by Steve Vernon
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was like something that you would see in a Saturday morning cartoon – only this time it was happening for real.
What came out of that Spirit Bear’s mouth was a little like a tangle of blood and guts and smoke. It blew away in Bigfoot’s big hairy hand like the smoke from a half a hundred birthday candles, Thick and cloudy and then gone all at once.
Bigfoot picked up what was left of the spirit bear’s skin.
He gave the spirit bear skin a big old sniff.
“Do you even smell anything?” Coyote asked. “Or are you just blowing your nose out of pure blue-eyed spite?”
Bigfoot shook his head.
“We’re going to need a better nose than I’ve got,” Bigfoot said.
Coyote sniffed the dead spirit bear skin as well.
“I got nothing,” Coyote said.
“I know that,” Bigfoot said, jerking a thumb in my direction. “In fact the kid knows that. You got nothing, you’ll never have nothing – heck you were most likely BORN with nothing and you’ve been slipping into the negative zeroes ever since – even the dead bear knows that much. There’s no real reason to go bragging about it.”
Coyote stuck his tongue out at Bigfoot – who pointedly ignored him.
“How about you, Winnie?” Bigfoot asked, holding the skin of the Spirit Bear directly beneath the Prophet’s bumper. “It was your idea to hunt for scent in the first place.”
Only the Prophet couldn’t find anything either.
Bigfoot turned to look at me.
“Do you want to sniff it too?” he asked, holding what was left of the spirit bear’s pelt in my general direction. “No sense you feeling left out.”
I just looked away.
I didn’t even want to see that Spirit Bear pelt, much less smell it.
“I didn’t think so,” Bigfoot said, stepping right over me and walking back towards the alder Winnebago. “Bring the kid, would you?”
“I can walk on my own,” I said, before Coyote could pick me up again.
“See that you don’t trip over your own two feet,” Bigfoot said before walking back into the Prophet. “Or I’ll drop a rock on them too.”
“I don’t think he likes me,” I confided to the Coyote.
“Bigfoot doesn’t much care for anyone that he meets,” Coyote allowed. “Being the last of the Sasquatch will make a fellow more than just a little stand-offish.”
Coyote and I stepped back into the Winnebago.
“Strap your seatbelts on,” Bigfoot ordered, sitting down at the steering wheel. “I already know that Winnie can’t tell us anything either.”
“I heard you say that,” the Prophet complained.
“So what?” Bigfoot asked.
“Friends don’t insult other friends,” the Prophet said.
“Who said that I was your friend, Winnie?” Bigfoot asked. “I’m just the guy sitting behind the steering wheel.”
The Prophet said nothing.
I’m not sure – but I’m pretty sure that giant pink mystical travel home was about to have himself a long and proper sulk.
“What about Sam?” I asked.
“He can find his own way home,” Bigfoot said.
And sure enough – when I looked back at the forest the Ghost of Sam Steele had already vanished into the shadowy darkness.
“Ghosts do that,” Bigfoot said. “It is a part of their union rules.”
Ghosts have unions?
“So are we going to visit the Old Man?” Coyote asked.
“I thought we just did?” I said, still thinking about the ghost of Sam Steele.
“Not that Old Man. We’re talking about Nanna Bijou,” Coyote said to me – as if I had to be seventeen kinds of foolish to not know just who or what they were talking about. “So are we going to call on the Old Man?”
Bigfoot smiled a great big how-stupid-a-question-was-that sort of grin in reply to Coyote’s question.
“So who else are we going to call?” Bigfoot asked. “The freaking Ghostbusters?”
I shrugged.
“Let’s roll,” Coyote said.
And that’s just exactly what we did.
We rolled – right onto the High Highway.
Chapter Eight – The Sleeping Giant of Thunder Bay
The Prophet’s engines rumbled and growled about as loudly as a slow rolling avalanche of megaphone-yodeling angry buffalo as we began to move forward. I could hear The Prophet’s big pink shiny wings flapping like the boom of giant cotton candy thunder.
“How in the world are we going to get through all of the trees?” I asked. “This motor home isn’t exactly built for agility.”
“The Prophet doesn’t travel through the trees or over the trees or even under the trees,” Coyote said. “He kind of moves between the spaces that lie between the spaces between the sky and forever. We call it riding the High Highway. It’s a little more like flying above the sky – only we’re faster and harder to catch.”
Coyote was leaning against the Warren-cocoon.
I thought about the way that Warren always used to stand up whenever my Mom walked into the room – like he thought he was some sort of a Duke or an Earl. I thought how about how I had always thought that behavior was a little gorky – but now I wasn’t really sure just what I thought about the whole situation.
I wasn’t even all that sure just how I was supposed to feel about him leaning against what used to be – what still was, I guess – my stepfather Warren.
It felt a little too casual – almost disrespectful.
But I had to admit that the Warren-cocoon also looked pretty comfortable.
And – truth to tell I was still just a little uncertain about how I really felt about how I felt about Warren. All this time I had grown very comfortable loathing and despising my stepdad and here all of a sudden I was feeling caring and protective and I wasn’t sure if this was some kind of a weird mood-swing that would change just as soon as the wind changed its direction or if this was something that had grown up in my spirit that I was just going to have to hurry up and get used to.
