We are being watched.
It was a thought that had prickled in the corner of Miranda’s mind ever since they had entered the forest, only then it had been essence and vapor, a dark feeling, a shadow collecting and deepening. But as she thought it now, it felt sharp and corporeal and real.
“You okay, Bean?” Kat asked as she passed, wood stacked under her chin.
The sun shifted behind the horizon; in that snap of daylight to evening, the music stopped. Miranda hadn’t realized she wasn’t moving, but now she felt a spell had lifted, and she shook her head.
“Fine,” Miranda said. “Just the wind.”
But in the silence, a whisper right to her from the shadows, the leaves of those grandfathers rustling in the breeze she’d made up. What if, the forest seemed to say.
What if, what if, what if?
Miranda did not sleep well.
The mud, as it turned out, was not orthopedic; as the night progressed it froze and got hard as a wooden slat.
She had packed an air mattress, but the floor of the tent was slicked with algae-dirt and creek water — no matter how desperately she tried to wipe it up, no matter how many paper towels she used, the gunk persisted — and she had wanted to keep the air mattress clean. Earlier, a cheery pink sunset had made an optimist out of her — they would wake up, the mud would go away, the forest would come to its senses and agree to be cooperative. She would swipe clean every dirty surface and spread out the air mattress and finish this trip with a full night’s sleep and only an adorable smudge of mud across her forehead.
Now, lying in the dark, her sunniness was zapped. It wasn’t smart or discerning to keep the air mattress clean and unused in the Critter Mobile; it was just plain dumb.
If the cold, cruel ground hadn’t kept her awake, the sounds certainly would have — a whole forest symphony playing for her, unsolicited. As a game to ward off her restlessness, she tried to decipher them one by one.
That tapping? A woodpecker. That swooping? An owl. That croaking? A chorus frog, and that howling, like something wounded, an unknown animal padding through the mist? That was nothing more than night air, tunneling through the dead hollows of a Sitka spruce.
There was no more starlight music, no twinkling music box melody, and for that she was grateful — even thinking about the ghostly song from earlier made her shiver and pull the sleeping bag tighter around her. The image of those old grandfathers, stretching their rheumatic limbs, twisting over in their sleep — she couldn’t shake it away.
In the blackest heart of the night, the forest fell silent. The only sounds were Kat’s snores and Miranda’s own ragged breathing. And then, sharp and clear, she heard it — the arrhythmic percussion of two rocks or sticks being hit together, banging, banging, banging.
She knew what Kat would say it was. She knew what the Internet would say it was, those websites in the deepest caverns of the web where strange theories floated like scum on ponds . . . but there was a logical explanation. There had to be. And in the morning, when she was clearheaded, she would figure out what it was.
Finally she pretended those sounds were nothing more than white noise tracks on her phone, lullabying her to sleep on a dithery night when Emma’s shade was already pulled down, her light already extinguished.
And so this was how Miranda drifted off into the lightest, most fragile sleep of her life, and floated into eggshell-thin dreams of pine needles and soft, sweet growls. She cried out once, when she dreamed of the moss climbing her neck, brushing against her lips. But when she woke, it was only her loose hair, covering her face.
It took several minutes to convince her stiff body to arise and move. The joints in her fingers, her kneecaps, every one of her neck bones — she could feel them all, squeaky and cold as she crawled out of the tent to a clear, clean sky, a few clouds ruffling the horizon. A horizon she could actually see this morning between the trees; the fog that had shrouded everything yesterday in cemetery haziness had dissipated.
Good. She hadn’t realized how much the fog had unsettled her until it was gone.
Kat had a small fire rolling, a skewer packed with marshmallows held over the flames. “There she is,” she said. “Morning, Bean. Do you want chocolate or extra chocolate?”
Miranda ran her fingers through her hair — the strands were damp, even though it hadn’t rained. She smelled like a wet dog. “I packed milk and cereal.”
“This is the breakfast of champions.” Her mother ate one of the marshmallows right off the stick, then offered the rest to Miranda.
“You burnt them,” Miranda said.
“They’re better that way.”
