The Spirit

by Thomas Page

  Washout! Jason examined the apple piles through his binoculars. All of them were untouched. For several horrible seconds he wondered if his reasoning was wrong, if the beast would bypass the lake altogether.

  He boiled some water on the stove and made coffee. He turned on his transistor radio and heard a newscast that evaporated his black mood. There had been a break-­in at a chicken farm last night, not far from the trailer park. Jason found the farm on his map; it was next to the second of the streams flowing into the lake.

  “That’s him, old boy,” said Jason, untying the dog. “They’re headed this way all right. They can’t be any more than four, five miles from us right now.”

  The beast would sleep in the daylight. Now might be the time for Jason and Buck to search the swamp and woods for any caves. No point in waiting for night, Jason thought, checking his ammunition, if I can surprise him now.

  He and the dog walked the perimeter of the lake, observing stones, willow thickets, and mud flats, until Jason was sure he could find his way around at night.

  Then he began an exploration of each of the streams for a distance of one mile from the Little Harrington. Although Buck was firmly leashed to his hand, he kept lunging off in chase of the occasional rabbit and even more occasional squirrel.

  By noon the wet, dank trees had become steamy with the sunlight. Gnats whirled around Jason’s perspiring face, and his feet were hot and blistered. His gun hung loose and accessible in its holster. He studied every clump of willow, every maple, every possible place where the giant might be sleeping.

  They reached the fifth and final stream around two in the afternoon. Jason sat on the graveled bank and took out a sandwich. He was wet to his hips. As soon as he sat, the mosquitoes charged after him. In between bites he slapped at them. The more he butchered, the more came. He knew better than to get emotional about them.

  Buck rumbled, splashed into the stream, and pointed.

  “You’re not a bird dog, you stupid mutt.”

  Buck’s rumble toned up into a glottal growl.

  Water splashed upstream; then an answering growl came. The stream turned to the right, and the view was blocked by clawed roots of a tree. Buck barked loudly, and the answering bark was higher in tone.

  Jason dropped the sandwich and kneeled behind a muddy peninsula. He drew his gun as Buck splashed up to the bend. It had been a dark night in Canada, the darkest in his life, but Jason recognized the other dog’s bark as an escaped prisoner never forgets the voice of his betrayer.

  The two animals collided once, then faced each other in slow circles, spring-­taut at the slightest lapse in protocol for an explosive, blinding, bloody fight.

  Other feet were splashing down the stream. Jason felt as if a hollow had opened inside him and was about to swallow his innards. Two feet. It was running!

  Now . . . now!

  He cocked the pistol and gripped it with both hands. Then the Indian stepped into view, his chest neatly bisected by the sight on his gun.

  Seconds after the snarls began filtering through the trees, the Indian was awake and running down the slimy stream. He fitted an arrow to his bow and pulled it taut. The enemy was a big dog, and the conversation between the animals was becoming heated, their rumbles dropping down to the dangerous level which indicates a crucial moment when one or the other decides to fight. The Indian was still plugged with sleep. His feet slipped on the mud, so he ran into the water.

  The German shepherd was big enough to make hash of the pup. It backed away from the Indian, snout wrinkled over white fangs, and growled at him. The triangle of rage between man and animals held as the Indian calculated the risk of killing someone’s obviously expensive pet with an arrow.

  The Indian whistled the spirit noise. The shepherd broke and ran downstream toward a muddy delta, where he halted and roared at them again. The Indian raised the bow.

  The shepherd barked at something concealed behind the mud bank. Probably a frog or a squirrel. His pride was wounded, so he had to prove his courage against some quaking little animal.

  His own dog started in pursuit of the stranger with reckless courage. The Indian lowered the bow, grabbed it by the scruff, and cuffed it. “Calm down, you don’t want to get killed over a chipmunk, do you?”

  The dog could not calm down. It barked, nipped, and scrabbled furiously in his arms, trying to get down to the mud bank. The animal’s fear was contagious. The Indian felt himself at the muzzle of some nameless danger. Tension braced the woods in invisible bonds. It was not just the shepherd. The Indian felt eyes watching him with keen, baleful intelligence at this very moment.

