The Spirit Read online

  The animal scampered up to the edge of the woods and paused until the Indian caught up. The trees closed around him like a warm coat. The woods were silent. All of the animals were gone except for the marmot, which whistled again, summoning the dog. The Indian tottered through the trees after it.

  Seated on a log in a clearing bounded by Douglas firs was a man, his back to the Indian. He was digging with large, oddly shaped hands at a pile of rocks and stacking them, one on top of another, in a pyramid. The Indian saw a field mouse run from under one of the rocks. The man grabbed it and popped it into his mouth.

  The dog barked at the man.

  The man grabbed a rock in each hand. He stood up and faced the Indian. He was at least seven feet tall. He wore no clothes. A thick coat of black fur covered him from head to ankle and curtained his face. His chest was fat and massive, his legs were short, and he had almost no neck. Because of the gloom, the Indian could not see the man’s face clearly.

  He was not a man. Not really. Such men had never lived. He was somewhere between man and beast. He was a spirit.

  The Indian put his rifle against a tree.

  The spirit set down his rocks.

  The Indian waited for his name.

  The spirit did not speak it. Instead, he blended into the slanted grays and blacks of the woods, heading toward the northern peaks and leaving the Indian alone with the dog.

  The dog said, He wants you to follow him.

  The Indian had no family, no job, no place to go. Nobody would miss him. He checked his clothes. He wore a tough Army jacket and moccasins. His pants were heavy corduroy, and there was a scarf around his neck. He dug out a handful of corn and hungrily ate it. The pain in his wracked body lessened; his joints filled with rigidity and strength that brought color to his face.

  “I will come,” he said.

  1

  The Central States Wildlife Fund was a Kansas-­based tax haven supported by numerous businessmen who claim to be conservationists. For four years straight they had sent out expeditions to Canada to check out the caribou and moose herds. These expeditions consisted of two men from Kansas City, George Nicolson and Roy Curtis, who geared up in Calgary with a Land Rover and supplies, tranquilizer guns, directional-­antennae devices, and a helicopter. Dennis Hill was the owner and pilot of this helicopter.

  This year things were different. A herd of musk oxen had been spotted far south of their Arctic habitat, and Nicolson and Curtis wanted to tag a couple of them to see where they would go. In addition, there was a new member of the group, an edgy forty-­three-­year-­old man named Raymond Jason. Jason was a tall, powerfully built man, who demonstrated his strength in a Calgary bar by bending a quarter between his thumb and first two fingers. He unconsciously practiced isometric exercises over his entire body. His robustness was a product of will, he said, necessary for camping weeks on end. He was a wealthy man who had worked hard for his money. Too hard, in Hill’s opinion.

  Hill knew why Nicolson and Curtis came on these trips. Nicolson was a sometime big-­game hunter and fisherman. Roy Curtis was a veterinarian.

  Raymond Jason packaged and sold pet food. For the life of him, Dennis Hill could not understand why Raymond Jason came to Canada, or why he made him so nervous.

  Raymond Jason stroked the stubble of his new beard and peered out the plexiglass bubble of the helicopter at the lakes far below. Between them were craggy forested hills, a part of the wrinkled, tormented West Canadian Rockies. As the copter turned, fire from the sun sheeted off the silver surfaces.

  This was one of the comparatively flat areas of the Rockies, and Hill’s main concern was that Jason not direct him to some goddamned peaks or something before they ran out of fuel.

  “Go on up a little higher!” cried Jason. “I think the hills are blocking the signal.” Jason adjusted a tuner on the radio before him. The Land Rover, with Nicolson and Curtis in it, was down there somewhere in that lacework of streams, concealed under the timbers that whiskered the heaving land.

  The speaker crackled, and Hill answered. It was Nicolson with his complaining voice. “Hill, it’s almost eight o’clock. Maybe we should think about camping. What does Jason think?”

