A friend is shocked by her mother’s collection of scat, Miranda cuts her out of her life completely. A solution.
“I want you to forget that. Forget everything you read or think you know,” Kat said. “I want you to just climb and leave the rest to me.”
Miranda let her mother help her up, and the two of them made their way up the narrow path, all muscles required to keep from slipping.
Below, the bear arched up on two legs, scrambling up the rock behind them — it had slowed, but did not stop its pursuit. Above them, the storm crashed, the rain bucketing down.
With every rock Miranda pulled herself past, she thought about everything that had happened in the last forty-eight hours. Standing on the road beside the busted Critter Mobile, the strange forest sounds and knockings and hoots. The black bear bursting into the ranger’s house, chasing them away from the cabin and all their plans. The heap of litter and mud in the river. The howl of a far-off feral dog. The strange lights in the moonlight, and the forest switching to autumn in a single night, and her golden hair.
Footprints in the mud.
All these things, she thought, had perfectly logical explanations.
The black bear was simply territorial.
The garbage pile only looked like a fish.
The moon dog was just a wolf, and the fairies . . .
The fairies were the result of dehydration, exhaustion, and near-starvation. Or she had eaten a hallucinogenic berry, and imagined it all. Her hair was just sun-bleached, and the drive home to the impending wintertime would coax it to darken.
And anyone could have made the footprints — another animal, a hiker, a prankster looking for giggles.
But sometimes, she thought as she watched the bear climb higher and higher, his black eyes flashing with frustration and anger — sometimes logic wasn’t enough.
Sometimes the answer was simply, “That’s the way that it is.”
No bear was this territorial. No bear had a memory like this.
The garbage raft had dived — it had swum down, bucked, moved, because it was alive.
She had touched a dying tree with her hand and she had held a heart-eating bug on her finger.
Those howls last night around the campfire hadn’t been from wolves or feral dogs; Miranda had never heard anything like them before.
Her hair . . . well, if the sun hadn’t bleached her hair — and deep down she knew it hadn’t — then something else had turned it gold, made it shine, made it shimmer.
And the footprints — what were the odds that someone would trek out to the middle of a national park — miles and miles from any trail — and plant Bigfoot tracks, on the off chance that someone might find them? Might believe they were real? It defied logic.
It all defied logic.
Some things were true, whether you believed in them or not.
Her father left. And he wasn’t coming back.
And that was the way it was.
“Mom,” she cried, over the din of the falls. “What does it want?”
“I don’t know!” Kat was frozen — above Miranda on the rocks, she was like little-girl Kat, wide-eyed, only getting a taste of how dangerous the world would be.
“In the stories!” Miranda said. “What do they want in the stories?”
Kat stared at her, stunned. “What are you —”
“Werebears,” Miranda went on. “Is there a plant they’re supposed to eat to change back, or a spell we can say, or . . .” Did she sound ridiculous? She didn’t care. “Tell me! Tell me a monster, Mom, a creature — a werebear!”
“Water,” Kat finally said. “They submerge themselves in water, and they morph right back to their human form. In the stories.”
Both of them looked back as the black bear carefully placed his paws on a slick rock, its balance steady. It was getting faster now.
“Keep going, Bean,” Kat coached. “Just keep climbing.”
Higher and higher they went, all the way to the top of the waterfall. Kat made it first, to where the river rushed off the slope.
Miranda was only a rock behind. From this high up, she could see all the way to the border of the forest, where trees sputtered and slowly turned into buildings, and the highway curved like a snake out of the park, paving a gray road all the way home.
The real world.
Where they would be heading soon. Back to bills, and school, and student government.
Back to all their old problems.
And she couldn’t wait to greet them — as long as she had her mother with her.
Miranda stepped up to meet her mother — and slipped.
In a fortuitous reach she grabbed a twisting tree root, saved herself from a topple down the violent falls, all the way down.
“Mom!” Miranda screamed, dangling there, both her hands slick with rain.
“Take my hand!” Kat reached down for her, and Miranda tried, but when she took one hand off the branch, she slipped farther and faster.
“I can’t!” Miranda said. “I can’t let go!” Her legs kicked, desperate for ground.
“It’s okay, Bean!” Kat scrambled back down until she stood on the rocks beneath Miranda, between her daughter and the bear, a fifty-foot drop to the churning white below. “You can let go!”
The bear climbed faster.
“I can’t!” Miranda shouted. “I can’t do it, I’ll fall!”
“I won’t let you fall.” Kat stood with her arms spread, her face serious. “Miranda! You have to trust me!”
And so Miranda let go, dropping into her mother’s arms, and Kat did not even wobble with the weight of her — her mother’s legs held firm, her arms cradling Miranda like she was little again, and it was story time, and the night-light was already on . . .
“Look out!” Miranda shrieked, just as the bear reached the rock below them. Its snarl was dripping as it swatted at Kat with fat, glinting, sharp claws.
“Hold on to me, Bean!”
Miranda barely had time to process her mother’s words when Kat took a running start and leaped across the waterfall. No looking, no scouting out the best angle, no measuring the distance — just a jump, and a certainty that somehow, they would land safely.
