The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac (11 page)

“I'm so sorry,” he said. “I'll only be in the way here today. The doctors will examine you. The women will take turns sitting with you. What you need to do now is rest.”

And so he left her alone with the doctors and their wives, the dogs, faithful Pookums, and their daughter, Amelia, who eventually grew bored with her mother's moans and disturbances and went to her father's den to play “secretary” with his letter knife and envelopes.

Gladys fell in and out of a wretched slumber. In the torture chamber of her dreams, her husband's monsters were more beautiful than she had ever allowed. They made better wives, better mothers.

Better women!

They were all so very grand and regal and kind.

 

1972

 

 

THE STUDY HABITS OF DEDICATED CREATURES

Here came the little man, picking his way up the deer trail: fussy, measured, painstaking. Waiting for him, hidden in the thicket, Mr. Krantz grunted softly to himself. This was now his favorite part of the day. He delighted in the man's arrival; he admired his bright-red spectacles and delicate skull. How funny this studious little man was! How out of place he looked here in the forest!

These were the remote north woods, the timberlands of the Inland Northwest. There were hiking trails a mile or so east, scarcely used. The forest was dense with undergrowth, shuttered with soaring ponderosas, lodgepoles, and white pines. Mr. Krantz could go months—whole seasons, even—without seeing a person here other than his own wife, but now the little man arrived almost daily. He fingered leaves, spooned up samples of dirt, examined the smallest fragments of marred bark. He came for several weeks in a row, through the wet spring and into the dry heat of summer. What was he looking for? Sleet and rain never deterred him.

Mr. Krantz scratched at a tick behind his right ear and then plucked it loose and flung it away. The man looked familiar. More so, he smelled familiar, but Mr. Krantz could not place the smell.

As much as Mr. Krantz enjoyed watching the little man, he wasn't going to march out and start a conversation. He wasn't going to ask,
Can I help you?
He wasn't going to squat next to him and squint at leaves all day, not if the leaves weren't edible, not if they weren't covered in fat tasty bugs. Mr. Krantz was not a conversationalist. He rarely spoke, not even to his own wife. But he liked this man, whoever he was, and he continued to watch him, day by day, as the man returned again and again.

With the exception of Agnes, Mr. Krantz had no friends. He had always lived in these woods, isolated from the towns and people of the Idaho Panhandle. His father had been a simple-minded man, ugly, with black teeth that pained him until he howled. He was hit by a train and killed when Mr. Krantz was quite young. His mother—towering, rank-smelling, and hairy, with craggy shoulders and cheekbones—raised him to be wild. The only words of English she could muster were the name of his late father,
Mr. Krantz.
When old enough, Mr. Krantz accepted the name for himself. It fit him well, he thought. It was dignified.

Like his mother, and so very unlike his dad, Mr. Krantz was enormous, muscular, hirsute. He was also, like his mother, a hunter and a thief. He preferred to hunt and gather in the dense woods, away from the stink of civilization, but now and again he would descend to town to steal a chicken or a loaf of bread. In the dead of night, he lifted articles from backyards, patios, unlocked garages or shops: clothing, a crate of oranges, sometimes a larger item like a wagon or a picnic table. He moved silently, with precision, his senses battered by sights and sounds and smells of a world he did not understand: vibrating televisions; drunken conversations; unchanged diapers; spilled gasoline. What animals these people were! He liked to watch them from afar, to see how oddly they moved and behaved. He could smell their laziness like he could smell pine sap. He could smell sulfuric anxieties and honey love. He would return home to his wife and gaze on her. Was she happy here in the woods with him, living with him in their little shack? Wasn't it better than being crammed into one of those cement boxes, surrounded by unnatural stench and buzzing neon lights?
Yes,
she assured him.

Mr. Krantz spent most days sleeping or wandering the forest. He fished in the creek and ate thimbleberries and huckleberries and mushrooms and bugs. If he felt like it, he washed himself in Lost Creek. If not, he just lay in the sunshine next to the creek's unspooling, glimmering thread. In the winter he slept almost constantly, dreaming deeply, rising only to relieve himself and eat tiny servings of whatever food his wife offered to him. His dreams in the winter were of mountain lions, of hunters with loaded rifles, of predators who chased him and murdered him, much as his mother had been murdered. But then spring would come and those deep dreams would leave him, and he would sleep less soundly.

