So, the Sheriff ordered more one ounce silver coins, complete with his portrait in the tail side. For this new Sasquatch hunt, he decided on a more local name, The Wishkah Valley Skookum Trail – 2008 on the front. Now that the Bigfoot hunters were all over the internet, he sold out the first minting in less than a month. The press was huge once they got pictures of the footprint mold up on the web. There were hairs left behind in the body bag that proved the Sheriff right, much to the surprise of the State Patrol’s forensic lab. The DNA profile of the Sasquatch was so close to that of a human, no one would have ever found it, except for the exemplars that Denton and Bowden brought in. With this new information, they were able to match DNA left on several more of the body parts to a Skookum, but not the one that had been in the bag.

Eric renamed the bar. The Lumber Mill was rechristened The DreamTime and the grand reopening featured another concert by Ralph’s band, Nobstreater Revival. Eric put a huge portrait of Ollie Svenberg above the bar and a nine foot statue of a Sasquatch just inside the door. Eric financed his remodeling by laundering all the cash he had piled up through Joe Cross’s building, getting a new roof, a new paint job and all new interiors. It only took a month or so for the makeover, making a place for Joe’s anchor tenant, Bowden’s Bigfoot Emporium.

Although Bowden would have preferred to use Sasquatch or Skookum in the name, his last name started with a B, so Bowden’s Bigfoot just sounded better. Sheila was able to run the store, selling those silver medallions and all manner of trinkets and curios to the tourists that had been driving through Aberdeen anyway, just not having a reason to stop until now. Aberdeen was back on the map, as Sasquatch Central.

Mr. Svenberg had a hard time coming to grips with what he’d been entranced to do with his customers and quit the business of death. He still drove his old Cadillac hearse around town after he sold the building where his shop was, keeping that car looking like brand new. And just like having to make the trip to Wal-Mart if they wanted something that the supermarket didn’t sell, everyone had to go to Aberdeen now for their final passage to wherever it was they were headed.

Ralph was so inspired by all the excitement that his geocache dabbling had started that he wrote an entire new album of songs. With all the new tourists in town, he even got noticed by some big wig from LA and signed a record deal. Sarah had warned him about using the old Nobstreater name, and sure enough, as soon as he started getting press, his old band mates came out of the woodwork to hassle him about getting the band back together.

Peter and Louise packed up their internet business and moved to Hawaii. Louise only bought the house in Hoquiam because it cost about the same as a parking space in a Seattle condo building. The rain didn’t bother Peter or Louie, but the cold and the grey did, so they moved to the Big Island where it rained even more, but at least it was warm. Now they wouldn’t run into any Skookums, but they’d better keep an eye out for Night Walkers.

“Hey, there’s the foot. Reset your trip odometer”, Ralph said, looking at the running shoe on the side of the road whiz by.

By the time they got back to the paved road the trip odometer read 1.4 miles, so the foot was a about half way up the road to the trail. Ralph wrote the number down to tell the police when they got to a payphone. Peter began to pull out on the road when they saw a big, black car coming up the street.

When it passed them they saw that it was Mr. Svenberg’s hearse and it looked like the old man driving. Peter slowed down the car so they could see where he went. There wasn’t anything up this road since it ended at another gated logging road about a mile past where they had been turning.

“Hey, he’s going up the road to the trail!”, Ralph shouted.

“I’m going to call the cops from here”, Peter said.

Peter grabbed his cell phone, but there wasn’t a signal down in the valley next to the river. “Shit, the phone’s not working. We have to drive up the road towards town a bit.”

“Go! Let’s get somebody up here. If somebody has a steady supply of body parts it’s the mortician!”, Ralph shouted.

Peter shoved the van into gear and sped down the road, watching the bars on his phone. As soon as he saw two bars of signal he called 911.

“Hi, this isn’t technically an emergency.”

“OK, what’s the problem?”

