The Spirit

“Mind showing me your camping permit?” Suddenly Drake did not seem like an easygoing woods lover. Suddenly he seemed like a cop.

“Camping permit?” Jason shifted uneasily in his chair.

“Now let me guess. You didn’t fill one out, did you?”

“No.”

“I sort of figured that. I figured that because your car wasn’t parked near to any trailhead.”

“Trailhead?” Jason said.

“We maintain little places in the woods for folks to park their cars, Mr. Jason. All these places have little boxes with papers in them. You fill these papers out and it tells us when you went in and when you plan to come out. It’s sort of nice to know if anybody’s running around in there.”

“I see.”

“Augusta County is officially classed as a wilderness area, you see. Why, there’s places around these mountains I bet nobody but Indians’ve been.”

Jason squirmed, trying to rest his weight on a different bruise. “I’ll certainly be more careful in the future. One snakebite is enough for me.”

“I reckon.” Drake acted absolutely delighted to have Jason in his office. His delight increased whenever he said something that made Jason uncomfortable. “Let me show you something else.”

He reached into a drawer and pulled out Jason’s traps. They were all clotted with dirt. “You’ll never guess where we found these. Right up there at the lake. And do you know what? Every one of them was buried next to a load of apples. Apples! What kind of pinhead would do something like that?” He made a clicking sound with his tongue and dropped them back in the drawer.

“Probably some dumbbell looking for animals.”

“Do you think that’s what it was? He must have forgot to clear it with us. If I find out who did it I’ll slam him in the cooler for a few days. We can do that, you know.” Drake smiled and folded his hands on the desk before him. “I’ve done it lots of times.”

Jason shifted position again. “I hear you had another type of emergency the other night.”

Drake’s delight flared into absolute joy. “You mean Lester and his ape? Ain’t that something?” He slapped the table with his hand. “I knew old Lester was going to pull something one of these days.”

Jason swallowed hard. “You think it’s a fake?”

“I know it’s a fake. Of course it’s a fake. Lester admitted it. He sat right there in your chair and told me how much money he was going to make on the Johnny Carson show. He told me he was going to write a book.”

“What happened?”

“Search me. He called me yesterday afternoon and said he was sorry about it all. He said he didn’t really see anything. You know, Mr. Jason, people do the damnedest things. Why, the University of Washington wanted casts of that print right away. Looky here.”

Drake took out an eight-­by-­twelve blowup of the picture Jason had seen in the newspaper. The prints were square with horizontal toes, without the slightest resemblance to his own quarry.

“Lester, he cut himself a piece of wood and fitted it to his shoe. We found this one in river mud close by the bridge. Know what I thought for a while, Mr. Jason?”

“No. What?”

“That the fellow who set these here traps was looking for a Bigfoot.”

“You don’t say.”

“ ’Course, that was before Lester called me and confessed. Where do you think he is now?”

“Who?” mumbled Jason, wishing he was gone.

“The fellow who set the traps!”

“Oh, him. I imagine he’s long gone, Drake.”

“He better be. If I ever catch him I’ll put a boot up his rear.” Drake stuck out his hand, dismissing Jason with a forceful courtesy. “You ought to run up to Colby Lodge and say hi to Martha Lucas on the way home. She’s the one who saved your neck, not me.”

“Where is it?”

Drake tried to describe the route, but Jason could not follow him. He pointed it out on a wall map as a dot floating amidst wrinkled elevation lines. Finally, he drew a route on a piece of stationery. “I don’t blame you. Helder plunked it down right where it’s hardest to get to. He says it’s better for folks who really want to get away from it all.” Drake obviously disapproved of ski lodges built in virgin wilderness. “They’ll be getting some snow before too long. Maybe they’ll go broke,” he said hopefully.

Jason yawned pressure from his ears as his car ascended through a tunnel of trees past the thousand-­foot level into the valley. The last stand of lodge-­pole pines opened like a curtain on a stage set dominated by a squat fireplug-­shaped mountain, with the lodge clinging to its east slope.

He stopped the car at the Silver River bridge and stepped out. The valley was startlingly isolated, and this natural loneliness besieged Colby Lodge. The lodge strung out a line of little bungalows like droplets separating from a blob of water. Twin, straight downhill ski runs flanked the buildings, topped by two snow guns, which looked like wrecking cranes.

No attempt had been made to blend the buildings into the setting. Colby had been chopped out of a thicket of pines, which, according to Drake, had been used to construct the buildings.