Monster in the Mountains

by Peacock, Shane;

  “No, not in the summer,” said Mom.

  “It’s the mudslides you’ve got to worry about this time of the year,” added Dad absent-mindedly, glancing over at his map. “A man was killed just up the road last week. Buried alive. Never found his body.”

  “That was…uh,” responded Mom, glancing back at me and almost snarling at Dad, “very unusual.”

  It was incredible. Here we were on a narrow two-lane highway in the mountains, going through these long tunnels that protected us from falling boulders and mud and snow, and every building we passed looked like a tunnel itself, covered up for protection. I gazed out the window and wondered what else lurked in these wilds.

  “You know, dear, there are eagles around here, and mule deer and mountain goats,” said Mom on cue, sounding cheery.

  “Are there any grizzlies?” I asked, “or black bears?”

  “Very few,” replied Mom quickly.

  “And the sasquatch, of course,” laughed Dad, hoping I’d laugh with him. But I kept staring out the window, trying to think good thoughts.

  Just past Revelstoke and the cavernous Three Valley Gap, we spotted some bighorn sheep standing like high-wire walkers on the sides of the rocks. Waterfalls poured down from the heights in places, where the summits were three thousand metres high. Gigantic rock faces peered at me. A train came steaming along near us and disappeared into a tunnel like a snake crawling into the mountains. We were going around breakneck corners—where I could just see us flipping over and flying off the road into the canyons—and driving down long, steep hills where Dad had to brake to keep from speeding out of control. It would be perfect for a James Bond movie; I started thinking about bad guys racing after us.

  Suddenly the Reptile’s face flashed through my brain. I felt for that fortune card in my pocket. Beware of the monsters in your mind. They are here in Wonderland. I gazed into the mountain wilderness, feeling freaked out again.

  Monsters.

  I noticed that Mom was watching me again. Soon she was bringing up any happy thing she could think of, talking about the rest of the trip to Vancouver (we’d fly home from there), saying it would be fabulous.

  “We have a surprise for you, too. It’s something we’re going to do before we get to the coast.” The expression on her face made me think I’d like it.

  “We’ll tell you soon.”

  A few hours later we started going downward and entered a sort of paradise in the mountains. It was like something out of a dream. The Okanagan Valley just suddenly appeared, looking like California on a hot day: fruit trees were everywhere and beautiful lakes; everyone had a tan, girls were wearing bikinis and guys, shorts. We zoomed south into the city of Kelowna and then over Okanagan Lake on a floating bridge, above the depths where Ogopogo is supposed to live. We stayed overnight in Peachland, on the west side of the lake. In the morning I stood on the beach next to the blue water and stared out across the flat surface. It glinted here and there, sparkling in the sun. Dad had picked up a local pamphlet and was reading it as he walked up to me. He pointed to “Rattlesnake Island” in the distance.

  “That’s where their sea monster lives.” He chuckled.

  I gazed out. Were they just glints of light playing off the water? Or was something moving out there, rolling through the waves?

  We drove south along the Okanagan. Then we turned west and the land changed. But I barely noticed. My nose was buried in the guidebook again. One of the photos in the monsters chapter was mesmerizing me. Looking through the rear-view mirror, Dad noticed. He tipped it down so he could see what I was stuck on.

  Sasquatch.

  “Remember what I told you when you were, oh, about two years old, son? There are no real monsters. Here’s a news flash for you: dragons never walked the face of the earth.”

  “Why don’t you just relax, Dylan,” said Mom, giving Dad a stare, “and look at the scenery while I tell you about our surprise.” I had the feeling that she’d wanted to leave this until later, but was getting desperate to make me feel better.

  I glanced outdoors. It was a beautiful green area of rolling hills that flattened out in places, amazing since we were still in the mountains. We might as well have been travelling through locations for cowboy movies, filled with valleys where cattle grazed. Everything was so green it looked like a painting. I couldn’t stop feeling like the world going past my window wasn’t real.

