“Look, Bean.”
After they had been walking for, at Miranda’s guess, an hour, Kat stopped at a huge cottonwood, little bits of its bark peeled away in stripes.
“Bigfoot.” Not even the smear of dirt could hide the glimmer of glee in the corner of Kat’s mouth. She ran her hands along the torn bark. “Classic territory-marking behavior. He rubs against the trees and the bark falls off —”
“Ridiculous.” The word escaped before Miranda could stop it, and for a moment she saw the icy cold of Kat’s eyes, the hyperaware, vigilant, mother-essence sternness.
“You’re right. It is ridiculous.” Kat pointed at the tree. “This isn’t from Bigfoot’s bark marks — the tree’s stripped all the way to the top. Much too high for the hairy guy.” She spread her palms on the tree, tracing the bare spots as tall as she could reach.
“Bigfoot is scared of heights?” Miranda said, more to herself than anyone.
Kat suddenly took her daughter’s hand and placed it on the tree. “Can you feel that?”
Miranda scoffed, but held her fingers still.
And found herself mesmerized.
She’d never felt a tree like this before, its armor removed — it was surprisingly soft. Vulnerable. She kept her hand there, pressing in.
Something pressed back.
She gasped.
A pulse, inside — did trees have heartbeats?
“Something’s moving in there,” she told her mother, who placed her hand beside Miranda’s, pinkie overlapping pinkie so they were both touching the bare tree and each other.
“Oh,” Kat whispered, and the thing inside the tree fluttered, gentle as a feather. “Do you know what this is?”
Miranda’s breath snagged in her throat — the tree felt so lovely and alive. “What?” she whispered back.
“Bugs,” Kat said in her softest, most tender lullaby voice, and Miranda ripped her hand away from the tree as if it were on fire, spell broken.
“Gross!” Miranda rubbed her fingers against her vest, wiping away the invisible petri dish of bug germs.
“Thrums.” Kat walked to a neighboring tree with similar stripes. “They burrow right into the heart of the tree and make their nests. Then when the eggs hatch, the larvae eat the tree from the inside out.”
“I’ve never heard of a thrum,” Miranda said, but her mother barely heard her. Kat was pressed against the tree in reverence, the sensation of thousands of heart-eating bugs beneath her fingers. “I had to research all kinds of tree-predator insects,” Miranda went on. “I read about hundreds of varieties. My paper cited twelve peer-reviewed sources — don’t you think I would have come across something on thrums? Even the tiniest reference?”
Kat turned away from the tree to face her daughter — why did Miranda suddenly feel like she was the one doing all the talking? Taking up all the silence, all the air for herself, her words?
“So, what then?” Kat said. “I’m just making this up?”
A plunge into freezing water. Was it here? This moment that she’d been waiting for all weekend — no, for much longer than that?
“No.” Miranda reached for the truth, the words she had stored for this very instant, but they scattered like pine needles blown down by wind.
“Then what? I’m just horribly uninformed? I’m stupid? Or both?” Kat went on.
Stand your ground, stand your ground, stand your ground, Miranda thought. Say it. Say it now. There’s no such thing as —
“You are a bright, brilliant girl,” Kat said, “but you do not know everything.” There was a bite in Kat’s voice, almost enough to be a yanked strand of hair. “All right. I’m going over there to pee”— Kat gestured to a cluster of ferns —“and then we’ll get going. Sound good?”
She left her daughter with the stripped-bare trees, and Miranda tried to breathe away the ghost of the conversation that she hadn’t had. The one where she said, “Thrums aren’t real, and neither is Bigfoot.”
A twitch.
A movement, a bending of light.
Miranda squinted, drew closer to the tree —
A bug, perched between slats of bark, its wings holding still enough to look fake. Any instinct Miranda had to flick it away dissipated as she studied it. A bug that supposedly burrowed past a tree’s thick bark, then viciously chewed away the insides like it was made of bread — such a thing should have fangs, or leathery wings, or demonic eyes.
