Gregory Brown felt like a schoolboy on Christmas Eve. He couldn’t stop squirming and tapping his foot and every 10 minutes he had to leave his machine and walk around. His supervisor Ted gave him the evil eye because you weren’t supposed to leave your machine at all, but what could he do? Tomorrow was the Big Hunt, and he could hardly stand the excitement. At break he had made a list of everything he had to take with him: a flashlight, in case the searching went late, extra batteries, sandwiches, a first aid kit, topographical map, night vision goggles, and a water bladder.
After work Gregory drove to the Grub Sack for snacks and batteries. The cashier, a thin, sallow young man rang him up slowly as if the effort of lifting his fingers to punch the register keys was almost too much. Gregory had gone to school with Brian, and he remembered that Brian did not have a strong work ethic when he was 17 either. If Gregory’s Grandmother Ross were to meet Brian she would probably say something about how “that boy needs a kick in the pants and a come to Jesus talk.” That was Grandma’s standard suggestion for any vice or dissipation she saw. On the way out the door, he locked eyes with a tall dark haired girl he had seen often when he stopped here. He had never heard her speak, but he felt sure that her voice was soothing, if it at all matched her tranquil face. Once, they were both picking out milk at the same time and he had been moved to speak to her, but instead he pushed back the urge and walked out the door.
On the way home from the Grub Sack, Gregory passed several old buildings west of Main St. that had been various establishments since his days in high school, none of them very profitable. A pizza restaurant run by a Vietnamese family had struggled along for a year in spite of its dingy appearance, but the other brick buildings stood vacant. He crossed the train tracks and saw the shiny tractors parked in the parking lot of the local feed and seed. He had loved those tractors as a child, always begging whoever was driving him past to stop so he could sit on them. When his Grandfather Ross was still alive he had stopped once to let Gregory sit on the green tractor, and then they had gotten ice cream from Dairy Queen. That had been a wonderful day, one that always came to mind when Gregory was trying to think happy thoughts.
Past the feed store and a string of antique stores, past Dairy Queen and the dollar store, Gregory finally turned right onto Jasper Street, down to the small white frame house at the end of the cul-de-sac. Grandmother Ross lived across the street, but she was always over talking to Gregory or his brother Danny, who owned the house Gregory lived in. Gregory pulled his truck under the carport and walked in the house. Danny and Althea, Gregory’s sister-in-law were seated on the couch watching TV while Grandma Ross stirred something over the stove. “Gregory! You are just in time for dinner. Tuna casserole, your favorite.” Grandma Ross smiled at him, and then quickly turned her back to remove browned rolls from the oven. Gregory felt a rush of affection and stepped up the old woman and gave her a hug. “Smells good Gramma.” He walked into the living room.
Althea looked up and smiled, and Danny made a show of getting up and hugging his brother. Danny was brash and talkative and he liked to swagger around, thinking that everyone was looking at him and admiring him. Probably some did; he had a strong build and hadn’t gone bald yet, but where it really counted, brains and heart, Danny was lacking and Gregory had gotten the lion’s share. Gregory, however, had not discovered this yet.
Danny leaned back and put his arm around Althea as Gregory sat down in the recliner. “So, you’re headed out to the woods tomorrow huh? Gonna find you a half man, half monkey? What you gonna do with him if you find him?” He was grinning cockily, and Althea giggled.
“Yeah, we’re gonna look for him. He could be there. People have seen signs before.” Gregory had explained all this before.
“What kind of signs? Some big piles of shit? Sure it ain’t a cow patty?” Danny guffawed at his own wit.
“Well, yeah,” Gregory said patiently, “There have been some large feces that weren’t from a man, or a cow. Some experts down at the university analyzed it and said they weren’t sure what it came from. And of course, there have been tracks. Lots of hunters and nature types out researching have come across large tracks that don’t look like bear or man or coyote or anything else you can think of. And the sightings. Some of the hunters and others swear they saw something big and shaggy walking upright, like a man.”
“How they know it wasn’t a man?” Danny objected
“Cause it didn’t answer when they called to it, and it didn’t have any clothes on. Unless it was a man walking along with a fur coat on, and that don’t happen much.”
Althea piped up, “It could be people trying to make you think there was something there. People dressed up, like in a monkey suit.”
Gregory sighed. “That’s true. It could be. But it isn’t likely they could make the tracks people saw right after, and hide their own tracks. And what about the poop?”
“This all sounds like a load of poop.” Danny said laughing.
As they sat down to dinner, he asked Gregory, “What does it matter if it’s Bigfoot or not? Why do you even care?
Gregory chewed his tuna and noodles thoughtfully and then answered. “I care because it’s a mystery and I like knowing the truth about things. If there is a Bigfoot, some creature that no one has ever seen up close, I want to help find it or figure out what it is. Plus, it’s nice to know that there are some things left to discover about the world.”
Danny, a man who routinely pushed everything that he did not understand out of his mind as best he could with alcohol, sex, and self-absorption, snorted, and continued to eat his dinner.
