Big
The Novel
Lloyd Pye
All Rights Reserved
Copyright 2012 by Lloyd Pye
ISBN: 978-0-9793881-3-2
Published by Lloyd Pye at Smashwords
Discover other titles by Lloyd Pye at Smashwords.com.
No Print Edition Available
Smashwords Edition License Note: This eBook is licensed for personal use only. It may not be resold or given to others or reproduced or transmitted in any form without permission from Lloyd Pye. Contact: lloydpye@gmail.com
DEDICATION
To those who tried so diligently to make this story into a movie in 1985-1986. If I were to mention your names, it might bring attention you don’t want or need, so I’ll refrain. Besides, it’s no longer relevant to anyone but us, and we know who we are.
FOREWORD
The wide and ongoing success of Lloyd Pye’s nonfiction book Everything You Know Is Wrong, available at www.iUniverse.com, has established his reputation as one of the world’s most knowledgeable hominoid researchers. Hominoids are bipedal hair-covered primates known as bigfoot, sasquatch, abominable snowman, yeti, alma, kaptar, sedapa, agogwe, and dozens of other names where they live on every continent except Antarctica. In this story, he writes about the title character with a depth of technical knowledge and insightful detail that few if any other authors in this genre possess.
PREFACE
Big’s original incarnation was a screenplay I wrote in 1984, when I lived in Los Angeles and worked as a screenwriter. In 1985, it was optioned by a small independent production company, but their size didn’t stop them from arranging funding for it, and soon it was in full pre-production. They secured time commitments from a handful of B-list actors and a well-regarded British director, and our bigfoot’s costume and makeup and special effects were contracted to a master of that field in Hollywood.
Everything was solidly on track for our low-budget movie to be a rousing success. Unfortunately, in Hollywood the best-laid schemes gang aft agley. When executives at Universal Studios—then as now, one of the largest production companies in the world—heard about our pending production and recognized its earnings potential, they inquired about buying into it. Our young producers—who, when they optioned the screenplay from me, were then temporarily its owners—politely declined, explaining that they had the production details well in hand and did not need additional participation.
In hindsight, that was an offer they should not have refused. Soon afterward, our independent, low-budget production found itself in a game of Hollywood hardball, confronted with a new bigfoot movie coming from the production company of Steven Spielberg, arguably the best writer-director-producer in Hollywood at that time, and whose offices happened to be based at—surprise!—Universal Studios.
The new Universal movie was a silly comedy called Harry and the Hendersons, with a budget announced at $15 million. Our production was a dramatic, action-filled, coming-of-age story, and our budget was not in the ballpark of Spielberg’s. Also—and this was key—because theirs was a comedy and ours was a drama, we had no way to suggest, much less prove, that they got the idea to produce a bigfoot movie at the particular time they chose to do it as a direct result of our production. Legally, we were outflanked.
Although our producers were already picking shooting sites, they could not maintain their momentum against the Spielberg/Universal juggernaut. They soon found themselves without their promised funding, they could gain no traction with other potential investors, and ultimately the Big project was a near-miss, and today it is a never-was…as a movie.
Fortunately, I turned the script into a novel, so now you can experience its drama as the eBook you are about to read. The story is the same as it was then, and everyone who read it then felt it had the potential to become a terrific movie. So who knows? Maybe Steven Spielberg will decide it’s time to put things right regarding this matter.
I’m not holding my breath…but crazier things have happened in Hollywood.
CHAPTER ONE
Monty Harper had hunted upland game birds since he was twelve, when his father took him on his first shoot. In the twenty-five years since, he couldn’t recall a worse day of it. He had tried two fields, but nothing flushed—not a grouse, not a quail, nothing. For the first time since he could remember, he hadn’t taken a shot, which was remarkable because this was the spring nesting season. He poached every spring, so he knew birds were down in the high grass, brooding their nests. So why wouldn’t they take wing?
Monty mulled possibilities as he returned to his truck along a shaded path in the woods surrounding the stump-cut hunting fields. He walked with his unhinged .12 gauge shotgun steepled across his right shoulder, its empty over-and-under barrels resting along his broad back. The length of its stock extended in front of his stubbly face and nestled in his thick right hand, while his left absently fingered the empty pockets of his game vest. Weighted with unused shells, it sagged below and around his beer belly like a faded-green tutu, its streaks of dried blood from previous hunts mutely mocking this effort.
To take his mind off those concerns, he decided to check on his hunting partner, Duke, a speckled pointer busily sniffing out bushes and brambles ten yards ahead. “What about you, Duke? Feeling any better now?”
At the first word, Duke ceased his zigzag pattern to cock a floppy brown ear. By the end of it he knew nothing was wrong, simply more of the rambling chatter his master tended to spout on their walks to and from the truck. He went back to sniffing.
Duke’s behavior was erratic since the first field. It was if he lost his way, or forgot how to do his job. For one thing, he couldn’t accurately zero in on nests. He kept pointing at nothing, or nothing that would flush, neither of which made sense. Even worse, Duke would periodically lift his nose to sniff the air, then snuffle and snort as if trying to clear some kind of clog from his nostrils. Monty checked him twice for burrs up his snout, to no avail. Something was wrong out there, but Monty had no idea what.
Duke suddenly froze mid-zig, extending his thin, bony tail straight back. Monty stopped walking. With smooth movements gained by years of practice, he unshouldered the empty shotgun; but he didn’t bother to put in shells because no game birds would be found among trees. Dog and master stood awash in the velvet tranquility of the forest floor. Then, as inexplicably as before, Duke again lifted his nose to sniff the air.
Monty surveyed the trail ahead. Towering pines, larch, alder, and fir trees cast a pall of deep shadows pierced by orange-tinted shafts of late-afternoon sunlight streaming at their backs. On that spot-lit stage airborne motes of pollen and dust did slow, sensuous dances in their moments of illumination. Then he noticed an unnatural stillness and hush had settled in, as if even the insects were intimidated into silence. What the hell….?