  Mom smiled at Dad. “We are going to stay at a resort,” she said. “And we’ll be there by late this afternoon.”

  I set the book down. “A resort?” That sounded good.

  “It’s in a place called Harrison Hot Springs, population—”

  “We don’t need to know the population, John, just this once.”

  “Right,” said Dad, reacting a bit like a kid who’d had his hand slapped.

  “It’s a beautiful spot with hot springs and a huge hotel and a beach and little restaurants and live bands and sand sculpture contests, sitting in front of a gorgeous lake, surrounded by mountains.”

  “And Sasquatch Provincial Park!” cracked Dad.

  “What?”

  “A beach and bands and….”

  “No, no. The park. What’s it called?”

  Dad turned around and gave me an evil glare. “Sssssssassssssquatch Provincial Park!”

  “Why do they call it that?”

  “Why do you think?” inquired Dad in a horror-movie voice, swivelling his head right around like Mom had earlier. He was trying awfully hard to make the whole thing sound childish.

  “Please watch the road, Johnny. Sometimes I think Dylan’s about twice your age.”

  She reached back and patted me on the knee.

  “Oh, there’re stupid stories about the sasquatch being around there,” she said.

  “Seen more often near Harrison Lake and the park than any other place in the world.”

  “Really?” I asked.

  “Dylan,” said Dad in his regular voice, “you can’t be seriously interested in such nonsense. The sasquatch monster? What’s next, the abominable snowman?”

  “That’s Yeti. He’s from the Himalaya Mountains, Dad, not Canada.”

  “He’s from Mars. Just like the sasquatch…and Ogopogo.”

  I opened the guidebook and turned back to the section I’d been glued to. There was that picture again: a reproduction of a single frame of a film. It showed a sasquatch walking away, glaring back over its shoulder at whoever was holding the camera. It was supposed to be real, taken somewhere near the west coast by two guys named Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin with a sixteen-millimetre movie camera in 1967. I just couldn’t get over it. Could this thing really exist?

  It took us another few hours to get to Harrison Hot Springs. We passed through an area that used to be the centre of a gold and silver rush, then entered Manning Provincial Park and began a long drop out of the mountains towards the Fraser River and its canyon. I couldn’t believe how high up we had been. It seemed to take us forever to get down. We saw warning signs for truck drivers along the road. Rough ramps were cut out of the trees on the sides of the highway so that out-of-control transports could veer off and go up into the woods to stop.

  I looked out into the dense forest. At times, things seemed to be moving in the trees.

  Sasquatch.

  “Before we get to Harrison, we need to tell you something,” said Mom, looking over at Dad.

  She sounded pretty serious.

  “What?”

  “Well, you have an uncle in Harrison Hot Springs. A great-uncle—named Walter Middy. He’s Grandma Secord’s brother. She was a Middy before she married.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  Mom and Dad exchanged glances again.

  “Well, we just thought we’d tell you. We might drop by his place and say hello. That’s it. It would just be a short meeting.
You don’t even have to come.”

  They don’t want me to meet an uncle I’ve never even seen before? That was strange. They’re usually pretty big on family. Was this guy scary or something?

  “He’s kind of weird,” said Dad.

  “Weirder than you guys?”

  There was a pause. Then they laughed. They sounded relieved to hear me tell a joke. At least they thought it was a joke. No one was much weirder than the parental units.

  They were making me curious about my uncle. But really, I’d had enough of weird people. It would be fine with me if the rest of this trip and the rest of my life were totally boring.

  I was actually starting to feel a little better about things by then. Our surroundings weren’t nearly as wild. We had finally reached the Fraser River, and a good old four-lane highway was stretching out in front of us, running towards Vancouver. You could feel the population picking up, the spookier land disappearing behind us. We drove into a town called Hope and then crossed over the river to the north side. Five minutes later we passed a sign that read Sasquatch Provincial Park. There it was, in plain English. I actually rubbed my eyes and looked at it twice. It really existed.

