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  I looked Bigfoot right in the eye.

  “I want to make him pay,” I said. “I want to make him pay for what he did to me. “

  Then I took a deep breath.

  “I want you to make him pay until it hurts,” I finished up.

  Bigfoot just smiled.

  “Just so you know,” Bigfoot told me. “When it comes to payback you have definitely come to the right fellow.”

  I smiled right back at him.

  I was ready for some honest-to-gods Raven payback.

  You bet your Colonel Sanders feather-plucking chicken fryer.

  Chapter Sixteen – Chasing Rabbits Only Makes Your Feet Sore

  Faster than you could say “go”, Bigfoot had herded us back into the Winnebago – which by now was loudly snoring – and believe you me, you haven’t heard ANYTHING until you have heard a giant pink mystical Winnebago snore out loud.

  I’m not saying it was pretty.

  We might have got there even sooner if Bigfoot hadn’t stopped to take the time to frighten the blue jumping blazes out of a Thunder Bay Cub Scout troop. They had been setting up camp just beyond the shadow of Nanna Bijou. There was about twelve of those Cub Scouts – and as near as I could tell they were all busily watching their Cub Scout leader trying to start a fire with rubbing two sticks together, neither of them being a match.

  At which point Bigfoot jumped out into the clearing and waved his hands in the air like he was being group-mugged by a horde of blackflies.

  “WHUGBUGGABUGGABUGGEDY BOO!!!” Bigfoot yelled out at the Cub Scout pack.

  I am not exactly sure who jumped higher – the Cub Scout leader, the troop or me. We all hit a certain level of altitude and then fell back down into the dirt.

  “So why did you have to do that for?” I asked afterward.

  “I’m just keeping the dream alive,” Bigfoot replied mysteriously. “The way I figure it they’ll be telling stories about me all night long. A little bit of luck and somebody will tell a newspaper – which will bring in Bigfoot-watchers from all across the country. And then – when they aren’t sitting out in the woods with their binoculars and their cameras and their motion detectors just trying to get a single Wikipedia-worthy photograph of me they will sit around their campfires and tell Bigfoot stories.”

  “So you mean the more that people tell your stories the longer you live?” I asked.

  “To a point,” Bigfoot explained. “There are rules that govern just how much a storied one such as me can expose my existence.”

  “So setting up a Facebook page would be out of the question?” I asked.

  “You got it,” Bigfoot said. “You give them a little peek – just enough to talk about – and then you make like magic and vanish.”

  “Show off,” Coyote said.

  “You’re just mad that I saw them first,” Bigfoot said. “You know as well as I do that the more people tell Bigfoot stories the more likely it is that I’ll stick around.”

  “That’s what you say,” Coyote grumbled. “I think you’re just blatantly displaying your innate exhibitionistic tendencies.”

  “You ought to be careful you don’t sprain a lip,” Bigfoot retorted. “Gargling with all of those multi-syllable words like you have been doing.”

  Which was right about when we reached the still-snoring Winnebago.

  “Wake up, Winnie,” Bigfoot growled, banging on the dashboard. “We’re on a mission now and there’s just no time at all for taking a nap.”

  “What about him?” I asked, pointing at the window at the mountain-god Nanna Bijou, who was lying happily stretched out listening to The Squealing Sacred Sea Monkeys on that i-pod I’d given him.

  “What about him?” Bigfoot asked. “You want to give him some more of your music? The last time you did it you almost yourself killed.”

  “Or worse,” Coyote added.

  “He did this to me, too,” I said. “If he hadn’t sent me where he did I wouldn’t have had to go through with what I did. The way I see it, he ought to pay too.”

  “I told you to be careful what you wish for,” Bigfoot snarled. “Do you REALLY want to go and try talking smack to a living breathing mountain?”

  “He gave you just exactly what you asked for,” Coyote unhelpfully added. “As far as I could tell he wasn’t really trying to hurt you.”

  “Heck,” Bigfoot went on. “He gave you a story to tell. That’s the most precious gift in the world, the way I see it.”

  I wasn’t so sure about any of that.

  “You two are afraid of him, aren’t you?” I said. “That mountain – he’s a whole lot bigger than you. I expect the two of you are scared totally stiff.”

  “Maybe old Coyote here might be scared of that big old trickster mountain god,” Bigfoot said, jerking one big hairy thumb in Coyote’s direction. “And I can definitely guarantee that Winnie the pink is scared out of his wits as well.”

  “I’m not afraid of anything,” The Prophet argued – only he was whispering deep down in his wheel-wells when he said it.

  “That’s not really what I’d call fear,” Coyote explained. “That’s nothing more than simple common sense.”

  “What about you?” I asked. “Are you scared?”

  Coyote looked at me like I was talking ten kinds of stupid.

  “Of course he’s scared,” Coyote said. “He just won’t admit it, is all.”

  “Wrong, wrong, wrong,” Bigfoot said. “I am not scared of Nanna Bijou. I could take him down somehow – if I really felt I needed to.”

  “I know there’s a big old hairy b-u-t hanging off of the end of that sentence somewhere,” I pointed out. “Why don’t you just go ahead and tell me why you aren’t going to do anything about what that mountain god did to me?”

  “Listen to the words that I’m telling you,” Bigfoot said. “If you chase one rabbit, odds are you’ll get yourself some supper. “

  That made sense – assuming a fellow wanted to eat rabbit. I never had but I had heard some people say that it made a pretty good stew.

  At least Elmer Fudd always seemed to think that Bugs Bunny would make pretty good eating in all of the cartoons I ever watched.