It was a mostly peaceful existence, except that Mr. Krantz suffered from unpredictable murderous rages. When a rage struck him, he needed to kill something. Not just kill it, but consume it. Lift it in the air and shred it limb by limb and feast on the bloody remains. Usually he found a deer or an elk, but once he had killed a person. A chubby hunter, lost in the woods, bumbling along the deer trail with bow and arrow slung on his back, squinting at an expensive compass. Mr. Krantz appeared on the trail in front of him, loping westward, and then rose to his full stature while the man shrieked and fumbled for his bow. Mr. Krantz pounced, taking hold of the man's padded shoulders and shaking him, then slamming the screaming jaw closed and deftly snapping his neck. The hunter dropped. He poked at the hunter's dead form with his hairy foot, turning him over before the feast began. He always looked into his victim's face before eating him; it was a proper thing to do. But when he studied the hunter's face, his appetite dulled. Despite the lack of resemblance, he was reminded of his father.

He ate him, but the taste was off, like meat beginning to turn.

After, Mr. Krantz sat on the forest floor, filled with self-loathing and regret. Blood matted his hairy chest; the raw red meat tasted like silver on his tongue. If he could, he would reach down his throat and stitch the man back together again, a patchwork nightmare of his prior self. Depressed and disappointed, he sank into the glacial creek bed and lay there until the cold made his powerful jaw ache. He moaned, and the trees above him shook. The birds went silent.

What of Agnes? Would he kill her next?

Agnes, calm and fearless, would never flinch. But he worried for her. After destroying the hunter, he could hardly imagine looking her in the eye. He reluctantly returned to the shack. Seeing him wet and shivering, Agnes ordered him into the bed and brought him warm blankets. The creek had mostly washed him clean, but she sponged off the caked blood around his mouth. She never questioned what had happened. She accepted his barbarity as part of her chosen life.

The days passed. Sooner rather than later, washed clean, purified by an all-berry diet, groomed and lean again, Mr. Krantz emerged from his depression, but with an expanded anticipation of his next murderous urge, a dense velveteen swath of worry that hung like a black curtain behind the beauty and lightness of all things. He feared when it would draw open again, but he knew better than to expect change. It was part of him, this dark nature. It was the most certain part of him, more certain than his bones.

The fussy little man did not have such a nature. Was this the difference between them, then? Intellect versus emotion? Brain versus brawn?

He studied the little man carefully.

The little man studied the forest.

Inevitably, Mr. Krantz worried that these urges would affect the one-sided relationship he shared with the little man. He wished him no harm. He even wanted to help him, if he could.

He felt genuine affection for the man. He liked how gentle he was with the leaves when he overturned them, or how motionless he became when studying a bit of trampled mud. Most persons thumped about the forest violently, talking loudly or just walking loudly, disturbing the wildlife, but this man was downright reverent. He had none of the silly paraphernalia that the other persons carried: no expensive backpack, no ornate hiking boots. Anything he brought with him had a true purpose. Sometimes he carried a small, sharp instrument or a clear glass vial, and other times he would shake open a plastic bag and, with gloved hands, drop a stick or stone or leaf into it. He wore a brightly colored bow tie and clean leather shoes. Now and then he lunched in the forest, eating from a brown paper sack that held a banana and a foul-smelling sandwich, likely assembled from a can. Agnes liked these foods, too, although Mr. Krantz could hardly stomach their processed aroma. He wondered if the man ate red meat.

Even when lunching, the man worked. He scrawled notes into a small black composition book that, when not in use, rested in his shirt's breast pocket. When he finished writing something particularly satisfying, he said, faintly, “Yes.”

The man loved the forest, Mr. Krantz felt. He was at peace here.

So when the urges arose, Mr. Krantz smothered them. He took a walk, or ate berries, or dove into Lost Creek's deepest swimming hole. It calmed him. Mr. Krantz killed nothing—not even a deer or a rodent—for a long time.

His stomach, protesting, rumbled.

