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Deadfall

Antonin Dvorak

    There’s something out there, I thought, staring through the cracked and dusty windshield of my Dodge Ram, and I need to know what it is.

    This was the late 1980s, a time when the nation looked to the sky only to watch the Challenger felled by an O-ring. Bush held office then, I think, and we lived in Canard, California. It’s a place we haven’t visited in years.
    The sun was already falling when I set out. It pushed its rays through the mountains and trees just enough to streak the road with a patchy, dusty light. My pickup bucketed down this dirt road on weak shocks, though I’m happy to say that the O-rings were in frisky-fine order, thank you very much. The woods bore down on me from the left, a dense forest that wasn’t completely pine yet. Behind the trees, a sharp-faced mountain jutted up into the sky.
    I need to know what it is. My hands clenched the wheel, knuckles gleaming white.
    I’ll never forget the way the forest looked that day. It was as if it knew that it was going to let its secret out. When I looked hard enough, I could make out sneering lips and squinty eyes born of twigs and leaves. Those visions frowned and glowered as the winds played through them.
    Samantha, my wife, hated what I was doing. She thought that I should have been tending to my daughter and not this tracking nonsense.
    “You’ve got stupidity in spades,” she always said, only half-joking.

    I pulled the Ram to the side of the road, where the long grass tickled the undercarriage. This wasn’t one of the new Rams, of course. Dodge reinvented the Ram long after this one was on its way out. Mine was boxy and rugged, not sleek like the new ones.
    For a moment I just sat there smelling the oily cabin — no rush, as I hadn’t actually heard the howling yet. It was Teddy who had heard her, and I had gone out straight after work.
    Climbing out of the truck, my back cracked and I winced a little. If I got lost out there, or if she was to get me, I wanted people to know who and where I was. Just leaving my driver’s license on the dashboard would do the trick. So I fumbled through my pocket, pulled out the license, and a few dollars fluttered to the ground like dying butterflies. I don’t carry a wallet. When people carry wallets, all their spare change ends up there, and they start thinking that they have more change than they can spare. I raked up my money and slipped it into my pocket.
    My license caught my eye that day. I don’t know why that was. Maybe it was the way the woods seemed alive. Maybe I was more scared than usual. There I was. The picture had been taken almost four years earlier, and I hadn’t even cared so much as to flatten the cowlick that sat on the back of my head. I looked like Opie on a bad hair day. My name was printed beside the picture and looked too grand to be next to it: Frank Shepherd.
    I stared at that snapshot for a minute before deciding that when I got back, we’d all have to go out and get some good pictures taken of us. They had just opened a new photo place in town. Why let it go to waste?
    The driver’s license ended up on the dashboard, and I pulled my shotgun — for protection, only protection — from the pickup bed.
    I turned away from the truck, slowly, like I was in one of those B movies where there’s some Swamp Thing, Vampire or, yes, Bigfoot. I felt like an actor; this scene couldn’t have been real. The wind eddied at the edge of the forest, making those faces and making the grass ripple like water. It eddied under the truck, the grasses clipping against the underbelly and making a sound like distant applause.
    All that wild thought left me once I was in the forest. All thought, really, fled from me. I stepped through the forest skirting and into the shadows. Inside, there was almost no wind. Just squirrels and chipmunks rummaging through the underbrush.
    I buttoned up my flannel against the late autumn air and soon I was climbing at an odd angle. It was cool enough down in the valley, but as I went up into the Klamath Mountains, the air went from cool to cold.
    I had done this many times before, this tracking, always done it alone and always done it hoping more that I wouldn’t find anything than that I would. For the first hour, with my ears straining to hear her, I walked with just one word in my head: bucolic. My mom called me that when I moved from San Diego to Canard. For a long time I was actually scared to look it up in the dictionary, but when I did, it wasn’t so bad. In her eyes, I was just living the rural life.
    Higher and higher I went, the shotgun bouncing against my back. The first hunger pangs picked at my stomach, and I ignored them.
    I looked down at my watch: 5:30 pm. An hour gone.
    “Where the hell is she?” I whispered. “Teddy said that she was out here. Said he heard her howling, loud and clear.”
    And then my eyes fell on what looked like a footprint. I crouched down to the pine needle-blanketed ground and studied the imprint. It was deep, maybe two inches. It was long, too, at least twice as long as my feet. I shifted uneasily, my thick clothes concealing the goosebumps that had sprouted all across my skin.
    Damn, I thought.
    /I>Huge, I thought.
    I didn’t think, Turn back you idiot.
    I ran my hand over the cold print. Whatever it was, it had to have been heavy to crush the cold earth down like that. The idea that it might have come from something else never crossed my mind: some rock’s old resting place, some rotted-out root system, some natural phenomenon — no, this was her. I was sure of it. It was her, or it was something.

