by Steve Vernon
Meanwhile, Bigfoot did his best to roll and curl up and protect his own belly. Actually, it looked to me like he wanted to curl up into a big shaggy Boy Scout knot and maybe pull himself tight enough to somehow disappear up his own behind-hole.
Which didn’t quite work.
The coyote stumbled over to the birch tree and leaned on it like he was slowly falling asleep. I think he might even have peed on the tree just a little too, which was kind of gross and probably smelled a little funny – even from this far away.
While all that was happening that wandering rain cloud that the Coyote had fallen off of seemed to sort of drift down out of the sky and park itself in a nearby thicket of alders – which seemed like a sort of a strange behavior for ANY sort of a rain cloud.
Then, while I was staring at the rain cloud, Bigfoot got one of his great big feet worked up into the gut of that birch tree grizzly bear – like he was trying to balance that big bear atop of one big foot. The next thing I knew Bigfoot twisted, trying hard to keep those big grizzly bear claws away from his rib cage – which had target written all over it. Meanwhile, the grizzly bear was doing his very best to swallow Bigfoot’s entire left arm from the elbow on up. And then Bigfoot worked his other big foot up into the grizzly bear’s big saggy gut.
I could see what was coming next.
“Do it,” I said, whispering softly aloud to myself. “Get that big foot up there and kick-stomp old King Kong Yogi right back to the heart of Jellystone Park.”
I’m not sure just when I had started to cheer for Bigfoot.
I mean, he was most likely going to eat me for dessert if he managed to make a main course out of the grizzly bear. I should have been crawling over to my stepdad and thinking about some sort of an escape plan – but my feet had still somehow not quite remembered how to move.
“Do it,” I repeated. “Kick-stomp Yogi.”
I still don’t really know why I was cheering.
Maybe I had just watched one too many wrestling matches on television but I felt I had to root for somebody – and so far Bigfoot hadn’t tried to eat me.
“Go, Bigfoot, go!” I called out.
The coyote giggled.
Now I didn’t know that coyotes could giggle but then again I also didn’t know that coyotes could sky-dive either. Meanwhile, Bigfoot threw me a dirty stop-bugging-me kind of look as if he somehow understood just exactly what I was saying.
Then Bigfoot pushed just as hard as he could with both of his big feet, his free arm, and the arm that the grizzly had almost swallowed nearly up to his elbow. He pushed hard, using all of his leverage, and then he flung that birch tree grizzly bear up off him. The bear made a fine fat arc across the skyline like a big shaggy funny-smelling eagle.
Then the bear sort of bounced two or three times hard when he landed and kept on rolling downhill. I guess being built on a slope the way he was – with his big high butt and his low-slung head he had a whole lot of trouble rolling downhill fast.
When he finally stopped rolling the grizzly bear picked himself up, shook it all out and did his very best to look as if he had intended all along to allow that Bigfoot to boot his big furry butt down the side of the mountain – which was right about when the coyote stood up, sucked in his breath and then he swelled himself up with a single mighty inhale. It was like he took a deep breath that kept on getting deeper.
He swelled himself up to about the size of a small-to-medium pickup truck birthday balloon and then he leaped – howling like a rabid fire engine siren – aimed directly at the grizzly.
At that exact moment, while the pickup-sized-coyote was hovering above the grizzly bear like a giant coyote-shaped hot air balloon in some sort of a weird Thanksgiving Day parade – a huge raven – about the size of full grown nuclear jet plane – swooped down and plucked the grizzly bear up like he weighed nothing more than a feather or two.
That raven beat his big black wings and then he took off airborne.
Only he didn’t exactly pick up that grizzly bear.
It was more like the raven’s claws reached down inside the bear’s body and pulled out a living breathing thundercloud – which should not be confused with the thundercloud that the coyote had sky-dove from off of. I could see that tiny little birch bear thundercloud floating and hanging in the raven’s grasp as the big bird beat its heavy black wings and disappeared over the horizon – thundercloud and all.
