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So I just lay there looking up at what looked to me to be a totally-zombified back-from-the-dead ursoid Spirit Bear – standing directly in front of me so close to my nose that I could smell the deep-crusted toe jam percolating nastily between the claws of his bottom feet.
“Hey bear - don’t you know when you’re supposed to be dead?” Bigfoot warned. “Am I really going to have to knock you back down again?”
The bear didn’t look nearly as lively as it had before. It had turned a distinct shade of blue – like that funky old blue Gorgonzola cheese that my Great Uncle Wilbert used to like crammed in between slices of burnt pumpernickel toast. The bear’s eyes had gone all flat and dark, like a sheet of slate after it had been rained on for about a dozen years – and then maybe dipped in black paint.
The bear shambled over towards us.
“There is just no way that he should be up and walking,” Coyote said. “Not after a hit like that from a fully-grown Bigfoot.”
Bigfoot growled a little.
“It might be that you’re losing your edge, Old Fuzzy,” Sam Steele taunted, drawing his pistol. “Not being able to knock down a Spirit Bear. They say that’s the first thing to go in a Bigfoot – is his punch. Do you want me to maybe shoot him a few times and maybe soften him up a little bit before you try again?”
“Yes!” I frantically shouted. “Will somebody please just freaking shoot this big ugly zombie bear before he eats me?”
It lumbered a little closer.
“He isn’t a Zombie Bear,” Coyote corrected. “He’s actually a Spirit Bear. They’re a whole lot more trouble than Zombie Bears. Killing Zombie Bears is easy. You just shoot him in the head or use a flamethrower on him or else read the poetry of Stephen Vincent Benet.”
Sam Steele took careful aim with his cannon-sized pistol.
“Zombie or Spirit Bear,” Sam Steele said. “I can nail him colder than a fresh frozen flounder if you like.”
Bigfoot just stood there and laughed.
“You’ve been firing blanks for way too many years, old man,” Bigfoot said. “You put that big old pistol away before your hurt yourself with it.”
“Well the way you hit him sure didn’t put him under,” Sam Steele pointed out. “I don’t imagine me shooting him could do any worse of a job.”
I could not imagine that I was going to die in the middle of a debate between a Sasquatch and the ghost of a retired Mountie.
“Well, I just guess I’ll have to hit him again until it sticks,” Bigfoot said.
That bear was getting closer.
“Somebody please hit him then,” I begged. “Somebody PLEASE just freaking hit him right now.”
If somebody didn’t hit somebody soon my next home was going to be inside that Spirit Bear’s stomach – and I wasn’t looking forward to that whole experience. I wondered if the Prophet was intending to cocoon me up just the same as Warren – or else maybe they were just figuring on wrapping the two of us up together in the very same cocoon.
“You just don’t know what’s good for you, now do you – you dirty old Spirit Bear?” Bigfoot asked. “Trying to scare a little boy like that is apt to get me irritated.”
That did it.
“Trying?” I shouted. “What makes you think he is TRYING to scare me? He is freaking well succeeded in terrifying the living bejeepers out of me.”
By now everybody was laughing.
Bigfoot, Coyote, Prophet – even the Ghost of Sam Steele seemed to think the idea of that big Spirit Bear eating me was funnier than a polka-dot barrel full of drunken howler monkeys. As for me - I was still working on getting used to hearing an eight foot tall dust bunny with teeth talk out loud the way that Bigfoot was doing – much less listening to him laugh at me.
The Spirit Bear just growled a low wet slobberish sort of growl.
Or it might have been a chuckle.
“Oh go ahead,” I told the Spirit Bear. “I give up. I surrender. Just eat me and put me out of misery why don’t you?”
Bigfoot ignored my attempted surrender; bending over and picking up a boulder about the size of a good sized stand-up television set.
“Do you want to play catch, bear?” Bigfoot asked. “Is that what you want?”
The Spirit Bear kept walking up towards us.
I could hear great black wings beating darkly with every step that the Spirit Bear took towards me.
Bigfoot just stood there and waited with that television set sized boulder poised over his big shaggy head.
The Spirit Bear took two more steps closer.
And then Bigfoot dropped that big television set sized boulder so that it bounced and landed on the Spirit Bear’s two big sized feet.
The Spirit Bear opened its mouth and roared in sudden unexpected pain.