But it wasn’t abhorrent; it was beautiful. Its furry, spindle-shaped body was dusty red, with a pair of gray triangular wings, gauzy as one of Kat’s capelettes and iridescent in the late afternoon sunlight.
This wasn’t what wood-boring insects looked like. Borers had long, hard, shield-shaped shells, and this insect was so . . . so pretty. Delicate.
Miranda lifted her hand to the tree. The bug transferred itself into her damp, beating palm, and the woods seemed to silence themselves, time swooping into slow motion as the bug explored the back of her wrist and the pad of her fingers.
“Are you real?” she whispered, and the wind of her words startled the thrum; it spread its paper-lace wings and she watched it soar through the air and vanish against the leaves.
“What’d you say, Bean?” Kat came back around the tree.
“Nothing.” Miranda brushed her hand on her pants. “Just — I’m ready to get walking again.”
“I have to tell you,” Kat said, “our hike’s going to get a lot harder from here.” She reached into her cat purse and passed Miranda a granola bar: caramel and sour apples. Miranda’s entire face puckered. “Switchbacks, downed trees to climb over, thickets with thorns.”
“I’ll make it.” Miranda unwrapped the granola bar and gave the trash back to her mom.
“You’re tough,” Kat agreed. “I know you are. But just — if you need help, it’s okay.”
“I won’t.” Miranda stepped over the bulging roots of the cottonwood tree alone, ready to leave this entire moment behind.
Her mother had been wrong.
There was no such thing as thrums.
Whatever Miranda thought she had seen skittering across the tree — it had been a trick of the light. The feel of it on her palm had been the tickling of a crumpled leaf, brushing her as it fell.
This forest was wily, it was tricksy; it snatched her memories and replayed them in her mind, and it distorted the things she saw with its mist and its gloom.
There was no such thing.
But as Miranda walked, she heard a whisper, like a restless stream. A humming behind her.
In the distilled afternoon light, the barren stripes of a barkless tree glowed golden. Miranda stared at it, the humming growing louder and louder, a heartbeat.
“Look, Bean.” Kat had draped Spanish moss on top of her head, tendrils hanging down either side of her face. “Troll hair.”
I may not know everything, Miranda thought, choking down the granola bar, but I know better than to believe.
It did get harder.
Her mother, right again.
The hike shifted from a stroll through fallen leaves and dead needles to a rugged scramble up a clump of fir trees; the colossus white bark pines and the spruces, blue as the sea, crisscrossed their branches, stealing the afternoon light. The fern-filled understory hid holes in the soil, roots lifting like cruel legs trying to trip the humans who stumbled, exhausted, through the greenery.
Miranda’s lungs grasped for breath, her thigh muscles aching as they moved. She had no way of sensing which direction they were heading; they could have spiraled back around themselves, for all she knew — she could only trust her mother.
But, oh! How lovely the forest was, and how otherworldly. From this altitude, the park was pristine — groves of trees shot to heights of two and three hundred feet, dripping in club moss. The sky, empty of clouds, bent down, brushing the tips of the pines.
The smells of fall in the trees were the mustiness of cedar root rot, the cool spearmint released when hands brushed a branch of e
vergreen, and that unplaceable, undeniable scent of cold.
“Drink it in,” Kat whispered to Miranda as they watched a pair of Roosevelt elk amble past, the velvet on their crowns of antlers peeling away to the bone underneath. “We’ll probably never see anything like this again.”
Miranda straightened. “What do you mean?” Did Kat mean there wouldn’t be any more trips? No more creature hunts at all?
“I mean this has been a very different trip than our usual one, hasn’t it?” Kat said. “We don’t ever see this — this wildness.” She gestured to a flourish of happy-capped mycelium, sherbet-colored against the damp soil. “It’s something else.”
It certainly was. Miranda could admit that.
Even the fungi were stunning, each type more strange in shape and texture than the last — the long necks of the honey mushrooms, the purple ridges of the pig’s ears, crinkling like chenille, the white flutes of the elfin saddles. . . . It reminded her of an underwater reef, the way nature filled in every nook with an experiment in design.
