“Look.” Kat pointed.
Almost a mile downstream, the river bent through a ravine, trees and salmonberry bushes and cattails parting to let the water through. Mount Draco came into view, majestic and proud — and getting closer.
Miranda’s heart skipped. They had come so far so quickly.
“The water curves right around the mountain,” Kat said.
“So you think we should try to go around the mountain, too?” Miranda’s voice wavered. “That’ll put us miles away from the Critter Mobile —”
“Give me a minute,” Kat said calmly. “Let me think.”
Miranda tried to picture it on the maps she had studied — she recalled that Mount Draco was, yes, surrounded by offshoots of creeks and streams and pools — but she couldn’t remember where they led.
She couldn’t remember.
“Yes. We’ll stay on the river and go around,” Kat finally said. “The water on the other side is nice and quiet. We’ll be able to climb off there and swim to shore.”
“Wait.” Miranda frowned. “How do you know?”
“Oh — we camped here once. A long time ago.” Kat removed her mud-splattered glasses and tried to wipe them clean on her capelette, which was also dirty.
“Me and you? Or you and Uncle Bob?”
Kat locked eyes with her daughter. Without her glasses to magnify them, her eyes were naked, child-size. Miranda could see straight past her mother’s irises to her soul, if she wanted to. But Miranda didn’t.
“Me and your dad.” Kat put her glasses back on.
“Oh.” A small word, all Miranda had to offer.
“It was years ago,” Kat said. “Before you. A lot of the terrain has changed. There are more trees now. Fewer squatters. But I do vaguely remember Mount Draco.”
Miranda was quiet, considering the forest around her — it felt haunted now, with memories she hadn’t even been alive for. What had her father thought of these pines, these birds, this sky? Was he a good fisherman? What would he be doing differently, if he was the one trapped on this raft with Miranda instead of Kat?
“We should come back here in the summer,” Kat said, “when the yew trees are in season and the nights are warmer.” She smiled. “Let’s do it. Just you and me, Bean.”
Miranda was only half listening.
Something had been knocked over, a switch flipped.
He had to be smart, she had decided. Book smart. A fan of graphs and charts and numbers, everything laid out just so. He must see the world this way, because that’s how Miranda was, too. Miranda must have gotten it from him — where else would she have gotten it from?
“Thirsty?” Kat offered Miranda the orange soda from her cat bag.
“Gross.” Miranda shook her head. “It’s probably warm. And flat.”
“Well, it’s all we have.” Kat gestured to the river. “Unless you like delicious, refreshing algae water.”
“Green tea,” Miranda blurted. Nine-year-old Miranda, bored during a hunt for the Bear Lake Monster, had decided to set up a booth selling lake water. The water had been full of bacteria and floaters, but she’d promised it would quench the thirst of any brave takers.
Kat giggled. “A quarter a cup,” she recalled. “Uncle Bob went broke.”
Miranda caught herself smiling, but wiped her face clean of emotion before Kat could make a big deal out of it — before she could take this and turn it into a mother-daughter bonding moment.
That was not what this trip was for.
Mount Draco loomed closer, and the river picked up speed. A log rolled into the water and was immediately ground to smithereens in the rapids.
Miranda’s fingernails dug into the mud of the raft — beneath them, the water churned chocolate brown and steely blue and hunter green, the white mirror of the sun on the surface shattering, then reforming, then shattering again.
“Okay, Bean, I’m going to need you to stay calm.”
“What? Why?” Then Miranda saw the mountain, and her jaw nearly fell off its hinges and splashed into the water.
The river did not go around the mountain; it went through it.
Cut out of Mount Draco’s rocky base was an archway, under which the river flowed into a cavern so long and deep, they couldn’t spot the daylight on the other side. The water dropped six feet before surging into the cavern — a short fall, but a dangerous one, especially considering their raft was made of sticks and trash.
What had she read about Mount Draco? She knew it had caves and tunnels, pockets of dead space.