“I saw a waiter in a movie do this once with a tablecloth and a dining room table full of fancy high tea fancy china,” Bigfoot said as he reached out his right hand and crammed it fist-first directly inside of the Spirit Bear’s wide open mouth. He caught hold of something inside that mouth that might have been a jawbone or maybe a set of tonsils or maybe even the inside-end of the bear’s unwashed pooper-hole. Then Bigfoot reached out his left hand and caught the Spirit Bear by the throat and then he yanked that big old Spirit Bear inside-out.
“Smooth move,” the ghost of Sam Steele complimented. “Did you practice that maneuver much or was it just dumb beginner’s luck?”
“I think it was a little bit of both,” Coyote said. “With the emphasis on dumb.”
“You just sit there and take notes, kid,” the ghost of Sam Steele said to me. “You can tell your grandchildren about what you saw today – assuming you live that long.”
Which wasn’t exactly that comforting of a phrase to hear.
“I always wanted to try it for myself,” Bigfoot went on – like he was talking about a particular card trick he had just recently mastered. “I’m glad I finally got the chance to try it.”
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was like something that you would see in a Saturday morning cartoon – only this time it was happening for real.
What came out of that Spirit Bear’s mouth was a little like a tangle of blood and guts and smoke. It blew away in Bigfoot’s big hairy hand like the smoke from a half a hundred birthday candles, Thick and cloudy and then gone all at once.
Bigfoot picked up what was left of the spirit bear’s skin.
He gave the spirit bear skin a big old sniff.
“Do you even smell anything?” Coyote asked. “Or are you just blowing your nose out of pure blue-eyed spite?”
Bigfoot shook his head.
“We’re going to need a better nose than I’ve got,” Bigfoot said.
Coyote sniffed the dead spirit bear skin as well.
“I got nothing,” Coyote said.
“I know that,” Bigfoot said, jerking a thumb in my direction. “In fact the kid knows that. You got nothing, you’ll never have nothing – heck you were most likely BORN with nothing and you’ve been slipping into the negative zeroes ever since – even the dead bear knows that much. There’s no real reason to go bragging about it.”
Coyote stuck his tongue out at Bigfoot – who pointedly ignored him.
“How about you, Winnie?” Bigfoot asked, holding the skin of the Spirit Bear directly beneath the Prophet’s bumper. “It was your idea to hunt for scent in the first place.”
Only the Prophet couldn’t find anything either.
Bigfoot turned to look at me.
“Do you want to sniff it too?” he asked, holding what was left of the spirit bear’s pelt in my general direction. “No sense you feeling left out.”
I just looked away.
I didn’t even want to see that Spirit Bear pelt, much less smell it.
“I didn’t think so,” Bigfoot said, stepping right over me and walking back towards the alder Winnebago. “Bring the kid, would you?”
“I can walk on my own,” I said, before Coyote could pick me up again.
“See that you don’t trip over your own two feet,” Bigfoot said before walking back into the Prophet. “Or I’ll drop a rock on them too.”
“I don’t think he likes me,” I confided to the Coyote.
“Bigfoot doesn’t much care for anyone that he meets,” Coyote allowed. “Being the last of the Sasquatch will make a fellow more than just a little stand-offish.”
Coyote and I stepped back into the Winnebago.
“Strap your seatbelts on,” Bigfoot ordered, sitting down at the steering wheel. “I already know that Winnie can’t tell us anything either.”
“I heard you say that,” the Prophet complained.
“So what?” Bigfoot asked.
“Friends don’t insult other friends,” the Prophet said.
“Who said that I was your friend, Winnie?” Bigfoot asked. “I’m just the guy sitting behind the steering wheel.”
The Prophet said nothing.
I’m not sure – but I’m pretty sure that giant pink mystical travel home was about to have himself a long and proper sulk.
“What about Sam?” I asked.
“He can find his own way home,” Bigfoot said.
And sure enough – when I looked back at the forest the Ghost of Sam Steele had already vanished into the shadowy darkness.
“Ghosts do that,” Bigfoot said. “It is a part of their union rules.”
Ghosts have unions?
“So are we going to visit the Old Man?” Coyote asked.
“I thought we just did?” I said, still thinking about the ghost of Sam Steele.
“Not that Old Man. We’re talking about Nanna Bijou,” Coyote said to me – as if I had to be seventeen kinds of foolish to not know just who or what they were talking about. “So are we going to call on the Old Man?”
Bigfoot smiled a great big how-stupid-a-question-was-that sort of grin in reply to Coyote’s question.
“So who else are we going to call?” Bigfoot asked. “The freaking Ghostbusters?”
I shrugged.
“Let’s roll,” Coyote said.
And that’s just exactly what we did.
We rolled – right onto the High Highway.