The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac (20 page)

You were searching, endlessly, for this one thing,
Eli told himself.
And your mind cracked and then …

Eli stopped himself. He had reached the SNaRL office. He unlocked the door and went inside, feeling numb. The lights were off. It was cool and quiet. It was peaceful.

He put the bone, snare trap and all, in the cooler in his office, and before he locked the cooler for the night, he stood over it and looked down into it and saw reflected in the clean metal the hazy outline of his own face.

The next day would be a flurry of excitement around the office. The trap would be opened, evidence would be carefully examined and reported, news media would be contacted, funding would begin pouring in from intrigued parties, and the doubting Thomases—far from being silenced—would cry foul.

But for now the world was quiet and waiting. There was a patience in the air that was mimicked by the hum of the cooler, and Eli tried to enjoy it. He locked up the office and headed home, wishing only to be left alone, wanting to see no one, especially not his wife and his sensitive young daughter, who invested so much in him emotionally. He was drained.

When he entered the house, Ginger was waiting for him. He could not have been more disappointed to see someone. She sat on the couch in a matchlessly bright mood.

“Come read with me, Daddy,” she said, and patted the sofa violently beside her so that a sparkling flower of dust bloomed at her side.

Eli wanted a drink. He wanted to take a long walk. He wanted to sink into his own dark heart, to shutter himself up with his hope and his exhaustion.

He opened his mouth to tell her,
Daddy's exhausted, sweetheart. Another time.

But then he looked at her, this little fragile creature, really looked at her, and he found himself moved by her wide, pleading eyes, which had already begun to glisten with fresh tears. He saw, horribly, that her hurt and her hope could be as wide and oceanic as his own.

“Okay, sweetie,” he said, and then watched with breathless pleasure as her mercurial face lifted skyward, so easily infused with joy.

Ginger was, Eli acknowledged, the most wonderful thing he'd ever seen. She put even Mr. Krantz to shame.

The good doctor set his own longings aside, hanging them up with his coat in the hallway closet.

He sat down next to his daughter.

He took up the book she shoved at him, a boring tome about a family of pigs, and he began to read.

 

1980

 

 

THE MOUNTAIN

It was a lovely May morning in the Selkirks, an hour or so after sunrise. Eli parked his wife's beat-up old sedan in the small town of Rathdrum, next to Lakeland High School's modest football field. The hiking trail threaded from the outskirts of town up Rathdrum Mountain, overlooking Highway 41. The woods smelled of lilac and water, fresh and still cold. Eli hiked away from town, uphill and then down and then up again. The trees swallowed up any signs of human life, but Eli could still hear a plane overhead, could make out the distant hum of the highway and the freeway to the south.

He was sure he was alone, but he was not.

*   *   *

A
GNES
R
OEBUCK, WHO
now called herself Agnes Krantz, recognized her son immediately.

She was returning to the shack from the creek bed, where she had enjoyed a zesty, teeth-clattering bath. Her clothes were over one arm and she held her tattered shoes in her left hand. She was an animal walking in the forest now, as quiet as a young elk—she moved silently, unseen, stepping with care but without being conscious of it.

Mr. Krantz was off on one of his expeditions, gathering food. Sometimes he would disappear for days, but usually he returned within a few hours. In the old days, he would gesture lustily for her to remove her clothes. The hunt excited him. He didn't make these urgent requests of her any longer; she had changed too much, and he had perhaps grown bored with her, but still he was enthusiastic about sharing his harvested goods. He would take her hand and drag her to the pile of stuff, gesturing at it excitedly, and she always made sure to thank him profusely. She truly was grateful. He returned with assortments of food, never paid for, only taken or stolen. Potatoes, berries, fresh fish (trout, usually, but sometimes, if they were lucky, a fat pink salmon), groundhogs, rotting loaves of bread, bleating lambs—once, to her horror, a large, handsome horse. She dressed and ate almost all that he brought to her, but the horse she refused. She released it with a spank on its rump the moment her husband fell asleep. When he awoke and found the horse missing, he was angry. He punished her by keeping his back to her for two days, but he never brought her another horse. He was a good, if aloof, husband. She didn't mind the aloofness. If anything, she loved him more for it.

