The Littlest Bigfoot

by Jennifer Weiner

  Millie tucked herself in even closer to the tree trunk. She didn’t want to think about the times she’d slipped away from her parents, in the forest or down by the water, drawn by the sound of No-Fur voices or just the knowledge that they were near.

  “Let’s not be losing our heads,” Maximus said in his soothing rumble. “There are measures we can take without abandoning the village. We can cancel Halloweening.”

  Millie bit her lip, hard, before she could yell “No!” and give herself away. Halloween was the one time of year that the Yare were allowed to venture out into the No-Fur world. Maximus was the one who had started the tradition, after years of Millie begging and pleading and—yes—running to away.

  For the last six years, each September, Maximus would pick out a town within a fifty-mile drive of the village and scout it carefully, making sure there’d be enough children in costume that a half dozen smallish Yare wouldn’t stand out. On October 31, the Yare littlies, practically vibrating with excitement, would climb into the old school bus that was kept specifically for the excursion. Maximus, disguised in a trench coat and gloves and a big, floppy straw hat, would drive them to the town and park on the outskirts, and the littlies, chaperoned by the grown-up Yare who were themselves interested in the No-Fur world, would be given the night to trick-or-treat. The Yare Elders—most of them female—would peek into the No-Fur houses or examine the No-Fur fashions, and discuss what they’d seen. (“It’s called a French manicure,” or “still stainless-steel refrigerators.”) The littlies would dash up and down the No-Fur streets with their pillowcases, to join packs of human children and gather pounds of candy that they’d carry home on the bus.

  Every year, unsuspecting No-Furs would remark on the excellence of the Yare costumes (“You guys look so authentic!”). Every year, puzzled No-Furs would turn to their partners, asking, “Was there some Bigfoot movie I missed?” It was heaven . . . and now it was going to be taken away. She felt tears slip out of her eyes, soaking her face-fur.

  “But we won’t move,” Maximus said. Millie sighed in relief. “Not until we know what kind of danger this presents.”

  “We should be having spies!” This from Frederee, who’d forgotten to take the Speaking Stick. His parents glared at him. He whispered an apology, then took the stick, then stood in silence, realizing he had nothing else to say, before handing the stick to his father, who passed it to Old Aunt Yetta.

  “Spies are not a bad idea,” Old Aunt Yetta said. “We should be knowing how many of them there are. How many grown-ups and how many littlies. If it’s really a school or something else, and if—”

  “I’ll do it!” Millie hopped down to a low branch, then jumped lightly to the ground. The Yare looked at her, wide-eyed and startled. A few of them gasped. Septima gave a shriek of dismay (a quiet shriek) while Melissandra got a smug, I-told-you-so expression on her face. Millie ignored them both, as well as the Speaking Stick, as she stepped forward into the firelight’s glow.

  “Please,” she said. “You know I’d be the best for this. I am the littlest of the littlies. I’m knowing everything there is to know about the No-Furs. I could pretend . . . or shave my fur . . . you could dress me up . . . maybe a hat, or a bonnet or such—”

  “Millietta,” said Maximus, pronouncing each syllable of her full name gravely. Millie bowed her head. She didn’t have the Speaking Stick, she wasn’t fully grown, she wasn’t even supposed to be there or have been listening . . . but she couldn’t keep quiet.

  “Why are we having the fear of them?” she demanded in her silvery voice, sweet and warm and clear as the tones of a triangle, or a crystal glass struck with a spoon, the voice the other Yare thought was so strange. “What have they ever done to us?”

  “They kill us!” Melissandra shrilled. Millie saw that her father was nodding, probably remembering the movie he’d shown her, of a Yare, long-and-long ago, who’d been hunted and hurt by the No-Furs.

  “But not these ones, Papa,” Millie begged. “Maybe No-Furs other places, other times, killed Yare, but these ones haven’t done anything, and maybe they never would. Maybe if they just got to know us . . .”

  “Nyeh!” said Ricardan, and stomped on the ground for emphasis. “This is foolishness!”

  Old Aunt Yetta was looking at Millie sadly, and Frederee, who was just a year older than she was, was staring at her with his mouth hanging open. Even Darrius, who Millie didn’t think was that afraid of the No-Furs, was shaking his head.

  Maximus pounded the Speaking Stick once on the packed dirt. “We will watch and wait,” he declared, in a voice that let them know that the meeting was over.