“Move out, Duke!” he muttered as he reshouldered the gun and resumed walking. “There’s nothin’ here. But if there is, we don’t want no part of it. Let’s get home.”
Duke’s keen ears picked up the difference in his master’s tone. This preceded a swift kick if orders weren’t quickly followed. He resumed zigging and zagging while discreetly snorting and snuffling, still trying to clear his nose of its unfamiliar irritant.
Several more strides brought Duke and then Monty within sight of an old single-cab Chevy Silverado parked where the trailhead and roadhead met. Monty cherished that truck because it comfortably carried his hulking body, and because its gray-and-blue-trim finish was so thoroughly broken in. Dozens of dents, dings, and gouges overlaid by a thick patina of dust and grime gave it character. In the orange glow of any afternoon spent hunting—even one as bad as today—it always struck Monty as a rare beauty.
Thirty yards from the roadhead’s open, circular clearing, Duke froze again. This time his nose, tail, and hackle fur lifted as he bared his teeth and snarled. Since pointers were expected to remain quiet when stalking, Duke’s actions told Monty he was seriously alarmed. Five years of hunting with such a premier animal had instilled in him a profound respect for his partner’s judgment, and there was only one thing that could do this to him.
This time he unshouldered his .12 gauge and reached around to the lower rear of the game vest, where he kept four buckshot shells to deal with bears. For him it had never before come to that, but there was always a first time. He removed two of the powerful shells from their loops, slipped them into the stacked chambers, quietly snapped barrel and stock together, then released the safety.
Ready for whatever might come, he crept toward the circular clearing where the pickup was parked, past still-growling Duke. “Come on, boy,” he muttered again, softer than before. “Let’s go see if we can bag us a bear.”
He was three steps beyond Duke when the dog trained to rigorous silence started barking furiously, which meant he’d been pushed beyond all restraint. Monty swung the gun to his right, half-expecting to find a charging bear. All he could see was the same stand of shadowy trees surrounding them in all quadrants. Then one of the thick, dark ‘trunks’ moved, and he realized he’d located his ‘bear.’
“Jeee-zus!” he blurted.
A lightning gush of adrenalin double-pumped his heart, dropped the bottom out of his stomach, and sent blood surging throughout his body. He felt queasy, then dizzy, then faint. He stared across the fifty feet separating him from an upright, eight-foot-tall, black-hair-covered, human-shaped giant. Its face revealed little more than curiosity, if that, but panic-stricken Monty saw it as a ferocious dreadnought.
Bigfoot! he thought. Can’t be anything else!
Like most people raised in America’s Pacific Northwest, Monty Harper had heard campfire stories about bigfoot since he could remember. Five years earlier, he took part in a trackdown effort after someone glimpsed a bigfoot and then found its tracks. That posse—and all others like it—had failed because men and horses and dogs could never outmaneuver such powerful, mobile, born-to-the-woods creatures.
Now one stood in plain view, where Monty could see it looked just like everybody said: enormous overall size; a head-to-toe coat of dark hair covering thick, muscular limbs; extra-long arms hanging to just above its knees; a short, thick neck supporting an ape-like face with heavy brow ridges that sloped up to a high, rounded crown.
It’s a spitting image!
The creature had emerged from the woods ahead of, and to the right of, the truck. It stood calmly, gazing into the bugged eyes of the ‘small upright’ holding the ‘shining stick.’ Then it studied the ‘wolf-thing,’ howling and cowering behind the small one. Its curiosity satisfied, it turned to continue along a route meant to carry it across the open trailhead in front of the truck and into the timber on the other side. When it saw the truck, it paused again for another few moments of assessment. Then it resumed walking.
Monty stood still, mesmerized by the bigfoot’s confident, leisurely gait. It had the regal walk of a lord in his domain, fearing nothing, not even creatures as bizarre as these. No lion on any African savannah could carry itself with more innate majesty or dignity. Then it entered a wide shaft of light that ignited its shiny black coat with an orange-tinted flash. That jarred Monty from his reverie. His slack-jawed expression twisted into the lustful gaze of a fortune hunter. He lifted the loaded shotgun, leveled its barrel, nestled its stock against his cheek, and took aim at the left side of the bigfoot’s head.
This is it! he thought, drawing a trembling bead. For all the marbles!
He squeezed the forward, upper-barrel trigger and felt the solid recoil as fifteen pea-sized balls of lead hurtled fifty feet. With eyes geared to tracking the impacts of birdshot, Monty saw those much heavier pellets strike low and off-center. Instead of the side of the head he aimed at, they slammed obliquely into the left shoulder-blade area, hitting with a loud thump! that ripped out a softball-sized chunk of hair, flesh, muscle, and blood.
At impact the bigfoot gave a sharp cry, then grabbed at its wound. Its extra-long right arm made the reach as its legs buckled and it sagged to its knees. Monty was elated by his victim’s collapse. He rebraced the gun, again drew a bead on its head, then pulled the rear trigger to empty the lower barrel. The gun’s kick was as solid as before, but this time all he saw was a small background bush disintegrate. A split second before the shot, the bigfoot pitched forward while twisting onto its right side, limp and helpless looking, leaving it sprawled on the forest floor’s matted undergrowth.
Can’t be dead from that! Monty warned himself. It’s fainted! Or playin’ possum!
He unhinged his weapon, ejected the two empties, and reached back for his final pair of buckshot. He jammed the shells home knowing one more was all he’d need to finish it off. It was just a question of picking the right spot so he could be certain of a heart shot while doing minimum damage to the hide.
“Let’s go, Duke-boy!” he shouted as he began lumbering across the fifteen yards that separated him from his victim. “Let’s go finish off that big ugly sucker!”