“Do you want to run that by me again?” I asked. “Using a few less syllables and a little more slow?”
“Listen, it’s just basic science,” Coyote said. “Everything in the whole world is made up out of atoms, right? But the Prophet, he’s figured out a way to move through the spaces between the atoms of existence – only it’s a little finer than that. It is a little like dodging raindrops. You dodge enough raindrops and you’ll never get wet.”
“So is that what you guys do?” I asked. “You drive around all day dodging raindrops and killing random Spirit Bears?”
“That’s just some of what we do,” Coyote said. “We work for the SOB – the Spiritual Operations Branch. It’s a semi-official para-mystical anonymous working division of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Like Bigfoot said, some people call us the Canadian Creep Squad.”
I had to stop and shake my head at that.
“So you’re some kind of a Royal Mounted Creep squad?”
“Well, we’re a lot more than that,” Coyote explained. “The RCMP is just who we happen to work for, is all. And they don’t even like to talk about us all that much. Truthfully, if you asked them, we don’t even exist.”
“So what are you then?” I asked. “Mutants? Aliens? Super heroes?”
Coyote thought about that.
“I guess what we really are when it comes right down to it,” Coyote finally told me “Is nothing more than stories.”
I shook my head at that explanation, too.
“Bigfoot over there,” Coyote said. “He’s the last of the Sasquatch. People have been telling stories about him ever since the days of Mesopotamia when storytellers would talk of Gilgamesh and Enkidu and the hairy wild men.”
It was funny. If I had heard those names at home they would have meant nothing more than a bowlf
ul of barely-cooked syllables. Yet hearing them here, inside of the Prophet’s belly, I had the same kind of feeling as if I were listening to someone speaking of hamburger and pizza and chocolate milkshakes. I knew and I remembered the taste of those words. I felt those words splashing upon my back like great drops of a totally undodgable warm summer rain.
Somewhere deep in some part of me I knew the names that Coyote was saying – like they were distant relatives that I had overheard Mom or Dad or even Warren talking about one time or another. I couldn’t put a face on any of those names but I kind of felt like I ought to know them just the same.
“Sure,” I said. “I’ve actually got that part of it figured out. But how does that make you what you are?”
“Well,” Coyote said. “Every time that you tell a story it is a little like dropping a small pebble into a bucket full of rainwater. There is a splash and then there are ripples and then there’s an echo and that water fills up just a little bit deeper. You tell that story often enough and hard enough and long enough and the water splashes out of the bucket it sort of takes on a sort of life of its very own. “
That explanation didn’t make much sense to me and I told him so.
“I can’t really explain how it actually happens,” Coyote went on. “It’s not like we storied folk come equipped with any sort of a user’s manual. But so long as storytellers tell our stories than we continue to live on in the borderlands that haze and drift between those lines that almost separate the cold steel truth of reality and the warm pure campfire smoke of our collective imagination.”
“That still doesn’t make much sense to me at all,” I said, shifting around so that I could lean on the Warren-cocoon too.
Coyote chewed over my question some before speaking again.
“Just think about it this way,” he said. “Let’s say some kid tells some other kid in your school a story about how that kid that always sits in the back of the class that wears one of those big funky old hoodies – well, let’s say that kid says that the other kid is really a Martian and he’s wearing that big baggy funky old hoodie to hide the fact that he’s really got a third arm duct taped to his ribcage, underneath the overly-large bagginess of the hoodie.”
“That’s stupid,” I said.
“Sure it is,” Coyote said. “Martians don’t have three arms. They’ve got six, anyone knows that. But if that kid tells another kid who tells another kid then thirty years from now somebody’s great-great-grandkid is going to be telling everyone about this three-armed Martian that went to school in the town that he grew up in and everyone will begin to wonder if maybe there couldn’t actually be some truth to the rumor. I mean, it’s thirty years ago, right? Nearly anything could have happened thirty years ago.”
I nodded slowly.
That story almost made sense if you squinted.
“Well, you tell that story for a hundred years and somewhere in some far-off parallel dimension that three-armed hoodie-wearing Martian kid is going to be born. That’s the power of good honest storytelling,” Coyote explained. “If you tell a story long enough and strong enough and before you know it’s going grow its own legs and learn how to walk, talk and breathe.”
It still sounded about as stupid as stupid could get – but how could I argue with it? I mean, here I was driving around in a magic Winnebago with a Bigfoot and a Coyote.
Not to mention the Ghost of Sam Steele.
“Okay,” I said. “I think I’ve got that. But why does Bigfoot have to drive? If The Prophet knows where he’s going why does he need someone to drive him around?”
“It’s how the magic works,” Coyote said. “I’m not really sure why – but someone has to be behind the wheel before The Prophet can ride the High Highway.”
“That doesn’t make any kind of sense either,” I said.
Coyote shrugged.
“Who says rules have to make sense?”
Which made even less sense.
“Why else would there be rules then?” I asked.
“Look,” Coyote said. “Think about all of those Walt Disney cartoons. Why couldn’t Pluto talk if Mickey and Minnie and Goofy and Donald could talk?”
