Stranger in the Woods

Zach walked his bike around to the front of his house where his friends waited for him, all three of them astride their own two wheelers. Zach’s mother stood on the porch and called to him with a wave of one hand. “Don’t stay too long, okay? I’ll worry about you. If you get lost in the forest, I’ll never be able to find you.”

Zach grumbled to himself as he rolled across the grass near the steps. I wish you wouldn’t do that in front of my friends. “How long can I stay?”

“Try to be back by five o’clock.”

“How am I supposed to know when that is?”

She held something up, black and slender, that dangled from her fingers. “I thought you could take your father’s watch.”

“Really? His good one?”

“Not his gold one, his sports watch.”

“And I can wear it? Awesome!” He dropped his bike on its side and bounded up the steps to join her. She handed the watch to him and he wrapped the band around his wrist and fumbled with the clasp. “How do I do this?”

“I’ll show you.” She deftly adjusted it and cinched it closed, then patted his arm and said, “There you go. It’s still set to the correct time, so you have no excuse for being late.”

“Cool,” he murmured as he admired the timepiece. “What do all these little buttons do?”

“They change the modes and the settings, but I don’t know how to work them. Maybe when you get back you can find the user’s manual on the Internet and figure it out. It should be hooked up by then.”

“Hey, that’s right!” He turned to his friends, who still waited below. “We can play online games and stuff when we get back.”

“You got more than one computer?” Justin said.

“Only one regular one. My Mom has a laptop, but we can’t use it.”

“First dibs, then.”

“Second,” Jason said.

Shelby’s face fell. “What am I going to do?”

“You can watch TV,” Zach said. “That’ll be connected, too.”

His mother shook her head. “If you can’t play something that includes everybody, then don’t do it.”

“But Mom, we want to —”

“Don’t argue with me now. Be happy that I’m letting you go off in the forest today.”

“Fine.” He snorted and said, “We can all watch TV, then.” Zach hopped down the steps, mounted his bike, and he and his friends pedaled across the lawn.

“Where’s Beepee?” Shelby said.

“Grandpa said she can’t go with us because she might run off and get lost.”

“We don’t want to look after her, anyway,” Justin said as they turned onto the sidewalk. “We got work to do.”

Zach maneuvered his bike closer to Justin and lowered his voice. “Did you get the you-know-what from my garbage bin?”

“Last night, right before dark. We hid it in the bushes around the corner so our mama wouldn’t know about it.”

They passed a pair of houses and Justin pointed at the gap between them. “If we were walking we’d cut through there. Can’t do it on our bikes ’cause we gotta jump a fence.”

Zach realized that it was the same spot where he’d first seen them, when they’d been shooting at each other with their BB guns. “How far is it?”

“To the woods?” Justin said. “Not far at all.”

They turned left at the next street and Jason led them to a clump of overgrown azaleas near the corner. He dismounted, knelt beside the dense shrubs, and withdrew a white plastic garbage bag from underneath them. He started to pull the bow saw out of it, but Zach said, “Leave it in it, in case anybody sees us.”

“Who’s gonna care?”

“I don’t know. Just do it anyway.”

Jason got back on his bike with the bag dangling from one hand and they resumed their journey. They soon turned left again and rode past more houses like Zach’s, spooky old Victorian behemoths, and then they took a right onto a street that stopped abruptly after the fourth home. The end of the road was blocked by a narrow wooden barricade that extended from curb to curb, with red reflectors set at even intervals along its length. Beyond it was an ocean of trees that stretched as far as Zach could see.

“This is it?” he said as they neared it. “This is the national forest?”

“There’s a fancier entrance a few miles away,” Justin said, “with a new visitors’ center and walking trails and stuff. We never go there. It’s for tourists, mostly.”

Zach tailed the Ross kids as they steered their bikes around the barricade, barely slowing their pace, and they pedaled onto the dirt path that followed. They were immediately swallowed by the woods, with trees scarcely an arm’s reach away. The air turned cooler and darker, and smelled sharply of pine.

