“Everywhere we go, we leave a giant dirty footprint behind.” Kat shook her head. “We’ll be lucky if Bigfoot ventures this far out in the open ever again — someday soon there won’t be any sightings at all. Not with the way humans treat our world — like it’s all one giant trash can.”
Miranda pounced on the proposition of “no more Bigfoot sightings” and began to weave a response, but her mother shushed her. “Hear that?” Kat slanted her head, one of her hair knobs reaching to the sky, eclipsing the far-flung sun.
There was only the peal of the water, the trickle of a pool collecting somewhere nearby, the movement of the birds as they ended their songs —
Something sharpened. Something large loomed from the trees, and Miranda’s stomach turned to water.
“No,” was her whisper, but the forest did not listen.
The black bear came through the understory; in that moment the sky seemed to touch the ground, the green rimming the blue. The bear swung its head from side to side, looking very much like it was searching for something in particular.
“Across the river, Bean,” Kat coached from behind Miranda. “Come on. Quickly.”
But Miranda held her breath, held herself absolutely still. Her fingers twitched; they wanted to rebel, wanted so badly to reach up and take one hair, one tiny hair.
“Bean!” Kat said again. “Follow me now!”
“No!” Miranda barked. “You’re not supposed to run!” Didn’t her mother remember what happened last night? Didn’t her mother know now that she had been wrong?
With a sudden guttural snarl, the bear spotted them.
It charged to the river, its paws grabbing at the slick, moss-carpeted earth.
“We have to run!” Kat took hold of Miranda’s vest and tugged.
Miranda’s limbs were full of electricity, ready to fly directly up and into the air to avoid being slashed to pieces by the bear. The only things stopping her were gravity and the fact that you are not supposed to run from bears.
“Stop!” She swatted behind her at her mother’s hands. “You’re going to tip me into the water!” Stay still! she ordered her legs, even as they trembled.
The bear was close enough now that she could see its eyes, glinting like ebony glass. How could her mother think this was Ranger Pat? A transformed human — a werebear, or whatever she called it? Something from her cryptozoology forums come to life? A legend, a bedtime story, a lie?
This thing racing toward them was pure animal. Muscle and claw and teeth.
Run, every instinct in her said fiercely — and hot on her neck was her mother, telling her the same thing.
But the research she’d done flooded back to her —
Stand your ground
Lift arms to make yourself taller
Fight back with fists, rocks, sticks, or teeth
DO NOT RUN
“Bean!” Kat screamed, her hands desperate and white-knuckled on Miranda’s vest. “They can’t go into water! You have to trust me!”
The bear was here, it was close enough for Miranda to feel the absorbed sun wafting off its black fur; close enough for her to smell nothing else but its heady musk, that sour stink of sweat and decay; close enough that its teeth —
Miranda stumbled backward.
Kat reached out to help her daughter cross the bridge of garbage, but Miranda pushed away her mother’s hands — those hands with the navy blue sparkly nails and the plastic bracelets jangling and the same curved pinky that was on Miranda’s hands, her most hated finger — and leaped onto the mess of sticks and trash and slick weeds. Her boots depressed the mud.
Suddenly, the garbage slipped beneath them, the great mass peeling away from the rest of the bank and sliding into the water.
Swimming pools in summertime were friendly, joyfully blue — this water was dark and mean, the sound of chaos churning, the threat of bones crushing.
“Hang on!” Kat dropped to her knees, shielding Miranda with her body. The bear leaned over the mermaid rock and swiped a paw, just missing Miranda’s head as the entire detached clump of muck floated away.
The bear paced along the riverbank, its fur gleaming dirty black in the daylight, as if it couldn’t make up its mind whether to storm the water after them or not. But it lost its chance — the raft of garbage and mud carried Miranda and her mother downstream, the bear seething, trotting along the shoreline until the water curved — bless the crooked, imperfect path of this river, Miranda thought as the bear faded into a black speck against the green.
“This is way better than walking. We’ll get a proper tour of the forest now,” Kat said, leaning over the raft’s edge to watch the water’s rush, and Miranda goggled at her mother.
“Are you serious?” she cried, her teeth chattering. “We’re going the wrong way down an unknown whitewater river on a floating hunk of garbage, and you think we should be excited about the scenery?”
“Hey!” A passing goose bobbed its head, startled by Kat’s volume. “If you had just crossed the river when I told you, we wouldn’t be in this predicament!”
“You’re not supposed to run from bears!” Were the trees weary yet of hearing her say this, again and again?
“That isn’t a bear!” Kat’s voice was raw above the violent swirls of the river. “That’s a werebear — you can’t stand your ground with a werebear or it’ll tear you apart!”
The word werebear assaulted Miranda’s ears, discordant, jamming the melody of facts, of data, of all things true.
Just as Miranda took in the breath to say, “There’s no such thing as a werebear!” over and over until her mother folded in on herself, she heard it — the music box again, gentle as summer rain, impossibly delicate above the din of the water.