I couldn’t answer that question.
I wasn’t sure if it was because the question was just plain stupid – or if Coyote was making some kind of crazy brilliant sense.
“Why didn’t anyone ever rub the djinni lamp and use their first three wishes to wish for three more lamps?” Coyote went on.
I couldn’t answer that question either.
“Rules don’t ALWAYS have to make a sense,” Coyote concluded.
I guess he had a point.
Either that or I was just stupid.
“So where are we going to?” I asked.
“We’re going to talk to talk to Nannabhozo – the Sleeping Giant of Thunder Bay.”
Hold it.
“You mean a giant – like fee fie fo fum?”
“That’s another story and don’t you dare be bringing Jack into it. He’s way more trouble than we need right now.” Coyote replied. “No sir, this is a story of the Anishinaabe – the people that you white men used to call the Ojibwa. Nannabhozo or Nanna Bijou – depending on what side of the Great Lakes you are standing on – is kind of special to me. He’s a Trickster God – which makes him one of my spirit brothers. “
“Wait a minute,” I said. “So you are some kind of a giant too?”
“I can be if I want to,” Coyote said.
“And you are also some kind of a trickster god?”
Coyote looked away for a minute.
“I’m not in that line of work anymore,” was all he’d tell me.
He said it quietly and then he looked away in that kind of way that some folks have of not talking directly to you – and I had the feeling that I wasn’t about to hear the whole story.
“But we were talking about a Nanna Bijou story,” Coyote went on. “At the time of this story he had settled from all of his Trickster days. He had grown old and had decided that he wanted to raise himself a family. So he decided that he was going to take care of the people who lived on the Isle Royale – just outside of the city of Thunder Bay.”
“So how did he do that?”
“Well, he taught them how to fish for themselves and how to hunt for themselves and how to take care of their own selves,” Coyote explained. “Just the way a real father takes care of his children.”
I thought about all of the times that I had wished and imagined that my real Dad had found the time to teach me about hunting and fishing and his tattoos. I know that Warren did his best trying to teach me how to throw and catch a football and how to do math and how to run so that I did not look like an arthritic penguin – but that wasn’t the same as my real Dad showing me things.
Was it?
Still, I could really understand just exactly what Coyote was trying to tell me.
“Another time Nanna Bijou fought Paul Bunyan for forty days and forty nights before finally beating him to death with a freshly caught giant Red Lake walleye,” Coyote went on. “Although the way that Bunyan tells it he always says that he just let old Nanna Bijou win, on account of that whole fight was starting to look way too much like work to him.”
I thought about that.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “So how does Paul Bunyan tell that story if he got beat to death with a fish?”
“Death isn’t what you think it is for us storied ones,” Coyote said. “We only die when the very last story is gone and forgotten – which, if we’re lucky, might mean forever.”
“So you know Paul Bunyan?” I asked.
“Sure, doesn’t everybody?” Coyote replied.
“I thought he was just a tall tale,” I said.
“Ha,” Coyote laughed. “Bunyan is tall all over – not just in his tail.”
A part of me was surprised to hear that Coyote actually knew Paul Bunyan – but I was way too busy try
ing to figure out why every now and then the memory of Warren – my gorky stepdad – standing in front of that fully-grown Spirit Bear with his arm stuck out like a crossing guard crept into my imagination and just confused the living heck out of my sense of what is and what isn’t supposed to be.
“After a while the Ojibwa of the Isle Royale began to refer to Nanna Bijou as the Spirit of the Deep Sea Water – which was kind of funny because Nanna Bijou had started out life as a sort of a Rabbit God – and he was always a little bit afraid of deep cold water – on account of so many of his kind had been dropped into deep old stew pots.”
Coyote licked his lips loudly – and I think he was actually thinking about rabbit stew – which probably wasn’t all that polite of a thing to be thinking about seeing as we were just getting set to visit ourselves an actual giant sleeping Rabbit God.
“The trouble all got started when Nanna Bijou discovered himself his very own silver mine and he showed it to his people and his people got to build themselves a bit of a reputation for having some of the finest silverwork in all of the country,” Coyote said. “Only it got worse when the white man decided that he was going to find out where all that silver came from.”
“You do realize that I’m white, too,” I pointed out. “Don’t you?”
“I won’t hold that against you,” Coyote replied. “We all have our various short comings. Besides, I have it on good authority that the Great Spirit is actually color blind.”
By now I was hunched over and leaning forward – totally caught up in Coyote’s story. It might have been because the whole thing was laid out in such a weird and twisty come-here-and-go-away sort of style that I had to lean in and focus just to follow it – but the fact was I was ACTUALLY kind of interested in hearing him tell it just the way he was telling it – mixed up weird or not.
“So what happened then?” I asked. “Did they try to shoot him?”
“Well those white men they tried all kinds of tricks. They had tried bribing the Ojibwa and they had tried torturing the Ojibwa but no matter they did they couldn’t find themselves an Ojibwa who could tell them just where that silver mine actually was.”
Then he paused and he sort of smiled and he looked off to his left like he was seeing the whole thing playing out before his eyes.