Page 30 of The Girl Who Cried Bigfoot

“Why didn’t you help sooner?” she asks. The question is quiet, stripped of her usual banter. “You’ve been here. You’ve watched them. You clearly love this land. You’ve been selling honey at the market all these years—I saw the records. Why did you stay in the trees while the lodge was dying? Why let it get this bad?”

I look out over the valley, my hands resting on my knees. It’s a question I’ve asked myself in the dark hours of the winter, but hearing it from her makes it feel like an accusation. I think of her father, a man who walked these trails with a heavy heart and a mind full of debt, and I feel the weight of my own silence.

“The arrangement runs on being sought, Wren. Not imposed.” I look at my hands, the skin like old parchment. “Your great-great-grandmother reached out. She shouted at the trees until the trees answered. She made the deal when I saved her children. But the Cassidys stopped reaching out two generations ago. Your grandfather treated me like a ghost story. Your father... he knew, but he was afraid. He respected the distance because he didn’t know how to bridge it.”

I look at her, making sure she sees the truth in my eyes. “I do not intrude on a family that hasn’t invited me in. I watched the lodge struggle. I watched the paint peel and the roof sag. But crossing that line uninvited... that was never the agreement. So, they kept the records, made sure the taxes were filed and the deed to my home was mine, because those requests were passed from Cassidy to Cassidy, and I kept the perimeter. Nothing more. I am a Guardian of the territory, not a manager of your debts. Until you came up that ridge and I demanded you turn off the hotline, you were a stranger to me.”

Wren looks away, her jaw tight. She doesn’t speak for a long time. I can see the gears turning, her mind replaying the years of struggle through this new lens. She isn’t angry—she’s mourning a version of history where things might have been different if someone had just known the right name to call.

“You’re the first one to come looking in a very long time,” I add. “I didn’t think there were any of you left who remembered how to shout.”

She looks back at me, a small, sad smile touching her lips. “I didn’t know I was shouting. I thought I was just being a nuisance.”

“You were,” I say, the banter returning like a familiar coat. “You still are. But it’s a focused kind of nuisance. I’ve grown accustomed to it.”

She laughs, a light sound that breaks the tension of the afternoon. She pushes off the log, brushing the bark from her pants, and starts walking again. The domesticity of us moving through the brush together feels earned. It’s a bridge we’ve built out of a business agreement and bad trail cameras, and it feels more solid than the stone of my house.

As we get closer to the lodge grounds, she stops and turns to me, her eyes narrowed in a way that usually means she’s been reading something she shouldn’t. She takes a step into my personal space, her nose twitching slightly. She looks like a predator trying to catch a scent, which is a ridiculous image given our respective sizes.

“What are you doing?” I ask, pulling back slightly.

“Research,” she says, stepping closer. She sniffs the air near my shoulder, her expression one of intense concentration. “The internet says you’re supposed to smell like a wet dog dipped in sulfur and left to rot in a dumpster. It’s a very specific profile.”

She leans in closer, her face inches from my chest. I freeze, my breath hitching as the scent of her—shampoo and sweat and the faint tang of old paper—washes over me. She sniffs again, her nose brushing the fabric of my t-shirt.

“You don’t smell like sulfur,” she concludes, looking up at me with a triumphant grin. “You smell like pine needles and... is that beeswax? And something else. Something clean. Like the air right before it snows.”

I stare at her, mortified. My face feels inexplicably warm. It’s not a feeling I’m used to. “I wash, Wren. I am a Guardian, not a garbage heap. And please stop smelling me. It’s highly undignified.”

“I’m conducting a scientific audit,” she says, her eyes dancing with mischief. “The public has a right to know that Bigfoot uses artisanal soap.”

She turns and heads toward the lodge, her stride bouncy and full of a confidence she didn’t have this morning. I watch her go, the scent of her still lingering in the air between us. I am a creature of ancient habits and century-long silences, but as I turn back toward the shadows of the trees, the forest feels a little too quiet without the sound of her voice.