The riding was more difficult over the bare ground, every root and rock jarring Zach’s bones and making his jaw clatter.

“How much farther?” Zach said between gasping breaths.

“It’s close,” Jason said over his shoulder. “We’ll have to ditch our bikes soon and walk the rest of the way.”

They rode in single file up a gradual rise, the path narrower and strewn with more rocks and thick roots that made Zach’s bike rattle, and the muscles in his legs began to burn. He pedaled after the others without complaining, though he wanted to. The Ross kids didn’t seem to be bothered by the arduous terrain, even skinny little Shelby. He gritted his teeth and focused on her back as they chased after the twins.

They crested the ridge and coasted downhill for a short distance before Jason suddenly swerved to his left off the trail, and the rest of them followed. They stopped and Jason dismounted with the bag in one hand and said, “We stash ’em back here, where nobody can see ’em.” He pushed his bike behind a dense thicket, and his brother and sister did the same.

“Are you sure they’ll be safe?” Zach said. “What if somebody steals them?”

“You can’t see ’em, for one thing,” Justin said, “and hardly anybody ever comes this way.”

“Uncle Marty does sometimes,” Shelby said, “when he’s hunting on the sly.”

Zach lowered his brow. “Is he…are there hunters out now? What if we get shot?”

“Ain’t the season,” Jason said, “and Uncle Marty’s in Chattanooga, according to Mama. Ain’t nobody gonna shoot us.”

Zach wasn’t convinced, but he pushed his bike in behind the others anyway. They returned to the path and continued their trek on foot. The going was more difficult, twisting and climbing, sometimes over short, steep places, where they had to hold on to saplings or exposed roots to pull themselves up over boulders.

“What do you do when it rains?” Zach said, bringing up the rear. “Doesn’t the footing get bad?”

“We stay home,” Jason said. “Last summer we got caught out here in a freak storm, with hail and everything, and we had to beat it back to the house in a hurry. Shelby slipped and hurt her knee.”

“Is it going to rain today?”

“We checked the weather on the TV before we left. Supposed to pour tomorrow.”

After about five minutes of hiking over the rough, narrow trail, Jason led them off the path and over a steep, granite knoll. Zach was last again, following Shelby, careful to step where she stepped. If I slip, it’ll hurt. Shelby didn’t hesitate, and followed her brothers with the confidence that must’ve come from experience.

They crested the rocky mound and paused at the top. Jason gestured with one hand and said, “This is it.”

They faced a small clearing. At the back of it was a ramshackle tumble of something, Zach wasn’t sure what. It reminded him of a crude shelter a homeless person might’ve started building and then abandoned.

“This is our clubhouse,” Jason said proudly. “Or it’s gonna be, soon as we finish.”

Zach followed them down to it and got a closer look. It consisted of two pine trees, growing about ten feet apart, with a few long branches and a couple of boards nailed across them to make the beginnings of a wall that only reached Zach’s knees. Another tree made up the back left corner, and a few more limbs were attached to that. The right corner was an old landscape timber set upright in a hole in the ground, and it appeared unstable, as if a hearty gust of wind might topple it. Justin pointed at it and said, “That was hard to get here. We had to carry it the whole way.”

“Oh,” Zach said, trying to hide his disappointment. “Where’d you get it?”

“We found it in our neighbor’s trash. They set it out by the street, so we took it. Same with these other boards. Whenever somebody throws out something good, we nab it and bring it out here.”

“How’d you dig the hole?”

“With a shovel, how else? We brought ours from the house, but we broke the handle and Mama got mad.”

“We didn’t break the handle.” Shelby stabbed a finger at him. “You did. But we all got punished.”

“It was for a good cause.”

Jason nudged Zach’s arm and said, “So, what do you think? Pretty cool, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Zach lied. “It’s cool. Um…needs some work, though.”

