<How am I supposed to do that?> he replied.
Make endearing noises at her.
<Like the ones she’s making?>
No, that’s screaming.
<She’s very loud,> Faolan said. <She won’t be able to hear me.>
Figure something out; just don’t let her get lost or eaten by anything.
<She’s not my cub.>
Pretend for me, please. I’ll be back as soon as I can.
<All right, but I want a moose for this.>
There are no moose in this part of the world.
<I know. That was a hint. I want to go back to the snow. The bugs down here are as big as hares.>
The other giant had a good stride and some impressive endurance. Try as I might, I couldn’t close the distance between us. But I wasn’t going to tire anytime soon.
After a good mile or so, he turned around to check his six. He saw me behind him — one puny man — and not his erstwhile friend. He stopped and tossed his screaming captive to the ground. She scrambled away, but he didn’t care. He roared at me and set his feet. He wanted me to bring it, and I was faintly disappointed; I wanted him to lead me to wherever he lived.
I stopped about twenty yards away and checked him out. I’d never seen anything like him, unless it was one of the Fir Bolgs back in Ireland. I think the Fir Bolgs might be slightly taller, but this guy would beat them in an ugly contest. He had a broad, sloping forehead, a wide mouth, and a coat of coarse dark hair all over his body, save for the palms of his hands. His lean, muscled limbs were proportioned like a human’s, and so was his reproductive tackle.
Beyond survival, my first instinct was to find a way to talk to this guy. He was a giant vat of testosterone, so weird, and now that the natives were out of immediate danger, I wanted to learn more about him. He didn’t have similar sentiments, unfortunately. He charged me, naked, armed with nothing but his ferocity and his actual arms, and completely ignorant of what the shiny thing in my right hand could do to him.
I treated him in much the same way Luke Skywalker handled the Wampa on Hoth: I took off his right arm at the shoulder and then got out of the way. Unfortunately, Fragarach doesn’t cauterize as it cuts, and the wretch pumped out its lifeblood in a matter of moments.
My examination of the body confirmed that it wasn’t a large, hairy human but rather a different creature. I hadn’t been to Africa or the tropics at that point, so I couldn’t even make a comparison in my mind to the various simian species. He wasn’t precisely like them, in any case; he was fully bipedal and never used his knuckles for support.
I never did find out where they lived. I suspect, since the elemental told me he didn’t know of any more, that I might have inadvertently killed the last two in existence — both males — and they were trying desperately to find a way to reproduce. Despite my intentions and the inevitability of their doom, it still depresses me to this day that I might be directly responsible for the extinction of a species.
The two native women got back to their tribe safely and they held a feast in my honor, but here is what I think really happened that night: I killed Bigfoot.
“No way!” Granuaile said.
“It’s true. The modern fascination with Bigfoot, I think, all comes from that night centuries ago.”
“Well, no, that can’t be right,” Granuaile said, shaking her head. “All those Bigfoot and Sasquatch stories come from the Pacific Northwest. There’s nothing about the Florida Everglades in the literature.”
“In the literature? You are claiming there is such a thing as Bigfoot Literature?”
“Fine. In the extant documentation, such as it is. None of the sightings occurred in the Everglades.”
“All right, I will grant you that. Now, who do you suppose started all that stuff about Bigfoot and Sasquatch in the first place, hmm?”
<Oh, no. You can’t be serious.>
Granuaile’s expression indicated that she was less than credulous. “Atticus. The Patterson film is widely regarded as making Bigfoot famous. But it’s also widely regarded as a hoax.”
“And it was. It was me in an ape suit. I did a custom job, put some fake hairy breasts on there, and once they lost me, I shifted away and laughed my ass off.”
Granuaile’s face remained stony. “No, I’m sorry, I’m not buying it.”
“Who else can walk around in a suit like that and then disappear without a trace?”
“That’s easy,” Granuaile replied. “Keyser Söze.” She blew on the tips of her fingers. “Poof. He’s gone.”
<If Sasquatch is really Keyser Söze, it’s no wonder they never caught him!>
“No,” I said, thumping my chest, “I did it. It was me.”
“Whatever, Atticus. Why would you do something like that?”
“Because I get bored sometimes. I want to see how gullible people are. Come on, a giant apelike creature in the Pacific Northwest, when all the apes in the world live in tropical zones? Who would believe something like that?”
“A significant percentage of Americans.”
“Clearly. But the truth is that there were two such creatures, both males, centuries ago just south of Lake Okeechobee. A subtropical zone.”
Granuaile snorted derisively. “You expect me to believe that after you just told me you made up the whole thing about Bigfoot?”
<The greatest trick that Sasquatch ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.>
“Fine. Sit there in your fortress of disbelief. Discovering a true Sasquatch was a tangent to the main story anyway: I bound the New World to Tír na nÓg almost entirely by myself, though it took me many years. Many mind-numbing, lonely years, Faolan’s surly companionship notwithstanding. But there was another benefit to that mission I shouldn’t neglect to mention. There were times when I was blown away by the virgin beauty of the land — kind of like that guy who lost his shit on the Internet at the full double rainbow across the sky. Remember that guy? He kept asking what it meant. And it is not so difficult a question to answer. It means that we are loved, like all living things that Gaia sustains. There is a poetry in the canopies of forests and in the gentle roll of hills, a song in the wind and a benediction in the kiss of the sun. There are stories in the chuckle of waters in creeks, and epics told in the tides of oceans. There are trees, Granuaile, that seem sometimes like they have grown all their lives just to feel the touch of my hand upon their trunks, they are so welcoming to me. You will feel that welcome in your hands someday. You’ll feel it in your toes as you walk upon the earth. I cannot wait to see that love bloom in your eyes.”
“It’s there already, sensei. Sonora showed me. While you were gone to Asgard.”
Tears glistened at the edges of her eyes, all mockery of my Sasquatch story forgotten. She knew precisely what I meant — she had changed; she understood. And she became almost unbearably beautiful to me in that moment.
“So it is,” I said. I sighed and tried to get the train of my thoughts back onto its original track. “After I completed binding the western hemisphere to Tír na nÓg — a process of centuries — I always kept a lookout for additional places to bind to the Irish planes. Lots of those bindings have been ruined by development, but plenty are still around.”
“Are there any near here?”
“There are some near Flagstaff. Or we could head west to the Kaibab Plateau. Not much else in the way of forests near here.” She accepted this without comment, and Oberon jumped in with his own question.
<Atticus? What happened to your wolverine friend?>