“Hello?” She stood unsteadily on the raft and called, gasping, “Hello? Can you hear me?”
Kat yanked her back down to sitting, the raft shifting in the water. “Are you trying to knock us both over?”
Miranda kept crying out, “Hello? Help! Help us! We need help!”
“Who are you yelling at?” Kat squinted down the banks, the water soaking her knees, and Miranda looked as well — but the banks had nothing but pebbles and moss and the occasional bird and trees. Oh, how she wearied of trees!
“You can’t hear that? That music?” she asked.
Her mother frowned, listening — but the tinkling song had ended, gone as quickly as it had come on. Whoever it was, they must have floated past. She imagined the kind of girl who would bring a beloved music box out to the woods to wind it up and play its eerie tune for the trees, a birdsong of steel and cogs — the type of girl who loved to hear stories, who liked her monsters sharp of claw and bristly of fur and real, very real.
No doubt Kat would’ve liked her.
“Now what do we do?” Miranda said.
Kat said nothing as the rapids pushed them farther down the river, farther into the forest, with only each other to hold on to.
Tell me a monster.”
The black-haired girl sat up in the dark, hugging her blanket-knees on a queen-size mattress on the floor.
A bigger version of the girl jumped in the doorway, a woman with stars for eyes. “Bean, you scared me.” She unbuttoned her flannel shirt and draped it over a desk in the corner of the small bedroom, a desk covered in clean laundry from earlier that morning, still nagging to be folded.
Two entire lives, crammed into that bedroom.
“Please?” the girl begged.
“You’re supposed to be asleep,” the mother said. “You already got a story from Grandma.”
“Her stories aren’t as good as yours.” The girl’s lower lip couldn’t possibly pout any lower; her mother was a fiddle, and the girl knew exactly how to play her. “Tell me a monster. A creature. From tonight.”
The mother changed into pajama pants and sat on the edge of the mattress. “All right. Tonight it was Bigfoot.”
“Again?”
“Again.” The mother released her h
air from a tight braid and shook it out, littering dried leaf bits and twigs across the bedspread. “But this time, it happened.”
“You saw him?” the girl gaped.
The mother showed the girl an image captured on her thermal binoculars — a blurred red outline against cold, black trees. “It was him,” she said, “I know it was him.”
“I wish I could see him.” The girl lay back onto the bed, her eyelids heavy, the creature already swimming around in the darkness, waiting for sleep to come so he could dance through her dreams all night.
“Maybe you will someday.” The mother kissed the girl good night and went into the kitchen where she put a kettle on for tea.
An older version of the mother and daughter already sat at the table — the grandmother — drinking from her own mug of steaming tea. Her eyes, once stars, were now more like mirrors, clean from all manner of spot or grime, reflecting spotless versions of the people who peeked in. She kept her eyes in her lap as the mother poured her tea and added three sugars.
“You quit?” the grandmother said.
The mother said nothing.
“Why? That was a good job for you. Flexible hours for Miranda, and they paid you well, even without a college degree. How could you do this? Why do you have to be so irresponsible?”
The mother sighed. “Mama, I —”
“Can you get it back?”
“I don’t want it back,” the mother said. “It’s perfect timing.”
“Perfect timing for what?” the grandmother asked. “What are you plotting?”
“To hunt full-time.” When the grandmother didn’t respond, the mother went on. “I have money saved up, I have my equipment — if I don’t do it now, I’ll be stuck in that office forever, and I’m close. I’m so close, I can feel it — just a little more research and time —”
“This isn’t about just you anymore.” The older woman had a particular talent: she spoke words of all manner of consonants and shapes, and yet her lips stayed a bold purple line. “You have a daughter to think of.”
“This is for her as much as it is for me.” The mother waved her hands in the steam curling up from her tea. “She needs to see that anything is possible.”
“She needs to have a mother who provides for her.” The grandmother stirred her tea. “You’re putting yourself before her welfare.”
“So I should give up on my dreams?” the mother said. “That’s now a requirement of parenting?”
“That is parenting,” the grandmother said.
The mother folded her arms. “I’m building a better life for both of us.”
“And this is the life you want? A life of camping and travel and searching for these — these monsters you claim are hiding in plain sight?”
“Why do you have to say it like that?” the young mother said. “Like it’s so ridiculous? All animals started out this way, didn’t they?” The mother paced the kitchen, every one of her movements made more frenzied and overdone by the comparison to her mother, sitting calmly, still as a pond. “The squid — people thought that was make-believe. Same with the kangaroo. The oar fish. The Komodo dragon. The okapi. They all had to be found — discovered by someone, someone willing to look past everything we see every day and find the extraordinary.”
“And you think you are this person?” the grandmother said.
The mother shrugged. “What if I am?”
The grandmother straightened. “And this is the life you want to build?”
“Yes,” the mother said.
“Then you will have to build it somewhere else.” The grandmother placed her hands flat on the table, facing down, so the tops of her knuckles and her wrinkled fingers were exposed, blue veins protruding, the skin worn paper-thin by nothing in particular, just living.