“I’m up on Central, north of Aberdeen. Send someone from the Sheriff’s Department up to the trailhead where they’ve been investigating the human remains in the woods. Deputy Denton and the Sheriff know where that is.”

“Who is this?”

“This is Peter Forster. My friend and I found the remains with my dogs last week and now somebody or something just threw a foot and a head at us on the same road.”

“Get serious.”

“I’m totally serious. Now the mortician from Hoquiam just drove his hearse up the logging road. I don’t know if he’s picking up or delivering.”

“We’ll call you back if we need to. Don’t confront the other driver”, the operator said as she hung up.

“Well, now we’re involved again I guess”, Peter said as he closed his phone.
“Who’s we, white man? I’m not here”, Ralph said, as he started to get out of the van.

*****

Salal Blossom had been dreaming again and now that he was awake he was really pissed off. The old human hadn’t brought him anything for months. For the last few years he would dream about his women and the old man would bring ghosts up into the woods, always ones that looked like the women in the old man’s dreams. Women with blonde hair, blue eyes and yellow rubber gloves.

He’d been waiting here on the hill that he dreamed about, waiting for the old man, but others kept coming. Too many came lately and he was started to think the old man would stop. The first time it happened, Salal Blossom didn’t know what to think. He recognized the ghost from the old man’s dream, but what would he do with a ghost? Ghosts weren’t warm and they generally didn’t taste very good, but when he figured out that the old man didn’t want them back, they help him vent.

There had been one or two that were fresh, edible even, and the meals satiated Salal Blossom’s hunger and his rage. Then the ghosts were less palatable, some even made him sick, so they became objects of his hatred, his grief and his loneliness. The feet always fell off first and then he’d rip the hands off. The rubber smelled so bad. Then when he got extremely tired of seeing the ghost’s face he’d figure out some new game to separate the head from the body.

After a couple of weeks, he’d bury the rest somewhere in the woods, to feed the trees.

Peter sat on the front bumper and took out his cell phone. He was pondering whether he wanted to call the police again. He didn’t want to, so he called Louise.

“Louie? Are you busy?”

“What? Are you almost done with Ralph?”

“We found, well we didn’t find it, another foot found us.”

“What does that mean?”

“When we were driving up here, it hit the windshield.”

“That’s crazy. Who threw it?”

“We think a bear, but it made a really strange sound, almost singing.”

“Bears don’t sing.”

“Well it did, and we saw Eric twice. He was down at the bridge on the Wishkah and he was just up here. He had the ammo box that Ralph was looking for.”

“Too weird.”

“Should I call the cops about the foot?”

“Go to a payphone and call it in anonymously. Make sure that you’re not on for more than thirty seconds.”

“Good idea. I’ll tell Ralph. We’ll be back in about a half an hour.”

“Bye, don’t bring any of those things home.”

“I won’t, bye.”

While Peter was on the phone he watched Ralph go up the trail and into the bushes. Ralph only took a minute to go to the spot that they’d seen the bare dirt and then he was back on the trail walking back.

“Hurry up! We’re going to a pay phone!”, Peter yelled.

Peter heard something in the woods to his right. It sounded like the same rustling that he had heard when the car horn honked, so he got into the van, turned the key on and started pressing the horn button. Ralph started running when he heard the horn, and Peter kept watching the brush in front of the van. Just as Ralph turned the corner where the trail ended something came out of the bushes. Ralph ducked as a woman’s head flew past his.

“Holy shit! Let’s get out of here!”, Ralph yelled as he opened the van door.

The whining started again, but this time Peter just held the horn button down, and started the van. They both rolled up their windows to keep the sound out and Peter backed up to get the van out of the trailhead as fast as the old VW could go. As he straightened the wheels and started to drive forward, the head rolled to a stop right in front of them. He swerved to miss it and they were on their way back to town. Ralph kept looking back, trying to see if he could catch a glimpse of the bear, or whatever it was that was throwing more body parts around.

“Hey, there’s the foot. Reset your trip odometer”, Ralph said, looking at the running shoe on the side of the road whiz by.