  In spite of this being his first trip, Jason had somehow taken over the group. Hill was amazed at how Nicolson deferred to him. It was Jason who darted the musk ox leader with a perfect shot from the helicopter, and Jason who guessed correctly where the animals were heading. Things had gone fine until the day before yesterday, when the leader cut off from the herd and headed for the lakes. Around his neck was a collar with a beacon that transmitted signals to both Land Rover and helicopter. They had not heard a peep from it until this morning. Jason had seen the huge, brown, shaggy animal for a split second under the tree cover, running as fast as it could. Now it was gone again.

  “Fine with me,” said Jason into the mike. “Find a place close to the woods where we can land the copter. We’ll stay up for”—Jason checked his watch—“another half-­hour. I really want to find out why the thing’s behaving like this. Can you see us?”

  “Yes, you’re about two miles southwest.”

  They were down in that delta edged with woods. With binoculars Jason could probably see the Land Rover with its whiplash antennae.

  Hill said, “You know, you never can tell how an animal will react to a tranquilizer. It’s a drug, and look what drugs do to people.”

  “I don’t think it’s that,” said Jason, flexing his arms. “I think it’s frightened.”

  “By what?”

  “Maybe the helicopter.” Jason adjusted his sunglasses and leaned close to the bubble. After a moment he pointed north, toward a sandy plain. Hill wheeled the copter around. As they rose, the square silver box with the aerial mounted on it emitted a small squeal, as if a mouse were trapped inside.

  Hill halted the copter in midair and faced it in various directions, trying to pinpoint the source. It was coming from the sandy plain. “We got the signal,” Jason said into the radio. “I figure it’s about seven miles south of you. It’s in this clear area.”

  As the copter moved, the steady squeal became a whine, then began receding again. Jason leaned out, looking down at the speckled brown ground. Hill juggled the controls until the beacon peaked. The musk ox should be right under them.

  Jason searched the ground with his binoculars. A large brown boulder resolved itself into the carcass of the animal, with an aerial gleaming in the late sun. “It’s dead, Hill.”

  “How?”

  Jason sat back in his seat, the binoculars hanging from his neck. “Well, among other things, its head is gone.”

  “What!”

  “That’s right. The aerial is lying on the ground.”

  Jason jumped from the copter while it was still a few feet off the ground, and ducked under the rotating blades. When Hill joined him he was kneeling in the soil, examining the body.

  The musk ox’s bulk had been diminished to an empty sack of fur-­covered skin and bones. Bullet holes punctured its body, and its internal organs had been neatly eviscerated.

  “That’s as neat a job of butchering as I’ve ever seen,” mused Jason. “How much do you figure this thing weighs?”

  “Oh hell, a thousand pounds, I guess. Most of it’s the head and bones. And blood. Now . . .” He looked dazedly over the remains. “I guess he’s missing about a hundred pounds of meat.”

  “So I was right. It was being stalked. That’s why it was frightened.”

  “For two days?”

  “Yup.”

  Hill could not conceive of any animal that would frighten a musk ox. Next to a polar bear, it was the worst-tempered and most dangerous animal in the north. Its head was thick, massive bone fortifying short curved horns; its body was coated with thick fur tough enough to keep out the coldest wind and the longest claws. Hill could easily imagine a m
usk ox winning a battle against a bear, and no animal could have done such a neat butchering job. And while it would run from an armed man, it certainly would not do so for two days. In fact, the beast was inclined to take its chances and trample down any man close enough to shoot it, regardless of the risk.

  “Why don’t we look for prints?” Jason suggested. “I’d like to see who this lumberjack is.”

  Hill expected to find the smooth moccasin prints of an Indian band, maybe even the sealskin indentations of an Eskimo pursuing the animal. He could even envision the nailed boots of white men, but why they would go after a musk ox was beyond him. Maybe they wanted the head for a fireplace.

  They found only one print, stamped onto the gravelly plain close to the woods like a slashing signature. It was human. More incredible, it was barefoot. Most incredible of all, Jason’s tape measured it out as fourteen inches long and seven wide.

  Hill could not bring himself to say the word, so Jason did it, with a satisfied smile. “Bigfoot.”

