“You’re joking, right?” Two pairs of eyes whip my way, and the boy places a finger over his lips. Baby Bigfoot gives me a frown. “This is such a bad idea.” That announcement earns a sigh from the giant creature next to me.
“You do see all the guns lying around, right?” A massive furry hand drapes itself across my face, pressing against my mouth. “Mmno.” I pull her hand away, rubbing my sleeve over my lips. “When was the last time you washed your hands? Like ever?” I hiss.
We all three duck behind a fallen tree when the hunters in the clearing glance around. We are likely going to die out here, and I try not to think about the irony of it. Two men, both middle-aged, have set up a hunting camp. Two small tents sit near a dying fire, and they busy themselves with cleaning up their supper. They lock all their cooking supplies in the back of a pickup with two shiny new Yeti coolers sitting in the back of the bed. Again, more irony.
One man zips up the tents, while the other loads gear and guns onto the back of a four-wheeler. A few minutes later they leave, the rumble of the four-wheeler fading into the distance. We stay where we are until long after the sound fades. When Baby Bigfoot moves, the boy follows her. “What do you think you’re doing?” I blurt out when they leave. “We can’t just go into their camp!” Realizing they are completely ignoring me, I hurry after them.
The boy leaps in one smooth motion onto the back of the truck and flips open the Yeti lids like it’s nothing new. Baby Bigfoot is playing with the zipper on a tent. The boy pulls out water bottles and a plastic bag of fruit. I peer inside, noting he doesn’t touch anything that’s been processed. Deli meat, cheese, bread, he leaves it all. When he moves to the next cooler, he whistles. Baby Bigfoot strides over and, with a gasp that screams of humanity, pulls a severed deer head from the cooler. She holds it by the horns, staring into the lifeless eyes of what was a very impressive buck. Her thick fingers trace lines down its face, almost petting, and then with a frightening growl she turns and walks toward the forest.
“Where’s she going?”
He nods toward the trees, so I follow her. Not far from the camp, she kneels down and places the head beside her, carefully resting it against the trunk of a tree. Grabbing a fallen branch, she begins to dig into the soil at the base of the pine. Once the ground is broken up, she uses her hands, scooping great heaps of red dirt up from the ground to place in piles around her. I kneel beside her, put my hands in the hole, and dig. She watches me, but I focus on the dirt, pulling rocks and roots when I find them, until there is a hole the size of our kitchen stove between us. I’m pretty sure we just dug a grave.
Baby Bigfoot grunts, reaches for the head, and pauses. She stares at me, human eyes contemplative, and then hands me the remains. “You want me to do it?” Her gaze never wavers, so I place the buck’s head down into the ground.
I know it’s just a deer, like all the others Matt and Dad bring home every winter, but this feels different. She cares about this animal, even though it’s dead, even though she can’t bring it back. I blink furiously, knowing I’ll just get dirt all over my face if I have to wipe away tears. After adjusting the antlers until they are completely beneath the surface, I glance up for approval. She answers by pushing a mound of dirt back into the hole. A few minutes later there is nothing to show we were even there. Pine straw covers our footprints, and any of the dirt we didn’t get back into the hole.
Baby Bigfoot reaches up and pulls on a tree branch until it breaks enough that she can bend it. After tearing off the small branches at the end, she angles it down toward the ground and pushes the end into the dirt. She steps back, studying the formation, and then brushes off her hands.
She stares down at the ground, at the spot where the deer is buried, and against my better judgment, I take her hand. I squeeze, she squeezes back, and I follow her away from the grave. The tears come, and I wipe them away with the hem of my T-shirt.
The boy’s got a pile of things ready to go, but Baby Bigfoot walks by him and heads for a tent. She slowly slides the zipper over, releasing the tent flap, and then crawls inside. The boy shakes his head and motions me in behind him. She’s sitting in the middle of a sleeping bag, and I can’t help but laugh out loud at the ridiculousness of it.
“I think we’ve probably broken a few laws by now, not that either of you care.”
Baby Bigfoot reaches for a duffel bag tossed in the corner. She rustles around in it for a moment, then pulls out a pile of clothes. She gives them a sniff, then a toss, and reaches back in and produces a plastic bag of toiletries, including a hairbrush, a toothbrush, and toothpaste. The boy takes the tube of toothpaste out of the bag but shakes his head when she tries to hand him the toothbrush as well.
She stares at it, turning the orange-and-white handle over and over. Her fingernail flicks at the blue bristles, and then I know what is coming next.
She licks it.
I close my eyes in sympathy for the man who is going to wonder where his toothpaste went tonight. I should probably take the brush and toss it when she’s not looking. I’d likely be doing him a favor.
Next she pulls out the hairbrush and hands it to me. “Thank you.” I take it and put it in my lap, not sure what to do with it. She grunts expectantly, and I glance at the boy. “She wants me to brush my hair?”
He shakes his head.
“She wants me to brush . . . ?” I let the question hang.
He points to her.