I’m at 46742 words, almost there…

The few Skookums that were left didn’t know all the other names the man gave them. They didn’t much care, not having the gift of speech. The main thing they were concerned about was trying not to get killed off by hunters and logging trucks. Being obligate carnivores wasn’t much of a problem for the Skookums. They had gotten the bad reputation of being cannibals, but they actually preferred salmon or deer to a smelly human being.

When Mount Saint Helens blew it sent eighty three percent of the Skookum population hurtling down the Toutle River where they blasted through Harry Truman’s cabin. Of course, by then they were all just a milkshake of rocks, trees, mud, snow and bodies. Somewhere in the DreamTime the Skookums communed with Harry and his sixteen cats.

The DreamTime was how the Skookums did communicate, be they near or far, and when a human fell into a state where words were lost, they could join in. Ollie Svenberg joined in with a particular Skookum when he collapsed in the woods of hypothermia. The Skookum that found him could be called Salal Blossom if he needed a name, his consciousness sometimes seen in the DreamTime as a dangling white flower covered with dew.

Salal Blossom pulled Ollie Svenberg into his den to keep him alive. He felt his dreaming from several miles away, pictures of spring and golden haired women dancing. Salal Blossom hadn’t seen a Skookum female for so many years, he felt Ollie’s pain of loss. Salal Blossom crept slowly around the dream, making sure not to scare Ollie or the women away, then dreamed about his women all dead in the volcano blast.

Salal and Ollie finally met on the third day of dreaming. Inga and her daughters danced with Salal Blossom’s women in the sunny glen of the dream. Salal and Ollie looked into each other’s eyes and shared the grief. Ollie didn’t understand anything but the grief, having been around it all his life. Salal Blossom felt him start to drift out of the DreamTime, so he put his human trappings back on and left him where he fell.

“Where’d he go?”, asked Ralph.

“Who knows? What is Kurt looking at?”

“He’s facing that direction, toward the cul de sac”, Ralph said pointing beyond the blackberry brambles.

“And I bet that is a DEAD END sign. Cute”, said Peter.

Peter and Ralph walked through the bushes along the river bank. It was just a short walk up the bank to the street. When they got to the pavement, they looked at the sign, which was a DEAD END warning.

“There’s got to be something near the sign pole”, Peter said.

Ralph ran over and looked around the pole and barricade. There was a derelict street light base with a door on it. He slid the cover to the side and saw a plastic container.

“Found it!”, he yelled to Peter.

“What’s in this one?”, Peter asked.

“Another laminated card. There’s a picture of Kurt Cobain on one side and it says, http://tinyurl.com/6b86w8, on the other.”

“OK, I’ll write than down on the cheat sheet. This didn’t say it was a virtual cache, did it?”, Peter asked.

“What does that mean? It said it was a multipart cache I think.”

“Virtual caches don’t have boxes or log books, but this one did so it’s kind of a hybrid I guess”, said Peter. “Go write your name and the date in the log book. Do you want to leave the box here or take it back up to the woods?”

“Can we take it back? Do you mind?”

“No, that’s fine. You have pay for some gas though”, Peter said starting to walk back to the bridge.

“OK, I will. Let me get the box and we’ll go put it where it’s supposed be. The little Sasquatch did want to be taken back home. It’s too bad Eric left the other card at his house”, Ralph said.

“Maybe you can get it from him later”, Peter replied.

They got back in the van to haul everything back to the spot in the woods. Ralph was pretty excited to be armed with a URL to check out when he got home and that he found the log book to record his find. He put his name in the book and also wrote that the box had been stolen by both the Sasquatch and a crazy bartender, but was still returned to its proper location.

Peter didn’t make the mistake of pulling into the first logging road this time and just motored up the gravel road to get this adventure over with. Ralph had brought along a couple Lego figurines to leave in the ammo box as souvenirs for fellow geocachers and he was trying to show Peter.

