The Bigfoot Files

by Lindsay Eagar

  “You don’t know it’s a he,” Miranda said, and knocked.

  “A ranger has to be able to fight off cougars,” was Kat’s logic, as watertight as cheese.

  “A woman could fight a cougar,” Miranda said. “There was a campaign last year to promote more women employees in the parks programs.”

  “Man,” Kat said. “They look better in the hats.”

  “Woman.” Miranda practically growled the word. “No one cares about the hats.”

  “What is the matter with you?” Kat turned away from the door; her two knobs of hair that earlier had flounced from her head like antennae now drooped, heavy and wet. “Do you have to turn everything into an argument? Anyway, maybe we’re both wrong.”

  The door opened, and a burly man in a red plaid shirt blinked at them with tiny eyes. Stubble coated the bottom half of his face; a snout of a nose protruded so far from his cheeks it cast its own shadow on the porch.

  “Man,” Kat whispered. “Told you.”

  “Shh.” Miranda couldn’t stand the glee in her mother’s eyes. To the ranger, she said, “Hi, sorry to bother you. We’re trying to get to Moon Creek campground, but we’re out of gas.”

  Ranger Pat rubbed the back of his neck with a furry hand. A television flickered behind him in a room paneled in cheap, flexible wood — a football game interrupted.

  Guilt scorched Miranda; they’d intruded on his quiet evening.

  The ranger finally said, “I might have an extra can in the garage. Let me look.”

  “Thank you,” Miranda said.

  “Were you guys hiking the falls?” Ranger Pat asked as he pulled on a jacket.

  “Yes,” Miranda answered, and was ready to leave it at that — but Kat said, “We’re researchers, actually — there was a sighting at the reservoir earlier this week.”

  The ranger stopped, arms in the jacket only elbow deep. “A sighting?”

  “Bigfoot,” Kat said.

  Miranda could have flung her mother off a cliff.

  Ranger Pat studied them, and Miranda grimaced. She knew this look well — he was measuring them, watching for cracks. Searching for the joke. “Well, did you find anything?” he finally asked.

  Kat didn’t notice the smirk in the corner of the ranger’s mouth, hidden beneath the lawn-mown whiskers — she never did. “Not today,” Kat said, “but tomorrow feels promising.” When the ranger didn’t reply — how could he, to such a thing?— she asked, “Can we use your bathroom?”

  And now Miranda wished that one of those trees would truly come alive, would reach over and lift her up and carry her away from this porch, away from the ranger, from the chasm of embarrassment she was currently rushing down like a slide at a neighborhood park.

  Ranger Pat opened his door wide, slightly stunned — a common side effect among the people who had to speak to Katerina Cho. Her mother left everyone bewildered.

  “Where’s your car?” Ranger Pat scanned the road from his porch.

  Miranda pointed down the trail. The Critter Mobile was barely visible, parked just before the asphalt road bent out of sight. Its tongue hung limply from the bumper, making it look, more than ever, like some out-of-breath creature, panting on the side of the road, nose in the huckleberry.

  “That’s a car?” the ranger said.

  “That’s a Critter Mobile,” Kat responded with pride.

  Miranda couldn’t bring herself to engage any longer; she pretended to be severely interested in her phone until the ranger sauntered off to his garage. Then she added to her to-do list:

  Get rid of the Critter Mobile — sell it, burn it, especially that stupid tongue, salvage it for parts

  She’d help her mother get a new car — a real one, a grown-up one — when they got back home.

  If they made it out of the forest alive.

  Miranda took in as few details of the ranger’s lodge as possible; they’d intruded on his privacy enough as it was. She itched her palms against her khaki vest. She wanted to get back to camp, back to the things on her to-do list. She still had so much to do — she hated being suspended in time like this, snagged on this stupid situation like it was a rusty nail.

  Despite herself, Miranda noticed that a bowl of wavy potato chips sat on the coffee table, along with a half-devoured cheesesteak sandwich, peppers and onions spilling out beneath the crusty bread — Miranda could smell it from across the room. A barely touched glass of some white fizzy drink sat on a coaster. Seltzer, probably — ammunition to ward off the inevitable indigestion from eating that greasy sandwich.