“Seriously?” It’s like this is turning into a damn slumber party and all I can think is, what if those men come back and find us here? I mean, they’ll have a heart attack for sure, but they might shoot her before they do.
I scoot forward and pretend this is nothing but normal and I’m not about to actually brush Baby Bigfoot’s hair. I mean, she’s all hair. Am I supposed to groom her like a dog?
I start with her head, pulling gently when I encounter a tangle and praying she’s not tender-headed. The boy slips out of the tent and hurries across the camp into the other one. I continue to run the bristles through her black hair, hearing her breaths grow deep and heavy. “Hey, Bee, are you falling asleep?” The name feels right the second it rolls off my tongue. So much easier than saying Baby Bigfoot to myself all the time. At least one of them should have a name.
Her head droops as I continue long strokes down the back of her head and neck. She’s nothing but hard, heavy muscle beneath all this hair. She could probably snap my neck with a finger. Just as I’m convinced I put her to sleep, the boy whistles and she’s on her feet in an instant, crouched like a bear, making the tent seem even smaller. The sound of a motor whines in the distance. “Oh good, we’re all going to die.” Bee crawls through the opening and I follow, tucking the brush with her hair away in my back pocket. She joins the boy as they gather up their treasures: the food from the cooler, the toothpaste, and a book, and then we hurry out of the campsite. Once we are behind our fallen tree, he runs back with a pine tree branch and moves around the camp, sweeping up where our footprints leave evidence. He even stops to snag a tuft of Bee’s hair from where it caught in the tent zipper.
By the time the hunters return, we are long gone.
We walk in silence, which gives me time to justify what I just did. We destroyed a hunting camp. We stole food and personal items. We buried a deer head. Bee licked a toothbrush. Basically we’re forest pirates. That will look so good on my rap sheet when I’m sent to juvie.
“Do you two do that a lot?”
“Yes.”
“And you’ve never gotten caught?”
He thinks for a moment, then shakes his head. “No.”
“What do you do with all the stuff? Where do you keep it?”
He stops, and Bee does too. I can see Mr. Watson’s pasture in the distance, hazy in the dusk of a setting sun. They’ve brought me home. I’m suddenly not ready to leave.
“I . . . sh-show you.”
“Now? It’s getting dark.” I’ve been in the forest when it’s dark plenty of times, but always on the other side of night, when the day is coming, not leaving. When he begins walking toward the house, I stop. “Wait. No, I want to go.”
His eyebrows raise like he’s questioning my judgment.
“Yes, I’m sure. Let’s go.”
Wood snaps behind us. Even as we turn around, the boy is already pushing me behind him, and a growl forms in Bee’s throat.
The male is standing there, not ten feet from us. The setting sun reflects in his eyes, lighting them afire. Bee and the boy stand still as statues, waiting. A voice, soft and unintelligible, drifts on the wind. I don’t realize it’s coming from the male until Bee answers him. It’s like listening to someone talk from far away, hearing a voice, recognizing the rise and fall of cadence, but too far to make out any specific words.
They are talking to each other.
Bee goes quiet, looks at the boy, then me. Slowly she walks away, toward the male, and then into the woods beyond. But he stays, watching us still. With a reluctant set to his shoulders, the boy turns around.
“You . . . go home.”
As much as I want to argue with him, plead with him to come with me, I don’t. I’m too busy fighting the fear that threatens to swallow me every time I look into the male’s eyes.
“When will I see you?”
He shakes his head. “Go.”
“Tomorrow?”
“No.” He turns me around and walks with me until we reach the pasture.
“When?” I’m on the verge of begging.
“Go.”
“Dammit, is that all you can say to me? I don’t want to go, and I don’t want you to leave.” The male roars from the forest, and I can’t stop the tears that roll down my face as my body starts to shake. “I heard you!” I scream back, and the boy grabs me by the shoulders.
“Go, Leah.” His eyes plead with me.
“Fine. Go back to your dad or whatever the hell he is. I’m gone.” With every step I take away from him, my body screams at me to turn around, to run back and apologize, but I’m angry. The kind of stubborn anger that I know I’ll regret later, but I’m trying to make a stupid point that he probably doesn’t even understand.
I know this is my fault, that I’m the one who has intruded on them, who sought the boy out. But being with him and Bee is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. It’s more than just being in my forest, and being myself, the one I keep hidden from the world. It’s being that version of me and having someone else see it too and accept it without question.
More and more, it’s getting harder to leave the trees and go back to the old me. I don’t fit into her shell as easily as I used to. I don’t like the weight of her baggage, the expectations placed on her, the rules she has to follow. The forest is freedom, and the boy is now part of that. But even he now comes with boundaries. I’m being forced away from him by something I can’t argue with or lie my way around. Something I can’t even speak to, much less reason with. My claim I think I have on this boy is so strong that I can’t dispel the jealousy that wraps around me like a second skin.
Sharing him is not something I’m sure I’m willing to do anymore. And he’s not even mine.