  Once we turned off the main road and headed away from the river, I could almost feel Harrison Hot Springs approaching. It just felt different. It seemed hot, almost tropical, like we were going into a Canadian jungle. And the sasquatch was suddenly everywhere. There was Bigfoot Campground, Sasquatch Springs RV Resort, hairy monster faces staring out from signs, and big wood carvings of giant beasts standing by the roadside. Everybody was making a buck from the legend.

  Soon we slowed down and approached the town, then turned at the beach. The blue lake looked like a huge long bathtub, with a hilly island in the middle and mountains rising on all sides. Sailboats dotted the surface and sunbathers were everywhere. A little on the stunning side, I had to admit. The resort hotel was off to our left, up the beach. It was made up of a couple of tall new buildings on either side of an old one. It was all brick and green gables. We pulled up in front of the main doors and a bellhop came running out to help us. Service. Things were looking up.

  But as I leapt out, I glanced back down the beach, past a big round swimming pool that looked like a massive bowl embedded in the sand, and had the strange feeling that someone was watching me. Another wave of fear swept through me as I searched the distant crowd. But in seconds it all passed.

  3

  The Magnificent Middy

  A solid afternoon of swimming at that big flying saucer in the beach, while music roared out of various speakers up and down the boardwalk, made me forget my worries for a while. People were parasailing around in the sky, there were Sea-Doos rocking the waves and all sorts of cool stuff. Then, at night, we caught some lounging time in the hot springs pools in this garden area behind the resort. It was unbelievable, like being in a gigantic hot tub. They keep them open late into the night. The parental units and I even went for a dip—well, more like a soak—not long before the stroke of midnight. Man, that was really kicking back.

  These springs are the reason the whole place exists. The Salish First Nations knew there was natural hot water rising up from the ground long before the white man even came here. They believed it had healing powers. Adventurers started using Harrison Lake as a way to get up north to the Cariboo Gold Rush in the 1850s, then someone jumped into a pond on the way home and discovered how incredibly warm it was, hot really. In fact, the hotel has to cool the water or it would cook human beings. The year after the CPR went through, along the Fraser, they built the first resort at St. Alice Springs, as they called Harrison back then. People came to cure their illnesses. To them, it was a magical place.

  Dad, of course, was telling me all this stuff. Magical place? I suppose. Good to hang out in, that’s all I knew. But after a day of lying around, I was getting a bit bored. It was proof of how much better I was feeling. Maybe the hot springs were curing me?

  Meanwhile, Mom and Dad hadn’t said anything else about weird Walter Middy. But I found myself wondering about him. How terrible could my own uncle be? Why hadn’t they taken me over to meet him yet? It seemed like they were putting it off. So, finally, I brought up the subject.

  “Well…” said Mom. She looked at me for a long time. “What do you think, John?”

  That’s never a good sign. When they ask each other a question in front of me it means that the one doing the asking doesn’t want to deal with the situation. Dad gave her one of his famous firm answers.

  “Uh, yeah, okay, I guess,” he responded, his head buried in a magazine about mountain climbing.

  Mom went into the other room in our suite and came back out a few minutes later.

  “We’re meeting him at the Muddy Waters Café.”

  “Neutral ground?” smirked Dad.

  “Neutral ground. Six o’clock,” replied Mom, not smiling.

  A couple hours later we turned into a café partway down the beach. People were eating their meals out in the sun. But Mom gave a very fake, cheery wave at a table tucked away in a corner. I couldn’t make out the form at first, positioned as it was in the shadows. All I saw was a pair of binoculars on a table.

  “It isn’t that your uncle Walter is a bad person; don’t get me wrong,” Mom whispered to me as we approached. “He would never hurt you, far from it. It’s just that ever since he was a kid he’s been involving himself and everyone around him in trouble. So, he wouldn’t be the best guy for you to, uh, hang out with. We have no idea what he might get you into. It’s like he’s never grown up.”