“What are you saying?” The mother’s eyes flashed, a warning, stars hurtling through the night.
The older woman held steady — though, if you knew to look for it, you’d find the trembling of her chin. “You’ve already borrowed more money than you could ever hope to pay back —”
“I’ll get you your money, if that’s what this is about,” the mother practically growled.
“How? Your savings will go faster than you think.”
“I’ll be fine,” the mother said. “I’ve got —”
“And those?” The older woman pointed at the black case for the thermal binoculars in the living room. “How much did they cost? This is an expensive career you’re getting into, and for who? Who’s going to hire you? How are you going to earn money when you work for no one but yourself?”
“I’m going to —”
“How will you do this, Katerina? How?”
“If you’ll just —”
“I know it was a shock, when he left.” The grandmother reached out, put her hand on her daughter’s hand.
For a moment, they could hear everything in the kitchen — the mineral drip of the faucet, the whisperings of the dishes, asleep in their cupboards.
“Not to you, right?” The mother pulled herself away. “Didn’t you say it would happen? You knew it was coming?” Her jaw hardened to steel. “It was exactly what you were hoping for.”
The grandmother’s mirror eyes went cloudy. “I didn’t know it would happen. I believed it might, but I never wanted it for you, Katerina. That — that pain. But I can’t support this lifestyle. I told you — if you live under my roof, you must be working or going to school.” She picked up her tea. “I will give you three months. Then you need to find your own place.”
But the star-eyed woman and her daughter were out in a matter of days.
One week later, the mother found her first footprint. She took a mold of it and sent the plaster to a university. The university sent it back with a letter listing the requirements for a research grant application; it was meant to be a deterrent, not an encouragement.
But the mother didn’t hear “no.” She only heard “not yet.”
She set the plaster footprint on her living room mantel in her new cheap, tiny box of a house as a reminder — a reminder to keep walking forward.
A reminder that some things were true, whether people believed in them or not.
The daughter with the serious eyes had overheard the conversation between the mother and the grandmother from her mattress on the floor. And for all the stories of monsters and creatures and mysterious things that hid in the shadowy places of the world, this was the most unsettling — to hear her mother snap like that, to hear her sound like a child. To hear that fear in her grandmother’s voice.
To hear the silences, and to feel a new coldness descend on the house.
But most unsettling of all was the moment when they pulled away in their rented moving truck, and the daughter looked back at her grandmother’s house — she did not recognize the living thing, standing, solemn, in the doorway as they left. She had never known her grandmother to be cold, not until this moment.
That was the moment she realized it — they would probably never see the grandmother again.
But for a while they were happy — the daughter was allowed to go on all the creature hunts, which were no longer sequestered to only weekends, but ran into first days of school and trick-or-treating and birthdays. Every time they left their driveway in the new-to-them squarish van, the daughter would tilt her head into the cool glass of the window; she could feel something, out there, beyond the wind. Tendrils reaching, a hint of gold in the sky.
Something magic.
“Do you think we’ll find him this time?” she’d ask the mother.
The mother would adjust her mirrors and say, half looking at her own reflection, as if she were talking to herself as much as to her offspring, “We don’t find Bigfoot, Bean. Bigfoot finds us.” Then, with a merciful wink and a grin that could outshine the sun, she’d add, “But we’re close. I can feel it. We’re close.”
Close or not, he never found them.
And they never found him.
They�
��d find footprints, or hear far-off noises, or spot shadows, “evidence” that was always exciting to the mother, who was searching for reasons to believe.
But things shifted that night on the floor in the grandmother’s house. The daughter began to see holes in everything until, eventually, she saw her mother for who she really was.
A mom who sold her own future and the childhood of her only daughter so she could hunt for monsters.
A mom who traded it all in for bedtime stories.
The debris held together as if it had grown from the earth that way, old cups and chip bags and cardboard tangled together with cattails and sludge, but it proved to be the perfect raft. It only jolted them once, when the river suddenly dipped its elevation to match the decline of the land — Miranda hadn’t realized she was dozing until the bump knocked her awake.
It was the lull of sailing, the warmth of direct sunlight on her face, the way her windbreaker was bunched up perfectly beneath her, and her mother’s shoulder . . .
She yawned.
Her sleep hadn’t been deep enough to make a dream, but she’d had one anyway. Another hiccup of time, another memory regurgitated like a pellet, and this one was full of teeth.
Things were still green, yes, but less uniformly so — the pines were now straight, triangular-shaped, acres of perfect Christmas trees. The distance between their roots and the places where they sprung from the ground — it was comfortable. Breathable.
Moss no longer blanketed every surface, only the fronts of some older trees, the tops of the branches, the sky-facing parts of the rocks. No longer a moss monster that would take over their bodies while they slept, but rather a dusting.
Like frost on winter’s first morning.
It embarrassed Miranda, to be so relieved by this.
They kept their eyes peeled for people — park rangers, canoers, for anyone who could rescue them.
But they were in true wilderness now.
The Bigfoot Files Page 14