  He carried the dog back upstream to the Sitka spruce against which he had been sleeping. The dog stood guard, nostrils flared. The Indian lay down to resume his sleep.

  “Tell him I don’t like this place. Tell him to get away from these rivers, I want to go somewhere else.”

  They were futile words. The spirit went exactly where he pleased and did not give a fart about what the Indian thought about it.

  Had he seen that dog before? The Indian sensed he had. It must have happened sometime during one of the holes in his memory.

  For a full minute Jason had the Army jacket squarely in his sight. One shot would have taken most of the Indian’s chest away. He had circled the body with the muzzle, trying to talk himself into coldbloodedness as the mosquitoes swarmed over his clothes.

  After the Indian left, he finally sat upright and uncocked his pistol. He clasped his hands and tensed his forearms while speaking almost apologetically to the shepherd. “Buck, old boy, for a minute there I thought you really did me in.” He strapped the gun into his holster and continued speaking without looking at the wolf face. “Couldn’t do it, old boy. Not like that.”

  The Indian was wanted for questioning in Canada. Assault and battery. Murder. Justice was useless unless the recipient was faced with it. A sniper shot from concealment was not a proper execution. Also, it was illegal.

  The Indian had changed over the past months. He no longer had a rifle. One did not throw away a perfectly decent pump .30.30 (incredible how details seen for only a millisecond come back later), particularly if one was living in the woods. That was final confirmation for Jason that the Indian was uninterested in hunting the Bigfoot. He was thin—indeed, emaciated. The bow and arrows were handmade, by a careful, time-­consuming process. Why had he thrown away the rifle and taken the time to make the bow and arrows?

  For the next three hours, Jason and Buck carefully poked through the woods, looking for the resting place of the Bigfoot. Jason watched the dog to see if he picked up a scent but although he remained ferociously tense, there was no sign of a trail. If they found one, Buck might raise hell. He tied the dog to a tree and went into the woods alone.

  After several futile hours in the woods, Jason returned to Buck, who was delighted to see him. “It’ll have to be tonight, boy,” said Jason, feeding him another sandwich. “The first lesson for a trapper is patience.”

  He replaced the apples with fresh ones. He parked his car deeper in the shrubbery and banked his tent with camouflage brush. By sunset anticipation of nightfall was jangling his nerves. He polished the pistol, oiled the parts, and reloaded again and again.

  He had this landscape in the palm of his hand now. Come what may, Jason would know where he was even at night for a radius of a mile in each direction around the lake.

  As darkness fell he took a caffeine pill and ate the last of his sandwiches. He believed himself ready for anything with his traps, his night vision, his fierce dog, and his big cannon pistol.

  A gentle lick from the dog woke the Indian that evening. He sat up, trying to clear his head. Sleep was nothing to look forward to any more. It did not rest him, it merely presaged more walking.

  The woods were quiet, which meant that the spirit was up and about. The Indian was hungry. He ha
d had no chance to hunt today after the dog fight. Unless the spirit found a deer or he caught a fish himself, both would be walking on empty stomachs tonight. He envied the dog’s energy. It pranced around impatiently, trying to get him moving.

  He gathered up his bow and arrows, then kneeled over the stream, splashing water over his face. He had overslept again. It must be sometime around nine o’clock. He said to the dog, “I want to find a fish or something first. Then I’ll be ready when he is.”

  The dog dashed away. The Indian ate a handful of berries from a bush. The dog returned, woofing. The spirit was walking southeast.

  As they trudged along the bank, the Indian watched the water. Moonlight rippled the stones on the bottom. A dark shape silvered under a spit of water weed swaying silkenly under the slow current. A small fin protruded like a flag.

  The Indian squatted down, hand poised. His fingers tined into the water and clenched around a slimy fish. He threw it on the ground and stomped it. The fish swelled and grunted in death. It was a cruddy old tripe, which the Indian hated. He whistled for the dog.

