Page 16 of The Girl Who Cried Bigfoot

“I live here.” My voice is like gravel grinding against stone in the sudden stillness. I keep my hands at my sides. They feel too large, too obvious, as if the truth I told her yesterday has physically altered the space I occupy. “The ridge is my responsibility. Regardless of the number of cameras you point at it.”

She flinches as if I’ve struck her. She takes a step forward, and then another, closing the distance until she is standing just inside my personal space. I can smell her—stale coffee, the pine-scent of lodge soap, and the sharp, salt tang of real sweat. She looks up at me, and for the first time, she’s not looking at me like she can manage me with a witty line and a piece of cobbler.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. The words land between us like a physical weight. “Rowan, I’m so sorry. I didn’t—I truly thought it was a bit. I thought you were just committed to the local lore, or that you were lonely, or... God, I don’t even know. I laughed at you. You told me the truth, and I laughed.”

I watch the way her lower lip trembles. I am a Guardian. I have watched the weather change the face of this mountain for more years than her family has owned the lodge. I have seen floods and fires and the slow, inexorable rot of civilizations. I do not care what humans think of me. Their opinions are transient, like the mist that burns off the valley floor by noon. But as she stands there, vibrating with a very human kind of hurt, I realize with a jolt of genuine alarm that I do care what she thinks.

Inconvenient.

“It’s the nature of humans to disbelieve what they cannot measure,” I say. It’s the most patient sentence I have ever uttered. I want to reach out and steady her, but I don’t. My hands weren’t made to steady humans. “You didn’t hurt me, Wren. You behaved as your kind behaves. You turned a mystery into a commodity.”

“That makes it worse,” she says, her voice breaking. She reaches out, her fingers hovering near my forearm before she pulls them back. “I turned you into a marketing plan. I put a price on your head because I was too blind to see what was standing right in front of me. I’ve been selling your existence by the click, and you just... you let me. Why didn’t you stop me?”

I look at the trail shelter behind her, a simple cedar-shake structure built for men who needed a roof for a night. A human solution to a human problem. I’ve never used it because I didn’t need to be contained by walls. I look back at Wren. The light filtering through the canopy catches the copper in her hair. She’s waiting for an answer I don’t entirely have.

“Stopping you would have required more effort than letting you continue.” The lie feels sour on my tongue. “And your family has an arrangement. I honor my agreements.”

“Well, whatever the arrangement is, I’m sure it’s not for me to make a fool of you.” She wipes a hand across her eyes, leaving a streak of mountain mud on her cheek. “I saw you turning the camera. I saw the way you move, Rowan. No human moves like that. No human is that... still.”

A long, shuddering breath racks her small frame. She isn’t afraid. Fear has a sharp, metallic scent that makes the air feel thin, and there is no hint of that emanating off her, just the devastation of having failed me.

“You’re Bigfoot,” she says. It’s not a question. It’s a heavy, clumsy label, a word built by people who saw a shadow and filled the gap with a campfire story. The name is a cage.

“I have a name,” I say. I am not angry, but the weight of the name she just used feels like a physical insult. “I am a Guardian. Bigfoot is a brand you use to sell shirts to people who are afraid of the dark.”

She looks down at her boots, then back up at me. “I’m an idiot. I’m the one who started the hotline. I’m the one who brought the drones. I’ve ruined everything, haven’t I?”

The framework of my life—the centuries of quiet, the absolute rule of non-interference—shifts on its axis. I could walk away. I could leave her here with her guilt and her empty pack and let the mountain swallow her lodge. But the way she’s looking at me, as if her entire world is recalibrating around the space I’m standing in, makes that impossible.

“You want the full truth, Wren Cassidy?” I ask. I don’t wait for her to answer. The decision is already made. It’s the most dangerous thing I’ve done since the last great fire. Doing this could expose me to the cameras she’s placed so carefully around my forest. But I don’t want her to feel guilty for being a human. I want her to see. “You’ve been looking for a ghost. I think it’s time you saw the real thing.”

I step back, creating a space between us. The air feels thicker now, charged with the intent of the earth beneath my feet. The change begins, a slow, tectonic shift of bone and skin that has always been as natural to me as breathing, that has always been a secret. I don’t look away from her. I want her to see the choice. I want her to know that this is not an accident.

The transformation is not a violent thing, despite what the movies in her lodge would suggest. It is a deepening. I feel my bones lengthen, the familiar ache of expansion as my frame stretches toward its true height. My skin begins to change, the smooth, tan surface giving way to the intricate, cork-like patterns of bark. It doesn’t hurt. It feels like waking up after a long, cramped sleep.

Wren’s eyes widen slightly, her mouth dropping open. But she doesn’t scream, doesn’t move. She just stands there, her mouth slightly open, watching as the man she thought she knew becomes the creature she’s been selling. I grow until I am nearly nine feet tall, my shoulders broadening until I fill her entire field of vision. The bark-patterned skin spreads over my face, tracing the lines of my jaw and the bridge of my nose, but the structure remains. The eyes—my eyes—stay the same.

I am more of myself than I have been in months. The forest is different when I am in this form. Every sound is clearer, every smell is more distinct. I can feel the pulse of the earth through the soles of my feet. I look down at her, a towering figure of wood and shadow. I wait for her to recoil. I wait for the moment she realizes she’s been playing with a predator.

To my surprise, Wren takes a step closer. Her hand rises, trembling slightly, and she reaches out toward my chest. I should move. I should warn her. But I am frozen by the sheer, impossible bravery of the gesture. Her fingertips touch the rough, textured surface of my skin, right over the place where my heart is thudding with a very real, very human rhythm. Her touch is cool, a tiny point of contact that feels like a lightning strike in the quiet of the ridge.

“It’s you,” she whispers, tracing the pattern of the bark with a reverence that makes the air in my lungs feel heavy. “It’s still you. Your eyes... they’re exactly the same.”

She looks up, her face inches from my chest, and she isn’t flinching. She is taking me in, studying the detail of my transformation with the same intensity she probably used for those Renaissance paintings she studied in her detour of a degree. She is seeing the reality of the forest, the ancient weight of my job, and she is meeting it with a stillness that rivals my own.

“I thought you’d be... I don’t know. Hairier,” she says so dryly, deflating the tension with a precision that makes me want to laugh. She doesn’t laugh, though. Her expression softens into something I don’t have words for. “You’re beautiful, Rowan. In a way that makes my brain want to quit, but you are.”

I stand there, nine feet of bark and ancient muscle, and I feel smaller than she is. The vulnerability doesn’t lie in showing her the truth, but in being seen by her. I have lived on the edge of her family’s world for generations, a shadow in the timber and a ghost in the records, but I have never been known. I have never been looked at with anything other than fear or clinical curiosity.

“You’re not afraid,” I say. It’s a statement of fact, but it feels like a question.

“I’m terrified,” she says, her fingers still resting against my chest. “But not of you. I’m terrified of what I almost did to you. I spent weeks trying to catch you on a camera when I could have just... talked to you.”

Her hand falls away, and the loss of contact feels like a sudden drop in temperature. She glances at the trail shelter. The silence between us is different now. We’re no longer predator and prey, but two people who have crossed a bridge that neither knew was there.

“You have a name,” she repeats, her voice low and steady. “And you have a job. And I have a hotline that is currently ringing its head off in the lobby.”

“The hotline is a problem,” I agree as the change overcomes me again, my human form returning. I don’t fight it. I don’t need to stay this way to be seen by her anymore. I shrink back to my seven-foot-two frame, the bark receding into skin.