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Bigfoot stepped out of the pink mystical motor home with the slow, heavy and hairy majesty of seven unshaven gunslingers stepping into a High Noon street.
He took three steps forward.
I saw his eyes glaze over like he was squinting hard into some sort of middle-distance sandstorm trying hard to focus on something that wasn’t really there.
He leaned back and opened his mouth wide enough to swallow a medium sized steam roller. Then he took a deep breath and yelled about as loud of a yell as was humanly possible for a nine foot tall Sasquatch.
“Hey BOSSSSSS!!!”
The trees shook just a little.
Maybe I did too.
“Loud, isn’t he?” Coyote asked.
“Don’t you have some sort of a radio or a cell phone that you could use?” I asked Coyote. “Yelling like that seems awfully undignified.”
It was hard on the ears, too.
“Sure we’ve got a radio – or at the very least we’ve got SOMETHING almost like a radio.” Coyote said. “In fact, we’ve got nearly everything that we need - but the big guy likes this way better. He says that the yelling helps him to think clearly.”
Only by now he had stopped yelling and was just standing there and staring out into the forest as if he thought something was about to come walking out from the shadows.
And then all at once something did.
“I’m never sure if I hate seeing him walking out like that or love it,” Coyote said. “But it sure is hard to forget – once you’ve seen it happen.”
I could understand why.
A long tall figure came walking slowly out of the woods. It was a little like he had just stepped out of the tree bark and the foliage – in almost the same way as the Spirit Bear had stepped out of the birch tree – only this was a little slower like he was wading out of the deep end of a swimming pool full of pitch black midnight.
“Yes sir,” Coyote said. “It is pretty nearly unforgettable once you’ve seen it.”
He was one of the tallest men that I had ever seen. Not NBA tall, you understand. It was more in the way that he held himself. He had a sort of strength and a presence and a quiet kind of dignity – something like a preacher crossed with a WWE professional wrestler and a twelve man SWAT team, with a heavy helping of John Wayne thrown into the mix. He was wearing an old-fashioned Canadian Mountie uniform that looked about a hundred years old with a tall black fur hat that added about another twelve and a half feet to his altitude. He had a heavy cavalry-style sabre – long and sharp enough to settle any sort of an argument – as well as an impressive looking pistol in a leather holster with an ammo belt with about a hundred bullets – and each of those bullets were growling – like a row of tiny brass-covered pit bulls.
“The growling bullets were Sam’s idea,” Coyote said. “Ghosts can do that sort of thing. The bullets don’t shoot any straighter, you understand, but their growling can sure intimidate the heck out of any possible perpetrator.”
Bigfoot just stood there, like he didn’t even actually notice the tall man’s bullet-growling approach.
“Did you boys forget how to do your job again?” the tall man asked, in a voice that probably could have registered on the Richter scale.
“Sam,” Coyote said, stepping forward to greet the tall man. “It’s like this.”
Only before Coyote could say another word the tall man just stepped directly through him.
Coyote fell on the dirt and lay there shaking like he had climbed out of a refrigerator sunk onto the bottom of the Arctic Ocean.
I went to him and helped him back up to his feet.
“I hate it when he does that to me,” Coyote said. “But that’s something else that ghosts do nearly any chance that they get. He likes walking through people and giving them the shiver-shakes just the same way as the big guy likes to yell.”
“You shouldn’t really ought to stand in the way of the law,” the tall man said over his shoulder, towards Coyote and me. “I’ve warned you plenty about standing in my way before.”
“We’ve got a situation here, Sam.” Bigfoot said. “We thought maybe you could help.”
“There is no help for the likes of you,” Sam replied.
“So he is supposed to be some kind of a ghost?” I whispered to Coyote.
“That’s the ghost of Sam Steele,” Coyote told me – as if I should have known that in the first place.
“If we leave him out in the rain will he rust up?” I asked – trying to sound a little more braver than I actually felt. “What with him being made of steel, and all.”
Only nobody laughed at my “steel” pun – which wasn’t all that funny in the first place - but I had a bad habit of making jokes every time that I got scared.
And if I got any more scared than I was right now I ought to think about making myself a lifelong career as a stand-up comedian.