While Kat devoured enough sugar to power an entire playground of preschoolers, Miranda got herself ready. They would drive to Fable Falls, park at the reservoir, and begin their search at the base of the waterfall, the location of the alleged sighting. Miranda guzzled a whole bottle of water and filled her vest pockets with trail mix and fruit snacks. She planned to cover a lot of ground today, both physically and mentally — she would turn over every rock, look beneath every fallen log, treat this as a real scientific expedition, so when the end of their trip came, and there was still no Bigfoot, Miranda could lock eyes with her mother, muster up a brave, sympathetic face, and say, “Now do you see, Mom? Now can you admit the truth?”
Before she let her mother start up the Critter Mobile, Miranda cleared her throat. “All right. I think we should establish some ground rules.”
Kat tilted her head. “What do you mean?”
“I mean we should be very clear,” Miranda said, “about what we’re looking for.”
“Footprints,” Kat said automatically. “Stray hairs. Disrupted foliage, stripped bark. Poop of unknown origin —”
“I’m saying let’s not get too excited about poop.” Miranda pulled out a hair and took in a cleansing breath. “We need to set our standards for evidence high, okay? We need something real. Can you agree to that?”
Kat narrowed her eyes. “Can you? Can you accept it if we find something real?”
Miranda paused before saying, “Convince me.”
They drove two miles north of their campsite to Fable Falls, and it was another postcard-perfect scene — water crashing down fat rocks into white froth, then rolling and stretching and calming itself into a still, kidney-shaped lake, a fine mist hanging over the alpine water. Its banks were lined with dried brown pine needles and shingles of gray bark. The unexcitable water was steel blue, licking against round, easy stones that sunned themselves above the water levels, old algae rings telling of the rainy season that would begin soon, and then the water would rise, higher every day. Hermitages of dead logs and sticks bleached the color of bones clumped along the bank near the border of trees. The thought popped into Miranda’s head without warning: this is where a Bigfoot would live.
What if —
She shook her head, and the thought leaped away like a pond skater.
“Do you want to start near the water first, or the trees?” Either answer was fine with Miranda; it was the option that was important. The option would make Kat feel as if she were the one in charge. She wouldn’t feel Miranda’s gentle hand guiding her, leading her to the inevitable conclusion.
“Prints!” The grin on Kat’s face should have been reserved for children set loose at a state fair with unlimited tickets.
Miranda sighed.
How well she knew this slow shuffle down the bank to the mud and gunk where the mayflies bred and the bullfrogs stared and the lap-lap of the lake was as dull and unrushed as a fountain in a hotel lobby.
At the water’s edge, Miranda studied the ground, the way the articles she read the other night instructed, and she did see prints: long, waving lines, left by a snake’s gliding belly; the tentative marks of a deer’s hooves as it sneaked in for a quick, paranoid sip. And those larger, deeper tracks, the ones that collected their own water like tiny lakes, those were almost large enough to be from —
�
�What do you think, Bean?” Kat popped up from the other side of a downed tree, brittle from years of lying on its side, the water taking pieces of it for driftwood. The tracks wound down the bank and around the dead tree, becoming less and less pronounced until they disappeared into the lake. Miranda considered them. They were from a creature with a sprawling tread, paws of something that pressed deep into the mud as it drank.
“The gait is about right.” Kat squatted, held her palms against a single track, a measurement she’d taken dozens of times. “This is it, Bean.”
“Hold on a minute,” Miranda said. “You’re jumping ahead — you have to make a hypothesis first, then gather evidence, then analyze it without bias. You can’t start with a conclusion. Besides,” she pointed out, almost giddy, “look closer. These are bear tracks.”
Kat was skeptical. “These are bipedal.”
“No, look at the heft.” The pair of prints made from the creature’s back feet were noticeably deeper than the front legs. “A bear came through those huckleberry bushes”— Miranda gestured to the tree line —“down the incline and into the lake, see? Black bears have been spotted in this area — the ranger at the entrance asked us if we had bear equipment, remember?”
Her mother’s lips pursed, her nostrils moving independently, like they were taking in more air to keep the body calm.
