Working for Bigfoot (5 page)

The Bully Brothers had inherited their predatory instinct from their supernatural parent.

Bigfoot Irwin had gotten something else.

The second brother stared down at the younger boy and struggled to wriggle free, his face pale and frantic. Irwin didn’t let him go.

“Hey, look at me,” Irwin snarled. “This is not okay. You were mean to me. You kept hurting me. For no reason. That’s over. Now. I’m not going to let you do it anymore. Okay?”

The first brother sat up shakily from the floor and stared agog at his former victim, now holding his brother effortlessly off the floor.

“Did you hear me?” Irwin asked, giving the kid a little shake. I heard his teeth clack together.

“Y-yeah,” stammered the dangling brother, nodding emphatically. “I hear you. I hear you. We hear you.”

Irwin scowled for a moment. Then he gave the second brother a push before releasing him. The bully fell to the floor three feet away and scrambled quickly back from Irwin. The pair of them started a slow retreat.

“I mean it,” Irwin said. “What you’ve been doing isn’t cool. We’ll figure out something else for you to do for fun. Okay?”

The Bully Brothers mumbled something vaguely affirmative and then hurried out of the cafeteria.

Bigfoot Irwin watched them go. Then he looked down at his hands, turning them over and back as if he’d never seen them before.

I kept my grip on my staff and looked down the length of the cafeteria at Coach Pete. I arched an eyebrow at him. “It seems like the boys sorted this out on their own.”

Coach Pete lowered his magazine slowly. The air was thick with tension, and the silence was its hard surface.

Then the svartalf said, “Your sentences, Mr. Pounder.”

“Yessir, Coach Pete,” Irwin said. He turned back to the table and sat down, and his pencil started scratching at the paper again.

Coach Pete nodded at him, then came over to me. He stood facing me for a moment, his expression blank.

“I didn’t intervene,” I said. “I didn’t try to dissuade your boys from following their natures. Irwin did that.”

The svartalf pursed his lips thoughtfully and then nodded slowly. “Technically accurate. And yet you still had a hand in what just happened. Why should I not exact retribution for your interference?”

“Because I just helped your boys.”

“In what way?”

“Irwin and I taught them caution—that some prey is too much for them to handle. And we didn’t even hurt them to make it happen.”

Coach Pete considered that for a moment and then gave me a faint smile. “A lesson best learned early rather than late.” He turned and started to walk away.

“Hey,” I said in a sharp, firm voice.

He paused.

“You took the kid’s book today,” I said. “Please return it.”

Irwin’s pencil scratched along the page, suddenly loud.

Coach Pete turned. Then he pulled the paperback in question out of his pocket and flicked it through the air. I caught it in one hand, which probably made me look a lot more cool and collected than I felt at the time.

Coach Pete inclined his head to me, a little more deeply than before. “Wizard.”

I mirrored the gesture. “Svartalf.”

He left the cafeteria, shaking his head. What sounded suspiciously like a chuckle bubbled in his wake.

I waited until Irwin was done with his sentences, and then I walked him to the front of the building, where his maternal grandmother was waiting to pick him up.

“Was that okay?” he asked me. “I mean, did I do right?”

“Asking me if I thought you did right isn’t the question,” I said.

Irwin suddenly smiled at me. “Do I think I did right?” He nodded slowly. “I think…I think I do.”

“How’s it feel?” I asked him.

“It feels good. I feel…not happy. Satisfied. Whole.”

“That’s how it’s supposed to feel,” I said. “Whenever you’ve got a choice, do good, kiddo. It isn’t always fun or easy, but in the long run it makes your life better.”

He nodded, frowning thoughtfully. “I’ll remember.”

“Cool,” I said.

He offered me his hand very seriously, and I shook it. He had a strong grip for a kid. “Thank you, Harry. Could…could I ask you a favor?”

“Sure.”

“If you see my dad again…could you tell him…could you tell him I did good?”

“Of course,” I said. “I think what you did will make him very proud.”

That all but made the kid glow. “And…and tell him that…that I’d like to meet him. You know. Someday.”

“Will do,” I said quietly.

Bigfoot Irwin nodded at me. Then he turned and made his gangly way over to the waiting car and slid into it. I stood and watched until the car was out of sight. Then I rolled my bucket of ice back into the school so that I could go home.

I Was a Teenage Bigfoot

Takes place circa
Dead Beat

There are times when, as a professional wizard, my vocation calls me to the great outdoors, and that night I was in the northwoods of Wisconsin with a mixed pack of researchers, enthusiasts and…well. Nerds.

“I don’t know, man,” said a skinny kid named Nash. “What’s his name again?”

I poked the small campfire I’d set up earlier with a stick and pretended that they weren’t standing less than ten feet away from me. The forest made forest sounds like it was supposed to. Full dark had fallen less than half an hour before.