“Moose turds,” Bigfoot growled – which I am guessing was Bigfoot for swearing.
Then Bigfoot bent down and picked up a rock the size of a Volkswagen engine and he threw it at the escaping raven – only he missed.
The rock knocked down an entire good-sized chunk of that alder thicket, almost crushing that rain cloud – so I guess that Bigfeet were environmentally unfriendly.
“Hey, watch where you go throwing them rocks!” a voice rumbled from somewhere deep inside of that alder thicket. “You nearly hit me that time.”
I looked hard but I couldn’t see anyone in there – unless maybe they were hiding there inside of that rain cloud.
Meanwhile, the raven flew directly over my head. I felt the raven’s shadow pass over me and it was like one of those chills that came at you out of nowhere, running up and down your backbone like an army of frozen tap-dancing zombie-ants.
What was left of the grizzly bear just lay there and the coyote landed in the dirt right directly beside the bear’s remains like a half-ton of awkward.
He made a sound like a falling pancake when he hit the dirt.
SPLAT!!!
We had won, I guess.
“YAY BIGFOOT!” I shouted out.
I couldn’t help but feeling happy. If someone had given me a pair of bright pink cheerleading pom-poms I would have shook them hard and maybe done a triple-cartwheel and followed up with a double-hernia-split. It felt a little better than screaming, I supposed, but I still have had better ideas in my time. The way I figured it this Bigfoot was either going to eat me or save me for later – like maybe for a midnight snack.
I figured if I cheered loudly enough it might spoil his appetite.
What the heck – if worse came to worse I could always wake Warren up and get him to sing about going over the mountain again.
Maybe even on-key.
Bigfoot lumbered over towards me. It was a little like watching a fully grown wood lot suddenly up-root itself and take a casual sort of Sunday stroll. I could feel his natural Sasquatch heat and I could smell his stink and his heavy feet thumping down on the mountain side like a wall full of walking thunder.
I tried to run but somebody had nailed my feet down into the dirt.
Bigfoot got closer.
I looked around for someone to help. Warren just lay there and bled a little longer. He sort of bounced softly every time Bigfoot took a step. Warren was still moaning each time he bounced so I guessed he was going to live just long enough to serve as the second course in a two course Bigfoot banquet.
The next thing I knew Bigfoot was standing over me, his shadow nearly swallowing me whole. That was something to be thankful for, I guess. At least I wasn’t going to die sunburned. So I opened up my mouth. Then I closed it again while Bigfoot stood over me just looking. Finally I found a few last words hidden in the dry and empty cave of my mouth, somewhere back in behind the pizza-stained enamel of my second left molar.
“Please don’t eat me, Mister Bigfoot,” I said. “I’m sorry I thought you were mythical.”
Which really wasn’t much as last words went.
Bigfoot blew his breath out through his lips.
For just a moment in time he sounded just exactly like my stepdad Warren, blowing his breath over his lips to show just how much teenage suffering he had to put up with. And Warren was right – the Bigfoot had a pair of the saddest-looking eyes I had ever seen.
“Eat you?” Bigfoot said. “Not even with a pair of rented-out teeth,”
I just lay there
in the dirt and gawked.
Somehow hearing Bigfoot talk like that was even harder to believe then seeing him beat up on a way-out-of-place grizzly bear.
“And I for sure aren’t no stinking myth,” Bigfoot rumbled, before turning back to staring towards that fast-disappearing raven. “Don’t think that I didn’t hear you saying that earlier, loud and clear.”
I still couldn’t find anything else to do but stare stupidly upwards at something that was NOT an hallucination, a lie, or a rural myth..
“He doesn’t really like to be called mythical,” the Coyote said, leaning over me and grinning ear to fuzzy ear. “Just so that you’d know.”
I nodded slowly.
Then I pinched myself.
“This isn’t any kind of a dream,” Bigfoot growled, without even bothering to look down at what I was doing. “So you can stop pinching yourself.”
All the same I pinched myself again.
Which hurt.