Duke bolted ahead of his slow-footed master, barking frantically now that his workaday spell of silent restraint was broken. However, as he drew near to the downed creature’s heavily calloused feet, he realized he could go no farther. His supersensitive nose would not permit actual contact with such a foul-smelling creature.
Monty stopped running at ten feet away. Above his own panting and Duke’s incessant yelping, he could hear the bigfoot struggling to breathe through a ragged, gurgling wheeze. Fainted! he thought. The hit took its breath away! Then he was reminded of another aspect of the many stories he had heard about bigfoot.
“Peee-ewe!” he said, wrinkling his nose in disgust. “Smells like a outhouse, don’t it, Duke? We finish this poor monkey off, we’ll be doin’ it a favor!”
As his victim laid on its right side, he couldn’t help staring at its face. It had large, thick, overhanging eyebrows, but no forehead; a steep slope back and up from the brow ridges to the skull’s peaked crown. Its head hair bristled up on top, like a thin Mohawk, then flattened down to blend into the strands of two- to three-inch hair that covered the rest of its body. The parts of its face not covered by hair were the ears, eye sockets, upper cheeks, nose, and around the mouth. Those areas were covered with dark, weathered skin.
The nose was large and wide, with a pugged tip. The mouth was much larger and projected farther forward than any human’s, with thin, flat lips that met in a narrow line, like a monkey or gorilla. The ears were human-like, though draped by shaggy head hair. Strangest of all were its eyes. Half-closed in stupefied shock, they were so much like dark human eyes, Monty had to look twice to be sure they didn’t belong to an outsized man in a brilliant costume. Then the light struck them at a certain angle, revealing a reddish glow deep within. Only animals with night vision had that, so it couldn’t possibly be human.
“Somebody will pay a fortune for this!” he muttered as he got in position for a kill shot. “No more livin’ in that crappy trailer! No more workin’ in the lumber mill!”
He stood even with its hips to get a straight shot at its heart through the exposed left side of its ribcage. With small animals, untainted side views gave optimum mounting results; but with large animals, such as bears, the front and back were most important to preserve for viewing. Monty assumed it would be the same with a mounted bigfoot.
Seconds away from death, the wounded bigfoot suddenly swept its left arm up and back to grab the shotgun’s barrels and inadvertently point them toward its own feet. Monty was so startled by that unexpected movement, his muscles instinctively tensed and his finger squeezed the forward, top-barrel trigger. The shotgun blasted out its deadly response, causing Duke to yelp in stunned surprise as the tight wad of buckshot ripped into his stomach and tore him nearly in half.
“Duke!” Monty screamed, instantly oblivious to everything but that tragic shot’s effect on his great friend and companion. He released his grip on the trigger housing and ran the three steps to Duke, whose life was draining out in a spreading puddle of blood and shredded viscera. He dropped to his knees to cradle his dying friend’s body. “For God’s sake, Duke!” he blubbered, rocking back and forth. “I’m sooorrrry!”
The bigfoot rolled over onto its back without losing its grip on the shotgun. Its huge left hand stayed wrapped around the double barrels, while its bloody right hand grasped the trigger housing in the manner he saw the owner hold it.
Duke offered up a final whimper as his head sagged across Monty’s wrist and his slobbery tongue lolled. The utter finality of that death brought Monty to his senses. He whipped his head around to find the bigfoot sitting upright now, pointing the gun at him. Red-tinged rage filled his victim’s eyes as its right hand squeezed the trigger housing.
After thousands of times being on the safe end of a shotgun blast, it was a surreal moment for Monty to suddenly find himself on the receiving end. At that moment of exquisite, blood-chilling horror, all he could think to do was shout, “Nooooooo!” But nothing happened. The bigfoot squeezed again, harder. The protective arch of curved steel bent until it pressed against the spent forward trigger.
That showed Monty two things: the bigfoot was super strong and very smart, because it now understood the use—though not the function—of triggers. Even so, it still might manage to poke one of its thick fingers into the housing and pull the rear, lower-barrel trigger, which would fire the shell still in the chamber and send him to join Duke.
Holy mother of—!
At that instant the bigfoot’s eyes went down to study the balky killing stick, giving Monty one more chance to survive this haywire encounter. He lurched to his feet. The still-sitting bigfoot looked up and snarled, showing huge yellow incisors and eyeteeth the size of AA batteries. He shifted the shotgun in his hands, gripping it at the front sighting pin and the rubber shoulder-pad. Using his knee as a brace, he mustered a surge of wrist and forearm strength that snapped the weapon in two at its hinge point.
That second display of awesome power whirled Monty around and sent him sprinting the few yards to his truck as fast as his bulk would permit. “Heeeellllpppp!”
He reached the driver-side door and yanked it open, grateful he never needed to lock it when parking in isolated areas. As he scrambled behind the wheel, he was also grateful that on hunts he couldn’t afford to have keys rattling around in his pocket, so they were easy to snatch from their hiding place behind the front sunshade. He locked both doors and forced his trembling fingers to insert the ignition key—all at record pace.
The engine coughed to life and Monty’s surging hopes soared. “Awwwright!” he gloated. “I’m gettin’ outta here!” He cut a wheel-spinning donut around the circular roadhead to get the truck headed away from it, back down the mountain. Then just as it straightened out and he seemed on his way to safety, he heard a thunderous, ear-splitting “Rooooaaaaarrrrrr!” as the bigfoot appeared from nowhere to sprawl lengthwise across the truck’s hood, obliterating his view through the windshield.
Monty slammed on the brakes and the truck’s tires dug in, sliding the bigfoot off the smooth hood and onto the ground in front. Seizing his advantage, Monty floored the accelerator to run into his just-rising opponent. The bigfoot saw it coming and dodged to his left, but the truck’s right fender struck a glancing blow on his right calf, which sent him rolling away like a hairy log as the truck rumbled past, spewing exhaust fumes.