“Since when do you know so much about bear tracks?” Kat asked, almost accusatory.
Miranda shrugged, her smugness fitting around her shoulders like a letterman’s jacket. “I told you I did a lot of research the other night.”
Kat had been to countless places with bears in the ecosystem, had seen a few of them chomping for trout in rivers. She had been a biology major once — she knew how to read tracks.
But her mother would never look down in the mud and see bear tracks, Miranda knew. She lacked the ability to see anything but Bigfoot. Everything she came across, everything she heard, everything she found was always Bigfoot.
Even though it never was.
They examined the rest of the bank, all the way around the reservoir, and their rhythm established itself quickly — Kat would spot tracks, and Miranda would identify them. More bears, a family of deer, a fisherman. Kat argued against that last one, but they could both see the tread of the heels, the gleaming hook of his fly sunken near the inverse of an illegible brand name. Details that were so obvious, you’d have to try not to see them.
“I guess that’s it,” Miranda said, and remembered just in time to sound defeated. “No Bigfoot here.” She was hungry, and weary of dirt in all its forms — it had caked beneath her fingernails and in between the peaks of her knuckles when she had, on Kat’s insistence, lifted a fish carcass from the mud so as to decipher its cause of death. Bigfoot might have chomped into it and spit out the tough parts, Kat theorized — but when Miranda lifted it by the tail, the hardened remains of the scaly skin slid out of her hands, whole and intact, not a bite mark to be seen.
“If Bigfoot was here, he’s moved on,” Kat agreed now.
There’s no sign of him whatsoever, Miranda wanted to add pointedly. Not a stitch of evidence that suggested a hairy, ape-like mammal was cruising through the trees unchecked — why keep reading clues that weren’t there? Why keep faith in something that didn’t exist?
“Wait a minute . . .” Kat walked to a stretch of beach where the reservoir thinned and the clear water washed onto sand. She stopped near a fallen branch, a long and skinny one, its dead twigs stripped of leaves and buds and color.
“A branch?” Miranda tied her hair back into a fresh ponytail, itching a bug bite on her wrist from something that had made it past her barrier of repellent.
But Kat crept around the branch, her eyes as wide as her grin. When she bent down to pick up the branch, she did so gingerly, like she was touching something electric. “Not a branch, Bean.”
“Then what?”
The not-a-branch was passed into Miranda’s hands without asking, and she stopped. “So what is it then?” It was light of weight and soft of touch, almost pliable — she wanted, on instinct, to fan it up and down like a palm frond.
Kat waited until Miranda looked back up. “It’s a feather,” she breathed, “from a bird.”
Miranda gave back the not-a-branch so quickly, she nearly dropped it. “A feather? Come on. This is way too big.”
“Step one: observation.” Kat ran her fingers along the fringe of the not-a-branch as she angled it into a patch of sun; it shimmered iridescent like hairs. “This is a feather and those”— she pointed behind Miranda to more of these odd sticks, which trailed up the sand, among the huckleberry bushes with the crunchy leaves and old spiderwebs —“are feathers.”
Miranda kept her face still; somehow the things looked a lot more like feathers when there was a whole pile of them. “Impossible. If these are supposed to be feathers, then the bird would have to have a wingspan of . . .” She did some quick calculations. “Ten feet. Or more!”
“More observations,” Kat went on. “We haven’t seen a single set of squirrel, raccoon, or muskrat prints — nothing smaller than us. Nothing that could be carried away in sharp, hungry talons — though judging by the size of those feathers, I’m sure even the deer are nervous. Yep, see here — the does keep their babies close when they come here to drink.”
Miranda scowled as she looked down at the tracks her mother pointed out — the hooves of mother deer, the hooves of their babies, nearly underfoot.
A bird of this size would eat much bigger prey. A traitorous thought.
“And yet another observation.” Kat pointed again, this time to the trunk of a thousand-year-old spruce. Sprinkled around its roots were rocklike clumps the size of bricks.
Kat took up a stick and stabbed one of the clumps; it disintegrated into sand and teeth and claws and bits of fur. A terrible sight; the stuff of nightmares.