On the best days, he broke into a local grocer or gas station and brought her hot dogs, bags of potato chips, fresh, cold milk. He usually dragged cold goods to the shack in a stolen cooler, filled with miraculous chunks of ice. Over the years he had presented her with other random gifts: wicker chairs, a patched leather recliner, even an oven, which she used only for storage, because of their lack of electricity (it held chipped, mismatching china and a plastic bucket she used to collect water from the nearby creek). Before their first winter, he gave her a woodstove. She had gathered his large, bearded face into her hands and kissed him passionately.

Agnes was approaching old age now, and her life with Mr. Krantz grew more physically demanding by the year, but she remained content. She was even grateful for the difficulty of it. She fashioned their rattletrap home together energetically, and its constant wear and tear distracted her from past grief. It was a lovely if makeshift little house in the woods. When times grew hard—when she nearly froze to death, for example—or when she was almost suicidal from loneliness, Mr. Krantz would return to her with the perfect offering: a fancy down sleeping bag, for example, or a tiny, mewling kitten. That they ate the cat one night after being snowed in for twelve days was irrelevant. She had wanted this: an escape from the human, from boredom, from routine. Krantz gave her that, and she thrived.

And, besides, even with the unpredictability of it all, they managed their own routines. Here she was, for example, returning from a springtime bath, as she would every other morning for the duration of the warmer days. She was glad it was spring. The days were longer, the leaves thrusting from the blossoms in a way that seemed to Agnes both pleasant and painful. Food would be easier to come by now. Her bones would no longer ache from the cold. In the evenings, she would comb Mr. Krantz's matted fur with a broken brush, picking him free of ticks. She would chatter at him as she worked, and he would cock his head and listen sleepily. When she fell asleep, he would rouse himself and go out into the night, and she would be able to stretch her limbs fully and enjoy the private bed. He never slept longer than two or three hours at a time, but he napped throughout the day.

Agnes tried her best to placate him. Sex had lost its pleasure for her. She was muscular and lithe but also lined and drooping. Her breasts and ass hung low now, and it seemed there was always a pain in her belly when he penetrated her. Lumps there, maybe, she thought, or just dryness. She felt she would live forever, but in what way? As a bag of floating bones? As an old bat in the woods? She liked the bats. She knew it was not such a bad life.

The sex didn't matter, she told herself. They were happy, in love. They enjoyed each other. Their own simple rhythm would always include the other, she believed, even though she noted with some alarm that she continued to age quickly while her husband—despite a slight, uneven whitening of his brown hair—more or less remained the same.

No regrets, she told herself. None whatsoever. Not even about her son. If she thought about Eli at all, it was usually with relief. Leaving him, she believed, was not even about her own freedom. She had freed Eli, too, cut him loose from the leash of her own unhappiness.

But when she saw Eli now, moving through the forest at an ambitious clip, she felt disappointed. He looked well: healthy, fulfilled, graceful if not exactly handsome. He wore fine clothes, pressed trousers, an expensive button-up shirt, a whimsical bow tie, and big red spectacles. He radiated self-care. Her first thought was:
Well done, Greg.

Her second thought was:
Well, so. He was better off without me, after all.

It was a puerile disappointment. She relished it bitterly, shrinking into the underbrush with a pouting lip.

He hadn't seen her. He didn't know she was there.

She wondered, irritably, What is he doing here?

She wanted him to leave.

Still naked from her bath, Agnes shivered. She quietly hurried into her clothes and, overcome with curiosity, followed her son deeper into her familiar wood.

*   *   *

E
LI STOPPED IN
a small opening of trees and unzipped his backpack. Clouds were piling in from the east, which was odd, because the weather report had described a clear, perfect day.

Damn weathermen,
Eli thought.
Always wrong.