Chapter Four – Talking With Bigfoot
I felt my jaw drop open. In fact I was fairly certain that my entire lower jaw bone had fallen off of my face and hit the ground and bounced about two or three times. After which I made a bah-bah-bah sound like a sheep with a serious case of jelly-mouth stutter.
“Bah-bah-bah-bigfoots don’t talk,” I stammered out.
“In the first place it’s Bigfeet or Sasquatch – not Bigfoots,” Bigfoot said. “Or do those weird plastic wires sticking out of your ears make it that hard for you to hear?”
“Bigfeet isn’t very proper, grammatically speaking,” the Coyote pointed out.
“Who asked you?” Bigfoot retorted. “And don’t you be bringing your grandmother into this particular discussion.”
“I said grammar,” the Coyote snapped back. “Not grandmother.”
“Actually, the word that you said was grammatically, not grandmother.” Bigfoot said, following it up with a big wise-guy yellow-toothed grin. “Maybe I ought to check your ears to see if any of those weird plastic wires are growing out of them.”
Weird plastic wires?
By now I had totally forgotten that I was still wearing my i-pod wire earplugs – which didn’t help any attempt at inter-species communication much.
“What are you listening to anyway?” Bigfoot asked, rudely yanking out one of my earplugs with one big hairy hand.
Bigfoot jammed the earplug into one of his big hairy ears. My grandfather used to have hairy ears, but this guy had an entire South American rain forest sprouting behind and within each of his ears. He listened to the sound of the Screaming Sea Monkeys for a moment and then made a face like he had just dry-swallowed a whole mouthful of unbuttered broccoli.
“What is this horrible noise?” he asked. “Don’t you have any Johnny Cash tunes?”
Johnny Cash?
“No Merle Haggard? No Jim Reeves? No Hank Snow?” Bigfoot went on. “Don’t you even have any freaking Willy Nelson?”
Willy freaking Nelson?
I guess a fellow can learn something new every day.
I had just now learned that the Cape Breton Bigfoot – mythological or not – had absolutely no taste in any kind of music.
“You can’t be real,” I told him. “I must have fallen and bumped my head. I must be hallucinating this whole thing. I am going to wake up in a hospital bed and maybe some pretty nurse will bring me some vanilla ice cream in a bowl.”
Bigfoot just looked at me with a sort of how-stupid-can-you-get sort of expression on his big hairy face.
“You are still hung up on that whole mythology foolishness, aren’t you?” Bigfoot asked. “You keep thinking this isn’t real, don’t you?”
I nodded.
“Let me tell you a little bit about mythology,” Bigfoot said.
I moved my head up and down in what I thought looked something like a nod. I mean – who was I to argue with a nine foot tall Sasquatch?
“If you look that word mythical up in a dictionary you are going to read that a myth is nothing more than a traditional or invented or legendary story that usually concerns some being or hero or event – with or without a determinable basis of fact or a natural explanation – especially one that is concerned with deities or demigods and that explains some practice, rite or phenomenon of nature – such as WHERE DOES THUNDER COME FROM?” Bigfoot explained. “Do you got it?”
I nodded.
“That is a nice definition,” the Coyote said. “Did you practice that much?”
“Every morning in front of the bathroom mirror,” Bigfoot said. “It pays to be ready. There’s just no telling when SOMEBODY is going to ask you a very stupid question.”
I just kept on nodding hoping that I would wake up soon.
I think my neck muscles might have seized up on over-nod.
“Did you ever hear anybody tell a story called Butterhead?” Bigfoot asked me.
I shook my head no. It felt strangely good to me after all of that nodding.
“Let me tell it to you, then,” Bigfoot said – and then before I could nod or shake my head he started in on telling it.
“This boy was visiting his Auntie and she gave him a piece of cake to take on home to his Momma. So he took that piece of cake in his fist and he carried it on home and by the time he got home the cake was fist-squeezed down to nothing but a handful of crumbs.”
Coyote laughed at that.
