The Spirit

At ten o’clock the Indian was leaning against the service entrance, watching the men climb onto motorcycles, into trucks or station wagons, and head for home. This parking apron had been leveled from solid white rock and surfaced with tarmac. At each corner was a spotlight mounted on a power pole. The back of the parking area was a wall of smooth-­faced granite, with trees standing sturdily upright on top.

The Indian heard a roar of laughter from the window of the Grizzly Bar at the corner. It was open, and the color television was on.

He patted the dog’s neck. “What do you say? Think he’s hungry tonight?”

Faint steam indicating the cool air chuffed from the dog’s snout. The Indian took out a plastic garbage bag he had taken from the kitchen and began a systematic raid on the odorous bagged piles lined up against the wall. It was a scavenger’s heaven. Beef rind. Lettuce. Onions. Gravy. Half-­eaten fruit. Bread crusts and rolls. He stuffed the small bag so full that the dog had difficulty dragging it.

They walked clear of the lodge, into the bungalow area and beyond that until the sentinel trees enfolded them. The Indian felt at home here, in his element. “Do you know where he is?”

The dog said it did not. It said it while scratching an ear.

“You’re lying to me.”

The dog scratched some more, then grasped the sack in its jaws, anxious to be away.

“What is it? You don’t want me to know where he is?”

The dog tugged the sack over the ground. It looked back once at the Indian. Don’t follow me. Then it was gone.

The Indian was puzzled. Instead of turning right for the valley, where he expected the spirit to be, the dog followed the road which wound past the lodge around the mountain to the north face. There were no rivers there, to the best of the Indian’s knowledge, only higher ground and more mountains. At this height, the vegetation would be skimpy and the water scarce.

A foundation shivered within the Indian’s mind. Again, it was the spirit’s animalness rather than its etherealness that bothered him. The spirit was behaving exactly like a wild animal deliberately hiding from the ski lodge. Animals avoided humans out of fear. But spirits?

The Indian sat on the ground and closed his eyes. He hummed a small tune taught to him by his grandfather. Bits of memory shook loose. The melody of the song threaded clearly from the dark past, and he hummed it in exquisite precision, remembering every silky, colored tone just as the old man had taught him.

A jolt of terror coursed through the Indian’s body. His grandfather was interrupting his song, grasping him by the shoulders and warning him about something. He spoke one word, but the Indian did not want to hear it.

He opened his eyes and listened to the forest. Instinctively his hand went to his medicine bundle. He was being watched.

The luminous dial on his watch told Jason he had been watching the Indian through binoculars for an hour. The lodge infirmary had rewrapped his bandage, but his arm still felt as if hot steel bars had been drilled through the fang marks. He had to prop the heavy binoculars on his good arm.

When he had followed the Indian out tonight, excitement had pumped blood through his body so hard his wound burned. He had kneeled in the bushes, fervently wishing he had a gun, for he was sure the beast would show up again. The last act of this drama was about to begin.

The dog ran off with a sack of food. The seconds ticked into minutes, then the minutes into an hour, and the last act fizzled into anticlimax. Whoever was writing this drama did not know how to end it sensibly. The Indian lay down on the ground and to all appearances fell asleep.

The Indian clearly shared some kind of relationship with the beast. Jason had seen him pack the food in the bag and give it to the dog. Kimberly’s words came back to haunt him. Suppose it really was some poor deformed human, a friend of the Indian’s whom he was caring for, and not the legendary Bigfoot?

No. Not with that face. Not with a face that could only have been dreamed up by a witch doctor at his most concentrated moment of existential terror. Deformed faces were ugly but dulled the senses, the personality behind them, barricaded by their own features. That face was alive.

A pretty picture, Jason thought ruefully. The Indian shadowing the giant and him shadowing the Indian. Was somebody shadowing Jason? Again he felt that peculiar empathy, as though if he looked in the Indian’s face he would see his own features.

Something hissed.

Half fainting, Jason hit the ground and flattened out, binoculars raised like a stubby club. But it was not a rattlesnake—it was Martha Lucas, with her finger to her mouth.

Martha Lucas lived in a bungalow so stuffed with piles of papers, books, and prints that little incidental room was left for such functions as walking and sitting. She knocked a mountain of stuffed file folders to the floor, revealing a chair for Jason. “I don’t usually have guests in here,” she apologized.