  The dog hesitated, listening to the running water. The Indian whistled again, louder.

  From the woods came the high scream of a woman, slicing the night into fragments. At its highest point of soprano pitch it was punctured by a gunshot and the thunderous barking of the German shepherd. The scream plunged downward into a man’s baritone and kept going until bottoming out in a wolf’s snarl of rage.

  Jason had been nodding when the bullfrogs across the lake stopped thrumming. His head jerked upright. The silence spread like a wave, silencing the birds, the crickets, and finally the animals on his own side. He reached for Buck’s neck. The dog was on his feet. He nipped at Jason’s hand.

  It could be nothing: a quick cold breeze, a truck on a highway, even a sudden awareness of him concealed in the reeds. Jason had heard such silences on previous camping trips. Humans frightened mammals into quiet, and they in turn frightened birds, which in turn passed the fear down the evolutionary chain to bacteria.

  Jason stepped gingerly through the reeds, night binoculars in one hand, pistol in the other. Moonlight sparkled on the water.

  Then he saw it. A hulk made shapeless by its posture. It was squatting over a pile of apples. Jason’s breath hissed through his teeth.

  The steel trap closed with a clink that floated across the water. The hulk elongated into a humanlike shape and screamed from lungs massive as drums. The sound was unbearable. Jason fired to stop its scream more than anything else.

  The gunflash was a ball of orange, half as tall as Jason’s body. The recoil lifted the gun over his head and clanged his ears into deafness.

  A tower of water spouted up and disintegrated exhaustedly as the figure limped along the shore with a dreadful moaning. The beast had left a severed section of itself in the trap’s jaws. Jason cursed and fired again. A branch dropped from a tree by the thing’s head as it scooted through the reeds and into the woods.

  While Buck surged through the water with hungry growls, Jason ran around the perimeter of the lake. Buck was well into the trees, his barks an echoing howl, by the time Jason got there.

  From the other end of the lake, Jason heard the barking of the Indian’s dog and feet surging through water.

  Jason plunged into the woods, mindful of the roots clawing at his boots. The thing was injured—that was sure. And Buck would get to him first, cornering him until Jason arrived. Jason was going to have to kill the beast; he could not take on both it and the Indian.

  Then he realized that something else had gone wrong. Buck’s barking had ceased.

  The Indian stumbled out of the woods into the marshland. He kicked at a pile of fruit. A steel trap slammed shut, flinging muck into the air and missing his foot by centimeters. Glinting in the moonlight were an attached stake and metal chain.

  Close by was a trap already shut, surrounded by half-eaten apples. In the steel teeth was a plug of gristly bone with hair matted around a toenail.

  “Oh God . . . oh God . . .” the Indian breathed, separating the jaws. He dropped the toe into his medicine bundle. There were other apple piles about. Somebody knew his spirit’s fondness for apples.

  His dog led him to the woods but adamantly refused to enter. The Indian stung it with curses and blows, but the animal cringed in the reeds, back arched in terror, and would not budge.

  From deeper in the woods came more gunshots, clustered together. With a final kick at the dog, the Indian entered alone, walking cautiously in case any more traps awaited him.

  Jason’s run decelerated to a walk as the silence became oppressive. He flattened his hand over the flashlight lens, then opened two fingers a crack. The slenderest of light beams flew out to a face on the ground. The light collected around white teeth and white eyes.

  That was all there was left of Buck. The rest of the body was gone. Deprived of his dog’s eyes and ears, his road presumably closed off by the pursuing Indian, Jason realized he was in a nasty predicament. He cut off the flashlight.

  A smell hung in the air—the same toilet stench he had sensed in Canada just before Nicolson died. Many Bigfoot sightings were accompanied by an odor mostly compared to muck dragged up from a river bottom. The predominant odor was sweat, Jason decided. Sweat and excrement, the fear smell. The beast was frightened of him.

  The fourth river was just ahead. The gurgling waters swamped out into marsh farther toward the lake. To his right the ground creaked.