“I brought a policeman and a knight, see?”, Ralph said holding them up.

Peter looked at what Ralph was holding just as something hit the windshield. “What was that?”, he exclaimed.

Ralph jumped out of his seat and looked out the rear window. “Stop!”

Peter stopped the van and Ralph hopped out the sliding door. Ralph ran back to the side of the road about thirty feet behind the van. Peter got out and walked over.

“It’s another shoe!”, Ralph yelled.

“Not again”, said Peter, shaking his head.

Ralph poked at it with a stick and he saw that the shoe included an occupant. “It’s another foot!”

“What is it with you and the severed feet?”, Peter asked.

Peter and Ralph were looking at the foot when they heard a loud noise. They both jumped and turned to face the van. The van’s sliding door had slid open and hit the end stop, making a pop. They turned to each other and laughed when they heard another noise behind them. It was the sound of a branch breaking.

Slowly, they both turned around towards the noise that seemed to be just on the edge of the road. Standing still and quiet, they listened to see it if happened again. Then there was a whine. Softly at first, it got louder, more rhythmic and they found themselves not able to move anything but their eyes. Peter looked over towards Ralph, who was looking back in fear. Their eyes all shot forward when another branch snapped and the whining stopped.

Then someone or something moved through the brush, fast and noisily, away from where they stood. They regained the ability to move and they tried to see what it was that held them so, but seeing nothing.

“Did you see that?”, asked Ralph.

“Nope. And I don’t want to see it. I’m totally ready to get out of here”, said Peter.

“Where’s your curiosity, your sense of adventure?”, asked Ralph.

“Where’s your survival instinct? You have kids!”, Peter replied.

“Oh, yeah, the kids. I better not get eaten by a bear”, Ralph answered.

They got back in the van and decided that that ammo box could be left down at the bridge where they found it. Someone else could put it back. Maybe Sasquatch would come get and bring it back up into the woods, he was the one that left it down by the river.

Ralph kept his eyes on the trees right above six feet from the ground, looking for a hole or crevice that could be hiding a film canister. Peter was picking through the clues for this find, slowly decrypting the ROT-13 text. Ralph saw a patch of bark in one tree that looked a bit too shiny, just below a crook. He shimmied up the trunk to get his hands up in the spot where he figured it was hiding.

“Got it!”, he said falling back to the ground with the small black cylinder in one hand.

“OK, open it up and reveal our new path”, Peter said, folding up the cheat sheets.

“It says, forty five feet east northeast”, Ralph said, turning the laminated card over to see a large brown eye printed on the back. There was a key hanging from a lanyard which hung from a hole punched in the card.

“Let me see that”, Peter said, holding out his hand.

The card looked like something done professionally or at least by a very adept scrapbooker. The directions were in a fancy script font and the color photo on the back was kind of creepy. It looked like a macro photograph of a hairy dog’s eyeball.

“Here, let me have the key”, Ralph said. Then he reached up and placed the film canister back into the crook of the tree keeping the card and key in his hand. He stood with his back to the tree trunk and aligned himself with the bearing east northeast. There was a path leading that direction, not a trail but more like a deer track where the brush had been opened up by people or animals passing through. He started walking counting his steps.

“Eleven, twelve, how’s this?”, he yelled back to Peter.

“You’re only about twenty feet from the tree. Fifteen more steps I think.”

Ralph continued on to twenty seven steps. He stood still and turned in a circle looking for something that might be the next clue. Just to his right was a space in the brush that formed a rectangle about 12 inches by 6 inches that was just bare red dirt. There had been something there for a while, but it wasn’t there now.

*****

Eric had stashed the ammo box he grabbed from the cops under a bridge in North Aberdeen. He didn’t look at it too closely, just making sure that it was still locked. Now he had retrieved it and brought it back to his garage since the cops were off his trail. He grabbed the lock and saw it wasn’t the normal padlock he used for these dead drops.