  As the Elders whispered a closing blessing, Millie closed her eyes, waiting to feel her father’s strong arms lifting her and feel her mother snaffling at her cheek-fur and whispering in her ear, Millie, how could you and Don’t you know better and, worst of all, When you are Ruler, you will have to Set the Example, Millie, you can’t keep behaving like this or wishing for what will never be.

  CHAPTER 3

  WHO’S NEXT?” MISS MARCH SOUNDED bored as she peered over her classroom from behind her old-fashioned cat-eye glasses. Miss March had been teaching at Standish Middle School for thirty-five years. She had powdered pink skin, a cap of white curls sprayed tightly in place, and a chin that proceeded directly into her chest, with a collection of loose, pouchy flesh where her neck should have been.

  Jeremy Bigelow thrust his hand into the air. The entire seventh grade groaned. Miss March’s glasses flashed as she glared at them.

  “Let’s give Jeremy the respect he gave each of you. Jeremy?” She waited while Jeremy, dressed in jeans and his favorite “I Want to Believe” T-shirt, made his way to the front of the classroom with a remote-control clicker in his hand.

  Normally, Jeremy hated school and rarely volunteered to be called on. His brother Noah had attended Standish Middle School six years ago at the age of eight. The teachers were still talking about him: the time that Noah had found an error in the algebra textbook that the publisher had been forced to correct, the time at the statewide Model UN that he’d brokered peace in the Middle East (this while representing Sierra Leone), how he’d blown through the entire middle-school curriculum in six months and had gone on to high school before he turned ten. Noah was back home now, doing a year of independent postdoctoral research before returning to MIT, which meant that Jeremy shared the house with him and their older brother, Ben, a senior at Standish High. Ben was captain of the football team, the baseball team, and the lacrosse team, an all-state player in all three sports. His bedroom wall was papered with letters from coaches from all over the country, begging him to play for them, and letters from professional football, baseball, and lacrosse coaches, importuning him to skip college completely and go pro.

  Jeremy had narrow shoulders and dark-brown hair that was always too long, because his mother usually forgot to bring him to get it cut. He was desperately uncoordinated, lacking both speed and endurance, and most sports bored him, whether he was a spectator or a participant. Academically speaking, he was absolutely average, equally uninterested in every subject.

  After his brothers, it was understandable, Jeremy told himself, that his parents, Martin and Suzanne, didn’t have much time or energy left for their so far unremarkable third son. They went to Jeremy’s soccer games, where he was an adequate player, and signed his report cards, full of Bs and Cs, but Jeremy believed that if a stranger stopped either his mother or father on the streets of Standish and said, “Tell me about your son,” they’d launch into a lavish description of Noah’s research or how many goals or touchdowns or home runs Ben had scored, and it would be a long time before it occurred to either one of them to mention their youngest.

  “May I have the lights off, please?” Jeremy said.

  Miss March nodded at Lucy Jones, whose desk was closest to the switch. Some teachers let the kids sit in a semicircle or even on beanbags or on the floor. Not Miss March, who kept the desks in neat rows
, with the troublemakers right up front.

  Lucy made a face at Jeremy and flicked the room into darkness, allowing Jeremy’s opening slide, red letters on a black background, to come into focus on the whiteboard.

  “Bigfoots: They Walk among Us,” the letters read.

  The groans got louder.

  “This is the exact same report he gave last year!” Lucy shouted.

  Jeremy quickly clicked his remote, and the words “Now with Exciting New Research and Evidence” appeared as a subtitle. Before anyone else could complain, Jeremy began.

  “As some of you may remember—”

  “Yeah, from when he gave the same report last spring,” whispered Olivia Núñez to her best friend, Sophie Clematis.

  Jeremy ignored her. “The myth of the Bigfoot has persisted throughout time and across cultures, with sightings, illustrations, photographs, and even films contributing to the growing belief that the Bigfoot or Sasquatch, as Native Americans called them, are not merely folklore or legends but are actual beings whose existence is a closely guarded secret.”

  He flexed his leg muscles, then locked them to keep his knees from shaking. “Civilizations and communities, starting with the cavemen, drew pictures or told stories about gigantic, fur-covered forest dwellers. In China, they are known as the Wild Men or the Yeren. The Tlingit talk of the Kushtaka. Here in Standish, there have been reports of the Bigfoot.” He clicked to the next slide. “This is a still from a nineteen sixty-seven film by Patterson and Gimlin.”