“Well, sure. That’s why we brought you out here. We figure with you helping us, we can finish in a week or so. ’Specially now that we got a saw. We need that to cut the wood.”

“We can’t keep it out here,” Zach said. “My Mom won’t like it.”

“We won’t need it every day. We can cut a whole bunch of branches and stuff right now, and that oughta last us a good while.”

“But we’ve used up all the good wood around here,” Justin said, “so we gotta go out lookin’ in the woods and find some more.”

“How big do the branches need to be?”

“Look here.” Jason pointed at the front wall. “They gotta be about this long.”

Zach fingered his lip and studied the rough structure. “Where’s the door going to be?”

“We thought we’d dig a hole and make a tunnel, then cover it with branches and pine straw and stuff. Then it would be like a secret entrance.”

“Won’t it get full of water when it rains?”

“Um….” Jason turned to his brother, who only shrugged.

“I told them that,” Shelby said, “but they wouldn’t listen.”

Zach considered the problem briefly. “Maybe my Grandpa can tell us how to make a door for it.”

Justin shook his head. “You can’t tell him what it’s for. You can’t tell nobody. It’s a secret.” He dipped his chin on the last word for emphasis.

“I’ll think of a way to ask him without giving it away. How are you attaching the wood for the walls to the trees and the post?”

“With really big nails,” Jason said, “’Cept we run out. We’re gonna buy some more with the money your mom paid us. We got a hammer stashed in a plastic bag in the back corner, hidden under some pine straw.”

“Mama’s mad about that, too,” Shelby said.

Jason ignored her. “We’ll buy more stuff besides nails if we have any cash left. We’re trying to get Shelby to kick in some of her money, but she’s being stubborn.”

“I’m saving mine,” Shelby said. “I’m buying new clothes for school.”

“School don’t start for nearly two months.”

“I’m still not giving you any of my money, so stop asking.”

“So where do we go to get more wood for this thing?” Zach said.

“Farther down the trail, more than likely,” Jason said. “We haven’t been out here since the last storm. There’s always lots of branches lyin’ around, then.”

They climbed the granite hill and returned to the track that they’d followed before, and set off in single file, Zach in the rear, carrying the saw in one hand. They walked for about five minutes before Zach said, “Are you sure we’re going to find wood in this direction?”

“Bound to be some out here, somewhere,” Justin said. “But we don’t come this way, much.”

Soon they passed through an area where the growth thinned and the ground was mostly flat rock, and gradually began to slope downhill. Zach heard the sound of rushing water and they came upon a stream, twice as wide as his driveway and strewn with large rocks, some as big as beach balls, and the banks were lined with ferns and bushes. “This is kinda cool,” Zach said.

“It goes all the way to the river, eventually.” Jason said. “It curves around and gets a lot wider and deeper farther on. And there really is a tree that fell across it. We didn’t lie about that.” He led them a short distance to a huge oak that lay on its side over the water, stretching from bank to bank. He jumped up on it and turned to Zach. “See? We use it as a bridge.”

Zach eyed it dubiously while Jason’s siblings joined him and began to cross. “Uh…what if you slip and fall in the water, or on a rock?”

“We won’t. It’s easy.” Justin said without looking back. “Even Shelby can do it.” Shelby trailed her brothers with her eyes on the trunk and her arms out like wings.

I guess I don’t have any choice. Zach boosted himself up and began to follow them. His pulse raced while he kept his gaze firmly on his feet, convinced that he would lose his footing at any moment and tumble into the rocky cataract below.

Somehow he made it to the other side where the others waited for him, and he breathed a sigh of relief. “How are we going to carry the branches when we cross back?” Zach asked. “We gotta walk on the tree again?”

“We’ll hold ’em out sideways,” Jason said. “They’ll help with our balance.”

“Like a high-wire walker in the circus?”

“Don’t know. Never seen one.”