After three rolls across the open sod, the bigfoot was able to stop himself. He lay prone for only a moment, breathing heavily, then worked himself into a sitting position. He flexed his wounded shoulder, then rubbed away the pain in his lower leg. Assuring himself that everything was in order, he cut loose with a leaf-rattling howl of anger and frustration. “Aaaarrrrggggghhhhh!”
He stood up, steadied himself, then shifted his attention from his injuries. He looked down the wide path his enemies took to escape, then looked left to where he was going when he was attacked. He calculated a moment, looked down the path again, made a decision, then darted into the woods with remarkable speed and agility.
He was out of sight among the trees and undergrowth long before the truck’s fading engine noise was swallowed by the silence of the forest.
CHAPTER TWO
The old gray Silverado whined in low gear, creeping through a tight switchback on the narrow logging road torn like a whip slash from the side of one of Washington’s Cascade Mountains. Monty Harper sat at the wheel with tears blurring his vision as he recalled poor Duke, guts blown apart, thinking he had committed some unpardonable sin by raising such a commotion about the bigfoot. If only! he kept thinking. If only I’d had time to explain! As if that would have made a difference to Duke.
“Damn that bigfoot sonofabitch!” he blurted. “Damn him to hell!”
The creature in question was somewhere within the green blanket covering those mountains, negotiating dense undergrowth, moving quickly over uphill terrain. He had to make his way through thigh-high tangles of dead fir, larch, and pine limbs, along with early summer’s chest-high thickets of blackberry, elderberry, and salmonberry. Luckily, he negotiated such obstacles every day and had little trouble doing so—under ordinary circumstances. But this! He hadn’t traveled at such a rapid pace since he was young.
Finally, he reached a crestline where the ground began dropping away in front of him. He found himself facing what his kind called a no tree area. It was several acres of clear-cut logging that was now an open grassy field, with only stumps where trees should be and few new trees coming up. This was the kind of place Monty would hunt birds, but now it provided the bigfoot with a clear view of the broad valley spread out below.
He bent over, hands on knees, wheezing from his exertions, feeling the stickiness of blood along the upper left side of his back. He reached his right hand around to feel his wound. As before, it came back smeared with blood. He wished he could see the wound, to know if it was draining or pumping. If it was draining, it would eventually stop and he would live. If one of his main blood tubes was broken, even a little, he would die. He had torn the heads and limbs off enough animals to know what pumping blood tubes meant.
Suddenly, between wheezes, he heard the angry, grunting sounds tree carriers made when traveling on the dusty paths they chewed into the mountains. His kind—the hairy uprights of the high mountains—knew of the tree-cutting monsters and the tree-carrying monsters, and their small upright masters. Tales were told about them. Once, long ago, when he still traveled with his mother, they crossed such a path and he saw and heard a tree carrier on it, at a great distance. The gray monster he fought with was much smaller than that one. What had him worried now was how tough it was, how hard its skin was. Worse than a bear, worse than any animal he knew of…as hard as stone!
With a grunt of grim determination, he set off down the slope, toward the angry sounds, hoping he was choosing the correct route. He would know soon enough.
Monty crested the carved-out logging road, then started the downward twists and turns that would take him into the valley twelve miles away. His truck gathered and held momentum as he recklessly negotiated the first turn, a hairpin to the right, with a jagged rock wall to the right and a steep scree slope of loose rocks to the left. He didn’t care. He wanted to get off that jinxed mountain range as fast as he could.
His friends had warned him, time and again, not to hunt on its eastern flanks because local Yakima Indians claimed bigfeet lived there. But during nesting season it was the only safe place to poach, so he really had no choice. Besides, those same Indians always said bigfeet wouldn’t bother you if you didn’t bother them. Now he wished he hadn’t bothered that one…or that he at least would have done the job right.
The sun was just setting behind the mountains flanking the western side of the valley when the truck came to another hard right turn. Overhanging the roadway was a large jutting stone ledge, the kind that might fall someday and close access completely. Underneath the overhang was one of the sharpest hairpins in the entire circuit.
As always, Monty slowed to a crawl to negotiate it, gazing up as he usually did to watch the thick finger of granite pass overhead. Suddenly, a huge dark blob appeared and dropped directly into his line of sight. Before his brain could even begin to analyze what the blob might be, the bigfoot slammed onto the hood of his truck with a resounding whomp! that left two platter-sized dents in its broad, flat contour.
He came down feet-first, facing the cab, and promptly illustrated the lesson he had learned about how to deal with the hard-shelled monster. From a squatting position he reached out with both hands to grip a front cab strut in each, which left him solidly braced as he glared in at Monty.
When Monty’s lagging senses finally caught up to the sudden turn of events, he showed what he had learned by again standing on his brakes. But this time the bigfoot didn’t lose his grip. In fact, he showed his huge yellow teeth in what might have been a gloating smile, followed by a roar that seemed to rattle the windshield glass.
“Aaaarrrrrgggghhhhh!”
Realizing his passenger would have to be dislodged some other way, Monty floored the accelerator to begin hurtling down the roadway. Looking over, under, and around the massive right arm and chest blocking his view, he began whipping the truck from side-to-side in an attempt to shake the bigfoot off. That hard jostling had an effect.
Though able to hang on with his hands, the bigfoot’s feet had nothing to cling to on the hood’s smooth surface. They lost their grip and splayed out behind him, beyond the front grille, which left them fishtailing back and forth every time Monty jerked the wheel. Yet despite those yeoman efforts to shake him off, he managed to hang on.