“That isn’t no way to carry cake, the boy’s Momma told him. The next time your Auntie gives you some to carry home you ought to wrap it up in some clean leaves and carry it home under your hat.”
“Hadn’t he ever heard of a cake box?” I asked.
“Isn’t the point,” Bigfoot said – and then he got back to telling. “Come the next week Auntie gave the boy a pound of fresh, sweet butter to take home for his Momma and he wrapped that butter in some clean leaves and carried it on home under his hat but by the time he got on home the butter had melted and run down the boy’s forehead, nose and chin.”
“I hate it when that happens,” Coyote added.
“That isn’t no way to carry butter, the boy’s Momma said. The next time your Auntie gives you some butter to carry home you ought to cool it in a clear flowing stream before you go trying to carry it.”
A part of me wanted to ask Bigfoot just how he figured you could soak a pound of butter in a cool running stream and another part of me wanted to ask just what this story had to do with anything at all but he kept on talking and telling way too fast for me to get so much as a thought wedged in around his storytelling.
“Come the next week Auntie gave the boy a cat to take to his Momma, who was trouble with rats, so the boy took the cat on down to the stream and tried cooling it but that didn’t work out too well and by the time the boy got home he was all scratched and tore up and his Momma laughed at him and said that the next time his Auntie gave him something to carry he ought to tie a little string around its neck and let it walk on home.”
“Yeah,” Coyote said, with a twist of a grin. “Just picture trying to walk a cat with a string. That’d work out really well.”
“Come the next week Auntie gave the boy a loaf of bread to carry on home to his Momma to eat so he tied a piece of string to the loaf of bread and he dragged it on home and by the time he got home it wasn’t fit for a cat to eat and his Momma just shook her head in disgust and said that she wasn’t going to waste her time giving him any more sort of advice but that she had left six fat mincemeat pies cooling on the back steps and the boy ought to be careful about stepping in those pies so the boy walked on out back and he stepped in the middle of EACH of those six fat mincemeat pies one after another, just like his Momma had told him to.”
“So what does that have to do with anything at all?” I finally had to ask.
“It’s a story,” Bigfoot said. “Which is another word for a myth. Boys are ALWAYS not listening and not thinking and goofing things up and that’s all that the story is abou
t – the way that it is easy for a boy or anybody at all to get the wrong idea from not listening and thinking hard enough.”
I still could not get it and I told Bigfoot so.
“Just try and think of it this way,” Bigfoot said, returning his attention to me. “A myth is nothing more than a lie that someone tells you when you are too young or too stupid to really know the difference.”
I gave him one more nod.
“Usually, we can lay the blame squarely on the parents,” Bigfoot went on, kneeling down beside what was left of Warren. “So is this your Dad?”
I wasn’t going to let that pass.
“He’s not my Dad,” I said. “He’s just my stepdad.”
“Does that mean I can step on him?” Bigfoot asked. “I washed my feet last week and I even used soap on one of them.”
I thought about that.
“No,” I said. “It just means that he married my Mom after my real Dad had to go.”
“So why did your real Dad have to go when he had to go?” Bigfoot asked.
I thought about that too.
The truth of it was Dad and Mom had gone off in completely different directions a l-o-n-g time before the baby carriage bomb had ever gone off.
That’s all that Mom ever said about it – she just told me that her and Dad had both gone in different ways – like a good Boy Scout compass or maybe even a GPS or a good map would have kept the two of them together.
Now I am seventeen years old and I know fully well what the word d-i-v-o-r-c-e means – only Mom never ever used that word. As far as she was concerned she and Dad had just gone their separate ways – like he’d lost his way and just wandered off.
“I’m not sure, I guess,” I said to Bigfoot. “All I know is that Warren took Mom to a dance and step on her foot so hard that he fractured it.”
It was true.
Mom had to wear a cast for six weeks after. Warren spent the whole time at our house bringing her cups of tea and cooking her meals and cleaning the house and apologizing. It darned near drove me crazy listening to him go on about how sorry he was.