She knew what lived inside those caves — white-nosed bats, Larch Mountain salamanders, scorpion flies — but she couldn’t make her brain summon the details she needed.
What if our raft capsizes?
What if we are smashed to pieces in the wake?
What if there is no way out of the tunnel, and we disappear under the mountain forever?
And then she was out of time for questions.
“Hold on to me!” Kat didn’t wait for Miranda to do it; she wrapped one arm around her daughter and clenched the mud-slicked weeds of the raft as it pitched down and dipped beneath the surface.
The world was muted, all those chirps and forest scuffles gone as the water plugged Miranda’s ears and shocked her with its cold.
And then the raft bobbed to the surface and passed through the archway into Mount Draco’s black cavern.
“Are you . . . all right?” Kat said, coughing.
Miranda choked out a “yes” as she rubbed the river out of her eyes.
They were alive.
Inside the mountain it was dark as night, but with the last swell of sunlight, she caught her mother’s silhouette. Kat was chewing on a sparkly blue fingernail. It was an old childhood habit, Miranda knew, one that Grandma Hai had insisted Kat break; her mother was as shaken as she was. Miranda felt a little better knowing this, though she couldn’t explain why.
Thankfully, the water was less violent inside the cavern. No more swirling vortex of death — this was a lazy river meandering beneath a fake plastic mountain at a water park, Miranda told herself, and their mud raft was an inflatable inner tube, carrying them away to relaxation. Miranda breathed out, trying to exhale the daggers in her lungs.
The river curved around a cluster of stalagmites, and the cavern opened, brightened. Tunnels in the mountain’s side let rays of sunshine through, like windows broken into the burnt orange rock. The water deepened, shifting in color from the cold, earthy blue of a mountain stream to the eerie green of a subterranean lake.
Miranda leaned over the edge of their raft and peered at her reflection in the olive water — an exhausted, grimy version of the Miranda she knew. What would the student body think if they saw their president now? She finger-combed her wet hair, pulling free a few strands that refused to conform, delighting in the tiny pain.
“Bean,” Kat whispered. Miranda’s hands dropped to her lap. “Are you seeing this?”
Sunbeams pierced the cavern’s darkness in rich aureate arrows, hitting the walls and setting off a rainbow of sparkling glitter.
Mount Draco was bleak and crackling gray on the outside, snow from ancient blizzards hardened on its peaks — but inside, every color of the spectrum glistened. The very air was jeweled.
The mountain’s big secret.
“Mineral deposits?” Miranda asked.
Kat’s face was covered in a constellation of little white reflected lights. “Or a dragon’s hoard.”
Miranda rolled her eyes.
“You’d better be careful,” Kat said, “or you’ll roll those eyes right out of their sockets.”
“Sorry.” Miranda looked for herself in the water again, but it was too murky. Clouds of black silt, stirred up by their raft.
Dark shadows against the green.
“Hey, Bean. Remember Hilda Wolf?”
“Who?”
“Hilda Wolf! You know, she snapped that famous picture of Bigfoot by the horse trough? On that farm in Oregon?”
Miranda made no indication that she knew or cared — Kat went on anyway. “She had a theory about Bigfoot and caves — something about their vocal reverberation and echolocation.” Kat glanced around the cavern. “He could be in here, right now. Watching us. Hiding.”
Miranda removed a twig that was stuck in her bootlace. “How exciting.” Her voice was flat as the water, but she was too worn-out to fake any enthusiasm.
“It could happen, Bean. Someone spotted him here at Mount Draco just last year.” Kat fiddled with her plastic bracelets. “A hiker saw him just before sundown —”
“And let me guess,” Miranda said. “He tried to take a picture, but his battery was dead. Or he did get the picture, but a bat flew across the camera lens at the exact moment he snapped it. Or he developed a sudden inexplicable tremor in his hand, so the picture turned out blurry.”
Even though the cavern was the most beautiful thing she’d seen on their trip so far, Miranda could not be more relieved to see the end of the cavern ahead — daylight pouring through another archway, the glimpse of a calm, clean-looking shoreline visible in the distance.
