Page 10 of The Girl Who Cried Bigfoot

I turn and walk into the trees. The silence of the woods swallows the sounds of the shouting tourists and the hum of the dying generator. This is my world. It is a world of slow growth and ancient rules, where nothing changes that doesn’t have to.

I think of the small, gold flecks in her eyes. I think of the fact that she didn’t look away.

I am the champion of hiding, yet for the first time in three centuries, I find myself wondering what would happen if I stopped trying to win the game. It’s a dangerous thought. It is a thought that belongs in a room with orange paneling, not in the deep green of the forest.

I keep walking, the bag crinkling against my side, a navy-blue secret tucked away in the shadows. I have my shirt. And I have a persistent, nagging awareness of a woman in her father’s boots who is far more dangerous to my peace of mind than a dozen drones.

I reach the creek that marks the boundary between the lodge’s immediate grounds and my own deeper territory. The water is high, rushing over smooth stones with a sound like a crowd whispering in a language only I can translate. I step onto a moss-covered boulder, the weight of the paper bag in my hand a constant, physical reminder of the transaction. Twenty-four dollars for a joke. Or an admission.

I find a fallen log a few yards into the brush and sit. The wood is damp, but I don’t care. I pull the shirt out of the bag. In the dimming light, the navy blue looks almost black, and the white letters seem to glow. I trace the word Champion with my thumb. It’s a human word for a human concept. There are no champions in the forest. Only survivors and predators, and the quiet ones who simply persist. But the word has a certain ring to it that the ancient part of me finds suspiciously satisfying.

I imagine wearing it beneath my flannel like a secret sigil. If I were to stand in front of Barnaby Jones while wearing this, would he see the irony? Or would he simply see another tall local in a tacky shirt? The thought of Barnaby’s EMF meter chirping in the presence of the Hide & Seek World Champion brings a dry, rattling chuckle to my throat. It’s an undignified thought. I am a Guardian. I should be above such petty, human triumphs. Yet, here I am, clutching a piece of mass-produced cotton as if it were a trophy of war.

I fold the shirt carefully—much more carefully than the teenagers in the shop had handled the plush toys—and slip it back into the bag. My thoughts drift back to the lodge, specifically to the way the floorboards creaked under Wren’s oversized boots. She’s a creature of friction. Everything she does rubs against the natural order of things, creating heat and noise and sparks. And yet, there is a rhythm to her struggle that I’m beginning to recognize. It’s the same frenetic, desperate rhythm of a bird trying to repair a nest in the middle of a gale.

I continue my trek toward my home, moving through the undergrowth without snapping a single twig. It is second nature, a skill honed over centuries, but tonight it feels performative. I am the champion, after all. The forest is my stadium, and the only spectator is a woman with a failing lodge. I reach the ridge overlooking the valley and pause. From here, the lodge’s lights are a cluster of yellow stars against the deepening blue of the woods. The SUVs look like toys and the people like ants. It should make me feel superior. It should make the irritation that had lit inside me feel distant and inconsequential.

Instead, I find myself lingering. I watch the window where I know the front desk is located. Wren is still there, likely still fighting the sill plate in her mind or arguing with a guest about the “energy” of a room. A small, quiet flicker of interest—not that sharp thorn of irritation, but something cooler and more persistent—stirs in the back of my mind. It isn’t attraction, merely a recognition of a fellow defender, even if she is defending the wrong things for the wrong reasons. I turn away from the lights, clutching the paper bag, and disappear into the absolute dark of the high timber. I have the shirt. I have the secret. And for the first time in a very long time, I have the feeling that the game of hide-and-seek is about to get significantly more complicated.

6

WREN

THAT IS NOT WHAT WE SOUND LIKE

The common room is musty with the stench of damp wool and expensive cedar-scented beard oil, but I don’t mind it. Tonight, the lodge feels less like a failing family legacy and more like a crowded bar. I’m standing by the fireplace, leaning against the soot-stained stone, watching the light from the dying embers catch on the tactical zippers of a dozen different cargo pants.

Barnaby is holding court on the sofa. He’s surrounded by three of his so-called researchers, all of them listening with the kind of intensity usually reserved for bomb disposal. In the center of the coffee table, right next to a half-empty mug of Marge’s peppermint tea, sits a Bluetooth speaker that looks like a rubberized grenade.

“Okay, listen to this,” Barnaby says, his voice dropping into a register he clearly thinks is cinematic. “This was recorded three miles north of the Silverton trailhead. Dual-channel audio, high-gain mics. No digital artifacts. This is the real deal. In fact, there has been interest in it from a production company who wants to make a documentary of the area.”

He taps his phone. The speaker crackles for a second, a hiss of static and mountain wind, then a long, mournful howl that starts low in the chest and peaks in a jagged, metallic shriek rips through the room. It sounds like a timber wolf having a nervous breakdown inside a corrugated steel pipe.

Silence falls over the room. Even the birdwatchers from Cabin Four, who usually ignore everything that doesn’t have feathers, look up from their field guides. It’s a haunting sound. If I didn’t know better—if I didn’t spend my mornings looking at invoices for Bigfoot-shaped cookies—even I might find it convincing.

“Did you hear that shift?” Barnaby whispers, looking around the room for converts. “That’s a dual-tone vocalization. Humans can’t do that. Bears don’t have the lung capacity for that sustain. That, my friends, is a territorial marker.”

I catch movement out of the corner of my eye. Rowan is standing in the shadows near the kitchen door, a seven-foot-two pillar of disapproval in a flannel shirt that looks like it was woven from the hair of grumpy gods.

He isn’t looking at me. He’s looking at the Bluetooth speaker with an expression that can only be described as intense offense. It’s the same look my art history professor used to give students who suggested that Warhol was just a guy who liked soup. It’s a soul-level rejection of the premise.

“Play it again,” someone from the back of the room says. “I want to see if the EMF meter spikes on the replay.”

Barnaby obliges. The howl shreds the air again. It’s louder this time, bouncing off the heavy oak beams and the framed SAR graduation photo I still haven’t moved. The sound is aggressive, desperate, and entirely fake.

“Incredible,” Barnaby breathes, leaning back as if he’s just witnessed the creation of the world. “The resonance alone tells you the size of the thoracic cavity. We’re looking at an apex primate, at least eight feet tall, mid-migration.”

Rowan moves, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, but he seems to take up more space than the room should technically allow. He steps out of the shadows, the low light of the fire catching the hard line of his jaw and the strange, bark-like texture of his skin that I’ve decided is just really intense mountain-man exfoliation.

“That is not what we sound like,” he says, just as Barnaby replays the recording a third time.

He doesn’t shout it. It isn’t even loud. It’s delivered with the flat, unadorned certainty of a man stating the current temperature or the fact that water is wet. It’s an instinctive correction, a reflex that happened before his brain could put a filter on his mouth. He sounds bored by the inaccuracy of it.

The silence that follows is different than it was after the second replay of the recording. It’s heavier. Barnaby blinks, his phone still gripped in his hand, looking up at the man who currently towers over his entire research team. Rowan is staring at the speaker as if he’s considering stepping on it just to end its suffering.

“Excuse me?” Barnaby asks, his voice cracking slightly.

Rowan doesn’t blink. He doesn’t even look at Barnaby. He keeps his eyes on the blinking blue light of the speaker, his hands hanging loose at his sides, though his fingers are curled slightly into his palms. He looks like a man who has just been told the sky is green and is trying to decide if it’s worth the energy to argue.