    After a while, one of those feet caught on a knot of tree roots, and I fell forward onto the stiff dirt. I picked myself up and looked down at my watch: 6:28.
    By now the hunger pangs weren’t coming and going; they were just there. It was like some tiny rodents were scuttling around in my gut, clawing and spitting angrily, waiting to be fed. I ignored the pain. More important things needed tending.
    I walked on. I walked, and I eventually came upon a clearing in the woods. There was no field of grass — this was high in the mountain, remember. All that lived here were scruffy bushes and a chipmunk that hightailed it out of there when I came. Funny that I had never been to the spot before, never noticed it before.
    The view from that clearing sticks with me. I can see it like a photograph in my mind, like one of those new photographs, those panoramas or whatever they’re called. I could see for miles out over the green canopies of tree. The Klamath Mountains rolled up and down, into and out of valleys, over and under the milky white fog that had gathered in the dales. The clouds were thick and gray above me. Wherever the sun was now, it was no longer casting its patchy, dusty light here. It wasn’t dark by any stretch of the imagination, not yet, but it wasn’t light either.
    I stood there for probably ten minutes, just relaxing, the howling completely out of my mind. The air was so rich. Cold, yes, but rich. It was intoxicating. And in the end, I had to drag myself from the clearing. I still needed to know what was out there.
    I pushed on for another ungodly length of time. The cold only got colder. My need only grew stronger. When the next stop came — I stood between a fallen pine, very near to Deadfall Lake — I glanced down at my watch again, 7:48. Only this time I had to look through a shuddery puff of my own breath to see the time.
    The hunger pangs would no longer go ignored. My fingers were tight with cold as I unwrapped my sandwich, but I would find her. If she was anything worth finding, I would find her tonight. And I sat down in-between patches of snow like icy toadstools.

    The noise started soft and deep, almost like a rhino’s whistle might sound. It grew in intensity until it was echoing in the trees. I could feel the sound against my body; the animal couldn’t have been more than half a mile away.
    The animal — I haven’t even told you what I was looking for, have I? No? Well, you’ve probably figured it out by now; this part of the world is Bigfoot country. And Canard, California, seems to be Bigfoot country’s capital. It’s a small tourist town that sits on the Rouge River. Mr. and Mrs. Riley own the Bigfoot Bed and Breakfast. There’s Bob Hastings who owns the Bigfoot Bar and Grill. Teddy Rumsey operates Howl Lodge, a resort very near to where you can always seem to hear the animal screaming. Howl Lodge is where I worked, as a front desk manager. The names are corny, I know. But if there’s a buck to be made, people will do corny.
    Some towns are built on legends and myths. That’s all good and well. Some towns make their lives of the legends. My life was part of the legend.

    But I was close now. I could practically feel her breath on me. Or was that just the wind?
    Now I’ve got to get something straight with you. I was a skeptic, too. I wasn’t sure if there was a Bigfoot out there. That’s why I was in the woods to begin with, tracking for answers. I needed to know.
    I put away the half-eaten sandwich and shouldered my pack. I followed the howling with squinty eyes. I walked as quickly and quietly as I could. My hands trembled. The wind blew around me in waves. I clutched my shotgun with swollen fingers.
    How could it howl for so long? The sounds came in such excruciatingly long stretches. This thing must have huge lungs, I thought.
    Then, after my foot stupidly snapped a twig, the howling faded away into the wind. Now I ran. I ran in the direction I thought the sound had come from. I ran like a jackass, my legs bucking under me, my body just along for the ride. This part I remember only as a blur. I remember seeing more and more moss. Then the moss was replaced with clumps of lichen. And then my lungs clenched like there were fists around them. I stopped running. I panted.
    The woods had grown shadowy.
    Where was I running to? If you ask me, I’m lucky that I didn’t find Bigfoot then. She surely would have gotten the jump on me.
    I spun around, peering through the trees wildly. An icy sweat held the goosebumps at bay, but I shivered anyway. And my legs weakened: I was lost. My insides flinched. I’m lost.