  He turned so that he could look at the picture of the gigantic, fur-covered, unmistakably female creature with thick arms and trunklike legs glancing shyly sideways in midstride. “This film was taken deep in the woods of Northern California by two investigators who devoted their lives to proving the Bigfoot was real.”

  In the back row, Austin Riley made an armpit fart.

  Jeremy continued. “When Europeans first arrived in the New World, evidence suggests that, in addition to finding Native American encampments, they also found villages of Bigfoots.”

  Aisling Tolliver waved her hand in the air. “Excuse me, but shouldn’t that be Bigfeet?” She looked hopefully at Miss March, who sometimes gave extra credit during reports, but the teacher appeared to be cleaning her glasses.

  “Bigfoots,” said Jeremy.

  “Let’s move along to the new evidence you mentioned,” said Miss March.

  Jeremy clicked to the next slide, a woodcut of a Pilgrim village, where a man in kneesocks and knickers and a hat with a curled brim appeared to be trading a sack of marbles for a machete. The creature holding the machete was tall and bearded and broad-shouldered and, apparently, naked, except for a thick coat of fur.

  “This woodcut,” he said, “which I found after extensive research in the archives of the Standish Historical Society, is thought to depict a scene from the village that became our town, Standish. For all we know, we could be attending classes on the bones of the Bigfoots.”

  He paused, letting his words echo, which they did, until Austin armpit farted again. Olivia was braiding Sophie’s hair, and in the front row Hayden Morganthal was resting his melon-shaped head on his forearms and snoring softly.

  Jeremy swiped his sweaty palms against his pants. He hoped nobody would ask for details about the Standish Historical Society, which was just a collection of liquor-store cardboard boxes in Mrs. Bradon’s garage. Mrs. Bradon lived downtown, and her great-grandfather Grayson Standish had been one of the town’s fathers. She kept old maps and newspapers, handbills, and town tax returns piled in boxes in her garage, and let Jeremy look at them, after he promised not to make a mess.

  Jeremy pushed on, clicking to slides that explained Bigfoot biology. “Once thought to be descended from the great apes of Africa, scientists now believe that Bigfoots are simply hominids who evolved at the same time as Neanderthal man, with certain musculoskeletal differences including extreme height and broad musculature that allowed them to become efficient hunter-gatherers in the Northeast and Pacific Northwest. Most Bigfoots are believed to be omnivores, eating flesh as well as flora. They are said to stand between seven and eight feet tall, weighing anywhere from three to five hundred pounds, and are covered with coarse, curling dark fur.”

  Another slide.

  “Is that from The National Enquirer?” asked tattletale Meghan Carpenter, who sat next to Aisling in the back row.

  “It’s been widely reprinted,” Jeremy said.

  Miss March, who’d spent a lot of time instructing her class about what constituted reputable source material, made a mark in her notebook. Jeremy winced and went on.

  “For hundreds of years, evidence suggests that Bigfoots and humans worked side by side to turn America from a nation of farms and homesteads to a land of towns, then cities. Bigfoots plowed the fields and cleared the forests.” He showed a picture of what might have been two Bigfoots or just two extremely large men in overalls and wide-brimmed hats standing next to a wagon full of lumber.

  “Bigfoots helped build the railroads.” Another slide, this one showing a crowd of men—one of whom towered head and shoulders above the others—posing proudly in front of a track.

  “Evidence suggests that sometimes Bigfoots and humans would marry and have children.”

  “Eww!” squealed Lucy Jones.

  Jeremy clicked to a sepia-toned family photograph, another discovery from the depths of the Bradon collection. The husband was an enormous, hulking man, tall and wide and heavily whiskered. His wife was clearly human, with a hint of amusement in the tilted corners of her mouth. The husband’s free hand rested on the shoulder of a big, thick-necked boy who was staring at the ground so that most of his face was invisible to the camera. The wife was holding on to a freckle-faced girl with two long braided pigtails and the same smile as her mother.

  “But as the march of progress continued, humans began to realize that their Bigfoot neighbors were different . . . and the Bigfoots began exploring means of controlling their fur and extreme size.”