“Harry Dresden,” said Gary, a plump kid with a cell phone, a GPS unit, and some kind of video game device on his belt. “Supposed to be a psychic or something.” He was twiddling deft fingers over the surface of what they call a “smart” phone, these days. Hell, the damned things are probably smarter than me. “Supposed to have helped Chicago PD a bunch of times. I’d pull up the Internet references, but I can’t get reception out here.”

“A psychic?” Nash said. “How is anyone ever supposed to take our research seriously if we keep showing up with fruitcakes like that?”

Gary shrugged. “Doctor Sinor knows him or something.”

Doctor Sinor had nearly been devoured by an ogre in a suburban park one fine summer evening, and I’d gotten her out in one piece. Like most people who have a brush with the supernatural, she’d rationalized the truth away as rapidly as possible—which had led her to participate in such fine activities as tonight’s Bigfoot expedition in her spare time.

“Gentlemen,” Sinor said, impatiently. She was a blocky, no-nonsense type, grey-haired and straight-backed. “If you could help me with these speakers, we might actually manage to blast a call or two before dawn.”

Gary and Nash both hustled over to the edge of the firelight to start messing about with the equipment the troop of researchers had packed in. There were half a dozen of them, altogether, all of them busy with trail cameras and call blasting speakers and scent markers and audio recorders.

I pulled a sandwich out of my pocket and started eating it. I took my time about it. I was in no hurry.

For those of you who don’t know it, a forest at night is
dark
. Sometimes pitch-black. There was no moon to speak of in the sky, and the light of the stars doesn’t make it more than a few inches into a mixed canopy of deciduous trees and evergreens. The light from my little campfire and the hand-held flashlights of the researchers soon gave the woods all the light there was.

Their equipment wasn’t working very well—my bad, probably. Modern technology doesn’t get on well with the magically gifted. For about an hour, nothing much happened beyond the slapping of mosquitoes and a lot of electronic noises squawking from the loudspeakers.

Then the researchers got everything online and went through their routine. They played primate calls over the speakers and then dutifully recorded the forest afterward. Everything broke down again. The researchers soldiered on, repairing things, and eventually Gary tried wood-knocking, which meant banging on trees with fallen limbs and waiting to hear if there was a response.

I liked Doctor Sinor, but I had asked to come strictly as a ride-along and I didn’t pitch in with her team’s efforts.

The whole “let’s find Bigfoot” thing seems a little ill-planned to me, personally. Granted, my perspective is different from that of non-wizards, but marching out into the woods looking for a very large and very powerful creature by blasting out what you’re pretty sure are territorial challenges to fight (or else mating calls) seems…somewhat unwise.

I mean, if there’s no Bigfoot, no problem. But what if you’re standing there, screaming “Bring it on!” and
find
a Bigfoot?

Worse yet, what if
he
finds
you
?

Even worse, what if you were screaming, “Do me, baby!” and he finds you
then
?

Is it me? Am I crazy? Or does the whole thing just seem like a recipe for trouble?

So anyway, while I kept my little fire going, the Questionably Wise Research Variety Act continued until after midnight. That’s when I looked up to see a massive form standing at the edge of the trees, in the very outskirts of the light of my dying fire.

I’m in the ninety-ninth percentile for height, myself, but this guy was
tall
. My head might have come up to his collarbone, barely, assuming I had correctly estimated where his collarbone was under the long, shaggy, dark brown hair covering him. It wasn’t long enough to hide the massive weight of muscle he carried on that enormous frame or the simple, disturbing, very slightly inhuman proportions of his body. His face was broad, blunt, with a heavy brow ridge that turned his eyes into mere gleams of reflected light.

Most of all, there was a sense of awesome power granted to his presence by his size alone, chilling even to someone who had seen big things in action before. There’s a reaction to something that much bigger than you, an automatic assumption of menace that is built into the human brain: Big equals dangerous.

It took about fifteen seconds before the first researcher, Gary I think, noticed and let out a short gasp. In my peripheral vision, I saw the entire group turn toward the massive form by the fire and freeze into place. The silence was brittle crystal.

I broke it by bolting up from my seat and letting out a high-pitched shriek.

Half a dozen other screams joined it, and I whirled as if to flee, only to see Doctor Sinor and crew hotfooting it down the path we’d followed into the woods, back toward the cars.

I held it in for as long as I could, and only after I was sure that they wouldn’t hear it did I let loose the laughter bubbling in my chest. I sank back onto my log by the fire, laughing, and beckoning the large form forward.

“Harry,” rumbled the figure in a very, very deep voice, the words marked with the almost indefinable clippings of a Native American accent. “You have an unsophisticated sense of humor.”

“I can’t help it,” I said, wiping at tears of laughter. “It never gets old.” I waved to the open ground across the fire from me. “Sit, sit, be welcome, big brother.”

“Appreciate it,” rumbled the giant and squatted down across the fire from me, touching fingers the size of cucumbers to his heart in greeting. His broad, blunt face was amused. “So. Got any smokes?”