  Uncle Walter Middy was sitting there in the shadows all right. But he wasn’t what I expected. He kind of had his head down and almost seemed shy. When he saw us, he looked quickly at Mom and Dad and then for an instant stared right at me. He had riveting eyes: almost purple. He stood up and nearly knocked a chair over. I could hear him apologize under his breath. This was my scary uncle?

  “Laura, dear,” he said quietly to Mom, extending a hand that seemed to be shaking a little. “John, it’s a pleasure to see you again,” he told Dad.

  I caught my parents glancing at each other with a slight look of surprise.

  Walter Middy turned to me.

  “This must be the King of Hearts,” he said kindly and shook my hand. It was a gentle squeeze.

  “D-Dylan,” I stuttered. “Dylan Maples.”

  I thought he’d be dressed in loud clothing and have a booming voice, but he was quiet in nearly every way: His clothes were as ordinary as they get. He was wearing plain corduroy pants and a short-sleeved golf shirt, both grey. He looked to be about sixty years old, but slim and muscular. His hair was jet black, only slightly streaked with grey. It hung down almost to his shoulders. A long moustache twirled out to two sharp points above a thick goatee. He was an ordinary guy with the face of a Musketeer, like the dashing D’Artagnon. But his days of adventure seemed long gone.

  He pulled out chairs for us and we sat. Mom and Dad positioned me between them. As my butt touched the leather I found myself looking straight over Middy’s shoulders towards a girl who was looking back at me; she sat at a table facing a woman she didn’t seem to be talking to. The girl was about my age, maybe a little older, her hair as black as a raven’s. She started to smile at me. I quickly turned my eyes back to Uncle Walter.

  “Welcome to Harrison Hot Springs, Maples young and old,” he said with a slight smile.

  Then he looked down. He did a lot of that while we talked. Sometimes it was even hard to tell what he was saying.

  “So, Walter, how have you been?” asked Dad, with a smile as fake as the Cheshire Cat’s.

  Walter paused for a second, took a deep breath.

  “I’m fine…how are you?”

  For a while after that the whole conversation was of almost zero interest to me. All adult stuff about “how’s the family?” and politics and the
weather. I could tell that Uncle Walter wasn’t into it either. Oh, he tried to look interested, but every now and then I caught his eyes darting towards me. Then he’d look away. It was like his mind was somewhere else. He looked guilty about something, and very sad. Finally, he interrupted Dad.

  “I have to be honest with you,” he blurted out.

  “Sorry?”

  “I know you didn’t want to see me today, and I don’t blame you.”

  “Uncle Walter…we, uh, wanted to see you. Didn’t we, John?” asked Mom, her “pleasant” smile pasted on her face.

  “Sure,” said Dad sheepishly.

  “I’m grateful that you made the effort and I’m really happy to have met Dylan.” He glanced at me. “But don’t worry. You can leave any time you want. And you don’t have to see me again. I know now that my life has been full of bad choices. I know I’m a bad example. It’s taken me years to realize that. I guess wisdom comes with old age. Things are much quieter now. There’s no circus in my life any more. I’m not putting anyone else in danger...I’m glad you’ve given me this opportunity to apologize.”

  “There’s no need for that,” said Mom.

  “Oh, yes there is. I wish you all well. And I’m sorry.”

  Circus? Putting people in danger? What was he talking about?

  He stood up to go. For the first time I noticed he was wearing hiking boots—they looked a little muddy.

  “Sit down, Walter,” said Dad.

  After that they spoke differently. It was all really emotional stuff about Mom’s family. Soon Walter started telling them about his new life in Harrison Hot Springs, how he spent most of his time just walking along the beach, playing a little golf, taking things easy.

  Then Dad tried to lighten things up.

  “Seen the sasquatch at all?”

  Uncle Walter’s face went a bit white. He didn’t answer. He glanced at me again. Those purple eyes were saying something.

  After a long, awkward pause, Mom came to the rescue.

  “Well,” she said, “we should be going.”