They went like that for a quarter mile, engine whining, rocks and gravel spraying, dust and fumes billowing, until they approached a deep, wide pothole at the scree-slope side of the road. If Monty could have seen clearly, he would have avoided that familiar hazard, and he knew what had happened the instant both front wheels dropped into it up to the axle. He felt the oil pan slam into the edge, which bounced the cab high into the air and flipped the bigfoot up and away, causing him to vanish—poof!—as the front end slammed back down and the rear wheels plowed into and out of the hole.
Monty was badly jolted by that bone-rattling bump, but he quickly recovered his composure and control of his vehicle, which continued to drive on as before. He looked around frantically in all directions: through the windshield and both side windows, then he checked the door mirrors and the rearview mirror’s image through the gun rack out of the back window—but no bigfoot! To Monty, it vanished as magically as it appeared.
“Thank God!” he muttered. Must have gone over the edge…. He accelerated again, shifted a gear, took a deep breath, and tried to relax. He exhaled, shifted again, then settled back in his seat. It was over. I beat the bastard!
At that precise instant a giant hairy fist and forearm rammed through the truck cab’s rear window, shattering the empty gun rack into kindling and spraying pebbles of safety glass everywhere. Monty instantly knew what had happened: The pothole had flipped the bigfoot up over the cab and into the rear bed—the one place he didn’t check! With that realization, he squawked in terror—“Yiiiieeekkk!”—as he released the wheel to try to protect himself from the huge black hand groping for his neck.
The now driverless truck veered to the right, toward the rock wall created by the road-cut. It hit the wall, bounced off, then careened into it again. That heavy jostling kept the bigfoot from getting a grip on Monty’s throat, and Monty from getting a grip on its arm. Each kept swiping futilely at the other.
Another sharp bounce against the rock wall was followed by a long, spark-spewing scrape along the entire length of the truck’s passenger side. That tossed the bigfoot back and forth in the rear bed as he struggled to maintain his grip on the left-side door strut, while trying to find and wring Monty’s neck. Both tasks were too much for him to accomplish simultaneously.
Finally, the truck’s right fender smashed into a low rock outcrop, shattering its headlight, caving in the fender, cracking the radiator, and skidding to a skewed stop in the road, engine dead. Monty was slammed forward, into the steering wheel and windshield, bruising his chest and banging the top and left side of his forehead. But he was pumped too full of adrenalin to notice—much less worry about—either injury.
Meanwhile, having failed to secure anything with his right hand, the bigfoot lost his tenuous grip with his left as the collision propelled him up and over the driver’s side of the cab. He flew about fifteen feet, turning a complete flip in the air and landing on his back in the dusty roadway, very near its steep drop-off.
Stunned, his wind lost again, struggling for breath, he couldn’t know that the powdery rock dust he was sprawled on was packing into his wound and helping to slow its bleeding. What he did know was that he had to get up, somehow, and continue the fight, or the gray monster and its evil master would surely kill him.
Monty quickly recovered enough composure to realize he had another chance to win the battle if he could restart the truck and drive it over the stunned bigfoot laying ten feet away. I can kill it like that! I can! But restarting the engine would be iffy because of the collision with the outcrop. Was his truck really built “like a rock”? This would be an acid test, because if it wasn’t, the bigfoot would come and kill him where he sat.
He cursed himself once more for not carrying a pistol in his glove compartment. Dumbass! Then he gripped the wheel and turned the ignition as the bigfoot pushed up to a sitting position, its back toward the truck, holding its head, as if trying to gather its senses. Monty could see it was doing just that as the truck’s engine coughed to life.
“Hallelujah!” he rejoiced, shifting into reverse while praying it would roll. It did! He backed up enough to move around the outcrop, then jammed the gearshift into first.
By then the bigfoot was on his feet and turned around to face the oncoming truck, just as he did at the roadhead. In that encounter he learned a valuable lesson: If it hit him as it did then, it would send him flying off the steep edge of the roadway to certain death. So this time he dodged away, moving like a giant matador as the gray “bull” roared past.
Unfortunately, there was very little room between the drop-off at his back and the truck brushing past his front. He ended up with only the front of both feet on the road; his heels were unsupported. He felt his great bulk start to teeter backward. I’m falling!
Meanwhile, Monty could only pound the steering wheel in frustration as he swept by his nemesis, barely missing it. He glanced at the rearview mirror and saw the bigfoot’s long arms frantically windmilling as it fought to maintain its balance. Then it gave a final hop back, dropping away beyond the ledge, down to…who knew how far? Awwwwright!
Instantly, Monty felt like a millionaire again, but he needed to pinpoint the body’s location so no one could doubt that he made it end up there. He stopped the truck and put it in reverse, then twisted his bulky torso to watch over his right shoulder and through the shattered rear window to guide himself backward. He was looking directly at the ledge when he saw the bigfoot’s right leg swing up over it. That improbable vision caused every inch of his skin to turn to gooseflesh. That thing’s a Terminator!
When the bigfoot realized he was losing his balance, he simply let his body drop away so he could get himself under control, reaching out to grab the edge of the road with both hands and breaking his fall with his feet against the rock wall. He stabilized himself, then did enough of a pull-up to scramble back onto the road.
Pulsing with a heady mixture of fear and greed, Monty debated his choices. He could try to ram the Bigfoot going backwards, which would risk sending his truck over the edge of the drop-off. Or he could retreat and get away from that dangerous sonofabitch while the getting was still good. He didn’t have much time to consider his options, because as soon as the bigfoot was fully to his feet, he began loping toward the truck.
With only twenty yards separating them, Monty ended his internal debate by shifting into first gear and flooring the accelerator to get going again. That sent a spray of gravel and dust erupting from the truck’s spinning rear tires. No rocks reached the bigfoot, but the dust cloud forced him to pull up short, wheezing from exertion and coughing at the acrid, putrid odor of exhaust fumes from a truck with bad piston rings.