  The shame washed over Miranda in waves; so they had kept him from his dinner, too. For a moment, anger flooded her. How could Kat have left the gas light broken? And how could Miranda not have predicted this whole situation?

  She perched awkwardly on the arm of the couch — half sitting, half standing, and looked out at the night through the screen door.

  The evening transformed every distant tree branch into claws, crooked and spindly, stretching toward the moon, which was white as bone against the bruised sky — but strange colors were made, in this hour. The lichen on the trunks gleaming golden, the spruce tips shone so silver, they were nearly blue.

  Blue.

  Miranda was pushed backward into another memory — the trees, the trees were doing it, they had reached into her mind and pulled it out —

  Then, from the living room, Miranda heard the clatter of a drawer in the bathroom. The memory stopped, just short of surfacing, and fell back into the water of her mind.

  Again, a sound came from the bathroom — a cabinet screeching open — and she groaned.

  It was worse than babysitting a toddler.

  She barged in on her mother, who was, as Miranda suspected, perusing the private contents of Ranger Pat’s bathroom storage.

  “What are you doing?” Miranda demanded. “This isn’t our house!”

  “No hair spray or Midol.” Kat picked up a prescription bottle from the medicine cabinet, examined the label. “That means no wife.”

  Miranda pulled out a hair, one of those tiny nipping ones along her neck. “We’re not here to find you a boyfriend; we’re here to find Bigfoot. Stay focused.”

  “I was just curious.” Kat found the bottle boring and put it back. She fished around in her hideous bag and found her cotton-candy hand cream. “Want some?” she offered to Miranda as she smoothed the lotion into the cuticles of her glittering navy nails.

  “No, thanks.” Miranda would rather her hands smell like the loamy, musty mud of the reservoir than a candy shop.

  “You seem extra stressed tonight.” Kat pulled a tampon from her cat bag. “Do you need —”

  “No, I don’t!” Miranda concentrated hard to keep from detonating. “Are we ready,” she asked slowly, “to go find Bigfoot?”

  “Sometimes,” Kat said after a minute, “you talk like we’re going into battle.” She adjusted her glasses and straightened her capelette, and left Miranda alone in the bathroom, drawers and cabinet still hanging open.

  In the ranger’s living room, the television played a beer ad, an obnoxious jingle that stuck in Miranda’s head like chewed gum, even three commercials later. Mother and daughter sat on the couch, Kat sprawling across an entire cushion luxuriously, Miranda taking up as little space as possible — trying to breathe as little of the ranger’s air as possible.

  First thing when they got back to camp, she decided, she would change out of these clothes — she could feel the gritty orange dust from Kat’s Cheetos coating her every surface. And then she’d warm her sore back muscles with the heat of the campfire — they ached from carrying that damn pulse detector up and around the falls.

  She closed her eyes.

  What was going on right now, she wondered, outside her window at home? Would Emma’s light be turned off, only the pink haze of her night-light visible around the edges of her curtains? Miranda was so tired from two late, restless nights, she was certain if she only saw that rosy glow, she would fall a
sleep immediately.

  Kat jumped. “What was that?”

  Miranda blinked, coming out of her daze. “What was what?”

  “A noise. Outside.” Kat relaxed back into the couch.

  The beer commercial came back on the television, and the two of them watched, silent and spellbound by the addictive music of the capitalist advertising compound.

  A new smell invaded Miranda’s nose — musk, a hint of fermentation, a smack of fresh pine. The couch really stinks, she thought, and breathed through her mouth instead.

  Kat helped herself to one of the ranger’s chips, then let out a yelp, gripping Miranda’s arm.

  “Ouch!” Miranda shrieked. “What?”

  Then she heard it.

  A husky growl, a clogged septum straining for air.

  “Bean. Don’t move.” Kat was frozen as she looked beyond Miranda, all spark and dance and light in her eyes replaced by panic.

  But Miranda couldn’t obey. She had to see for herself.

  On the porch, a huge black bear stood on its hind legs, its wet nose pressed against the screen door, a mountain of fur with glistening beetles for eyes.