Zach had. Twice, with his parents. Zach was beginning to suspect that he’d experienced many things that these kids had not. He realized that compared to them, he’d led a privileged life. Then he remembered that his father was dead, and he didn’t feel so lucky. But their father is in prison. They’re not lucky, either.

Zach heard a sound coming from the trail behind them. “What was that?” He stopped and turned, looking back the way they’d come. “Did you hear something?”

“Hear what?” Jason said, and slowed with the others.

“Sounded like a growl or a grunt.”

Justin wrinkled his brow. “I don’t hear nothin’.”

Zach saw movement between the trees, something big and black, coming their way. “Uh…guys? You see it?”

“What is it?” Shelby said.

It came into full view in the distance. It was a huge animal, black and muscular, walking directly toward them on all fours. “It’s a bear!” Zach cried. “Run!” They sprinted down the narrow trail and Zach glanced over his shoulder to see the brute loping after them. Zach flung the saw away and pumped his arms and legs as fast as he could, heedless of the roots and rocks at his feet. The others raced ahead of him, Shelby keeping up with her desperate brothers and Zach following her.

Their frantic attempt at escape took them downhill, and the trail began to cut between rock and brush that formed a V-shaped gulley.

Zach chanced another backward look and found the bear gaining on them, quickly. He’s going to catch us! He ran with everything he had, his heart pounding, following his fleeing friends down the deepening slash in the terrain, the walls of the ravine hemming them in and funneling them in the only direction they could go — downhill. A roar behind them sent them into a higher gear, and the foliage blurred past them.

Without warning, Jason, who was in the lead, jerked to a halt, his body upright and his arms flailing to keep his balance. The others stopped beside him and Zach reached them in a split-second. “Keep going!” Zach said.

Then he saw why they’d stopped. The path fell away into the creek, which was forty feet below and full of boulders directly beneath them. He shouted, “Jump!”

“It’ll kill us!” Jason said.

Zach spun and saw the bear racing toward them. “So will he!”

They were trapped. They couldn’t go left or right because the land rose steeply on both sides, and it would slow them enough for the bear to catch them, easily. They couldn’t go forward because of the creek and the rocks, and they definitely couldn’t go back. The monster was nearly upon them.

Out of nowhere, a figure leaped into the animal’s path and stood erect, a man, the biggest Zach had ever seen. He faced the bear and extended his hand, palm out, signaling for it to stop.

It skidded with its paws scrabbling across the hard ground, and came to an abrupt halt a few feet from the stranger. The man stood motionless, staring steadfastly at the black mass of muscle and claws, unflinching and unyielding. That guy is crazy. The bear is going to kill him.

The animal chuffed—a thick, agitated sound—and bared a vicious-looking set of yellowish-white teeth.

The stranger held his ground.

Finally, after several long seconds, the bear chuffed again with a flick of its head and began to climb the slope on Zach’s left, its claws finding purchase on the steep ground and its enormous shoulders bulging as it pulled itself up. Zach watched, mesmerized, until it disappeared over the top of the ridge, and he realized his mouth was wide open and his heart was fluttering as if it had wings and was trying to fly from his chest.

The huge man turned to face them and Zach got his first good look at him. He was broad at the shoulders and dressed in rough clothes. His hair was white-blond, short and sticking out in spikes. His face had high cheekbones and it curved to form a triangle at his jaw. His ears were unusual, sweeping up in the back, but not quite pointed. His most striking feature — his eyes. They were large and wide apart, and so blue they appeared to glow. He held Zach and his friends transfixed with his neon gaze, and after several seconds he gestured with one arm at the trail behind him. “Go,” he said in a deep, resonant voice. “You are safe.”

He started to turn away, but paused and looked directly at them again. “Tell no one.” Then he leaped onto the slope and followed the bear, climbing effortlessly, and vanished in an instant.