“Sam is a story, just the same as us,” Bigfoot explained. “The real Sam Steele was one of Canada’s very first Mounties. He died way back in 1919 – almost a hundred years ago - after fighting with the Fenians, chasing Louis Riel during the Red River Rebellion, meeting in a sit-down wiki-up with the great Sitting Bull himself, single-handedly taming the Klondike and fighting a half a thousand Boers over in Boerland.”
He was a story?
I tried very hard to swallow that.
It went down like a mouth full of fresh frozen octopus.
“Is that true?” I asked the tall man.
The tall man snorted in amusement.
“Most of it is true,” he told me. “Not all of it, you understand, but the gist of it is mostly true – if you squint at it awful fearsome and hold your mouth just a little to the left.”
“In certain parts of Canada,” Coyote went on. “Sam’s actual stories have grown to a near mythic stature – thanks to a handful of novels and a half a thousand newspaper articles and a movie or two and campfire tales and once even a CBC minute vignette commercial.”
“They even named a mountain after Old Sam,” Bigfoot said. “That’s more than I can say about me.”
“They got it wrong, though,” the ghost of Sam Steele said. “Mount Steele is actually only Canada’s FIFTH tallest mountain. The way I see it they ought to have saved the tallest peak for hanging the name of Steele upon.”
“It only stands to reason,” Bigfoot said wryly. “I expect it must have been nothing more than an oversight.”
“That’s one more way that a story can be born into this world,” Coyote further elaborated. “After Sam’s adventures had been told and retold and inevitably exaggerated upon, his legend had slowly taken form and his ghost rose up and eventually assumed control of the Spiritual Operations Branch – otherwise known as the SOB’s. The three of us – me, Coyote and Winnie are part of their tactical branch – otherwise known as the Creep Squad.”
“Sometimes known as the Canadian Creep Squad,” Bigfoot added. “Not that there is actually an American Creep Squad.”
“We’re unique,” Coyote said.
“Actually, it is only known as the Creep Squad by those small-minded folk who don’t have any sort of a sense of ceremonious propriety,” the ghost of Sam Steele replied.
“Which makes Sam my boss of the Creep Squad,” Bigfoot said. “Which makes him the fellow that I sometimes have to listen to.”
“That and a generous helping of intelligence coupled with manly good looks,” the ghost of Sam Steele added. “As far as I can tell I am a natural-born leader – but enough about me. Why don’t you tell me what the problem is?”
Coyote and Bigfoot told the ghost of Sam Steele everything that had happened.
They told him about the Spirit Bear and Raven and the mauling of my stepdad Warren.
The whole thing didn’t sound any more plausible than it had while I was actually experiencing the entire sequence of events.
“What do you think, Prophet?” the ghost of Sam Steele asked the travel home. “Do you think that you can actually track the Raven?”
“Might be I can,” the Prophet replied. “But I would need a whiff of his scent.”
“Be a good boy and go get that for me – now would you Fuzzy?” Sam Steele asked Bigfoot.
I did my best not to chuckle over his use of Fuzzy.
Bigfoot stepped back outside of the giant pink Winnebago.
“Are you coming?” he asked the Coyote.
“I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Coyote said. “But somebody had better stay close to the kid, just to be safe.”
By “kid” he meant me.
I didn’t like the sound of them using that word “kid” but there really didn’t seem to be much I could do to correct it.
“Allow me,” the ghost of Sam Steele said.
Before I could say anything like “No” or “Let me think about this.” or “I want an adult.” or “I think I hear my mother calling me” the ghost of Sam Steele picked me up by the scruff of my Batman backpack and unceremoniously carried me on outside the motor home quicker than you say “Quick, to the Batmobile, Robin.”
“Remain calm, boy. You have just been duly apprehended,” Sam Steele said. “Kindly restrain yourself – or I will have to do it for you.”
He was being awfully polite for a jerk, I thought.
“I liked you a whole lot better when you were just being a Mountie ghost walking through stray coyotes,” I said. “Do you think maybe now you might want to put me down?”
“What makes you think I will do anything of that sort?” Sam Steele asked.
“Well, for starters, I might cry a whole lot and that might hurt your ears,” I said. “Not to mention how hard it is to get tear stains and snot streaks from off of red serge.”
Sam Steele chuckled softly to himself and then he dropped me down in the dirt, almost directly beside the dead bear.
Which was right about the moment when that dead bear opened his eyes and stood back up on his feet and growled.
Mostly at me.