By then the sun had dropped behind the western mountains and the sky glowed with a bluish-orange tint. Night was falling. The bigfoot was stymied. He shuffled to the edge of the drop-off and stared at the valley below. His keen, nocturnal eyes searched for some hint or clue to what he might do next. Then, in the shadows cast by the distant mountains, he noticed something that reminded him of the stars beginning to appear overhead. It was the lights of a small community winking to life in the onset of dusk.
Monty Harper lived there, although the bigfoot had no way to know that. But he did link the two in his “primitive” brain, because among his hairy upright brethren there was vague knowledge of the small, strange beings who dwelled on the flat land below their high mountain home. His mother had told him—as her mother had told her—that on rare occasions forest uprights encountered small ones, and whenever that happened, the small ones usually ran away. That was why he was unafraid when he met one.
Now, after what had happened with the terrible killing stick and the powerful gray monster, he could only conclude that the small upright he met and fought with was some kind of perverted renegade. And his instincts told him that the renegade was connected somehow to those “stars” down below. If that was true, the battle might not be over.
The bigfoot reached his right arm over his left shoulder to check his wound. His fingertips came back caked with the blood-soaked rock dust that now covered the whole left side of his back down to his upper buttock. Good news! The dust hadn’t been washed away by his blood, which meant he was draining rather than pumping. Sooner or later, draining would stop and the wound would begin to heal. Even severe wounds usually healed. He lifted his left arm to circle it around his head a few times. It worked as it should with a minimum of pain. More good news.
Suddenly, the retreating truck came into view, fifty yards down and away, coming out of a hairpin curve. The bigfoot could see Monty in it, and a startled Monty could see him. The bigfoot roared as loud as he could—“Raaaarrrrrhhhhh!”—and lifted his right arm to make a fist. He shook it and roared again, sending out spine-chilling echoes that might have carried all the way down to the village nestled in the valley below.
That sight and sound again stiffened the hair on Monty’s body and caused his stomach to squeeze into a sour knot.
CHAPTER THREE
Granny Elk lived in a frontier-style, single-room log cabin that was an accurate reflection of its ninety-year-old owner: sagging and weather-beaten on the outside, but homey and comfortable inside. Also like the owner, the living room’s furniture was basic and rough-hewn. Granny usually occupied a high-backed birchwood rocker.
Marcy Dillon always felt at ease there, sitting on the floor opposite her chair, leaning against the bed’s footboard. On this early evening the glow of a dying fire cast flickering shadows across Native American memorabilia scattered around the cabin, as well as on Granny’s iron-gray braids and Marcy’s blonde ponytail.
Granny sipped from her teacup as Marcy finished jotting a note in a steno pad. “Okay, I have that,” she said, glancing up at the shriveled old woman with a satisfied expression. “What’s next?”
Marcy Dillon was a tall, solidly-built girl who had done her share of chores around her family’s ranch. She was too straightforward for any of the foolishness that went into being considered “pretty.” She was attractive enough to suit herself and her boyfriend, and for her that had always been enough. Like any eighteen-year-old, she was always pleased to be called pretty, but she preferred being thought of as smart or talented.
“Now, you take your slippery elm,” Granny went on. “Slippery bark is good for general digestion problems, like food poisoning, but it’s not much good for nervous upsets. Don’t know why that is, just the way things work out sometimes.”
Marcy nodded, mumbling as she jotted. “Slippery elm bark...good for general digestion...not for nervous upsets. Got it.”
Granny put the teacup on a small table beside the rocker and rubbed her fingertips against the thin leather headband holding her braids in place. Her gnarled hands shook slightly, and fatigue etched across her deeply wrinkled face. “Is that enough for now, Marcy? We’ve been at it two hours now. I’m a bit tuckered out.”
Marcy glanced at her watch. “Oh, sure, Granny Elk!” She flipped her notebook closed and shoved it in the shoulder bag lying beside her on the floor. “I guess I had enough for what I need about an hour ago.”
“Child!” Granny said as Marcy rose to her feet. “Why’d you let me ramble on like that? I told you nearly all I know about herb medicines!”
Marcy flashed the toothy, dimpled grin that had melted hearts since she was a toddler. “I’d sit and listen to you as long as you’d talk. I love learning about healing.”
“Well, this report you’re studying to write…it better be an A!”
“It will be,” she said, retrieving Granny’s empty teacup. “I promise.”
She took the cup to the kitchen area’s sink and rinsed it out as Granny sat quietly, waiting for her to finish. After drying and putting it away, she turned and spoke again, but this time she had to struggle to find the right words.
“You know I graduate in a couple of weeks, and…. Well, most people just assume I’ll marry Paul and settle in to help him run his ranch.” Granny shifted in the rocker as Marcy moved across the cramped room to sit opposite her on the foot of the bed. “We’ve been a couple since junior high, so I guess everyone has a right to think that.”
Granny nodded. “It’s what everyone in town believes…and I do, too.”
“That’s because I never tell anyone the truth about how I feel!” Marcy blurted. “Not even you! But now, with graduation so close, I’m getting scared, so I want to tell you.”
Granny’s wrinkled face wrinkled even more. “Tell me what?”
“I’m, uhhhh…. Well, I’m thinking about trying to become a doctor.”
Granny knew what to say to that. “Why, that’s wonderful news! Wonderful!”
The golden ponytail swished as Marcy’s head shook vigorously. “Oh, no, it’s not! Boys around here don’t go to college very often, much less girls. Everyone thinks it’s a waste of time and money, and a good strong back.”
The valley they lived in—aptly named Lost Valley—was an agricultural stronghold of farmers, ranchers, and timber workers; men and women who earned hard but decent livings from an isolated, beautiful land. Because of their isolation, they were provincial enough to believe their little corner of the world was the fairest on the planet. Few ever left for longer than it took to “come to their senses.” Fewer still permanently joined the “crazies” who ran things “outside.”
