I Saw a Bigfoot at Salt Fork

Tom had been on the trail for about two hours when he noticed the quiet. Not the ordinary quiet of a forest in the middle of the day — something else. The birds were gone. The creek sound had thinned out. He was deep in the interior by then, well past the campground turnoff and the picnic areas, in a section of Salt Fork that most visitors never reach. His hiking partner had stopped to adjust her pack fifty yards back. He kept walking.

He saw it off the left side of the trail first. Or he saw the space where something was — a stillness in the brush that didn't match the rest of the woods. A shape that wasn't resolving into anything familiar. He stopped walking. He stood there squinting at the tree line, telling himself it was a stump, a shadow, a trick of the afternoon light coming down through the canopy at the wrong angle.

It wasn't a stump.

The thing was upright. That was the first fact that reached him — not the size, not the color, not the shape of the face. Just that it was standing on two legs, and it was still, and it had been watching him before he noticed it. He could feel that last part. Whatever it was had been tracking him up the trail for some time before it stopped and let him catch up to it.

He put it at eight feet. Maybe taller. He's a big man himself — six-two, spent twenty years framing houses — and he knows what eight feet looks like. This was taller than a standard ceiling and broader across the shoulders than two men standing together. The arms were long in a way that registered as wrong before he could put a word to why. They hung past where arms are supposed to hang.

He didn't move. He didn't call out to his partner. He wasn't thinking about his partner at that moment. He was doing what you do when something very large and very still is looking at you from a distance of thirty yards — he was doing the math. He was trying to decide if it was aware of him. He already knew it was.

Then it turned its head.

It turned its head the way a person turns to look at something directly, not the quick swivel of a deer, not the slow pan of a bear sniffing the air. It turned its head with intention, and for two or three seconds Tom had a clear, unobstructed look at its face. He doesn't describe the face in detail when he talks about it. He says only that it was not an animal face in the way he understood animal faces. The brow was heavy and forward-jutting. The eyes were set deep and wide. He could see the eyes from thirty yards away, which means they were large, which means the thing was built on a scale that still doesn't fit when he tries to explain it to people.

It moved. Not toward him — sideways, and then back into the trees. The movement was fast in a way that didn't match the size. That's the thing that Tom comes back to. Something that large should have been slow. Something that large should have snapped branches and shaken brush and announced itself as it went. But it didn't. It stepped back into the forest with a quiet that felt deliberate, like it understood the value of disappearing, and then it was simply gone.

He stood there for a long time after it was gone, trying to decide what to do with what he had just seen.