A leap of faith.
They made it to the other side.
They lay there in the dirt, stunned, Kat with skinned knees, Miranda’s forehead scratched on a protruding tree root when they landed.
But they made it.
The bear was gone. It had tried to follow them, to make its own flying leap across the falls, and had come up short — beneath them, the water swirled white, no animal to be seen.
Miranda’s hair was soaked, golden tendrils now hanging like muddy, rusty snakes. Even sopping wet, it was not blonde, it was not any ordinary hair color, any color that the sun might take credit for. It was decidedly, impossibly gold.
Kat pulled herself onto a downed tree and sat, catching her breath and cleaning her glasses, which had survived the scamper up the falls with only a hairline fracture in one lens.
“You saved us,” Miranda said. “Seriously, if it weren’t for you, we’d be dead.”
Not just the heroic leap across the falls, but all of it. She’d saved Miranda from dehydration, from hypothermia, from hunger.
Kat smiled. “Just doing my job.”
“I didn’t realize cryptozoologists had to be Olympic-level long jumpers,” Miranda joked.
“Not that job,” she said. “My other job. Being Mom.” She took a slug of water from the soda bottle, splashing some on her face. “Can you walk?”
Miranda’s legs were a bit shaky, but she was fine.
Her mother stood. “Let’s get you home. You can’t miss any more school, I hear.”
School. Absences. The leadership camp.
All of it seemed a million miles away.
“Wait.” Miranda sat on the dying tree and exhaled a gust of wind. “Mom, about the camp — let’s not worry about it.”
“What are you t
alking about?” Kat knit her hair into two long braids, then fastened them into loops below her ears.
“I’ll apply for it next year,” Miranda said. “Or when money isn’t so, you know . . . nonexistent.” Part of her caved in — everything she had been working toward this year, and was she really willing to let it go?
I’m not letting it go, she told herself. I’m trading it in for something more important right now.
“Miranda.” Kat leaned over her, so Miranda had to strain her neck to look up at her, her huge round glasses, her starry eyes. “I’m going to get you into that camp. Whatever it takes. I promise.”
Another promise. Miranda could litter all of Fable Forest with the promises her mother had made and broken — but this one. This promise . . . Miranda looked at her mother, and she believed.
She chose to believe.
“Mom?” Miranda’s voice shook. “I owe you an apology. I never should have looked through your mail — or told you what to do with your money. It’s your business, and you’ve always taken care of us —”
“Bean, stop.” Above them, two birds preened their wings clean from the rain. Kat lifted her hand to chew a chipped blue fingernail, then caught herself and took a deep breath. “When I opened the mailbox and saw all those bills, I panicked. I kept holding out hope that a grant would come through, or that I’d find something big to sell on the blog . . .”
“Or that Grandma Hai would change her mind,” Miranda said softly.
Kat stared at her in bewilderment, then heartbreak. “Oh, Bean, I’m so sorry. I never meant for you to know about any of this. I just let things slip for so long —” She rubbed her face with her hands. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I really — I blew it, Bean. I need help.”
When she lifted her head, her eyes were red-rimmed, and she looked afraid. Not running from a black bear afraid, but truly lost. “Tell me how you do it, Bean. When you have something big and scary that you have to do, and you don’t know where to start. Tell me how to be more Miranda-like.” When she reached out her hand, Miranda took it.
“A list,” Miranda told her. “I always start with a to-do list.”
Miranda’s mind whirred into action like a cold engine waking up for the day, and the possibilities shot out at her quicker than she could speak them —
To-do list:
Sell expensive cryptozoology equipment
Call banks (just in case)
Check online for jobs that are hiring
But she stopped.
Kat stared at something behind Miranda’s shoulder, mouth lolling.
What now? Miranda thought wearily. Would it be a bloodthirsty vampire bat or a lake beast or a flying horned monster, or something even more obscure? Everything that’s ever existed only in books and minds and imaginations and bedtime stories. Give me your best — convince me to believe.
There, just behind the falls, tucked away from sight, was a small cave, protected by the veil of the falls and a natural doorway of ivy tendrils and Spanish moss — if you didn’t know it was there, you’d miss it. Leading into the yawning black opening, smashed into the mud, were footprints.
Big footprints.
“Is that — is it —” Miranda’s sentences kept stopping and starting like the Critter Mobile on a January morning.
But Kat said nothing, and the moment remained reverent.
The rain fell on their heads as they waited — for what? For something else impossible to happen?
It was Kat who finally said, “Well, maybe we should go inside where it’s dry.” She was asking Miranda for permission, for confirmation that whatever was about to happen, Kat wouldn’t lose her. Not physically — but rather, that this Miranda, this version of her, wouldn’t slip away as soon as unbelievable things began happening.
Miranda nodded. “Until the rain lets up.” Whatever happened in that cave, she would stand by her mother.
Into the cave they crept — first Kat, then Miranda — slowly, cautiously, the clamor of the falls muted. It was dank, muggy, a wet dog smell permeating the air. The rocks carved back, shaped by tiny water droplets over the millennia. It calmed Miranda to see the daylight on the other side, to know they could run straight out if they needed to.