“It’s a new day, Marcy,” Granny insisted. “Women can do anything they set their minds to, anything at all.” She paused, then added wistfully, “We could have in my day, too, but we didn’t have any way to let each other know. Not like now.”
Marcy let a pause hang long enough to make clear she wasn’t accepting anything as easy as that, which didn’t surprise Granny. Marcy Dillon had always been smart, shrewd, tough, and determined, and with age she was becoming even more so.
She glanced at her watch again and said, “I really should go. I was supposed to meet Paul at the A & W, and I’m waaaay late already.”
Granny flashed her gap-toothed grin, glad to postpone a difficult conversation to a more convenient time. “That’s how it is at your age, always racing your motor to try to keep some boy idling his. But we can talk more about your situation some other time.”
She began struggling up out of her chair, which was Marcy’s cue to step over, take her hand, and help her rise. “Thanks, Granny…I really do need to figure it all out.”
Still moving with purpose through the darkness, the bigfoot’s stride was not as brisk as before. Lights from farm and ranch houses glowed in the distance on either side of him as he reached the asphalt path that bisected the open valley floor by running a course parallel with the winding river that had carved the valley for eons.
The nearby river didn’t concern him. He would cross it if he had to. For now he could take the path—provided it was safe for his kind to use. He warily touched it with his foot. Hard! Like tree skin! He squatted down to smell it and taste it. Rank to smell and bitter to taste, but it seemed safe to walk on.
He stepped onto its unnaturally smooth surface and noticed he left no tracks. None! Good! He could not be followed on this path; his passage would be untraceable. He resumed moving toward the cluster of “stars” he had stalked for the past few hours. Suddenly, his keen hearing picked up the faint but familiar sound of a vehicle engine.
The gray monster! He paused to be sure. Yes! Coming this way! What to do?
He hadn’t thought this far ahead. He had decided to seek revenge on the monster and its master by assuming both would be hiding like the cowards they had already showed themselves to be. But now they had changed tactics and were returning to battle him.
What to do?
The monster’s sound grew louder as the distant night began to glow like dawn. He had to shield his sensitive night-vision eyes as two bright circles became visible, shining like small moons as they rounded a bend in the bitter black path. As his eyes adjusted, he could see them better, two widely spaced moon-eyes searching for him in the dark.
What to do?
He took a staggering step backward, then another. The moon-eyes were rapidly turning into even brighter sun-eyes as they bore down on him at a speed that was much faster than he could ever hope to run…faster than anything in the forest! Fear-tingles stood all of his body hairs on end as he took another step backward and found....
The ground! It’s gone!
He had backpedaled into a deep, dry ditch that paralleled the road, causing a loss of balance that sent him sprawling into it, rump-first. Momentarily stunned, he sat watching as the sun-eyed monster continued its relentless approach, its battle cry coming at an ever-increasing tempo, but not nearly the volume it had on the mountain.
His panicked brain kicked into gear. Fight it! You have to get up and fight it! He scrambled to a squatting position with his mother’s frequent warning ringing in his ears: Don’t die in the open! The black flyers eat you if you die in the open!
The monster’s muted battle cry kept increasing as its blazing suns dazzled his vulnerable eyes, leaving him unable to see his advancing opponent. What now?
With no way to defend himself, he could only lift both arms in what he knew would be a futile effort to fend off such a powerful beast. This is it! My life is ended!
Thinking of his mother’s admonition, realizing buzzards would indeed feast on his carcass as they did to so many dead animals he had seen, he stiffened his body and tried to brace for the shattering blow that would propel him to the Otherworld.
Inside the car, a man driving on automatic pilot was busy telling his date about a trip he had taken to far away Seattle, and she was doing her best to appear utterly absorbed by it. Neither one noticed the drama playing out in the glow of their vehicle’s headlights.
In the ditch, the bigfoot suddenly, unexpectedly, incredibly, felt only a sharp rush of breeze, like wind on an angry day. Then it was over. He could still feel the ditch’s rubble under his feet and its grass against his knees. I’m not in the Otherworld!
He opened his eyes to find the monster moving in the opposite direction, its night eyes magically changed from small suns into much smaller red spots, like the eyes of his own kind at night. Then he noticed the retreating beast was no longer gray, but white. Like snow! And it wasn’t the same shape. It was much smaller and carried itself lower to the ground, and there was no big hole with edges in its back. It’s not the same monster!
Relief washed through him and he began to think clearly. Of course it wasn’t the same monster! That one lost its right eye in the battle on the mountain. He saw the hole in its head where the eye belonged, and he saw shattered pieces of it glinting on the path. He also realized that the missing ground beside the path was deep enough, and cast enough shadow, to hide his bulky frame. If another monster came, he could easily hide from it.
His confidence was returning until he stood up and felt his head start to swirl, the way it did when he was young and would play the circle-game with his sister. They would look up at the sky and turn in circles, which made their heads feel like his felt now without whirling around. He assumed those long-ago feelings were caused by his wound, by the loss of so much blood. He had never lost so much blood before, but he knew it couldn’t be good for him. It was probably why he felt so weary, too.
The circle-game feeling soon passed, so he dismissed all concerns about that and his increasing fatigue. He still had a task to accomplish, and he intended to do it if he could find his prey. Again he flexed his throbbing shoulder, then brushed off the leaves and twigs sticking to his pelt of body hair. He climbed back up onto the bitter path and resolutely resumed moving toward the many bright “stars” glowing on the horizon.
Marcy and Granny Elk exited Granny’s cabin to move in a slow shuffle toward Marcy’s VW beetle, a hand-me-down from her father, who had kept it running since acquiring it as a teenager twenty years earlier. It was colored deep forest green to match its usual surroundings, and Marcy always parked it beside Granny’s half-acre garden. They often joked about how much it resembled a giant watermelon sitting there, especially at night, but this wasn’t one of those times.
