It was a Saturday morning when we had gone hunting for Bigfoot.
The sky was overcast and gray, matching my mood perfectly until we pulled over on the side of the old highway. The moment I popped the trunk and slid my hand over the wooden stock of my grandfather’s rifle though, my focus returned. I cocked the gun in sync with the spark of rage that flared within the depths of my belly. I looked to my brother Darren, who had also taken his weapon in hand, though with noticeably lesser intent.
“Come on, Darren, enough sulking. You know what we need to do.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know..” He slammed the trunk shut and slung his bag over his right shoulder, keeping the rifle in both of his hands as he trudged past me towards the woods. “Let’s just get this over with.” His exasperation was on full display. It sickened me.
I simply followed along, having nothing left to say. Our boots squished into the softened surface of the forest floor, following the ATV trail deeper into the wild. The smell of wet grass and rotting logs was overwhelming, only to become sickening once it meshed with the stink of the swamp. But the smell would not deter us.
We followed the swamp’s edge, keeping the water to our right. Our eyes, however, were constantly surveying the area, searching for any signs of the ancient ape. Or perhaps signs of its victims. There wouldn’t be anything left of Dad; we’d already been out here countless times before, ever since the creature had taken him.
Darren still refused to believe his brother, let alone his own eyes, but I knew what we had seen that day. A dad taking his two preteen sons on a fishing trip, having great fun in the sun. It was the first time I had ever actually caught anything, which was still better than how Darren was doing. At one point, my kid brother started crying after one fish broke his line, and Dad had to console him.
And as he did that, the shadow came. I watched it approach from its cover amongst the treeline - slow but steadily. When I pointed it out to him, Dad took a quick look before telling us to start walking away from “the bear”, backwards with care. We all had our eyes on the shadow, so we all were able to see when it dropped to all fours and began sprinting for us. Dad told us to run back to the car as he pulled out his pocket knife, trying to stand as tall and wide as he could to scare it off.
Darren was crying in fear, so I had to pull him away - but that didn’t stop me from watching. Soon enough, the beast was in front of my father, and back standing on two legs. And it sure as hell wasn’t a bear. If anything, it was a roided out gorilla that hadn’t skipped leg day. It blotted out the sun with its stature, looming several feet over our dad.
Darren and I had gotten to a safe distance where the beast didn’t see us, but I could sure see them. I wanted to cry for Dad to run, to scream at him to get out of there. But my throat closed up, choked by fear as I watched him stumble back. The knife dropped out of his hand, and the monster roared in his face, revealing a set of flesh-ripping fangs. After that, my eyes were transfixed on the monster beating my father into a bloodied pulp, unable to avert my own gaze. It swung his body around wildly, slamming my father against tree and rock and ground alike. I would’ve assumed that the thing was using my dad as a plaything, if it had not been for the pure feeling of rage that it exuded, even to us up on the hill. My throat finally began to muster some small short cries as I witnessed the beast dragging the corpse back to whatever hellhole it called its home.
I distinctly remember the size of its hand - almost large enough to wrap around the entire length of my father’s lower leg. The only leg that was left, anyways. A good while after they had disappeared, I led Darren back to the car, and with snot and tears dribbling over the screen, I called Mom, I was finally able to utter something that resembled a word: “h-help…”
The police found the leg that the beast tore off a few days later, floating in the swamp. And the footprints fit the proportions too - but the police ruled that we had just seen a bear attack, and that the footprints’ size was due to the bear’s paws “spreading out in the mud.” I didn’t buy it. I never would, and now, as a grown man, I returned to these woods every weekend to get revenge.
Looking down at the ground, I stopped dead in my tracks. “Darren! Over here!” My younger brother came sprinting back to me as I grinned and pointed - the same enormous footprints we’d only seen on a few occasions. “What did I tell ya?”
“Jacob, they’re the same prints from before. We’ve been over this, those are-”
“Don’t. Don’t say it again,” I growled. Darren was far more willing to just conform to whatever the Nice Police Officers told him, because it was easier to listen. It was easier to just pretend that what happened was something normal, and not our father being murdered by a Sasquatch.
“Do you see the pattern of the pads? This is NOT a bear’s foot, and it ain’t one of our boots. That there, that’s the footprint of our Bigfoot.”
Darren just sighed and stood up. “Come on, let’s just lay the traps already. And you’re on the first watch, it’s way too early for me to deal with your crazy mess.”
Grumbling, I pulled my pack off and ruffled through its contents until I found the jaws. In one swift but heavy motion, I tossed my bag over towards my brother, which contained our leg traps. He cried out as the steel slammed against his shin. “Oww! What is wrong with you?”
Darren always was an infant. Weak. It was for that very reason I dragged him out here each weekend, hoping that seeing the beast and confronting it would toughen him up and finally give us the closure we desperately needed.
“Hey, you asked for them-” A rumble sounded through the trees. We both instantly grabbed our rifles and began scanning our surrounding, trying to catch any kind of movement. PLAP- My guard only began to lower as a raindrop crashed into the right lens of my glasses, warping half of my vision heavily.
“Just thunder,” I murmured, putting my rifle down to clean my glasses. “Prep the traps and come back over here quickly. We’ll only be out here for a little bit today, I guess.”
Darren just groaned and snatched up the trap, storming away from me. With my vision fixed (for the moment), I inspected my rifle and began to load it. If we were going to come across Bigfoot today, it’d have to be soon - it wouldn’t be caught wandering around in a storm. The creature was smarter than that.