“Hey!” She plucked a mushroom growing in the braids of a western hemlock’s root system, and held it up for Kat to see. “Chanterelles! We can eat these.”
Kat picked one, blew away the dirt from its cap, and ate it. “Delicious!”
“Is this what it takes to get you to eat vegetables?” Miranda joked.
“I’m afraid so.” Kat took as many chanterelles as she could find and cupped them in her hand. “Come on, Bean. Gotta keep walking.”
A few hours later, when they paused to stretch their calves and retie their bootlaces, Kat frowned. “There’s something weird about this forest, Bean. It keeps . . . making me think about things. Things I haven’t thought about in a long time.”
Miranda sat straight up. Tried not to breathe.
“Like when I’m trying really hard to think of one thing, it gets so slippery and just slides away, and I find myself thinking of something else. Something I don’t want to —” Kat exhaled, her cheeks puffing out. “What do you think? Could this forest be magic, Bean? Enchanted?”
I find myself thinking of something else. . . . Miranda tilted her head up, stretching her neck, and let the memories that the forest had pulled from her mind roll down her back. Not an enchanted forest, no — there must be a perfectly reasonable explanation for why she’d been thinking so much about . . . her.
“Let’s think about it logically,” Miranda said carefully. “It could be the elevation, making our brains fuzzy. Or it could be dehydration. Or it could be some component in the rain, some chemical from the mist . . .” She heard her own reservations as she talked, the way her theories were punctured even before they came out of her mouth. But what else could it be that was guiding their thoughts into deep, dark, misty caves of memories that were supposed to be buried forever, lost to rocks and time?
Enchanted forests were for fairy tales.
When her mother abandoned the subject to talk about tree octopi and whether or not they vied for territory with the Squatch himself, Miranda wondered, just for a moment, what kinds of things the forest was drawing from her mother’s mind, what kinds of memories.
But she left this thought behind when they started walking again, and thankfully, the forest kept it there.
When the sun sat golden, liquid-like on the distant purple horizon, Kat squatted at a clear, swollen stream and filled their bottle with water. “I think we’ll stay here tonight.” She gestured to the clearing around them, a circle of Douglas firs and redwoods, trunks wide and lined with snags and knots. Battle scars, as Miranda thought of those defects — old wounds that now provided homes for squirrels and birds and all manner of tiny woodland creatures.
“I’m not tired.” Truly she was — but she worried that if she stopped, she might not want to stand up again.
“Night’s coming fast.” Kat ran damp hands through her hair, collecting the strands into a neat bun on top of her head. “If we power down now and get up at dawn, we’ll cover more ground than if we try to fumble our way through the dark.”
Her mother . . . actually made sense. Still, Miranda’s overworked brain prepared a list of what-ifs to rapid-fire —
What if it rains?
What if we die of exposure?
What if a wild animal sniffs us out and devours us in the night?
Kat dug a hole for a fire in the middle of the clearing, then hauled wood into the hole; Kat seemed so certain, so capable, so un-Kat-like, that Miranda pushed her what-ifs into the stream and watched them drift away.
Her mother hauled wood into her fire pit, whistling, and Miranda watched, aware that she was standing idle while someone else did all the work — and so she filled her arms with sticks.
Kat crossed the clearing and took what Miranda had gathered. “We don’t want any spruce, if we can help it.” She showed Miranda what she had collected. “See if you can find more of these little dead pieces, for kindling.”
That’s right — spruce was a soft wood, Miranda recalled from the pages of survival techniques she’d printed out. It would burn fast and make more smoke than heat.
As Miranda searched the area for bits of dried black wood, she felt lighter. It was as if she’d been carrying, all this time, a massive backpack full of stones — and a few had spilled out into the ferns.
They’d make a fire. A good one.
Together.
Kat packed a few larger branches on top. “There.”
“How are you going to light it?” Miranda reminded her mom, gritting her teeth to fend off her guilt for not bringing a lighter or a box of matches.
