The Spirit

The steel trap closed with a clink that floated across the water. The hulk elongated into a humanlike shape and screamed from lungs massive as drums. The sound was unbearable. Jason fired to stop its scream more than anything else.

The gunflash was a ball of orange, half as tall as Jason’s body. The recoil lifted the gun over his head and clanged his ears into deafness.

A tower of water spouted up and disintegrated exhaustedly as the figure limped along the shore with a dreadful moaning. The beast had left a severed section of itself in the trap’s jaws. Jason cursed and fired again. A branch dropped from a tree by the thing’s head as it scooted through the reeds and into the woods.

While Buck surged through the water with hungry growls, Jason ran around the perimeter of the lake. Buck was well into the trees, his barks an echoing howl, by the time Jason got there.

From the other end of the lake, Jason heard the barking of the Indian’s dog and feet surging through water.

Jason plunged into the woods, mindful of the roots clawing at his boots. The thing was injured—that was sure. And Buck would get to him first, cornering him until Jason arrived. Jason was going to have to kill the beast; he could not take on both it and the Indian.

Then he realized that something else had gone wrong. Buck’s barking had ceased.

The Indian stumbled out of the woods into the marshland. He kicked at a pile of fruit. A steel trap slammed shut, flinging muck into the air and missing his foot by centimeters. Glinting in the moonlight were an attached stake and metal chain.

Close by was a trap already shut, surrounded by half-eaten apples. In the steel teeth was a plug of gristly bone with hair matted around a toenail.

“Oh God . . . oh God . . .” the Indian breathed, separating the jaws. He dropped the toe into his medicine bundle. There were other apple piles about. Somebody knew his spirit’s fondness for apples.

His dog led him to the woods but adamantly refused to enter. The Indian stung it with curses and blows, but the animal cringed in the reeds, back arched in terror, and would not budge.

From deeper in the woods came more gunshots, clustered together. With a final kick at the dog, the Indian entered alone, walking cautiously in case any more traps awaited him.

Jason’s run decelerated to a walk as the silence became oppressive. He flattened his hand over the flashlight lens, then opened two fingers a crack. The slenderest of light beams flew out to a face on the ground. The light collected around white teeth and white eyes.

That was all there was left of Buck. The rest of the body was gone. Deprived of his dog’s eyes and ears, his road presumably closed off by the pursuing Indian, Jason realized he was in a nasty predicament. He cut off the flashlight.

A smell hung in the air—the same toilet stench he had sensed in Canada just before Nicolson died. Many Bigfoot sightings were accompanied by an odor mostly compared to muck dragged up from a river bottom. The predominant odor was sweat, Jason decided. Sweat and excrement, the fear smell. The beast was frightened of him.

The fourth river was just ahead. The gurgling waters swamped out into marsh farther toward the lake. To his right the ground creaked.

Jason whirled around, pistol ready, as something long and sinuous was thrown through the air. It draped warmly over his arm and hissed. The dangling rectangular head buried its fangs in his left forearm and pumped fire deep under his skin. Jason shouted, shaking the rattler to the ground, and blasted a crater in the mud midway down its squirmy body, the bullet sweeping away the tail section even as the head continued striking against his boot.

A rock sizzled out of the brush, scraping skin off Jason’s scalp and scattering pieces of bark from the lodge-pole pine behind him. Jason fired into the trees. The flash framed a hairy arm with another rock, and fiery green eyes.

Jason fired again, blowing away a pinwheel of pine needles in the area where he imagined its face was. His next two shots came with machine-­gun speed. One bullet exploded a chokecherry bush, one gouged wood from a tree. The hammer clicked on an empty chamber.

Silence. Reload?

The beast swelled out of the forest like a pall of smoke. Jason turned to run, and a rock caught him between the shoulder blades. He fell over roots, then sprang to his feet and headed for the river, the great shaggy shape howling behind him.

A profound ache spread from Jason’s left arm to his shoulder. He had read somewhere that rattlesnake bites are overrated. The poison is a hemotoxin that attacks blood rather than nerves. He had a couple of hours to get help, if the running did not force the poison too deep into his body.

Jason dove into the river and stayed under water, letting the current carry him toward the lake, until his lungs swelled to an intolerable limit. He came up for air and dug his feet into the stony riverbed to brace himself against the sluggish current. He looked around for the Bigfoot.