That night Gregory packed his bags and laid out his clothes for the next morning. He lay in bed and thought about how he would feel if he actually saw Bigfoot. The thing about it was that he couldn’t say for sure why he cared at all, except that the feeling he got when he thought Bigfoot might really exist was the same feeling he got when he thought about God. If something as unlikely as Bigfoot wandering around the woods could be true, anything was possible. Hope was a fragile thing Gregory cocooned up in his mind, hope that his getting up everyday was somehow meaningful. And the searching itself was what Gregory longed for, the waiting in anticipation for some sign. The rest of his days were so predictable-a series of moments that revolved around food or physical labor or sleep. He felt like an animal that might, at any moment, be hit by a car or slaughtered in the field with no one to mourn it.
The next morning was cool and gray, just the morning for deer hunting. Most of the men Gregory worked with would be out in their deer stands by now, some with their sons, all with a bottle of beer and a maybe a plug of tobacco. Althea and Danny were still asleep-they wouldn’t be up for hours yet. By straightening the garage Gregory whiled away the time until he left at two o’clock. He was headed for a deer lease in the National Forest owned by a man named Lewis who had volunteered to host the regional Bigfoot hunt for this season.
Gregory drove down familiar farm-to-market roads to the deer lease the group was meeting at, and his alertness and excitement grew over the 45 minutes it took to get there. As he went west the land grew hillier and the trees grew thicker together, hiding the land except for an occasional glimpse of open field that flew quickly by like a small green bird. Gregory had often thought how this would be the ideal place for a reclusive creature to live-the hills broke the land into small pockets and the trees covered over the pockets so that in some places you couldn’t even tell whether the land beneath was rising or falling.
At a small bend in the road, there stood a sign-the Lewis’s, and Gregory turned north onto a small gravelly dirt road. Soon he drove out into an open field that already had several vehicles parked in it. One man hailed Gregory over.
“David Lewis,” he said as he stuck out his hand. “Glad you could come.” Lewis was a tall, lanky man who carried himself with a slouch, like a man more accustomed to being in the saddle than walking. Gregory took his place with the rest of the group, where names were genially given out and stories exchanged.
““I’ve got a couple of horses for some of us to cover the far perimeter, and the rest can go on foot. The plan for the day is to work northeast into this area, and then circle back to this point.” Lewis pointed to a small topographical map he held up. “The land is pretty dippy, and there are lots of possibilities for shallow caves or brush build up that might shelter a Bigfoot. If anyone spots spore or sign, you can take a snap shot, and radio if you think it is worth seeing. Anyone in the vicinity can double back to see it, or you can continue on if you are too far away. We also have several feeders set up with apples in coon-proof barrels. Whatever wants to would have to push a latch to release the apples. You can travel in twos but try to keep chatter to a minimum. We don’t want to scare him off.”
Everyone started breaking up, adjusting equipment, and inspecting maps, and finally, walking off into the brush. Gregory was not far behind a man and woman intently focused on their GPS device. He scrambled over saw palmetto and brambles, on into the woods. The couple in front of him veered off to the right immediately, but Gregory pressed on northwards. He wanted to cover the outermost perimeter, because more than likely anything that might actually be living in the forest would live as far away from people as possible.
He saw numerous squirrels, blue jays, woodpecker, sparrows, and once, a cottontail quivering in the tall grass. He felt a sense of comfort at being outdoors and walking; he felt filled with purpose and satisfaction just by walking and observing and breathing in pine-scented air. It wasn’t often he felt these things and they scared him a little, if only because he was reluctant to think of them slipping away, and being replaced by the old, familiar feelings of emptiness and longing.
After an hour of walking, he stopped briefly to rest on a fallen log and take a swig of water. He pulled out a granola bar from his bag and began to eat it, but his rest was broken by a sudden crash 50 yards through the brush to his left. He paused with a bite of granola in his mouth and listened. He could still hear brush rustling, as though something was moving away to the west. He stood up and adjusted his backpack. Whatever had made the noise was big-either a deer, or possibly a dog. Just for fun, Gregory decided, he’d follow it, and figure out what it was.
He walked in the direction the crash had come from and found a large swath of brush that looked pushed aside or trampled. Odd, he thought. He bent down and inspected the path of broken bushes that traveled on westwards. He chuckled to himself as he imagined himself dressed in buckskin, a brave hunting big game through the woods. He straightened up and continued walking in the wake of whatever had stomped through.
He walked for a couple more uneventful hours, until his stomach rumbled a request for dinner. He walked more after this, still westward. It would be time to head back to the clearing soon, since the group would be having a meeting and party and discussing all things Bigfoot related. He had lost the trampled trail an hour back, but he continued on in a straight line.
