The Spirit

After the Indian left, he finally sat upright and uncocked his pistol. He clasped his hands and tensed his forearms while speaking almost apologetically to the shepherd. “Buck, old boy, for a minute there I thought you really did me in.” He strapped the gun into his holster and continued speaking without looking at the wolf face. “Couldn’t do it, old boy. Not like that.”

The Indian was wanted for questioning in Canada. Assault and battery. Murder. Justice was useless unless the recipient was faced with it. A sniper shot from concealment was not a proper execution. Also, it was illegal.

The Indian had changed over the past months. He no longer had a rifle. One did not throw away a perfectly decent pump .30.30 (incredible how details seen for only a millisecond come back later), particularly if one was living in the woods. That was final confirmation for Jason that the Indian was uninterested in hunting the Bigfoot. He was thin—indeed, emaciated. The bow and arrows were handmade, by a careful, time-­consuming process. Why had he thrown away the rifle and taken the time to make the bow and arrows?

For the next three hours, Jason and Buck carefully poked through the woods, looking for the resting place of the Bigfoot. Jason watched the dog to see if he picked up a scent but although he remained ferociously tense, there was no sign of a trail. If they found one, Buck might raise hell. He tied the dog to a tree and went into the woods alone.

After several futile hours in the woods, Jason returned to Buck, who was delighted to see him. “It’ll have to be tonight, boy,” said Jason, feeding him another sandwich. “The first lesson for a trapper is patience.”

He replaced the apples with fresh ones. He parked his car deeper in the shrubbery and banked his tent with camouflage brush. By sunset anticipation of nightfall was jangling his nerves. He polished the pistol, oiled the parts, and reloaded again and again.

He had this landscape in the palm of his hand now. Come what may, Jason would know where he was even at night for a radius of a mile in each direction around the lake.

As darkness fell he took a caffeine pill and ate the last of his sandwiches. He believed himself ready for anything with his traps, his night vision, his fierce dog, and his big cannon pistol.

A gentle lick from the dog woke the Indian that evening. He sat up, trying to clear his head. Sleep was nothing to look forward to any more. It did not rest him, it merely presaged more walking.

The woods were quiet, which meant that the spirit was up and about. The Indian was hungry. He had had no chance to hunt today after the dog fight. Unless the spirit found a deer or he caught a fish himself, both would be walking on empty stomachs tonight. He envied the dog’s energy. It pranced around impatiently, trying to get him moving.

He gathered up his bow and arrows, then kneeled over the stream, splashing water over his face. He had overslept again. It must be sometime around nine o’clock. He said to the dog, “I want to find a fish or something first. Then I’ll be ready when he is.”

The dog dashed away. The Indian ate a handful of berries from a bush. The dog returned, woofing. The spirit was walking southeast.

As they trudged along the bank, the Indian watched the water. Moonlight rippled the stones on the bottom. A dark shape silvered under a spit of water weed swaying silkenly under the slow current. A small fin protruded like a flag.

The Indian squatted down, hand poised. His fingers tined into the water and clenched around a slimy fish. He threw it on the ground and stomped it. The fish swelled and grunted in death. It was a cruddy old tripe, which the Indian hated. He whistled for the dog.

The dog hesitated, listening to the running water. The Indian whistled again, louder.

From the woods came the high scream of a woman, slicing the night into fragments. At its highest point of soprano pitch it was punctured by a gunshot and the thunderous barking of the German shepherd. The scream plunged downward into a man’s baritone and kept going until bottoming out in a wolf’s snarl of rage.

Jason had been nodding when the bullfrogs across the lake stopped thrumming. His head jerked upright. The silence spread like a wave, silencing the birds, the crickets, and finally the animals on his own side. He reached for Buck’s neck. The dog was on his feet. He nipped at Jason’s hand.

It could be nothing: a quick cold breeze, a truck on a highway, even a sudden awareness of him concealed in the reeds. Jason had heard such silences on previous camping trips. Humans frightened mammals into quiet, and they in turn frightened birds, which in turn passed the fear down the evolutionary chain to bacteria.

Jason stepped gingerly through the reeds, night binoculars in one hand, pistol in the other. Moonlight sparkled on the water.

Then he saw it. A hulk made shapeless by its posture. It was squatting over a pile of apples. Jason’s breath hissed through his teeth.