Blood Lite III Aftertaste.pdf

I Was a Teenage Bigfoot

JIM BUTCHER

There are times when, as a professional wizard, my vocation calls

me to the great outdoors, and that night I was in the northwoods of

Wisconsin with a mixed pack of researchers, enthusiasts and . . .

well. Nerds.

"I don't know, man," said a skinny kid named Nash. "What's his

name again?"

I poked the small campfire I'd set up earlier with a stick and

pretended that they weren't standing less than ten feet away from

me. The forest made forest sounds like it was supposed to. Full dark

had fallen less than half an hour before.

"Harry Dresden," said Gary, a plump kid with a cell phone, a GPS

unit, and some kind of video game device on his belt. "Supposed to

be a psychic or something." He was twiddling deft fingers over th

surface of what they call a "smart" phone, these days. Hell, the

damned things are probably smarter than me. "Supposed to have

helped Chicago PD a bunch of times. I'd pull up the Internet

references, but I can't get reception out here."

"A psychic?" Nash said. "How is anyone ever supposed to take our

research seriously if we keep showing up with fruitcakes like that?"

Gary shrugged. "Doctor Sinor knows him or something."

Doctor Sinor had nearly been devoured by an ogre in a suburban

park one fine summer evening, and I'd gotten her out in one piece.

Like most people who have a brush with the supernatural, she'd

rationalized the truth away as rapidly as possible - which had led

her to participate in such fine activities as tonight's Bigfoot

expedition in her spare time.

"Gentlemen," Sinor said, impatiently. She was a blocky, no-

nonsense type, grey-haired and straight-backed. "If you could help

me with these speakers, we might actually manage to blast a call or

two before dawn."

Gary and Nash both hustled over to the edge of the firelight to

start messing about with the equipment the troop of researchers

had packed in. There were half a dozen of them, altogether, all of

them busy with trail cameras and call blasting speakers and scent

markers and audio recorders.

I pulled a sandwich out of my pocket and started eating it. I took

my time about it. I was in no hurry.

For those of you who don't know it, a forest at night is dark.

Sometimes pitch-black. There was no moon to speak of in the sky,

and the light of the stars doesn't make it more than a few inches

into a mixed canopy of deciduous trees and evergreens. The light

from my little campfire and the hand-held flashlights of the

researchers soon gave the woods all the light there was.

Their equipment wasn't working very well - my bad, probably.

Modern technology doesn't get on well with the magically gifted.

For about an hour, nothing much happened beyond the slapping of

mosquitoes and a lot of electronic noises squawking from the

loudspeakers.

Then the researchers got everything online and went through

their routine. They played primate calls over the speakers and then

dutifully recorded the forest afterward. Everything broke down

again. The researchers soldiered on, repairing things, and

eventually Gary tried wood-knocking, which meant banging on

trees with fallen limbs and waiting to hear if there was a response.

I liked Doctor Sinor, but I had asked to come strictly as a ride-

along and I didn't pitch in with her team's efforts.

The whole "let's find Bigfoot" thing seems a little ill-planned to

me, personally. Granted, my perspective is different from that of

non-wizards, but marching out into the woods looking for a very

large and very powerful creature by blasting out what you're pretty

sure are territorial challenges to fight (or else mating calls) seems . .

. somewhat unwise.

I mean, if there's no Bigfoot, no problem. But what if you're

standing there, screaming "Bring it on!" and find a Bigfoot?

Worse yet, what if he finds you?

Even worse, what if you were screaming, "Do me, baby!" and he

finds you then?

Is it me? Am I crazy? Or does the whole thing just seem like a

recipe for trouble?

So anyway, while I kept my little fire going, the Questionably Wise

Research Variety Act continued until after midnight. That's when I

looked up to see a massive form standing at the edge of the trees, in

the very outskirts of the light of my dying fire.

I'm in the ninety-ninth percentile for height, myself, but this guy

was tall. My head might have come up to his collarbone, barely,

assuming I had correctly estimated where his collarbone was under

the long, shaggy, dark brown hair covering him. It wasn't long

enough to hide the massive weight of muscle he carried on that

enormous frame or the simple, disturbing, very slightly inhuman

proportions of his body. His face was broad, blunt, with a heavy

brow ridge that turned his eyes into mere gleams of reflected light.

Most of all, there was a sense of awesome power granted to his

presence by his size alone, chilling even to someone who had seen

big things in action before. There's a reaction to something that

much bigger than you, an automatic assumption of menace that is

built into the human brain: Big equals dangerous.

It took about fifteen seconds before the first researcher, Gary I

think, noticed and let out a short gasp. In my peripheral vision, I

saw the entire group turn toward the massive form by the fire and

freeze into place. The silence was brittle crystal.

I broke it by bolting up from my seat and letting out a high-

pitched shriek.

Half a dozen other screams joined it, and I whirled as if to flee,

only to see Doctor Sinor and crew hotfooting it down the path we'd

followed into the woods, back toward the cars.

I held it in for as long as I could, and only after I was sure that

they wouldn't hear it did I let loose the laughter bubbling in my

chest. I sank back onto my log by the fire, laughing, and beckoning

the large form forward.

"Harry," rumbled the figure in a very, very deep voice, the words

marked with the almost indefinable clippings of a Native American

accent. "You have an unsophisticated sense of humor."

"I can't help it," I said, wiping at tears of laughter. "It never gets

old." I waved to the open ground across the fire from me. "Sit, sit,

be welcome, big brother."

"Appreciate it," rumbled the giant and squatted down across the

fire from me, touching fingers the size of cucumbers to his heart in

greeting. His broad, blunt face was amused. "So. Got any smokes?"

It wasn't the first time I'd done business with the Forest People.

They're old school. There's a certain way one goes about business

with someone considered a peer, and Strength of a River in His

Shoulders was an old school kind of guy. There were proprieties to

be observed.

So we shared a thirty-dollar cigar, which I'd brought, had some

S'mores, which I made, and sipped from identical plastic bottles of

Coca-Cola, which I had purchased. By the time we were done, the

fire had burned down to glowing embers, which suited me fine -

and I knew that River Shoulders would be more comfortable in the

near-dark, too. I didn't mind being the one to provide everything. It

would have been a hassle for River Shoulders to do it, and we'd

probably be smoking, eating, and drinking raw and unpleasant

things if he had.

Besides, it was worth it. The Forest People had been around long

before the great gold rushes of the nineteenth century, and they

were loaded. River Shoulders had paid my retainer with a gold

nugget the size of a golf ball, the last time I'd done business with

him.

"Your friends," he said, nodding toward the disappeared

researchers. "They going to come back?"

"Not before dawn," I said. "For all they know, you got me.

River Shoulders' chest rumbled with a sound that was both

amused and not entirely pleased. "Like my people don't have

enough stigmas already."

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