Kat was nervous. Miranda could see her mother’s knees threatening to buckle as they stepped, like they could buckle any second. She popped her knuckles over and over, and when she looked back at Miranda, she didn’t even smile, just nodded.
Halfway across the cave, Kat stopped.
“Mom?” Miranda whispered.
“I — I can’t believe it. It’s really here,” she whispered back.
Miranda shuffled next to her and saw it.
A nest. Prehistoric-looking, somehow. A mess of hair, and twigs, and feathers, tucked against the rock wall, large enough to house a mother pterodactyl and her eggs. Scattered beside the pile of twigs were long bones, little rodent skeletons, poop, dried branches of leaves, and footprints.
More footprints.
“This,” Kat said, “is a Bigfoot nest.”
Miranda inspected it again with this new definition. “I think I read about these,” she said. “They fashion these nests for daytime use, and defecate around them to mark territory.” Ridiculous, a voice inside her hissed.
Go away, she told it.
She stepped away from one such pile, and around her the light shifted. A new shadow cast on the wall above the nest.
Miranda froze.
Breathing. She could hear breathing.
Behind them, in the entrance of the cave, something stood, breathing.
Something huge and wild and real.
“Mom,” she whispered. She could have counted the hairs on the back of her neck.
Kat reached for Miranda’s hand, but the motion died unfinished; she was stupefied.
The shadow on the wall materialized, clarifying itself — an outline of a two-legged creature, standing tall, watching them.
Waiting.
Heat flooded Miranda’s body, even in the chill of the damp.
“I have to,” Kat said to no one. “I have to.” As slow as a figurine on a music box, she turned around, spine curled, her head bowed. When she faced the entrance of the cave, she lifted her eyes.
“Miranda,” she whispered. “Look.”
Every cell in Miranda’s body seemed to pound against her muscles. She couldn’t move. “No.”
“Please,” she said. “You have to look.”
“No. I can’t.” If she looked, she’d never believe it. Her brain would feast on every small detail, analyze them, catalog them, and figure out why she wasn’t seeing what her eyes told her she was seeing.
If she didn’t look, maybe she could keep on believing.
Her mother linked her arm in Miranda’s, one of them facing the shadow and one of them facing the thing that cast it, and they stood there, Kat staring at the thing — whatever it was — and Miranda waiting.
Miranda, a girl who was so very good at reading shadows.
After a weekend in Fable Forest, she knew so many new ones.
A massive, many-limbed shadow dripping with black, icicle-like daggers — that was a western hemlock, covered over in moss.
A fat cloud of a shadow, squat against the ground — that was a salmonberry bush, its roots drinking from the nearby stream.
A tiny trumpet shadow — that was a mushroom.
A shadow that darted, and moved, and became a light — that was either a fairy, or else something flying over the wide-eyed moon.
But this.
This was not an oddly shaped rock. This was not a misshapen tree branch, or a gnarled nursery log, or a flock of birds, or anything that she could explain away with logic.
There was only one thing this shadow could be.
“Okay, Bean,” Kat said. “Time to go. Now.”
“What — what’s wrong?” Miranda pulsed with adrenaline.
“Nothing — it’s just time to let it come back home. Kee
p your head down, stay quiet,” Kat said, “and take small steps. Here we go.” Her arm in Miranda’s, she led her daughter across the cave to the other side of the falls, the curious nest and the shadow on the rocks fading as daylight blurred their figures.
Was she really going to do this? Walk out of the cave without looking, without turning around and seeing this thing she’d spent a lifetime searching for?
But seeing wasn’t believing. Believing was seeing. Miranda’s last chance to look, but she kept her eyes on the sky and let the darkness swallow the mystery behind her.
The storm had thinned, and the sun peeked through the clouds. Gray turned to rose, turned to white, turned to blue. From here, near the top of the falls, they could see the distance to the road — they could see the road. Not a far walk at all.
Miranda let her arms drop shaky at her sides, her legs loosening one at a time.
But her mother gripped her shoulder, wobbling, and her hand was like concrete. “Bean, that was . . .” Her chin trembled, her eyes spilled over.
“Mom . . . Are you okay?”
“He was right there.” Miranda could see the heartbreak in her eyes. “He was right there, but no one —” She swallowed. “No one will ever believe me.”
Miranda slipped her hand in Kat’s; her fingers brushed against her mother’s jagged, bitten nails. Different nails, but those same, curling pinkies. “I believe you.”
Kat’s lips twitched, but still the tears streamed down her cheeks. “We found him once,” she said. “We’ll find him again, right? When we have a camera? Something to prove it?”
“We don’t find Bigfoot,” Miranda reminded her. “Bigfoot finds us.”
And then her mother came back — she grinned, and said, “That’s my girl.”
Their walk back to the road was quiet. Not the kind of quiet that was deliberate, that required concentration to sustain. That kind of quiet was a weapon, one Miranda had employed many times. No, this was the clean quiet of exhaustion, and of resolution. The quiet that came when there was nothing else to say, or everything else to say — a million things to relearn about each other, but they had a lifetime ahead to figure those things out.
For now, it was enough to just walk side by side.
The Bigfoot Files Page 22