Zach and the others stared after him with stunned expressions. The only sound came from the rushing water, until Zach heard a faint phssh, and he saw Shelby sticking her inhaler back in her pocket.

Jason jerked his thumb toward the trail. “Let’s get out of here.”

Zach barely noticed the white van from the telephone company in the driveway when he and his friends raced into his yard and jumped from their bikes, letting them fall onto the grass. They ran up the front steps, rushed inside, and slammed the door behind them. “Let’s go to my room,” Zach said and started up the stairs.

“Zach?” his mother called from the kitchen. “Are you home already?”

He paused on the fifth step with his friends clustered behind him. “We got bored. We’re gonna hang out in my room for a little bit.”

She appeared in the short hallway with a red bandana wrapped around her head and looked up at him. “Don’t you want to watch TV? The cable’s hooked up.”

“Really? You haven’t been able to watch TV much all week.”

“We’re going to play cards for a while until the phone guy leaves.”

“Don’t you want to play in the kitchen so you can use the table?”

He gave her a tight-lipped glare and she threw up one hand. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll make some lemonade if you want some.”

“Yeah, sure. Lemonade. Let us know when it’s ready.”

He started to walk up again and she said, “How about a snack? You kids must be hungry. I’ve got some cookie dough in the refrigerator, so I can whip some up really fast, or I can—”

“Mom. Stop, will you?”

“I want some cookies,” Jason said from behind him.

Justin nodded. “Me, too.”

“Sure.” Zach pushed his fingers through his hair. “Anybody else?” Shelby held up a meek hand and he sighed. ‘Okay, you, too. Cookies would be great, Mom.” He motioned to his friends. “Let’s go.”

“Hold on,” his mother said. “I need you to set up the computer in the family room when you get a chance. It’s still in a box underneath the desk in there.”

“Later, please? We’re busy right now.”

He started to go again and she said, “Aren’t you forgetting something.”

“What now?” he growled through his teeth.

“The cards? They’re in the cabinet drawer under the coffee maker. I’ll get them for you.”

She went into the kitchen and Zach whispered to his friends, “Can you guys cool it for a minute or two?”

“She offered us cookies,” Jason said. “It’s polite to accept.”

“We don’t hardly ever get ’em at our house,” Justin said.

Zach’s mother returned with a box of playing cards, and Zach took them and led his friends up to his room. Once inside, he closed the door and said, “What was that all about back there in the woods?”

“I dunno. Never seen nothin’ like that.” Jason shook his head firmly. “Did you see that guy? He was huge!”

“And his eyes and hair,” Justin said. “Freaky. Looked like a rock star or something. A big one.”

“I think he’s an elf,” Shelby said.

“What?” all of the boys said in unison.

“He’s an elf. Did you see his ears? And he has some kind of magical power over animals.”

“There’s no doubt about that part,” Jason said. “Did you see what he did? He put his hand out and that bear stopped dead in his tracks, like he was about to hit a wall or something. That man didn’t even say a word! He just stuck that hand out, and boom.”

“You guys have never seen him before?” Zach said.

“’Course not. Never seen a bear, either.”

“You’re way more likely to see a bear than a giant elf, or whatever he is.”

Justin scratched his chin with a thumbnail. “Maybe he’s like that Bigfoot that people talk about. There’s supposedly one that lives out in the forest, according to Uncle Marty. The Bigfoot of the Nantahala, who’s also called the white giant or something like that.”

Shelby curled one corner of her lip. “Uncle Marty says all kinds of crazy things. That’s because he does drugs. Besides, Bigfoot is supposed to be all hairy, isn’t he?”

“Maybe we could find out more on the Internet,” Jason said.

“I’m gonna tell my mom we changed our minds about the cards.” Zach opened his door. “Let’s go hook up the computer.”

The family room, which used to be the sitting room, was in the back corner of the house, and like all of the rooms, it was large, with high ceilings and tall windows. It didn’t seem so creepy, Zach thought, with his family’s furniture in it instead of the haunted-house antiques that were there before, but it still had old, ugly carpet, and the walls were painted dark gray.