Their last minutes in the dark.
Miranda’s last chance, before the sunshine chased away the shadows, to say something she hadn’t been able to say yet, in the light of day. “I can see how some people wonder . . .” she chose her words carefully, “if there really is a Bigfoot. If he’s real, why there isn’t proof?”
Kat laughed. “There’s so much proof!”
“Like what?”
“Footprints —” Kat started.
“Are easy to fake,” Miranda said. “All they prove is that someone with a plaster mold was stamping around in the dirt.”
“Hair and scat samples —” Kat tried again.
“Which, so far, have only come from known, already-discovered creatures.”
“There are some photos and video footage —”
“And they’re never in focus, or they’re obviously people in gorilla suits.” Admit it, Mom — the words were there on her tongue. She could taste them, the yaw of the consonants, their sharpness. There isn’t any real, hard, scientific evidence that Bigfoot exists!
Kat was quiet for a moment, their raft sailing along the green. “Eyewitnesses,” she said. “There have been hundreds of accounts every year for centuries. People spotting large, hairy, simianlike creatures all over the world — but especially in the Pacific Northwest.”
“That doesn’t count. You can’t trust people.” Miranda realized she’d been shaking her head for about a minute straight, but she couldn’t stop. “People see what they want to see.”
“If you can’t trust people,” Kat said, “you can’t trust anything.”
Miranda focused on the upcoming shoreline, the way the sun hit the water. Back at camp, tucked at the bottom of her duffel bag, was the stack of opened mail — the bills, the notices, splattered with red ink in envelopes with jagged edges. If she had the bills here, she could pull them out now, let them win this argument for her: You see where Bigfoot has gotten you? she would say. You see where trusting people has gotten me? I trusted you to be responsible, Mom, and now we are in trouble.
“None of that matters anyway.” Kat picked at the long strands of grass that trapped a rusty tin can to the mud on the raft. “We’re going to find proof enough for all of them this week.”
This week? “No, it’s already Sunday.” Miranda’s insides clenched. “The trip is over. As soon as we get back to the Critter Mobile, we have to pack up our things and start driving.”
“But we barely got to search for clues!”
“I told you, I can’t miss any more school. I already missed Friday.” Tears prickled her eyes. All for this stupid trip, so she could save their house — and save her mother. “We’re never going to make it back, anyway. If we don’t drown in this stupid river, we’ll die of hypothermia or get eaten by that bear.”
“Werebear,” Kat corrected, and explosions went off in Miranda’s head.
“Stop it!” Miranda’s shout reverberated in the cavern. High above them, bats rustled among the stalactites. “Stop calling it that. It’s just a bear!”
“We’re lucky werebears are rogues.” Kat continued as if Miranda’s words had gone straight into a vacuum; her hands were now caked in mud as she tried to unearth the tin can at her knees. “Can you imagine if he ran in a pack?”
Orange flames. Billows of black smoke. Buildings collapsing.
“It’s. Just. A. Bear.” Miranda’s teeth gritted together so hard, they could have shattered like panes of glass. “Just a regular, run-of-the-mill, terrifying black bear with some sort of territorial grudge against us —”
“You know what?” When Kat finally looked at her daughter, there was steel in her eyes. “If you don’t want to believe me about the werebear, fine. That’s your choice. I can’t make you. But you need to realize,” she said as she yanked up the final blade of grass trapping the tin can to the mud, “some things are true whether you believe in them or not.” She freed the tin can with a yank and their raft shifted beneath them.
A bellow sounded in the cavern.
“What was that?” All Miranda’s anger liquefied into cold, trembling fear. She scanned the cavern for black fur, black claws, a dripping black snout . . .
The garbage under them shifted again. Another growl, like a famished stomach, amplified in the rocky enclosure.
“Bean,” Kat said. “We’ve got to get off.”
“No!” Miranda said. “We’re almost to the shore —”
The raft slowed in the olive water, then spun around — spun against the current.