  Jason whirled around, pistol ready, as something long and sinuous was thrown through the air. It draped warmly over his arm and hissed. The dangling rectangular head buried its fangs in his left forearm and pumped fire deep under his skin. Jason shouted, shaking the rattler to the ground, and blasted a crater in the mud midway down its squirmy body, the bullet sweeping away the tail section even as the head continued striking against his boot.

  A rock sizzled out of the brush, scraping skin off Jason’s scalp and scattering pieces of bark from the lodge-pole pine behind him. Jason fired into the trees. The flash framed a hairy arm with another rock, and fiery green eyes.

  Jason fired again, blowing away a pinwheel of pine needles in the area where he imagined its face was. His next two shots came with machine-­gun speed. One bullet exploded a chokecherry bush, one gouged wood from a tree. The hammer clicked on an empty chamber.

  Silence. Reload?

  The beast swelled out of the forest like a pall of smoke. Jason turned to run, and a rock caught him between the shoulder blades. He fell over roots, then sprang to his feet and headed for the river, the great shaggy shape howling behind him.

  A profound ache spread from Jason’s left arm to his shoulder. He had read somewhere that rattlesnake bites are overrated. The poison is a hemotoxin that attacks blood rather than nerves. He had a couple of hours to get help, if the running did not force the poison too deep into his body.

  Jason dove into the river and stayed under water, letting the current carry him toward the lake, until his lungs swelled to an intolerable limit. He came up for air and dug his feet into the stony riverbed to brace himself against the sluggish current. He looked around for the Bigfoot.

  What looked like a mountain detached itself from the river bank downstream and surged up against the current toward him, plowing great wings of water around its chest. The beast’s arms opened wide to embrace Jason.

  Jason struck for shore. The Bigfoot surged up between him and the river bank and kept coming. Jason splashed water at it. Ludicrous gesture. He threw the flashlight, still clutched in his hand, then the empty pistol. Both bounced thickly off bone.

  Jason balled up and sank underwater in freezing pitch-­blackness. He pushed against the riverbed, hoping his momentum and the current would carry him past the beast.

  A snake of fur, sticky despite the water, closed around his chest. With the relentless force o
f a steam shovel, Jason was hauled out of the water, lifted high over the beast’s head, and flung in again, with such force that he felt as though he were hitting a brick floor. For one brief instant before the water closed over him, Jason saw its face.

  The Indian walked like a cat, wary of bulges signifying more traps. He found the shepherd’s head on the ground. The dog bustled up, his courage restored, avoiding the dead snake. Both heard the furious splashing in the river.

  He heard a loud shout of pain from the river, then the frantic slosh of a body surging toward the shore. The battle had ended.

  The dog looked at him. The Indian stroked its fur. “He is well,” he said. After this there was no question that the spirit would be hungry.

  Dazed by the snake poison and the paralyzing vision of the thing’s face, Jason lay limp as he was propelled downward head first. The water burst into bubbles and chunks of mud as his head was pushed into the muck at the bottom.

  He kicked his legs into the thing’s chest as it closed those clamping arms around them and pushed him deeper. Jason grabbed at the trunklike legs sunk deep in the muck by his chest, but they were like hardwood. His ears and nose filled with mud. If he opened his mouth he would choke.

  The hatchet.

  The thing had limped. The trap had injured its foot. Jason touched the steel hatchet strapped to his waist. The movement caused the thing to savagely rotate his body, sending up mud-­streaked air bubbles.

  How had it limped? Right? Left? Right! Jason’s right hand fumbled the hatchet from its case. It nearly slid out of his hands. He fumbled his fingers over the thing’s legs. Right leg, right leg! He found the knee.

  Water resistance slowed his swing, but the blade was sharp; it had been sharpened yesterday, when he bought it. The blade struck the knee a harmless touch, and Jason slid it down the thing’s leg toward the foot buried in muck.

  The water exploded before the blade reached its mark. Simultaneously, Jason kicked and felt his boot toe strike its chest. The current gripped him and tore him out of the beast’s grasp.