  Nicolson unhappily removed his glasses and tapped them in his hand. His friend, Curtis, photographed the print with various objects—a hatchet, the tape measure, his own foot—set next to it for scale. Nicolson said, “Jason, I know we don’t have any plaster, but isn’t there some way we can make a cast?”

  “No,” said Jason. “Nothing. Either we let it erode and forget it or we bring the real thing back. A real, live, tranquilized Bigfoot. Otherwise, no one will believe us.”

  Nicolson flinched at the word. Bigfoot was the Abominable Snowman of the Americas, the legendary ape who dwelled deep in the forests of the Northwest. His existence, so far as scientists were concerned, was about as likely as that of leprechauns.

  Curtis closed his camera and wiped dirt from his hands before putting it in its case. “He’s a long way from his stomping ground. We’re a good thousand miles from the coast.”

  “And outside of baboons and man, I never heard of any gorillas eating meat,” Nicolson added.

  “I expect he eats everything,” said Jason. “He’d be an omnivore. By this print he must weigh close to eight hundred pounds. You’re right, though, Curtis. Even for an omnivore, it’s pretty slim pickings around here. And apes don’t hibernate like bears.”

  “Maybe he’s migrating,” said Hill, who should have known better.

  “He wouldn’t migrate north,” Nicolson snorted. “He’d go south.”

  “And gorillas don’t carry rifles,” Hill chortled.

  “Oh, that’s easy enough,” said Jason. “Some hunter brought down the ox and the Bigfoot stripped what was left later.”

  The pale sun was sinking, thickening the trees into luxurious blackness and draining warmth from the air. Nights were startlingly chilly up here, even in May.

  “We’ll camp here tonight and get after more prints in the morning,” said Jason. “He might still be around, since he ate so much. I don’t suppose the Wildlife Fund would object to changing our mission.”

  This was directed at Roy Curtis, who was the group’s treasurer. “We’re the only ones that have anything to do with the Fund, so I don’t know why not.”

  “I don’t like to sound like a great white hunter,” said Nicolson. “But I’m wondering if we should load our guns with real bullets.”

  “What on earth for!” Curtis replied.

  “He’s a meat eater, isn’t he? That’s not your normal ape.”

  That stopped Curtis. “Maybe we can just load one of the guns.”

  “No,” said Jason, knowing his word would be final. “We don’t want to kill it. There’s absolutely no report of this thing being dangerous to anybody. If we load a rifle we’ll use it. No,” he repeated with final indissoluble certainty. “We can keep watches if that will make you feel better.”

  “Yes,” said Nicolson, holding his rifle. “It would.”

  They pitched camp under the trees, close by a gurgling stream. Curtis and Nicolson played three quick backgammon games on a portable board, as they had done nearly every night since meeting twelve years before in Kansas. Jason offered to take the first watch. He sat with his back against a tree, a little apart from the other three men, with his blanket over his legs and rifle across his lap.

  By midnight Hill, Curtis, and Nicolson were lumps of nylon curled around the glowing campfire embers, which pulsed whenever a breeze crossed them. Except for a marmot whose whistle broke the block of quiet that settled over the forest, Raymond Jason might have been alone at the end of the world.

  He clasped his hands together and tightened all the muscles of his arms. Wrists, forearms, biceps. A pleasurable tension in the shoulders. Then he relaxed and felt blood pump through the strained tissues.

  Raymond Jason had spent the better part of his life being successful. Success was money, security, and physical comfort. He had waited until his first million, accumulated by the age of thirty-­five, to cash in on physical comfort. He got married. He bought a house and several cars. Having done all that, he discovered something was wrong with him.

  This thing that was wrong had driven him to a psychiatrist, who had told him a human being is just a log of the past. Jason considered that, then rejected it. “Doc, I’ve got everything I want. I had a perfectly normal childhood and everything, you said it yourself. By any sensible standards I should be as happy as a clam, but I’m putting on weight, I get depressed, and my temper’s getting worse when it should be getting better.”