Dark was falling fast when he heard another noise that sounded as if something large was nearby. The noise came from the north this time, and it sounded nearer than before. Ahead of him was a shallow creek bed littered with rocks and sand, and backed by a gentle hill covered in brush. Gregory eagerly headed towards the noise, picking his way across the rocks and sand. At that moment he heard a sickening snap and felt his right knee give way. He fell to the ground and let out a yell of agony. When the wave of pain had ebbed a little, he opened his eyes and saw that he had stepped into a rocky hole that had been covered by leaves. His right leg was broken; the pointed end of the shinbone had pushed up through the skin just below the knee. Gregory felt as if he might pass out, and then he did.
When he came to, pain shot up his leg into his side and he gritted his teeth in anguish. He tried to get up but the effort hurt so badly he immediately stopped. He would have to have help getting back. After struggling to take his backpack off, he reached in and felt for his walkie-talkie radio. With a sinking heart his fingers closed around pieces of the radio. It had smashed when he fell.
It was entirely possible that the rest of the group was as far as ten miles away by now. He had no idea how far he was from the clearing, but he did know that there was no way he could walk back. He would have to wait for help to come to him. Once the initial shock and pain had dulled, and he realized he wasn’t bleeding profusely, he calmed down a bit. Once the rest of the group realized he wasn’t back yet, they would come looking for him, he reasoned. Gregory leaned back and tried to relax, but it was extremely difficult to ignore the hot pain in his leg. His head was pounding and he felt hot. He had made it about half way across the creek bed; he thought briefly of Pharaoh’s army, drowned as they chased the Israelites across the Red Sea. Maybe God wanted whatever he was searching for to stay hidden.
He lay there several minutes when he heard a sound like someone stamping through the woods from the north. It sounded like the noise he had been following when he fell. Was it one of the party circling back now that it was dark? He paused mid-swallow and hardly breathed until suddenly he was aware of the ache in his throat. The noise was to his right now, on the east. He called out, “Hello?” but no one answered. Surely they were close enough to hear him. “Anyone there? I’ve broken my leg! I need help!” he shouted again. The tramping stopped abruptly. Gregory felt a twinge of fear but quickly reasoned with himself. Black bears were very scarce in the area; probably it was a deer, or a raccoon. The rustling and tramping grew fainter; it seemed to be going south now. Whatever it was, it wasn’t human. He remembered his night vision goggles and searched for them in the backpack. They were intact, and he brought them up to his eyes. Something was moving in the direction of the noise, but there were too many trees in the way to make any sort of shape out. He moaned and leaned back. Several minutes passed, when out of the darkness flew a dark lump, scaring him badly. The lump landed about five feet away. A bird? It didn’t move at all. He reached for it, but it was too far away. From the same direction another lump flew and this time it landed close enough for Gregory to reach out and grab it. His hand curled around something hard and cool and familiar. An apple. He shivered. Someone was there, someone not answering him, but throwing apples at him. He couldn’t breathe for a moment, and his mind raced. Perhaps it was a teenager, playing a trick, or a raccoon had rolled it down the hill. As soon as he thought of these things he felt foolish, but he had no better explanation for the apple. No further objects were lobbed from the dark, and Gregory forced himself to think of other things, like the dark-headed girl he often saw at the Grub Sack. Why had he never been bold enough to speak to her?
The hours passed slowly in the dark as he strained for any sound of people coming near, searching for him. He heard the sounds of night all around, the rustle of creatures hunting and being hunted. A slight breeze picked up and cooled him. A sliver of moon came out from behind high clouds. It was 1 a.m. when he heard voices from the south, and the sounds of feet tramping towards him. Relief flowed through him and he shouted, “I’m here!” Answering shouts drifted towards him, and he called out again and again to help guide them to him. When they found him, and placed him on a makeshift medics stretcher, he passed out once more from the pain. He drifted in and out of consciousness as they carried him the nine miles back to the clearing.
They finally arrived and evidently they had radioed ahead because an ambulance was waiting in the clearing. As the paramedics carefully transferred him to the ambulance stretcher, one of the search party, a burly man named John roused Gregory from his stupor. “You know how we found you don’t you, man?” No, Gregory shook his head, faintly annoyed that John couldn’t leave him in peace.
“We followed a trail of apples that we guessed someone had dropped to lure the Bigfoot. We knew someone had gone that way and since no one else had seen you during the day we figured you had gone off that direction.”
Even through the fog of pain Gregory was startled. He didn’t have time to explain to John that the apples weren’t his, and hadn’t been there when he had set out earlier in the day. The rustling going back south…something or someone had deliberately left those apples to serve as markers on the trail. And the thrown apples? Were they intended to scare him off, as he had originally believed, or were they some sort of effort to help him? The thought came out of the blackness around him like a ray of light-the Bigfoot. It had thrown the apples it had pilfered from the feeders in a misguided effort to comfort him with sustenance, and used the rest to lead the searchers to him.
As the thought settled in his brain, he felt a sense of comfort that he had not known since his grandfather was alive. Something was looking out for him, and had provided unlooked for comfort. The unexpectedness of the event, of the sign, pushed the joy deeper into his mind than it had ever before been. He still had the smile on his face when the doctor shot him full of anesthetic prior to setting his leg.