“You might try a good steak,” Agnes suggested one evening, noting her husband's peaked color.

He made a face.

“I'll make it very rare,” she told him. “I'll make it exactly how you like it.”

She understood and accepted him for who he was. He was a hunter by nature. A hunter and a gatherer both, but it was difficult to do one and not the other. There was bound to be some withdrawal.

“I could throw it up in the air for you,” she joked. “A moving target.”

He tried to laugh. She was an easy woman to please, and that was a good thing. He admired her, appreciated how little she demanded of him. She was like him now more than ever: She wanted to be left alone. She was getting older and stringier. She winced with pain during sex. She shortened her daily walks, citing her bad knees. Mr. Krantz was older than she was, but he was “better preserved,” as she said. There were other women in other places, he knew, younger women with fake fingernails and breasts like hot-air balloons. He spied on them as they teetered, drunk, outside the Rathdrum taverns, talking in shrill voices and smoking cigarettes. He enjoyed watching them from the dark trees.

One night the boldest of these women approached his hiding place and pulled her panties down and crouched to pee, cussing when the stream nudged her pink shoes. After she returned to her companions, who were now attempting to light a bonfire from a bag of garbage and a bottle of lighter fluid, Mr. Krantz put his nose to the wetness. It smelled like beer and hairspray. He felt a surge of lust.

One day soon, he knew, he'd seek out a new woman. But for now he was happy enough. A friend was probably what he ached for most in the world, and now he had perhaps found one in the little man.

The steak his wife gave him was not a perfect success, but the cooked meat did appease him. When he saw a deer or elk or moose, he managed to avoid killing it. He felt more civilized, more respectable. His urges were under control. Mr. Krantz watched his new friend in relative peace and looked forward to the day when they would formally meet. He waited for the right moment to stride up to the man and extend his huge, hairy hand.

I'll shake the man's hand carefully,
he told himself.
I'll make sure not to squeeze too hard.

(Agnes always teased him about not knowing his own strength.)

He practiced over and over again on an elegant branch of dogwood. He had smashed the branch on his first try, but now he could shake one of its limbs so gently that the leaves barely shivered.

*   *   *

O
NE BRIGHT SUMMER
day, the man arrived with another person.

A woman.

She was taller than the man, and louder. She spoke constantly, nasally, and asked the man endless questions. Her footfalls were noisy for such a thin creature. She tottered through the forest, tripping every now and again on a root or stone, cursing as she caught herself. The man blushed whenever she spoke, raced to her side when her clumsiness nearly felled her, and admired her secretively whenever she turned away to exclaim over the furtive (and apparently miraculous) appearance of a squirrel or woodpecker. It was easy to see that the man was in love, although Mr. Krantz could only guess as to why. To him, the woman was too clumsy for a proper mate. How could you properly mount a woman who had no sense of balance?

Perhaps it was her youth. She was younger than the man. Mr. Krantz could smell the youth coming off her in big, bright waves. It aggravated his carnivorous urges. How sweet she would taste, he thought; how easy it would be to pluck a supple limb from a socket. And the silence following, what a vast improvement! But the little man would disagree with this: He swiveled his head toward her whenever she spoke, as if she issued not words but music. He was in love with the woman. She could do no wrong.

Out of respect for his new friend, Mr. Krantz vowed not to kill her.

After all, she was only here for the day. He assumed that she would not return the next day.

But she returned, clutching a large yellow notepad. She waved the notepad around as she told the man about her writing. Poetry, she said. Mr. Krantz did not fully understand what poetry was, but he took from her long rambling description that it was something both silly and self-important. The words she used to describe her work were strange and meaningless to him:
semi-autobiographical;
lugubrious;
tempered, but aiming for transcendence
. She was, he realized, trying in her own way to impress the man. With a sweet smile, she called him “Doctor.” She fluttered her eyes and then went silent, stooping over her notebook and etching out words onto the page. She wrote like that for a good minute or so, swaying on her gangly, clumsy limbs before accepting the doctor's invitation to sit on a boulder beneath the white pines. The doctor told her to write all that she wished—he would be nearby and would check on her throughout the next hour—and then they could lunch together beside Lost Creek.