  Jeremy clicked, then wiped his hands again and stole a glance at the classroom. Hayden Morganthal was fast asleep. Sophie was now working on Olivia’s hair. Aisling had a textbook open in her lap and was reading ahead in science.

  Jeremy sighed. Just wait, he thought. Wait until I find them. Wait until I show you they’re real.

  The next slide showed a canvas-covered wagon with a poster on the side advertising “Snake Oil Scalp Tonic.” Other posters offered love potions, slimming belts, various liniments, and lotions including—Jeremy zoomed in until the class could see it—Dr. McLaughlin’s All-Natural Wildroot Hair Removing Crème. “Troubled by unwanted hair?” the text read. “Twice-a-day application of Dr. McLaughlin’s All-Natural Wildroot Hair Removing Crème will eliminate unsightly whiskers from any portion of the anatomy, small or large, and permanently prevent their return!”

  “Wasn’t that just for, like, ladies’ mustaches?” asked Austin the Armpit Farter. Austin had red hair and freckles and a smirky grin that allowed teachers to identify him as a troublemaker before he’d actually made any trouble.

  “That’s what they want you to believe,” said Jeremy.

  “Who’s ‘they’?” Austin inquired.

  Jeremy clicked to the next slide, ignoring his classmate’s questions. “Sadly, humans turned on their former friends and neighbors, labeling them freaks and abominations, forcing Bigfoots into hiding. The unfortunate Bigfoots who had the misfortune to be captured by hostile humans were displayed in circuses and traveling sideshows.”

  The worst slide, the one that always made him feel sick, came next. “BEHOLD LUCILLE, the FAMED and ORIGINAL BEARDED LADY!” blared a poster nailed to the wall above a cringing, fur-covered human-size creature in a cage. “IS SHE HUMAN? IS SHE BEAST? BORN with a FULL HEAD OF HAIR, her BEARD was APPARENT AT BIRTH and now she is COVERED WITH A PELT OF THICK FUR FROM HEAD TO TOE. Experts consider her ONE of the WONDERS OF THE MODERN AGE.”

  “My Nanna’s got a mu
stache,” volunteered Lucy Jones. “Maybe she’s a Bigfoot!”

  Jeremy, who thought Lucy had a bit of a mustache herself, hurried through the slides, eager to get away from the image of the furred but unmistakably female Bigfoot cowering behind the bars of her cage. If he found a Bigfoot, he’d make sure it was treated better than that—not locked up, not shown off for money. He’d be kind; he’d figure out its language (or teach it English) and make sure it had a comfortable place to live, with lots of space. He’d never keep a Bigfoot locked up . . . at least, he’d only lock one up until he figured out how to make it understand that he was its friend, not its enemy.

  Jeremy showed his classmates pictures of footprints with rulers set beside them, proof that they hadn’t been made by bears. He clicked through newspaper reports of campers who’d been awakened by strange noises and seen gigantic, hairy creatures running away—upright, on two legs—with their coolers and supplies. He lingered on a newspaper clipping with a picture of Milford Carruthers, a Standish resident, identified in the caption as “Famed Bigfoot Hunter,” and his quote, which Jeremy knew by heart: “Given the preponderance of evidence, of sightings and reports down through the years, we must come to the obvious conclusion that Bigfoots are real, and that they live among us.”

  In the back row, Anthony Palmore, one of the smart kids who always turned in his homework on time, raised his hand. Anthony’s button-down blue shirt was neatly ironed, his blue jeans had creases, and his sneakers were pristine. Anthony’s mother, Jeremy thought, would never forget to take Anthony for his haircuts. Jeremy curled his toes inside his shoes. “Yes?”

  “If they’re real,” said Anthony, “then why hasn’t anyone found one? That picture you showed us was taken in the nineteen sixties, right?”

  “Nineteen sixty-seven,” said Jeremy, and jerked his neck to flip his long hair out of his eyes.

  “And that’s the most recent one?”

  “They’ve gotten better at hiding,” Jeremy said. “They’ve probably figured out how to grow their own food and tap into the power system without anyone knowing.” He thought of the news reports of bears raiding a campsite in California two years ago. The campers had said they’d seen bears, but the footprints hadn’t looked like bear prints, the police had said, but feet. Big feet. Jeremy was sure those weren’t bears the campers had seen, but the investigators had never confirmed anything, and Jeremy knew his classmates would be brutal if he brought it up.