“Pellets.” Kat swigged the orange soda and put the bottle in her bag. “All the gnarly stuff a bird can’t digest stays in her gizzard until she regurgitates it in these hard little mouth-poops —”
“Ew,” Miranda said.
“— which leads me to step two: form a hypothesis. Giant molted feathers. A dip in common prey animals at a water source. And now, these pellets — still fresh.” She pressed into another one with her stick — an entire skeleton spilled out, skull and spine and tail, and Miranda blinked.
Was that a set of beaver’s bones? Its square teeth, its flat tail . . .
“My hypothesis is that up there, in those branches,” Kat said, and again, pointed — Miranda was growing weary of that finger, that painted, glittering navy nail — to the highest boughs of the wizened tree, “there is a nest of owlets — from the rumored giant owls of the Northwest.”
A noise from the crown of the tree.
Miranda looked up, shielding her eyes from the sun. A wad of sticks and moss and other forest debris stuck together in a mass on a high branch — much too high for any reliable estimation of its size, she thought, so there was no reason for her breath to be scant, her heart light in her chest.
No reason for the word nest to stick in her mind — there were other logical explanations. It wasn’t a nest — it was debris, blown high into the tree during a summer storm. And the feather was not a feather — it was a type of uncommon, deep-woods fern. The smaller animals weren’t hiding because of birds; they were shy of the impending humans, and the pellets were — the pellets were — Miranda spun, her mind seeking traction. But she was out of ideas.
“Of course,” Kat finished, “if this were an expedition to find giant owls, we would do a lot more research here — we would climb the tree, test my theory, hopefully take a specimen to an aviary specialist and have it properly studied. But it’s not. This is about finding Bigfoot, and so none of this matters.
“You can make this about the scientific process, Bean.” Kat leaned into Miranda, an arm draping across her daughter’s shoulders. “You learned it in school, and you c
an check those off as we go — I know how you love your lists — but the real scientific process isn’t always as clean as that. It’s not always about marching through some arbitrary steps. This weekend isn’t only about science, Bean.” Kat removed her glasses and wiped the sandy grit and splashes of river water off with her capelette. “It’s about believing.”
Miranda’s cheeks burned against the chill of the late morning, and she willed them not to — Kat hadn’t put her glasses back on yet; she stared at her daughter with naked eyes, and Miranda wondered if her mother was looking through her. She felt see-through. Did her mother know? Know that Miranda didn’t really buy that Bigfoot was real; know that this whole weekend was a sham, a construct, a lie?
“So what’s the plan, Bean?” Kat said. “Do we stay here and take another lap around the bank, or head back to camp and regroup?”
“No,” Miranda said quickly. “We go to the falls.”
“You think that’s a good idea?” Kat tilted her head.
“I know large herbivores tend to stay near still water,” Miranda said, “but maybe —”
“Maybe there are places behind the falls that would work as a habitat!” Kat finished, grinning, and Miranda weakly nodded. “Great idea, Bean — let’s grab the pulse detector and we’ll just follow the bank up to the rocks.”
As Kat rummaged through the back hatch of the Critter Mobile, Miranda tugged out a hair. “Should we take one of those — those things home with us?” She nodded at the pile of not-branches, gray against the bleached sand.
“Too late for us to claim that discovery.” Kat pulled the doohickey from its case and flipped its switch to on. “It was all over the cryptozoology forums last year — two universities, both racing to analyze the DNA from feather and eggshell specimens and name the creatures first.” With a generous smile, she extended the scanning pulse detector to Miranda, its machinery humming and whirring like something alive. “But we’re not here for giant owls. We’re here for something else.”
The weight of the pulse detector in Miranda’s hands, its awkward construction, the thought of how much her mother had likely spent on its purchase — money that should have gone to important bills . . . it all seemed ridiculous again. Comfortingly so. She didn’t know what to make of brittle feathers longer than her arm, or muted hoots from the tippy-top of a spruce crown — but she could handle ridiculous. That was why she was here.
The Bigfoot Files Page 9