“We’ll swim for it.” Kat held out her hand. “You have to trust me, Bean — come on!”
“We’re fine! The raft’s just caught in the weeds.” Miranda’s own heart didn’t share her faith — it thumped for attention, hopping and scratching and meowing in her chest.
“Bean, this isn’t a raft!” The tin can at Kat’s feet rolled into the water with a splash. “It’s a —”
Before she could finish, the raft shook like a sopping wet dog, and Kat was thrown off. She landed in the water with a splash.
Miranda screamed.
Then the raft dove into the river, with Miranda still clinging to its back.
Miranda’s lungs were on fire.
The raft — the thing that wasn’t a raft — moved along the bottom of the river. Flashes of colored lights from the mineral deposits penetrated the green water as they took laps around the cavern, the thing trying to shake Miranda off, her hands clenching its weedy tendrils in panic.
Don’t breathe in, don’t breathe in.
The part of her mind that still held on to a shred of logic repeated this over and over, but it was getting harder and harder to keep her mouth closed. Her body craved oxygen, burned for it.
No oxygen down here! her mind shouted —
Or maybe there was?
That’s how the mermaids do it, right?
Something in her brain itched. That last thought didn’t feel right.
Maybe sweet relief is only an inhale away?
Which thoughts were good thoughts, and which thoughts were only surfacing because she was starved of air?
Which thoughts were like her mom’s thoughts?
The thing abruptly stopped, shuddered beneath her. Miranda convinced her hands to release their death grip. She was finally free, but too weak to kick or swim. Just tired skin and bones drifting through the river alone.
Her eyes fluttered open and closed. Muted rainbow lights and soft green water the color of moss.
And then —
Then she saw it.
She saw it, and her eyes focused.
The thing.
The thing that wasn’t a raft.
It wasn’t a raft —
Because it was a fish.
A giant fish, one eye blinking dully at Miranda — a long, cylindrical eye, like an old tin can. Her mother must have ripped its other ey
e clean out of the mud.
Mud that wasn’t mud, because it was scales — huge mud-slicked scales covering its garbage-studded body, weeds poking out of its face.
Weeds that weren’t weeds, because they were whiskers. Like a catfish’s whiskers.
As for the garbage in the mud — soggy pizza boxes, plastic soda bottles, dozens of cigarette butts — Miranda couldn’t tell what was truly litter and what was just the strange scale pattern of this impossible creature.
A creature.
How could they have thought this was part of the riverbank?
Through the sea of green, Miranda watched its bottom lip droop, its teeth like broken bits of mismatched glass — emerald green, root beer brown, amber orange.
Her eyes rolled into the back of her head. This was it. The last of her oxygen.
She drifted down, down into the water, down . . .
A pair of arms wrapped around her middle, and she was rocketed to the surface where she gasped for air and found it at last.
“Swim, Bean, swim!” Kat shouted in her ear, her voice rattling around inside Miranda’s head.
No, Miranda thought, groggily. Get out of my head. You can’t come in here.
But Miranda obeyed, kicking her legs, newly energized with every breath she took.
The fish, the thing — whatever it was — made a wide revolution in the river and headed out of the mountain cavern toward the light, where its shadow faded from the water. Off to find another lazy, shady spot in the forest to park itself.
The river carried them under the archway and out of the cavern, too, to the other side of Mount Draco.
Here the water was quiet and low, pooling in a natural reservoir of gunpowder blue. Geese dipped their white-flecked heads in the shallows for water bugs; an abandoned beaver’s dam unmade itself in the anemic current, spiky black splinters beaching themselves on the pebbles.
Miranda clawed her way to the bank and lay there, plastered to the ground like a starfish. “What . . . was that?”
Kat sat up beside her, unwinding her inky hair so it dripped down her back. “I didn’t get a good look at it — some kind of overgrown sturgeon?”
“A sturgeon?” Miranda said. “That thing was the size of a car!”
The Bigfoot Files Page 15