  Jason had a vicious temper, which had been an asset in his business career. He was a man with a short fuse and a long memory, whose reserves of sheer anger had crashed him through all obstacles, commercial, personal, and social. This temper was damaging his marriage.

  “Human beings are slates upon which experience writes the only words,” said the psychiatrist. Then after a moment he said, “Do you believe in God, Mr. Jason?”

  “No.”

  “God is one of the words on most humans’ slates. Mystery. I hesitate to say mysticism. It is an essential part of life. It is a center, a magnetic core as necessary to a human as sex.”

  Being a supremely rational man, Jason simply did not understand what the psychiatrist was talking about.

  “Do you know what material success is, Mr. Jason? It is an earthly substitute for going to heaven. It is a non­existent place where rich people live cushioned by money, with no cares or worries forever. When you made your first million, you died in a way. Only heaven isn’t where you went. Heaven does not necessarily come after success.”

  Jason was not paying a shrink forty dollars an hour for a religious lecture. He found himself getting mad.

  “You are angry because you are fundamentally frustrated, Mr. Jason. You are searching for something to devote yourself to, something to lose yourself in. A purpose to your life. More money probably isn’t the answer.”

  “You mean find a religion,” Jason asked through clenched teeth.

  “You are a hungry man, Mr. Jason. Hungry for something irrational. If this were the Middle Ages, yes, you’d be hungry for God. But this is the twentieth century, so let’s say you’re looking for something . . . inexplicable. Something to challenge you. Some—” which was as far as the psychiatrist got, because Jason had lost his temper and thrown an ashtray at him.

  Shortly after that, his marriage broke up. He had struck his wife with his fist after an argument about vacations. He threw his fiercest energies into dozens of projects, including the Wildlife Fund. He decided to go to Canada and look for oxen. His business expertise and a sense of organization had slipped control of the expedition into his hands, and he welcomed it.

  A hand touched his shoulder. He jumped in shock, clutching his rifle. Hill’s hand clamped over his mouth.

  “Listen,” whispered Hill.

  Jason was embarrassed at being such a lousy watchman. All three men had awakened and dressed while his mind drifted.


  Nicolson slid his rifle from its nylon sheath. From the Land Rover, parked on the gravelly plain, came the clink of metal. Something was poking about the tailgate.

  “It’s probably just a woodchuck,” said Hill with a delighted smile. “But let’s pretend it isn’t.”

  Jason found some antenna wire in the signal package. He cut two lengths and tied flashlights to Curtis’s and Nicolson’s rifle barrels. “You and Nicolson dig in at the river about fifty yards apart,” he whispered harshly. “Me and Hill will go for him at the Land Rover. If he starts running, we’ll drive him between you. And be quiet!” he said as they crashed excitedly into the trees like Boy Scouts on a treasure hunt.

  He turned to Hill. “You take the light. I’ll take the rifle.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  “Do you have a better idea?”

  Hill did not have a better idea. Jason was a better shot than he was.

  The river was actually more of a creek. It rose and fell seasonally, leaving steeply carved banks tangled with tree roots. Nicolson and Curtis slipped down the bank. Nicolson wiped perspiration from his glasses. He glanced at Curtis. “You look like Frank Buck.”

  “Are you sure you don’t mean Pearl Buck?” Curtis shot back.

  “Better keep your voice down.”

  Curtis lit his pipe and settled onto the ground. “What for? Haven’t you ever been on a snipe hunt before?”

  “This isn’t a snipe hunt,” retorted Nicolson. Then added, “Is it?”

  “Oh, of course it is. Jason and Hill are laughing their rocks off now. I bet Jason’s been planning this ever since Calgary. Nice to know he has a sense of humor.” Curtis drew on his pipe. “Just a game, my boy, just a game. I like games. I think hacking up that musk ox was going a bit too far, but you have to be convincing. What I’m waiting for is Jason running through the woods and growling. Maybe he’ll swing from a tree.” Curtis laughed dryly. “What do we do if he swings from a tree?”

  Nicolson shrugged and pointed his rifle to a bend in the river. “Well, I’ll make my way to the other side of that.”