Kat removed her capelette and held it to her mouth. She bit into the yarn until it was severed, then unraveled a string about three feet long. She tied the string to both ends of a stick, like a bow, and twisted another stick in the middle of the string like an arrow. She dug with her nails into a flattened piece of wood, creating a divot, and into this she put the stick. Then she began sawing her makeshift bow back and forth, the string twisting the stick in the divot.
Doubt had Miranda biting her lip. After her mother had been rubbing the stick against the divot for a long time — too long, in Miranda’s mind, she said, “Are you sure —”
But Kat caught a spark. She blew on it, babying it, until a teeny orange flame unfurled in the tinder. She transferred the flame to the kindling in the pit, and soon a respectable fire blazed forth.
A few more stones tumbled off Miranda’s back.
She waved her hands over the fire, the surge of heat prickling her skin.
So her mother took care of the fire. But even as Miranda thawed, she looked around at their pitiful camp and more doubts crept in. “Are we going to sleep on the ground? What if we freeze? What if wild animals come in the night? And how are we going to find dinner in the dark?”
Kat threw a branch onto the flames, pine needles crackling as they burned. “Your job,” she said, “is to relax and let me handle it.”
“But —”
“I am going to build us a shelter, right here, by that tree.” Kat pointed to a cedar, one of its branches broken and hanging like a busted limb. “I’m going to cover that branch with debris, then bind it all with yarn from my capelette so it insulates us. Then I am going to make a delicious dinner of chicory and mulberries.” She pointed again, this time to a row of bushes just past the clearing’s boundaries. “And we are going to sleep all night, nice and warm, and as soon as the sun comes up, we’ll get back on our way.”
Miranda couldn’t help herself: “And if — if animals come?”
Kat smiled. “Animals won’t come. I promise. We’re so dirty at this point, we don’t smell like anything but forest. And if they do, I’ll fight them off.”
Miranda was legitimately impressed. If she had been in charge, they’d be clawing beneath the trees for clean water and sleeping on beds of poison ivy. Kat walked around the perimeter of the camp, dropping mulberries and chicory into her outstretched capelette for dinner. “Mom, I
— where did you learn to do all this?”
Kat shrugged. “We used to camp like this all the time. Before Uncle Bob’s tent trailer. You don’t remember?”
“No.”
“We used to go a couple times a month,” she said. “Throw some granola bars and a tarp into a backpack on Fridays after work and get outside. Away from the city.” She sipped her water through the filter straw. “Away from normal life.”
Miranda saw a crack and dove right in. “You and me, and”— she dared to say it —“Dad?”
Kat hesitated, the fire snapping. “Sometimes. In the beginning. He would come when he could break away for the weekend. But later, it was just us.” She looked back at Miranda. “Just you and me, Bean. Under the stars.”
Beyond the clearing, something howled.
A long, lonesome howl.
Miranda scooted closer to the fire, eating the mulberries one by one, letting her empty stomach reacquaint itself with the sensation of food.
“Bean?” Kat’s eyes were hidden by the reflection of the orange fire on her glasses. “Thank you for coming. I know this wasn’t what you expected — it wasn’t what I expected, either — but thank you for being here. With me.” She inhaled. “Especially since I know you don’t — I know you’re not —”
Katerina Cho, at a loss for words — Miranda had never seen such an impossible thing. “That I what?”
Whatever she was expecting, it was not this. “I know you’re not a believer,” Kat said. “Not anymore.”
Miranda couldn’t speak.
All those moments this weekend when she’d hidden the truth behind carefully dressed lies . . . all those moments she’d spent wearing a smile, crossing her fingers that her mom couldn’t detect the truth — and Kat had known. She had known.
What else did she know?
“How did you figure it out?”
Kat’s smile was equal parts happy and solemn. “You’re so passionate about everything you do. But with this . . . I could tell your heart wasn’t in it. I could see you were just going through the motions.” She nibbled a stalk of raw chicory, thinking. “I have to ask you, Bean — when did it happen? What made you stop believing?”
The Bigfoot Files Page 17