This was where his mother had decided to put the television and the big computer, which had its own desk in the corner. After setting it up, Zach’s friends crowded around it while he tapped at the keyboard.

Jason pointed over Zach’s shoulder at the monitor. “Look. Cherokee County, that’s us. Five sightings of Bigfoot.”

Zach pointed, too. “But see here? That’s over a ten-year period. That’s not very many.”

Shelby crossed her arms and frowned at the image on the display. “That looks like a man in a gorilla suit. The man we saw today didn’t look anything like that.”

Justin fingered the scar on his forehead while he regarded the web page. “I didn’t know there were that many different names for it. Must be a hundred, at least.”

“Nuk-Luk.” Jason chuckled. “I like that one.”

“Stink Man.” Zach nodded. “That’s a good one, though I wouldn’t say that to his face.”

“I wouldn’t say anything but yes sir and no sir to him,” Justin said. “Or goodbye, as I’m running away.”

“He wouldn’t hurt us,” Shelby said. “He saved our lives.”

“I still wouldn’t call him Stink Man.”

“He didn’t look stinky,” Shelby said. “He looked clean.”

“He looked kinda like an Indian,” Zach said, “in the face, with those cheekbones. Don’t you think?”

“Indians don’t have blond hair and blue eyes,” Jason said. “We see some of ’em around once in a while. The Cherokee reservation’s not that far from here.”

“We passed by it on the way to Maggie Valley,” Shelby said. “Daddy took us up there on a trip, once, before he got locked up.”

The mood around the computer desk suddenly turned glum after the mention of their father. Zach could feel it, like a wet blanket had been thrown over their collective shoulders, and everyone turned quiet for a long moment. “Come on,” Zach said to his friends. “Let’s go see if my mom’s got the cookies ready.”

Zach sat in bed that night with his book closed beside him, thinking about the day’s adventure. He replayed the events in his mind, trying to understand what had happened, but the sense of it eluded him like trying to understand a dream. The blond-haired man was a mystery unlike anything Zach had ever experienced. He was so big, Zach remembered clearly. The man’s blue eyes had seared an impression on Zach that he would never forget.

Why did he say to tell no one? Zach and his friends had tried to puzzle it out, and had finally decided that he must be some kind of fugitive, hiding from the law. The thought gave Zach a little thrill, like they had their own special secret, even more special than the clubhouse, and each of them vowed solemnly to honor the giant’s command.

During dinner, Zach had carefully sidestepped questions from his mother and grandfather about his trip into the woods, answering with non-committal shrugs as much as he could. “It was okay,” he told them, and they eventually stopped asking and turned the conversation to other things. He managed to make it to bed without having to explain what really happened.

It sure was a weird day, though. Zach stared at his lap, recalling his first look at the ramshackle clubhouse, and how proud his friends were of it. Then the hike through the woods in search of more wood and the first glimpse of the bear, then the frantic dash down the trail, Zach throwing the saw away so that he could run faster, and…the saw!

We left it out there. His heart began to race as he realized how much trouble he was in. Mom’s going to kill me! He swung his legs over the side of his bed, ready to get up. I gotta bring it back.

But he couldn’t, it was dark outside, and even if it wasn’t, he had no idea where it was. We’ll never find it. He flopped down across the sheets and put his hands over his face. I’m dead. Mom’s going to ground me for the rest of the summer and I’ll never get to see my friends. They’re the only friends I have. I’ll start school as a total loner.

He smacked the bed with both fists.

Zach didn’t sleep well. It took forever for him to finally drift off, and then he was troubled by vivid nightmares of a giant bear, and running through the woods, slipping, falling, desperate, the monster gaining on him. Biting at his heels with horrible fangs. At one point he jerked awake, panting and covered with sweat. He sat upright for a long time until his heart rate slowed.