Why do you search for Bigfoot?
I will tell you how. But first, you must tell me why. Why do you search, when you have seen so many people mistaken, so many hoaxes, so many liars who use the name for fame, for money, for a good story? Why do you cross that wire line between asphalt and dirt, broad wall of red oak brushing your shoulder?
You have already found it, in a way. You found it in the town, in the café and the hotel and the zoo. In the bartender, in any local who didn’t roll their eyes at another cryptid hunter, another Bigfoot crazy. In the sightings related from miner to grandson about a creature much too tall, much too hairy to be a man. It lives in stories, novels, posters, tourist traps with rubber replicas.
Do you believe? You answer with a smile, but I knew before I asked. Everyone does, a little or a lot. Everyone who’s looked to the woods and wondered what we haven’t yet found. People of all creeds in all countries have known for all time that these things exist in the wild. You are no exception. You know, even if you don’t say, that something in Oregon needs explaining, something with man-like footprints.
After a struggle, the buckle penetrates the belt hole. You shove black metal into your pocket as you adjust your waist. Must you be the one to find it? I chuckle and you blush, as though there are walls I’ve yet to break. You, with your night-vision goggles and sunscreen, your tent that your brother taught you to pitch, your backpack of tinder and tinned food, know the woods better, and have learned greater patience; you will take your camera and gun, and will shoot it if you can.
I hope you will cling to these things of steel and tin. That you will roam with all the preparations a society can provide, and you will stay a world and a mile away from Bigfoot.
I hope that you will not, as your eyes suggest you desire to, abandon the fainter signs of trodden paths. You will not leave the sparse dusting of candy wrappers and bootprints, and delve into the places unseen by civilised eyes. You will not get yourself lost in the way folk like you come here to. Lost in the kind of way that means ‘never to be found’.
Last night, you must’ve seen me idly whittling away time with chess puzzles, because you muttered that you used to play, then rolled over and claimed the other half of the covers. I smiled — I so rarely smile when my customers’ backs are turned. I wondered if you might stay in town a little longer. Play a game or two with me.
But I saw you hand your last dollar to me, crinkled and faded. I know you don’t have another night in the hotel next door. I know you did not come here with any intention of going back.
In this room, you call me Clara. I wonder, whose name did I assume when you came inside? Perhaps she is the one whose ring left pale, wrought skin by the webs of your fingers. Perhaps she is the one before her, or after.
You leave. I don’t need to imagine what will happen to you, and I certainly don’t need to search to find it. Your eyes are not the first to drift to the open window like that. Soon I will see the missing posters. I will catch your name in a news article under a picture of a man pretending to be a Sasquatch. The police will find me, ask me questions, and sneak my business cards into their pockets while their partners aren’t looking. Perhaps I will see a wet-cheek Clara in the streets, perhaps not.
You told me you liked the peace of the forest. The quiet. But you are learning, I’m sure, that the quiet of the forest is not quiet, in the rustle of the brush and the cry of the hawk. Even at night, fire crackles, cicadas buzz, rain spatters dully into the earth and into the shoes that you take off, that you leave beside a tree, waterlogged and filthy, unusable, no better than your own soles.
Many sleeps in, long after people start worrying that any morning could bring the knock of an officer with news of your corpse, your last tin runs dry. You debate returning in a polite manner, giving the idea respectful consideration before inevitably deciding you’ll roast squirrels and deer shanks over your fire.
Bigfoot is closer now.
Your words keep you company enough. Not conversation — you just bark orders and reminders at yourself. Get up, don’t forget the snare lines, enough film in the camera?
With each new barefoot step, mud coats the hem of your jeans and you slough off clothing piece by piece, hung like flags from branches, until there are none left to leave behind. They flutter, even with no one there to see them.
Far from the towns and roads, you forget your nakedness. The wildlife don’t fear you, nor hunt you, and the breeze against your skin fortifies you as much as the cheap denim and polyester ever did.
You forget your camp, too. Leave behind your camera and gun and goggles for someone else, your bag with your name scribbled on the label in a red marker, for the police to find and to tell Clara and your friends and your mother, if you have one. You grunt, huff, clamber over a tree trunk and let out something that could have been a curse, but you have left your words behind, too.
Night falls, day breaks, you walk. You follow no path, you slip between the redwoods and when you look back, you can’t tell your own footprints from the bear sign and elk tracks. It rains, it snows. The forest stretches forward. You no longer have yesterdays, todays, or tomorrows. Only here, only now.
There, then, a figure grows against the trees. Dark, giant, with fuzz around its silhouette. Something much too tall and much too hairy to be a man. You think, without regretting your empty hands, or fearing your forgotten holster, that it is Bigfoot. It is not; it is his shadow. Your shadow.
As I prepare for my next client, I find your driver’s license on the nightstand. I didn’t ask for it. I don’t deal in real names here. Here, in the places no one likes to look, where the light doesn’t reach, where the cobwebs are thick with those things in us we won’t confront. So I dust. Someone has to.
I have felt that yearning too, I’ve dreamt of the tops of trees and beds of rivers and depths of caves. I’ve felt the shadow of the Sasquatch at my back. But there isn’t a shadow I haven’t felt, nor one I refuse to confront.
I put the plastic card on my bookshelf, next to the lockets, keys, whatever else was lost here with no intention of being found.