“Buck, it has something to do with Montana. Ever since that woman told me the Indian was from Montana, a little bell went off.”
He took another map from the glove compartment, a large road map covering western Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. After searching for several moments, he found Stevensville, Montana. From there he drew a northwest line past the Rockies to Caribou, where the beast had attacked them. And from Caribou he brought the line down to their present location, on the border of Canada and Washington. Jason whistled. The two of them had traveled no less than a thousand miles on foot. It was a meaningless, meandering journey that began nowhere and ended nowhere.
Jason had heard of only one Bigfoot sighting in Montana. A Boy Scout troop had been visited in the Deer Lodge National Forest in 1964 by a giant who stirred up their camp gear. Generally that gigantic state did not figure in Bigfoot lore.
Where were they going?
They? Jason looked out the window, pondering the lake.
He just couldn’t figure that Indian. He was not hunting it, or he would have killed it long ago. It was as though he was just tagging along with it, like . . . like . . .
Like Raymond Jason.
Jason had been petting the dog. Suddenly he snatched his hand away as though the fur were hot. He and that scroungy Indian?
For a terrifying split second Jason felt a dark empathy with the Indian. Both were moving alone in pursuit of this enigmatic ape. Both had traveled hundreds of miles . . .
“Nuts!” Jason said loudly.
Thinking like that would land him back on the shrink’s couch. Jason could not begin to guess the Indian’s thoughts, but he knew his own reasons were solid, down-to-earth, practical ones. He had lots of good reasons! There was science and all that stuff. He was avenging the deaths of Hill, Curtis, and Nicolson! Look at the spell Bigfoot and the Himalayan Yeti cast on the human configuration. Why, this was an enthralling adventure, except for the bugs and all that wading through water. You’d have to be made out of stone to resist a Bigfoot hunt.
Maybe Kimberly was right. Maybe Jason should forget it and go home before the Bigfoot possessed his mind so totally that he could think of nothing else.
He put the key in the ignition. And, just as easily, the lock in his mind snapped open, releasing glittering revelations.
The fourth river! Jason fumbled open the survey map and looked at the streams. All five rivers led to this lake, but the fourth one was different. The lake’s oblong shape opened into a delta at the fourth river farther east than it did with the others.
The fourth river was the quickest way to the Little Harrington. The Bigfoot knew this! The Bigfoot knew these rivers!
“Buck, I ought to have my head candled. Montana fouled me up. Just because the Indian’s from there doesn’t mean the Bigfoot’s from there too! Dammit! Maybe he knows these rivers because he’s from around here! By God . . . by God!”
The Cascade Range began a few miles south of here, the gigantic mountains that ran all the way down to northern California. The Cascades were the traditional stomping ground of the Sasquatch.
Jason stepped out of the car and looked at the peaks on the horizon. The sun was setting, its slanting rays bronzing their slopes, as they marched rank after rank toward the south.
“He lives around here somewhere, boy!” said Jason in awe. “He’s been running around the country for some reason, and the Indian picked him up in Montana.” Fully eighty percent of all Bigfoot sightings occurred in the Pacific Northwest, in a fairly even area from where Jason stood. Jason could not begin to understand why a non-migratory beast would set out on such a journey, but he was certain to the depths of his soul that the ape was headed for home right now.
He slipped the maps into the glove compartment. He squealed the car back from the lake onto the road. He had to make one quick phone call, and after that Buck wasn’t going to be a city dog much longer.
The Indian was dreaming about Vietnam.
He lay deep in the rice paddy, absolutely motionless, hearing the lazy slap of rifles. The firefight had gotten the communications people first, so the rescue copters would not come. Now the guerrillas were moving in and killing the wounded.
The Indian had no spirit to protect him from the Viet Cong. He lay perfectly still, prepared for a long death, even as a bayonet tickled his leg. But the guerrillas moved on, apparently thinking he was already dead.
When night came, the Indian cautiously raised his head above the rice plants. All of his squad had died, none of them easily. A hard red boil formed in the Indian’s gut. He crawled out of the rice paddy, into the jungle. That night he slit the throat of a guerrilla and made a string for a bow from a length of his bowel. He carved twelve arrows and barbed the ends. Armed with this weapon, he tracked the enemy devils at night: the sentries, the gun bearers, and once an officer. He was a part of the jungle, a plains and forest dweller more at home in wilderness than the cleverest enemy devil. For the next ten days he ate nothing but tarantulas, lizards, and wild pigs. He gorged himself on stealthy death, stacking bodies in heaps in his mind and on trails causing major dislocation in the enemy’s forces.
Later a helicopter found him half dead. His leg was swollen to the size of a tree trunk. They told him a captured guerrilla had surrendered out of fear of him.
The Indian had hunted them down without a spirit to help him. This fact burst on him in the Army hospital, sending him into paroxysms of sheer terror at his own frail mortality. From then on he knew he could not face life without a spirit or a name.
His fingers tore out chunks of earth. He sat upright violently, just short of screaming his lungs out. Silent feet dashed away from him, thrashing the leaves.
He was not in a dream after all, or a jungle. He was in the woods somewhere in America. The dog cringed, wide-eyed, at the Indian’s obvious distress.
The Indian calmed down and oriented himself. He had overslept. It was evening. And he was completely alone.
“He’s getting scared now, isn’t he?” snarled the Indian. “His little momma isn’t sending him his dinner no more. So he come by to watch me.” He leaned closer to the dog, which quailed, one foot off the ground. “I’ll trade. A nice salmon for my name.”
He gave the dog the finger and ambled back to the road. The sleep had done him good. That and the food were reminders that there were some good things to say about mortality. He liked the goose bumps raised by cold air on his skin and the way his lungs carried this chilled air to the blood and thence all over his body.
The dog was not the only one shadowing him. The birds and crickets were quiet. A moving pool of silence alerted the Indian to the presence of the spirit just within the woods lining the road.
The tables were turned. The spirit was following him now.
The Indian stopped and looked into the trees. The harder he stared, the more the darkness danced.
“Hey!” he shouted.
The trees ticked under a breeze.
“What do you want from me! Come on out and tell me! Come on!”
The dog was seated on a white divider line, its ears cocked, its nostrils trembling at the trees. The Indian said, “He’s worried, ain’t he. He knows I mean it.”
The whistle cracked out. The dog dashed into the trees without a glance at the Indian.
The Indian quickened his pace down the road, his hands holding the medicine bundle so it would not bounce against his waist.
“Ah, Mr. Jason!” Kimberly chuckled over the speaking phone line. It must be raining between here and Kansas City. “And where are you?”
“I’m in a pay phone in a gas station in Washington.” “And how is the hunting season?”
“Never better. I’ve tracked my moose to northern Washington. He came through a trailer park last night not ten miles from here.”