“Does what you said about wanting to be a doctor…does that explain why you’re putting so much effort into this biology report?” Granny asked.
Marcy nodded. “If I decide to go to college, and if I can somehow find a way to pay for it, then every report I’ve ever done will be important. But I’d like this one to be extra special, the one I’ll send out if anybody wants to see a sample of my academic work.”
“Then are you sure I told you enough?”
“I think so. But hearing about herbs from you isn’t the same as trying them out for myself, so first thing tomorrow morning I’m going up to Bear Creek to gather some.”
Granny Elk nodded. “You’ll find a lot of what we talked about up in that area.”
“Just to be on the safe side, can I bring you what I gather so you can double-check them for me? You know, in case I get confused?”
Once again Granny Elk spread her gap-toothed grin. “My door is always open to you, girl, you know that.”
Marcy returned her smile with interest, then leaned over to give her dear friend a gentle hug. “I do know it, Granny Elk, and I appreciate it more than you can imagine.”
Another monster came and went, but from the opposite direction. The bigfoot stayed squatted in the ditch until it was gone, then he stood again and resumed walking. He was learning more about them each time one went whooshing past. For instance, that one had four masters, young and puny and making loud noises. He couldn’t tell if they were making sounds of joy—or being eaten alive by it—but by then he was long past caring. He wanted to get on with what he had come to the low land to do.
He next came to a road sign that said: “Entering Lost Valley, Pop. 855.” It was the fourth such thing he had passed on his way to the stars, and he no longer bothered trying to figure out what they meant. They were strange, like everything else in this flat world of the puny masters, their hard-skinned monsters, and the hard, smooth paths they traveled on. He wondered again if he should turn around and leave well enough alone.
Each time he considered giving up and returning home, he reminded himself of how brutal and unprovoked were the attacks of the cowardly master and his obedient monster. They had hurt him badly—tried to kill him, no less!—so they had to be hurt to an equal or worse degree or the memory of what they did would forever sap his courage and strength. That was a major credo of life for forest uprights like himself: Always make your way in peace and with fairness to all. But always avenge unjust wrongs to yourself or your group. Failure to do so would invite perpetual cowardice and fear.
His mother had often told him: Fear is your worst enemy.
Those thoughts led him past the outlying farm and ranch houses, to where he could finally see a source of the illumination he’d been stalking. He paused to study it from the road. Its color was white, like clouds, with a dark top, and it rested flush on the ground, like a huge boulder with regular edges all around. But it was clearly no boulder, or any other thing he could compare it to from his own experience. He had never seen anything like this freestanding boulder-thing that somehow had captured daylight that was now spilling out through regularly edged holes of various sizes cut into its surface.
None I know would believe this!
To see it better, he left the road and approached it until he drew near enough to distinguish a monster near it. A monster with an edged hole in its back. But the color was lighter than his gray monster. Then a wolf-thing began yapping like the one silenced by the killing stick on the mountain. Its sound came from somewhere near the monster. He took several steps back toward the road and the wolf-thing fell quiet. The monster did not rouse itself at all, so he decided it must be asleep and was a very heavy sleeper.
From where he stood, he could see that only certain of the edged holes had light spilling from them. Others were dark to the point of being almost invisible. But all the ones with light inside them were covered with things that from a distance resembled the thin sheets of skin that held an animal’s insides together, the kind he could almost see through. Suddenly, he glimpsed the outline of a small upright moving behind one.
There could be no doubt. It was a totally black outline behind the skin sheets, but it moved. And though he could only see the top half of the body, he knew it was not the shape of the one on the mountain. This one was as thin as a young tree. So now he had answers to several puzzling questions.
The boulder-things were shelter caves somehow built by the puny ones. The monsters and the wolf-things lived there to protect and serve their evil masters. And somehow, someway, they had discovered how to capture daylight and use it whenever they needed it. Or maybe they kept other monsters inside the shelter caves, using their sun-eyes to make the light. However they did it, he couldn’t help admiring it. But he also couldn’t imagine how they could feel secure taking shelter in such exposed places.
He returned to the road and decided to travel inside the ditch from there on, so all he had to do was stoop over to be hidden from the cars and trucks passing intermittently on the road. As he drew closer to Lost Valley proper, he noticed that every home had one or more vehicles near it, and at least one dog guarding the premises. That was the way of life in the country where he now was, and he was quickly coming to understand that.
What struck him most was that everything was so different. Each shelter was different...each monster...each wolf-thing…even the small uprights he occasionally saw moving behind their skin sheets. That was a sharp contrast with his high-mountain world, where everything—living or not—looked much the same as everything else in its group. Among his own kind there were certainly differences among individuals, but nothing to compare to the wide differences he was finding everywhere he looked in this world.
Maybe so many differences caused the puny ones to behave badly, he thought as he hurried along, hoping none of the wolf-things woke any monsters, or brought the masters out with more killing sticks. If he saw even one killing stick, he was leaving—fast.
When Granny Elk and Marcy reached the VW, Granny said, “How is Paul doing since his father died? It must be hard on a boy his age, suddenly in charge of the biggest ranch in the valley.”
Marcy shrugged. “He’s been more or less running it since Mr. Granger got sick, so he’s used to it by now. To tell the truth, there’s hardly been a hitch in his stride.”
Granny wasn’t surprised. In his own way Paul Granger was every bit as capable as Marcy Dillon, which Granny felt was the main reason they had been a pair since they were cubs. “When you said you haven’t told anyone about wanting to be a doctor, did you mean Paul, too?”
Instead of answering, Marcy tossed her shoulder bag into the VW’s open window. Granny assumed she had stepped over a line, so she backtracked. “I didn’t mean to pry.”
Marcy turned, leaned her rump against the driver-side door, crossed her arms, and forced a smile. “That’s okay, really. It’s just…I can’t tell him. He’d never understand.”
“What about your parents?”