own simple rhythm would always include the other, she believed, even though she noted with some alarm that she continued to age quickly while her husband—despite a slight, uneven whitening of his brown hair—more or less remained the same.

  No regrets, she told herself. None whatsoever. Not even about her son. If she thought about Eli at all, it was usually with relief. Leaving him, she believed, was not even about her own freedom. She had freed Eli, too, cut him loose from the leash of her own unhappiness.

  But when she saw Eli now, moving through the forest at an ambitious clip, she felt disappointed. He looked well: healthy, fulfilled, graceful if not exactly handsome. He wore fine clothes, pressed trousers, an expensive button-up shirt, a whimsical bow tie, and big red spectacles. He radiated self-care. Her first thought was: Well done, Greg.

  Her second thought was: Well, so. He was better off without me, after all.

  It was a puerile disappointment. She relished it bitterly, shrinking into the underbrush with a pouting lip.

  He hadn’t seen her. He didn’t know she was there.

  She wondered, irritably, What is he doing here?

  She wanted him to leave.

  Still naked from her bath, Agnes shivered. She quietly hurried into her clothes and, overcome with curiosity, followed her son deeper into her familiar wood.

  * * *

  ELI STOPPED IN a small opening of trees and unzipped his backpack. Clouds were piling in from the east, which was odd, because the weather report had described a clear, perfect day.

  Damn weathermen, Eli thought. Always wrong.

  It was light enough to film, however, so Eli pulled out a Canon 310XL loaded with Super 8mm film. It was a shaky and grainy medium but reliable in decent light and ultraportable, used by many of his colleagues. Eli set the camera to one side and then polished his spectacles. This same spot was where he had located the metatarsus, and he had returned to it again and again, always with a growing sense of Mr. Krantz’s elusiveness. The foot bone had received its fifteen minutes’ worth of fame, but its exact origins remained dubious. Was it a hoax, people wondered, or real evidence of Bigfoot? Even the fascinating genetic evidence failed to prove its origins without a doubt. No, it was not exactly human, tests seemed to suggest, but it wasn’t inhuman, either.

  Eli thought he would spend the morning recording video footage of the area. He was not expecting to see an actual Sasquatch—they were mostly nocturnal, he believed, or at least preferred dawn or dusk, like the other arboreal wild—but you never knew. In those days, Eli was filled with hope. He’d found the metatarsus, hadn’t he? More impressive evidence was sure to follow.

  Calm, enjoying the morning air, Eli put the camera to his eye and began to record. The world through the lens was slightly foggy, limited. Eli filmed for a few moments, aim
ing at nothing in particular.

  Then a figure moved in the trees. Eli’s heart stopped.

  Had it happened, finally, just like that? Had the creature been waiting here for him all this time? He kept the camera trained on the figure, his hands shaking from excitement.

  But the figure continued its approach, and Eli, disappointed, calculated the figure’s proportions: too small and too slim, tallish but only just so, like a juvenile bear. Certainly not Mr. Krantz.

  But it was not a bear. Eli lowered the camera.

  It was a woman stepping toward him.

  The sky went black.

  It was blacker than a storm. It was like a blotting out of all light, like an eclipse, suddenly midnight.

  It smelled like burnt sawdust.

  It began, impossibly, to snow.

  * * *

  “WHAT ARE YOU doing here?” she said to him.

  “Mom,” he said.

  White flakes fell around them. When she stepped on them, smoke rose. Looking up, Agnes could make out the rounded black heads of the clouds that hung over them like bent knuckles, like punching fists.

  “Something’s not right,” she said. She squinted. “The sky is falling.”

  “It’s snowing.”

  “That’s stupid. It’s a warm day.” Her nose burned, her lungs. She laughed. “The world is ending.”

  It was dreamlike, wandering to her son like this, in the dark in the middle of the day, with the smell of sulfur around them, with the gray smoke of her footfalls. The birds stopped chirping, the bugs burrowed desperately into the earth. The flakes fell heavier, a thick blanket that made her cough.

  “We need to get inside,” she said. “We need to get out of this.”

  Her son seemed unaware or indifferent.

  “The air is poisoned,” she pressed. “Come with me.”

  “Where is he?” Eli said.