He thought that some bozo had fucked up and lost the normal lock and threw this cheap thing on here after they bought it Wal-Mart. He tried the key anyway, it didn’t work. So, he grabbed a hacksaw and started cutting through the lock’s center. With these cheap locks, the rivets holding it together were the weakest part of the package.

Once he had cut through the rivets on side, he grabbed a locking pliers and ripped the lock apart. He pulled the latch and opened the box.

“What the fuck?”, he yelled.

*****

“Hey, Peter! Come over here and check this out”, Ralph said standing in front of the recently vacated spot on the forest floor.

Peter walked through the brush where Ralph had just bushwhacked. He got up to where Ralph was standing and saw the bare red dirt rectangle.

“Looks like someone’s not playing fair”, he said.

“Is that the size of an ammo box?”, Ralph asked.

“Yes it is. Did the cops find this geocache and think that they had some big clue?”, Peter asked.

“Read the next couple of clues, this sucks”, Ralph said, pointing at the cheat sheets.

Peter went through the encoded messages that people had left on the website for people who got stuck. Some words came to him easily as he got used to the ROT-13 encoding, but some still took a little thinking through.
The first clue read:

FZNYY QRRE GENPX RAR GUVEGL CNPRF 50 PNY NZZB OBK NJNVGF

Which Peter read out loud to Ralph, “Small deer track ENE thirty paces 50 CAL ammo box awaits.”

“Well, that’s what’s supposed to be here. What else about this one?”

The next clue spelled out:

VS FNFDHNGPU UNF FGBYRA GUR OBK TB GB GUR LBHAT FGERRG OEBQTR

Peter started reading this one, “What? Sasquatch?”

“Really? Keep going!”

Peter grabbed a pencil and wrote the letters under the second word just to be sure and then continued, “It says, If Sasquatch has stolen the box go to the Young Street Bridge.”

“Oh, That’s just too cheesy. Look at this card again, does that eye look familiar now?”, Ralph asked hold the card up so Peter could see it.

“I guess that could be a Sasquatch eye”, Peter said looking at the next clue.

****

Eric was very disappointed that he wasn’t greeted by neatly bundled piles of US currency. He pulled everything out of the box that looked exactly like all his other boxes. There was a log book, filled with names and dates, a couple plastic toys, a Seattle Supersonics Squatch doll and a laminated card that said, “Go to the Young Street Bridge.”

Apart from the fact that the contents convinced Eric that he had risked life and limb to steal the wrong ammo box, he thought that is was a little ironic that this box had just spent the last three days wedged in the beams of the very bridge it was instructing someone to go visit. He started putting the things back in the box, trying to control his anger and frustration. When he picked up the Squatch doll, he saw the small card wedged in it’s basketball shorts.

“Please take me home. -Sasquatch”

*****

“Don’t read the next one yet! Let’s go down to the bridge, I found this part by myself”, Ralph said, putting his hand on the cheat sheets.

“OK, boss. No more clues until we reach another inevitable dead end.”

Ralph went back to the tree and grabbed the film canister. He pushed the card and the key back into the container and wedged it in the tree. Peter had already started walking back to the van and he hurried to catch up.

“I call shotgun!”, Ralph yelled.

Ollie Svenberg lived his entire life in a circle twenty miles in diameter, centered on the house his grandfather built. Karl Svenberg came over from Sweden to log the forest, an axeman who liked to jump from board to board, chipping blocks out of the giant old growth trees that dwarfed the ones he had known in the forests around Göteborg. Karl was smart and was soon managing one of the many lumber mills in the young town of Hoquiam. He built his house from the lumber that ripped through that mill and that old house stood as strong as the douglas firs it was born from.