I watched as Darren’s figure grew hidden amongst the thin trees, wandering along our pre-established boundary to set the traps. Today we were trying cow livers as bait. We had been rotating the meat to see if any of them would have a better chance of attracting it. Darren thought it was just an expensive waste, but after just trying venison for two years straight with no results, something needed to change.
By the time Darren was returning to our lookout spot, a thin mist had begun to fill the forest. The cold pierced through my sweater, so I was forced to zip up my puffer coat to keep warm. When he arrived, he tossed my bag back at me and plunked himself down with his back turned to me. I could hear the crinkling of his morning breakfast bar and groaned. “You should be ready to kill that thing at any moment, not snacking.”
“You’re completely deluded, you know that?”
I didn’t bother responding. Darren’s mind was well made up at this point, and no amount of convincing or conversation would change it. Only the stone cold corpse of the Sasquatch would make him see the truth now. For a moment, I wondered what Sasquatch meat would taste like to myself.
The rumblings of thunder grew more consistent, and the mist had thickened as we sat and waited. I was constantly having to wipe my glasses clean to remain vigilant, now blinded from water and fogging alike. After a little while, it was my turn to check on the traps. Brushing off the mud and leaves, I trotted through the brush, checking all the trap’s positions. And as usual, Darren had completely mucked up all the placements, the lazy prick. So it was left to me to adjust them, moving them to spots that were slightly more hidden, so it wasn’t blatantly obvious to the beast that it was being hunted.
Muttering under my breath, I fixed each trap and just moved on - until the fourth trap of five. The cow liver was not there, but the trap had not closed shut. And the mud around the area was stomped and squished in various ways. The tingle of anticipation began to hurry my heartbeat, and I just stared at the device before calling out to Darren. “Hey, Darren! You put livers on all the traps, yeah?”
“Ugh, YES Jake! I don’t need your-”
Thunder rolled again, but I had heard enough from my brother to get my answer. I began to make my way back to our ‘outpost’, walking backwards at first and surveying my surroundings. Once I was certain no eyes were watching me from beyond my view, I raced back to my brother and slid back beside him. Darren began shouting at me and demanding to know what was wrong, but I shushed him quickly. “Something took the liver on trap four,” I whispered, trying to hide my simultaneous excitement and fear.
“So!? It could’ve been some hungry bear for all we know, or a coyote, or whatever kind of animal among the hundreds that live in the woods!” Darren was expressing annoyance with me, but he too was whispering. He had to, in part, believe that something was out there.
I ignored his sentiments and grinned. “We gotta set up the tarp. We aren’t going anywhere.”
We always made our site near a trio of young trees, shaped in a triangle, so we could easily create a tarp roof if the weather was not in our favor. And with the way that rain was beginning to cut through the fog, we decided to do just that. Beneath the tarp, we continued our watch as water poured down before our eyes.
Darren continued to whine that we should leave before we got struck by lightning, but I refused. The missing meat from the trap was already a sign that we needed to stay. In all of our time out here, only twice before had the meat been taken, and both times the trap had been shut. But we had never caught anything actually stuck in the traps. The beast mocked us, taunting us, wanting us to know that it was not just some random creature of the woods. It was greater than that.
Time passed. The sky boomed above us. I gave myself but a moment to imagine that we were soldiers in Vietnam, hunkering down in the rain, but staying awake in case of a sudden enemy attack. I was pulled from the thought by a hand on my shoulder. Whipping my head around, I saw Darren starting to get up.
“I need to stretch my legs. Gonna go check the traps.” He started to leave, but turned back to look at me. “We really should get going soon. The weather is awful.”
I shook my head without a word. Darren opened his mouth to say something else, but gave up and left. Huddling with my rifle, I shivered profusely in my cold, wet clothing. My hand was nearly frozen in place, clasped around the barrel. I could feel my knuckles locking up in their sockets.
CRASH! The crack of lightning erupted nearby. I witnessed the flash from between the trees. The rain began to fall faster, hitting the leafy forest floor like bullets from the heavens. I could feel my senses all beginning to be overwhelmed by the sensations of the wild.
“AARRGGHH!” A scream - I pivoted in its direction and readied my rifle. It sounded like Darren, but I couldn’t see him between the rain and my fogged glasses. I wiped them off quickly, then looked again.
There. It was still blurry, but there was no denying it. A large black figure raising its hands above its head and slamming down into the ground. Attacking my poor brother, who was likely being beaten on the ground by it, out of my sight. I was not going to let Bigfoot take another member of my family. The rage was ignited. I ripped a bullet off my belt and slammed it into the chamber, then shoved the bolt forward and took my aim. The beast was still slamming at the ground - maybe the trap had caught it in place!
There was no time to waste. The crosshairs were aligned with its chest. I pulled the trigger without hesitation. The gunshot echoed through the trees, louder than any thunderbolt had previously. And the bullet was a direct hit. I watched with widened eyes as the Sasquatch fell, clutching its chest before crumbling slowly to the ground.
I scrambled to my feet, slipping and tripping in the mud and grass. My fingers screamed out in pain as I pulled myself past multiple trees, hurting from the cold. I kept the gun close to my side, in case the job wasn’t done yet. But finally - after all these years, I had finally struck back and avenged my father. I had slain Bigfoot.
When I reached the spot where the Sasquatch had fallen however, there was no beastly corpse, no massive muddy footprints imprinting its last path. I found only my brother, collapsed face first into the mud, with his blood mixing in to form a foul sludge beneath his body.
Written by RedNovaTyrant
Content is available under CC BY-SA