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By the time I had finished telling the story of how I had first met Bigfoot and Coyote, Bigfoot had grown himself a brand new body and the stumps of his legs and arms.
Now mind you they did not exactly LOOK like legs and arms. They looked more like those stubby little eyes that grow on a potato if you leave it for too long in the cupboard, until it begins to sprout.
“Just keep on talking,” Bigfoot encouraged. “Keep on telling.”
I kept thinking about all of those stories that my stepdad Warren had tried to tell me and I kept wishing that I had actually listened to a few of them – but I kept on telling my stories just as hard as I could manage to.
I told about how Bigfoot had managed to single-handedly capture and granny knot the mighty Great Lake Dragons. I told how he had subdued Nanna Bijou and had compelled him to tell Bigfoot just exactly how we could track down Raven. I told how Bigfoot had managed to take Old Shuck down in two out of three falls without a bit of help from either myself, The Prophet, or Coyote.
Oh sure, I was exaggerating in places and I was outright lying in other places but none of the lying and exaggerating really mattered at all - because when it came right down to it I was doing just exactly what every storyteller in the world has ever done before me.
I was stretching the truth and making it shine just a little bit brighter.
Embellishing, some folks would call it.
Others might say I was falsifying data.
Some might even call it lying.
Why not?
Stephen King gets paid ALL kinds of money to make stuff up like this.
So do some politicians that I have heard some grown-ups I know talking about.
I had always hated English class – ESPECIALLY The creative writing part of it. Back then I had always thought that writing and telling stories was stupid and dumb and boring – but now I could see there was a real point behind it and not only that – but it was really kind of fun.
Why shouldn’t I try and make use of my flexible rubber imagination and my ability to make things up to help myself and to help my friends and to help me get the heck out of this funky old raven cave?
So I kept on telling my homemade Bigfoot story right on up to this point that you are hearing right now – and then, when I had run out of road to run on I started to make stories up. I told Bigfoot a story of how he had beaten King Kong himself in an arm wrestling match, thanks to a little trick that Coyote had pulled off involving a feather duster, some sneezing powder, a banana and a rubber chicken.
Then I told how Bigfoot had created the Northern Lights using nothing but a slide projector, some colored cellophane and a half a dozen tins of paint that he had peeled from off of an abandoned church in the wrong end of a British Columbia ghost town directly after he had finished beating up all of the ghost town’s ghosts.
I was halfway through a story involving Bigfoot, Ogopogo, Superman and Hulk Hogan – and I really wasn’t sure just where I was going to go with a cast as varied as that one – when Bigfoot stood back on up. He looked a little wobbly and some parts of his arms and legs still seemed to be growing and I wasn’t really certain if I had got the color right in his fur – but he stood up just the same.
“It’s really good to see you,” I said. “I was afraid that you were going to quit while you were a head.”
“It’s good to see you,” Bigfoot replied. “But I knew that you would come through for me in a pinch.”
“You never doubted did you?” I said. “After all, I am a storyteller.”
I was thinking of Warren when I said that.
I was thinking about all of the stories that he had told me in the few years that I had known him. I was thinking about how much of himself he put into those stories and how much of those stories he had kept trying to put into my thinking.
And all I could do for him was to turn away and make fun of him and do my very best not to listen.
How stupid could I have ever been?
I made a promise to myself – there in the heart of the Labrador Cave of Tears – that I was going to get that Warren cocoon back from Raven and I was going to sit down and tell Warren’s stories back to him to show him that I had been listening all along. I was going to tell stories to that Warren cocoon until the cows came home and gave milk and then jumped into a meat grinder and made hamburgers out of themselves.
It was a promise.
It was a promise that I swore that I was going to keep.
“So how do we get out of here?” I asked Bigfoot. “I’ve got some deep meaningful Raven payback to grab hold of.”
“You’re starting to really dislike that bird fellow, aren’t you?” Coyote asked me.
“Dislike is a kind of a strong word to use,” I said. “Let’s just say that I intend to pluck him and put him into a pot full of noodles and then I will sing Hank Snow songs to him while he boils himself down into a bowl full of raven noodle soup.”
I had to grin at that.
As death threats go, it was pretty awesomely colorful.
“You tell a lot of good stories, kid,” Bigfoot said. “Now let me tell you how I am going to escape out of this cave.”
“I hope it isn’t going to be a long story,” I said. “Because I am feeling just a little bit impatient right about now.”
“It will be a real short story,” Bigfoot said, drawing his big right fist about six inches behind his big hairy right ear.
“It will start about here,” Bigfoot said. “About seven inches behind my right ear.”
“I could have sworn it was six inches,” I said.
“Don’t bother me with details or mathematics,” Bigfoot corrected. “My story starts here and it ends right about HERE!”
He leaned forward into a beautiful right cross that hit the closed-up mouth of the Raven’s Cave of Tears like a half a dozen nuclear missiles rolled into one.
“POW!!!” Bigfoot, Coyote and me shouted in unison – and there were not enough exclamation marks in the entire universe to punctuationally demonstrate the power and the impact of Bigfoot’s big right hand.
The mouth of the Raven’s Cave of Tears opened up and barfed out boulders and stones and pebbles and bat poop and cave beetles and them funky little lizards that sometimes crawl on the walls of a cave.
We stepped out into the daylight, blinking and squinting from the glare of the sudden sunshine and the dust that Bigfoot’s thunderous thump had stirred up.
He put his big hand against my chest.
“Hold on a minute,” Bigfoot said. “I need to make me a long-distance call.”
Then Bigfoot took three slow deliberate steps forward.
I watched as his eyes glazed over as if he was trying to squint hard into some sort of middle-distance sandstorm , trying hard to focus on something that wasn’t really there.
Then Bigfoot leaned back and he opened his mouth wide enough to swallow a medium sized steam roller. Then he took a great big deep breath and then he yelled about as loud of a yell as was humanly possible for a nine foot tall Sasquatch.
“RAVEN!!!”
The earth shook a little.
And then Bigfoot shouted again.
“COME HERE!!!!”
I saw a few trees lean just a tiny bit away from the shout.
And then he shouted a third time.
“I WANT YOU, NOW!!!!!”
The clouds shook a little in the sky.
I am pretty sure I actually might have heard a dozen or so black bears faint just a little, somewhere about three miles west of the Quebec/Ontario border line.
The sky clouded over.
It was almost as if I had blinked and while I was in mid-blink and wondering somebody had stolen that bright blue Labrador sky and then had replaced it with the promise of a thunderstorm, it had happened that fast.
I felt a slow chill creep down my backbone, winding up about halfway down my left little toe.
I blinked for real.
Somewhere in the middle of my mid-blink my Dad appeared.
Dad-not-Dad.