    I had had the foresight to leave my driver’s license on the dash, but not the foresight to bring a compass or a map. Hell, these were my backwoods, practically my backyard. How could I get lost in them?
    And there were real things to worry about — screw Bigfoot — real things that were more than legends. There were grizzly bears and cougars and moose. I’m not sure what a moose could do, but I bet a moose would have had its way with me just then.
    That’s when I saw it. Not Bigfoot. Only the strangest-looking tree I’ve ever seen.
    Its lifeless limbs reached out into the air, holding shiny bunches of snow in their crooks. Its bark had probably been eaten by elk and deer during some particularly nasty winter, because its white innards were exposed. And there was a splintery hole in the middle of it. Lichen lolled out of this hole like a tongue. Two trees had fallen right next to it, their branches stretching yearningly across the ground and over the useless roots of the first one.
    I smiled at this tree. At the very least, its absurdity framed my own. It was something I could talk about when I got back.
    The adventurous spirit had finally run out of me. I was just a tired idiot lost out in the woods; another Bigfoot hunter stumbling over his own shadow. I had “stupidity in spades.” My wife — as with every idiot’s wife — was right as usual.
    I sat down, rested against a tall pine, and stared at that odd tree. I retrieved the peanut butter and jelly sandwich and wolfed it down.
    I peered out from under heavy eyelids: 9:02.
    Sleeping out here is a horrible idea, I told myself. I might just as well shoot her in the toe and then climb into her arms to see how she’d react.
    No. I shouldn’t have slept out there and I did my best not to. But every time my mind resolved to get up, my body lacked the energy. I was weighted down with cold, fatigue, and mounting fear. The last thing I can remember thinking that evening was, I wonder if there are any bats in that tree. After that thought, it was all just sensation and memories.
    The temperature dropped as I drifted towards an unrewarding sleep, dropped far below freezing. Darkness crept into the forest and lurked through the trees. I don’t think it ever gets quite as dark out in the open — not by Deadfall Lake, anyway, not as dark as it got out there on the tree-covered mountain. I can remember playing as a kid late into the night, playing by the quiet waters of good old Deadfall. My brothers and I had stayed out so late, telling wild stories and scaring each other.
    I slept.
    I woke to the howling — the howling, practically in my ear.

    My eyes had trouble adjusting to the darkness. And for those few seconds, it was all I could do to keep from pissing my pants. The adjustment made things look unreal, made the darkness stretch in places it shouldn’t have stretched. It made hairy arms out of branches.
    There were no hairy arms, though. There wasn’t even a whisper of howl.
    “Stupidity in spades,” Samantha said from somewhere inside me. “There’s no medication for that, you know?”
    I clawed at the ground, trying desperately to find my shotgun. But the darkness was thick and heavy, like I was under icy black water; I couldn’t see anything. I tried to feel it out, but to my numb fingers, everything felt cold and smooth. My fingers finally closed over the barrel though, and I held the gun against my chest. I sat there, my back pressed hard against the tree trunk — so hard that the indentations from the bark would linger for hours.
    Numbness like I had never felt climbed through me. It had already taken my fingers and hands, my toes and feet. Now it worked on my nose.
    Still, there was no sound except for some pestering owl off in the distance. I waited to hear Bigfoot’s bellow again. I waited to feel her sticky breath against my skin.
    Now and again — just as I would start to let my guard down, it seemed — I would hear the faintest hint of her. And again, my body would go tight.
    I tried to smell her. In any respectable Bigfoot legend, the animal stinks to high heaven — I couldn’t smell anything but cold. I had given up trying to see her. To my eyes, everything looked like her.

    Then, about an hour before dawn, the howl came full force again. And now I did piss my pants. I screamed right back in a high, waspy voice. A sharp wind tangled my hair and ran through the trees. And I pulled the trigger on my shotgun. There was a soft, dry snap, like a tree branch splintering in two. A misfire.
    And suddenly I knew the howling. It wasn’t Bigfoot. It wasn’t a bear, or a cougar, or a moose. It was that damn tree, that odd-looking tree. The wind had caught in it and gotten all riled up, making those howling noises.
    I sat, still shaking, dropping the shotgun down onto my legs.
    My last thought before falling asleep was funny; only the stupidest of bats would hide in that tree. And Samantha’s voice came to me again, “So, I guess if you were a bat, that’s where you’d be.” She followed that remark with a little laugh, and I laughed, too. Then — abruptly as anything if I remember it right — I fell asleep again.
    I still jittered the next morning though. Snow tumbled from the sky and frosty piss clung to my jeans. And when Teddy found me, he said that I looked like I had seen a ghost, like I had seen Bigfoot.
    The snowflakes melted on Teddy’s nose, but seemed right at home on mine. My nose would be fine though. So would my fingers. The doctors would be able to save everything except the pinkie toe on my right foot.
    “God, Frank,” Teddy said, “Samantha’s so freaking worried. You’re lucky I’m a better tracker than you.” A pause, then: “Did you see her?”
    He was all talk that morning. I wasn’t: I shook my head, no.
    “Are you sure?”
    As if I wasn’t. What kind of a question was that? Was I sure? Of course I was sure. The idiot didn’t even notice the tree.
    “So what did you see?” he asked, eyes as bright as lamps.
    “You don’t need to know.”



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