Johann “Jonny” Svenberg knew the forest wouldn’t last forever, the way the Americans plowed through them, so he convinced his father, Karl, to help him start a business that never lacked for customers, a funeral parlor. Sturdy wood coffins and warm swedish coffee helped his reputation as the friendliest little mortician in town. Ollie followed in his father footsteps, learning everything about the business of death and kept the family concern healthy. Jonny Svenberg was always quick to offer comfort or even a joke if that’s what the family needed, but Olaf was much more serious. After Jonny died, Olaf and Inga took over, keeping the Swedish coffee but losing the smile.

There wasn’t much to smile about in The Harbor once they had mowed down all the trees. People held on to the small piece they had, only moving away when there was no other choice. Now, sixty years later, there were only a couple mills still running, and with all his women gone, Ollie Svenberg lived just for the next bit of bad news for his neighbors. That and his debt to the trees. When the lumber companies clear cut a piece of land, they might clean it up and plant it, or they might sell it off cheap. All the value was in the standing timber and the dirt was, well just dirt.

Ever since Inga died, Ollie had been buying up dirt. Dirt that one day he hoped would grow trees back. He used to hike through his land, watching the ferns take over the old stumps and the little trees fight for spot in the sun. He owned over twenty thousand acres of forest land and it took a while to walk through all of it, but that’s what he did when Hanna and Frida died.

He couldn’t bear the thought of seeing his daughters in death, he wouldn’t. He asked a lady that lived in the old folks home to move his car around town so no one would look for him and he walked out of town. He walked north along the river and into his land, with a few things to eat, a warm coat and a compass, he’d come out when he was ready, or he wouldn’t.

The tenth day he was in the woods, he got caught in a storm. Wet to the bone and freezing, he found an old cedar tree where he stripped his wet clothes off and tried to start a fire. In the night he passed out, overcome by hypothermia. He woke up three days later, wearing his clothes, but his shoes were on the wrong feet. He didn’t remember what happened, but the dreams returned. Those three days of fever dreams haunted him when he got back to town.

*****
“Are you ready to try this again?”, Ralph asked Peter when he showed up at Ralph’s house on Saturday morning.

“Can we even get up to that geocache again? Have the cops left?”, Peter asked.

“I don’t know yet. But now I have all the clues, still encrypted, and if need be the clue that will lead to the next location”, Ralph said, waving a bunch of papers that he had just run through his printer.

“I’m not bringing the dogs today”, Peter said.

“Although that takes some of the adventure out of it, that is probably a good idea.”

“Your neighbor is outside washing that old hearse. I’ve never seen him before.”, Peter said, pushing the curtain back to look out the window at the old man.

“Oh, Svenberg. Let’s go see what he’s up to. He’s a strange one, he is”, Ralph said, putting his shoes on to go outside.

Mr. Svenberg hadn’t washed the hearse in two months, the rain kept it pretty clean if he didn’t drive it out of town, or behind a logging truck. The last funeral was a new fangled, green affair and he had to drive up a dirt road to the top of a hill where the family buried their grandfather in the woods, wrapped in cotton cloth. He didn’t make much money on that type of funeral but it paid for gas.

“Hey, Mr. Svenberg. How’s it going?”, Ralph asked, walking up to the old man. “This is my friend Peter, he’s my sidekick!”, Ralph joked, nodding at Peter, who smirked.

“Nice to meet you Peter. I’m Ollie, the undertaker, boo!”

“Ha, funny”, Peter replied, shaking the old man’s hand.

“This car would be great for hauling gear around in”, Ralph said.

“Do you need that much beer?”, Svenberg asked, not hearing properly.

“No, not beer. Gear, for my band. My van died and I keep making Peter haul the amps and things around”, Ralph said.

“That’s my van over there”, Peter said, pointing out the vanagon in the street.

“Oh, nice German car. I’d like to have a Volvo instead of this old Cadillac, but it’s here”, Svenberg said, shrugging.

“We’re going to try to go up to the woods where they found all those body parts last week!”, Ralph told Ollie.

“Hmm, watch out for the cops”, Ollie said.

“We’ll try to stay out of their hair”, said Ralph.

“Say hi to the trees for me.”

Oh, I’m at 41,791 words.