My skin feels like it’s humming as I touch the line of my jaw where she leaned in close, wondering what it would have felt like if her lips had brushed against me instead of her breath. I have lived for centuries in the stillness, but for the first time, I find myself looking forward to the next time she decides to be a nuisance.

I don’t follow her all the way to the porch, keeping watch from the safety of the thickest hemlocks as she navigates the gravel lot. She stops to wave at Walt, who is busy trying to convince a tourist that, no, the Bigfoot Scat in the gift shop was actually just chocolate-covered raisins, and then she disappears inside. The lodge swallows her, and I’m left with the silence of the mountain—a silence that suddenly feels less like a sanctuary and more like a void.

I turn back toward my own territory, moving with the practiced invisibility that had served me for centuries. Now that Wren isn’t with me, I can give my full attention to the boot print, that jagged scar across the peace I’ve spent decades cultivating. Someone is getting closer. The nudges aren’t enough anymore. The subtle redirections that usually sends hikers stumbling back toward the well-marked trails are failing against the sheer, mindless persistence of the modern world. These tourists document the woods, mapping every inch with a cold, digital precision that doesn’t leave room for shadows.

When I reach the creek where I crushed the print, I inspect the earth. The boot print isn’t the only thing marring my territory. There’s a deep, metallic scrape on a nearby stone, the kind of mark left by a tripod leg or a heavy camera rig. Narrowing my eyes, I study the surrounding area. There is more than one boot print. The leaf litter here has been trampled, disturbed by multiple sets of boots. They’re looking for the ‘man’ they saw on the hotline’s page, the one the internet has started calling the Lodge Giant. They aren’t looking for a monster, but an employee. It’s a terrifyingly human sort of interest, and I know, with the certainty of the coming winter, that my isolation is a fraying thread.

I stand, my gaze traveling up the ridge toward the hidden mouth of the hollow. I told Wren the truth. The arrangement required the Cassidy family to seek me out. But as I think of her sniffing my shirt, her eyes bright with a humor that felt as vital as the spring water, I realize the terms have shifted. I’m not just a neighbor anymore, and she’s not just the record-keeper. We are something messy and undefined, a partnership built on a foundation of fake phone calls and real secrets.

I reach the slab of granite that serves as my step and paused. The air is cooling, the first true frost of the season whispering through the needles. I have lived through a thousand such changes, watching the weather turn and the families rise and fall like the tide. But tonight, as I pull the heavy oak door shut and listen to the latch click five feet above the floor, the house feels too large. The chairs are too tall, the ceilings too distant, and the silence no longer a comfort. I sit at my table, the air still smelling faintly of the coffee Wren didn’t finish, and wonder if Florence Cassidy ever realized that the name she gave me out of spite would eventually become the only thing I had that felt like it belonged to me.

17

WREN

ONE BED, NO GENERATOR, NO EXCUSES

The sky doesn’t darken so much as it becomes bruised, a deep, sickly purple that presses down on the canopy until even the birds go silent. I shove my father’s old crowbar into the side pocket of my pack, the metal clinking against a spare box of nails. We’re up here finishing the winter prep on the North Ridge shelter, checking the roof shingles and making sure the emergency rations haven’t become a squirrel’s buffet. It’s a six-mile hike from the lodge, a distance I usually navigate with a steady stream of internal complaints, but today the silence between me and Rowan is heavier than the dark clouds above us.

“The air is wrong,” Rowan says, his head tilted as if he were listening to a conversation happening three ridges away. Even in his human form, he looks like something the forest grew rather than something that walks through it. Seven feet and two inches of ancient, stubborn muscle, currently draped in the ridiculous HIDE & SEEK WORLD CHAMPION T-shirt.

“Wrong how? Like ‘I forgot to turn off the oven’ wrong, or ‘the apocalypse is scheduled for three in the afternoon’ wrong?” I follow his gaze toward the western horizon, where the clouds are a boiling, roiling mass of charcoal and slate that seem to swallow the light as it approaches.

“Like the mountain is holding its breath,” he mutters. The set of his shoulders, broad and immovable, tells me everything I need to know about our immediate survival prospects. “We need to get inside. Now.”