  If it hadn’t been so terrifying, it would have been comical; the animal looked more like a man in a bear suit than an actual bear.

  But Miranda got another whiff of that strong, hot musk, the scent of wild animal. This wasn’t a mascot. Wasn’t an oversize teddy bear. It was real, and it was less than ten feet away from the two humans on the couch, only a screen door between them.

  “We’re okay.” Miranda said this like she was trying to convince herself. “Bears aren’t interested in humans. It probably just smelled the food. We’re safe in here.” Her pulse hammered in her chest as she searched her mind for the research she’d done for this trip — she’d read about bear attacks, she knew she had.

  “What about the ranger?” Kat whispered.

  In one swift horror-movie motion, the bear slashed a paw across the mesh screen and barreled into the cabin. The wooden door frame fell around its neck and hung there like a strange rectangular collar; the bear bucked into the wall and the door frame splintered into pieces.

  Just as swiftly, Miranda’s brain spat out the information:

  Black bears — do not run. Stand your ground. Make lots of noise and if it attacks, hit it in the eyes and the snout.

  She jumped to her feet, grinding her boots into the carpet, prepared to raise her arms above her head and growl.

  “Bean, run! Run!” Kat cried, and ran across the living room and into the kitchen.

  “Mom!” Miranda called. Her feet weren’t supposed to move. They were supposed to stay planted, the way those trees out there were planted, rooted to the earth — but the bear charged forward.

  In a split second she made the choice.

  And she followed her mother.

  “Go!” Kat threw open the door to the garage and shoved Miranda through, leaving the bear inside.

  The garage was open. Outside, night had fully steeped the forest in blackness. A star or two twinkled in the cloudy sky; from this angle, the moon seemed to be a mere ornament, resting on the pointed top of a pine tree.

  “You never run from a bear!” Miranda shouted as she sidled around a blue pickup truck, speckled mud caked above the tires. She arched her back to avoid the dirt, and her khaki vest caught on the door handle.

  “I know, Bean,” Kat panted.

  Miranda wrenched herself free with a devastating rip, tearing a hole through the pocket of her vest. “Why’d you run, then?”

  The door to the house burst open, falling off one of its hinges. The bear’s monstrous head poked out of the kitchen, snout first.

  “Mom!” Miranda cried.

  The bear tried to squeeze its massive body into the garage, but the pickup truck impeded it — long enough for Kat and Miranda to rush around to the back of the house.

  “Mom, stop!” Miranda shouted. “You’re making it think we’re prey. We have to stand our ground! You’re not supposed to run from bears —”

  “That is not a bear!” Kat said, and tugged Miranda until the two of them were at a gallop.

  “What are you —” Miranda started, but she was cut off by a roar — loud and angry, close enough to send chills rippling across her skin.

  Too close.

  Miranda stopped thinking, stopped worrying about the ranger, or the Critter Mobile, or Bigfoot.

  She stopped thinking about the right or the wrong thing to do, and she ran.

  She ran.

  Kat ran alongside her, and though Miranda gasped for her mother to stop, slow down, calm down, Kat never did. Miranda peeked over her shoulder once and saw it, the bear’s fur highlighted by the moonlight, but otherwise the beast was dark as the night, its eyes glowing, and new energy took over Miranda. She couldn’t stop, couldn’t run fast enough. She let her fear drive her and her mother deep into the forest, until the cabin was a blip in the distance and the road was gone and all they knew was green.

  They ran.

  They ran and they ran and they ran. They encountered obstacle after obstacle — logs to leapfrog over, downed trees and fallen branches crisscrossing the ground, old stumps and stones jutting from the earth like the forest’s own crooked molars — yet somehow they kept their footing.

  They did not run through silence; such a deep, dark forest was certainly full of sounds — blips of water droplets from the canopy, the distant bugle of a Roosevelt elk bedding down for the night, the warble of a lonely wren, singing in the understory — but they ran past it. They ran past sound itself, so it was only a rushing over their ears, an eerie nothing that they heard, and beneath that, there was the faint noise of their panting and the shifting of twigs beneath their feet. The twigs did not crackle, because the forest was too damp, and with every step the ground gave in, pressed down, like their footsteps would leave a relief in the floor — a memory of this night.