It was light enough to film, however, so Eli pulled out a Canon 310XL loaded with Super 8mm film. It was a shaky and grainy medium but reliable in decent light and ultraportable, used by many of his colleagues. Eli set the camera to one side and then polished his spectacles. This same spot was where he had located the metatarsus, and he had returned to it again and again, always with a growing sense of Mr. Krantz's elusiveness. The foot bone had received its fifteen minutes' worth of fame, but its exact origins remained dubious. Was it a hoax, people wondered, or real evidence of Bigfoot? Even the fascinating genetic evidence failed to prove its origins without a doubt. No, it was not exactly human, tests seemed to suggest, but it wasn't inhuman, either.

Eli thought he would spend the morning recording video footage of the area. He was not expecting to see an actual Sasquatch—they were mostly nocturnal, he believed, or at least preferred dawn or dusk, like the other arboreal wild—but you never knew. In those days, Eli was filled with hope. He'd found the metatarsus, hadn't he? More impressive evidence was sure to follow.

Calm, enjoying the morning air, Eli put the camera to his eye and began to record. The world through the lens was slightly foggy, limited. Eli filmed for a few moments, aiming at nothing in particular.

Then a figure moved in the trees. Eli's heart stopped.

Had it happened, finally, just like that? Had the creature been waiting here for him all this time? He kept the camera trained on the figure, his hands shaking from excitement.

But the figure continued its approach, and Eli, disappointed, calculated the figure's proportions: too small and too slim, tallish but only just so, like a juvenile bear. Certainly not Mr. Krantz.

But it was not a bear. Eli lowered the camera.

It was a woman stepping toward him.

The sky went black.

It was blacker than a storm. It was like a blotting out of all light, like an eclipse, suddenly midnight.

It smelled like burnt sawdust.

It began, impossibly, to snow.

*   *   *

“W
HAT ARE YOU
doing here?” she said to him.

“Mom,” he said.

White flakes fell around them. When she stepped on them, smoke rose. Looking up, Agnes could make out the rounded black heads of the clouds that hung over them like bent knuckles, like punching fists.

“Something's not right,” she said. She squinted. “The sky is falling.”

“It's snowing.”

“That's stupid. It's a warm day.” Her nose burned, her lungs. She laughed. “The world is ending.”

It was dreamlike, wandering to her son like this, in the dark in the middle of the day, with the smell of sulfur around them, with the gray smoke of her footfalls. The birds stopped chirping, the bugs burrowed desperately into the earth. The flakes fell heavier, a thick blanket that made her cough.

“We need to get inside,” she said. “We need to get out of this.”

Her son seemed unaware or indifferent.

“The air is poisoned,” she pressed. “Come with me.”

“Where is he?” Eli said.

“What?”

“Where is Mr. Krantz?” Eli said. “Is he with you? Are you with him now?”

She shook her head. She had no idea where Mr. Krantz was. He was no doubt searching for her, worried for her with the foul air.

“It's raining hellfire,” she said. “Come along, now.”

“Will you take me to him?”

Her son's face was no longer recognizable to her, cruel now, filled with ache and murder.

She could not bring her son to meet her husband. Not now. Not ever.

The two males would cancel each other out.

“You should go,” she said. “Your car is close by. We shouldn't breathe this in. It's raining acid.”

“You look horrible,” Eli said. His face was pale, unnerved. His small pink mouth squirmed. “What happened to all of your red hair? It was red, wasn't it?”

Agnes reached up absently and touched her hair, still wet from her bath. “Auburn,” she told him. “That's what your dad called it. It's gone gray now. White.”

“Do you know where he is?”

“Greg?” she asked, confused.

“No.” Eli's face hardened, and she saw in his expression that Greg was dead.

“I'm sorry, Eli.” She cleared her face of all betrayal. “I'm alone now,” she lied. “I've been alone for years.”

Eli didn't know what to make of this. He repeated his question.

“Really, I don't know. He could be anywhere. I don't know. It's been years. I've been here, all alone, for too long.” It was easy to lie. It felt natural, what she said, as if she truly had been alone. Had she been? She felt almost confused as she spoke, light-headed.