  A cramp had sprouted in Miranda’s side. Her feet slapped the ground gracelessly. She stumbled once; Kat helped her back to standing.

  “Is it — still there?” Miranda was breathless.

  Kat sacrificed a few seconds of running to whip her head around. “I don’t — see him.” She slowed to a stop.

  The forest was no longer moss-choked and dripping wet and green; the trees were still tall, but they were no longer the behemoths of the old growth. Trunks were thick, straight arrows to the stars; the bushes were a reasonable size. They were in a clearing of firs, branches spiked black like a garden of sea urchins — Miranda instinctively tucked in close to her mother’s side; Kat put a wiry arm around her.

  “Where is it?” Miranda asked.

  Kat hushed her, listening. “I think we lost him.”

  “What are w —” Miranda started, but Kat clapped a hand over her daughter’s lips and yanked her to the ground.

  “Can you hear him?” Kat breathed the words right into Miranda’s ear, and Miranda strained to listen. There — a monstrous grunting, a heavy tread of paws, getting closer.

  Slowly, silently, they crawled. Beneath the arches of the ferns, through the white starlike flowers of the Oregon oxalis, and into the hollowed-out bottom of a big-leaf maple, the roots reaching above ground, creating a tree that looked like it was on stilts.

  Miranda hesitated; what gross botanical disease had rotted this tree from the inside out? But before she could voice her concerns, the snuffling, snorting, seething was nearly upon them, and she huddled in the cavernous trunk with her mother, heart thumping, limbs aching.

  The bear ran at top speed, right past the hollow tree, through the clearing and out into the open forest. What a horrible thing, Miranda thought, to know that it is possible for bears to move that fast. She recalled what it felt like to look over her shoulder and see the beast, see its eyes, looking right at them, and it knew what it wanted: to tear them apart.

  A nightmare.

  Inside the safety of the maple they stayed, tucked beneath its bowed legs, p
ressed together on hands and knees. Miranda counted to one hundred before she let herself breathe or move or blink. Then she counted again, and when she stopped, the silence welcomed her. Silence usually was a cold, lonely thing, silence usually made you turn inside yourself for company, made you listen to the wind in your own bones — but this silence snuggled her like a quilt.

  The bear was gone. Truly gone.

  Kat crawled out of the tree first; Miranda followed, legs shaking. “Any idea where we are?”

  Her mother looked around at the trees, at the shadows, up at the sky. She pulled her cell phone from her cat bag and tried to turn it on. “Dead,” she pronounced.

  “Why didn’t you charge it?” Miranda reached into her vest pocket for her own phone. “What’s the point of you having a cell phone if your battery’s always dead?”

  “It’s not like there’s reception out here anyway,” Kat said. “Besides, your phone is only charged because you unplugged mine in the Critter Mobile.”

  Miranda folded her arms. “It’s my charger. I needed to finish my to-do lists.” The words came out like this, all spiked and arrowed.

  “Who bought your charger?” Kat said. “In fact, who bought your phone? Who pays your phone bill?”

  It took all of Miranda’s restraint not to say, “I’ve seen that phone bill. No one is paying that phone bill”— but she kept her secrets to herself as she searched for her phone and found, instead, a giant hole in her pocket.

  The garage.

  The rusty nail.

  “My phone!” she cried. “I must have lost it while we were running!”

  “Shh!” Kat reminded her.

  “My whole life is on that phone!” Miranda went on in her fiercest whisper. “All my to-do lists, my schedule, phone numbers for everyone on student council —”

  “We’ll get you another phone, Bean,” Kat said, placing a soothing hand on Miranda’s back.

  “Our itinerary!” Miranda went on. “All my research — Mom, we’re lost! Really, really lost!” As soon as she said it out loud, it felt real — she noticed, suddenly, how this section of the forest was even taller, the crowns of the trees refusing to touch each other up at the top where the leaves broke away into open sky. How the green ahead of them looked exactly the same as the green behind. How the constellations above glittered and blended and made Miranda’s head spin.