  “But if you try and chase more than one rabbit at the same time and all you end up with is aching feet,” Bigfoot went on. “And with feet as big as mine I don’t need to add one more ache to my current personal hurting limit.”

  I still didn’t get it.

  I told Bigfoot so.

  “I don’t get it,” I said – just in case YOU didn’t get that.

  “Right now, that mountain god is one too many rabbits for us to chase,” Bigfoot patiently explained. “We might deal with him later – but right now we’ve got one thing and only one thing only that actually NEEDS to be dealt with.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We need to hunt ourselves a dog.”

  “A dog?” I asked. “What for?”

  “We need a dog because I told you so,” Bigfoot said.

  There’s nothing I hate more than being told “I told you so” by somebody bigger and older than me when all I’m really asking is “why”.

  I told him that too.

  “You’re not going to give up on this, are you?” Bigfoot asked.

  “I want what I want,” I said. “And I want it right now.”

  Meaning I wanted an answer.

  “Close your mouth,” Bigfoot told me. “Listen to what I am telling you. Stop talking right now and start thinking.”

  He bit each single word off slowly and carefully.

  So I shut up.

  I sat there and I thought quietly and just as soon as I did all that it came to me – why we were hunting a dog.

  “We need a dog because we need to find a better nose to track Raven’s scent,” I said back, just as slowly.

  “See,” Bigfoot said. “I told you that you were going to learn something.”

  I sat back
and I even grinned a little, feeling pretty pleased at me.

  “All right,” Bigfoot said. “Prophet, tune me in a little old school classic Hank Snow and see if you can pipe it into Old Nanna Bijou’s headphones, would you?”

  “Hank who?” I asked.

  “Exactly,” Bigfoot mysteriously replied. “Give him a little taste of Liverpool, Nova Scotia – now would you, Prophet?”

  We took off just as Nanna Bijou sat up howling loudly in consternation as the Squealing Sacred Sea Monkey’s off-key shrieking and skirling bagpipe fervor was replaced by whatever it was that Bigfoot had suggested Prophet pipe into his earphones.

  We hit the High Highway and Bigfoot started singing and he didn’t stop until we got back to Nova Scotia.

  “That big eight-wheeler is a’rolling down the track, means your true-loving daddy ain’t a-coming back – I’m moving on, I’ll soon be gone,” Bigfoot roared out. “You were flying too high for my little old sky so I’m moving on.”

  “Yeehaw,” Coyote chimed in.

  And then old Coyote started to yodel – and you haven’t heard anything until you have heard a yodeling Coyote spirit.

  I’m not saying it was pretty.

  But oddly enough I sang right along with the three of them.

  I didn’t know the words – but it really didn’t seem to matter.

  I just hummed along with the story until I figured out how to get the whole thing right.

  Chapter Seventeen – Following the Scent of Feathers

  It is kind of funny just how very much the passing of a little bit of time can change a person’s outlook on life.

  Five minutes following our departure from Thunder Cape I had begun to feel a whole lot different about listening to Bigfoot sing.

  Bigfoot had slid on through Hank Snow’s “Moving On”, had sung straight through Boxcar Willie’s “Wabash Cannonball” and we had snowplowed into Dave Dudley’s “Six Days on the Road” – and the only reason that I knew that those were the names of each of the songs and the singers that had sung were because in between each horrifying song Bigfoot would pause and announce in a big old baritone broadcaster’s voice – “And for my next song I’ll sing…”

  “Does he always sound this bad?” I asked Coyote – after I’d finally got tired of trying to sing along with him.

  “Oh no,” Coyote told me, grinning that ear-to-ear mile-wide Coyote grin. “Most of the time he’ sounds a whole lot worse.”

  That was really hard to believe.

  “It can GET worse than this?”

  “I could always take a stab at harmonizing,” Coyote allowed, with a sarcastic grin. “The Prophet blows a pretty mean car horn to and you’ve already heard my yodeling. If you knew how to play the guitar we could actually take this act on the road.”

  That sounded pretty bad to me.

  “So why does he like to sing so much if he sounds so awful?”

  Coyote shrugged.

  “Because it’s fun, I guess.”

  I thought about Warren’s own terrible singing and the way that my Mom always laughed when he tried to sing.

  The thought of my Mom laughing was even harder to think about than Warren’s singing – so I tried to change the subject.

  “Speaking of the road,” I said. “Where exactly are we headed for? And how is this all supposed to help my stepdad Warren?”

  I jerked my thumb at that weird pine needle and alder brush cocoon that used to be my step-dad. I still thought Warren was actually a bit of a dork, you understand, but I had become sort of invested in seeing that he gets back safe to Mom.

  I’m not saying that I liked the guy any better than I had.

  Don’t you dare try and put words in my mouth.

  “We’re following a scent,” Coyote explained. “Or at least The Prophet is – and Bigfoot is driving because that’s how the magic works and we’re just going along for the ride.”

  “So we are supposed to be following Raven, is that it?”

  “Sort of,” Coyote allowed. “Only he’s too smart to leave himself a scent to follow.”

  That arithmetic didn’t add up one bit at all.

  “So if this Raven doesn’t leave a scent, then what are we really following?”

  “We’re following the scent of the Spirit Bear that attacked your step-dad,” Coyote said. “And, in a way we’re kind of following the scent of your step-dad’s spirit – which is what that Spirit Bear actually took from him.”

  “That only makes sense if you squint at it and blink hard,” I said. “If Raven is as smart as you say he really is then why hasn’t he done something to mask the scent of the Spirit Bear?”

  Coyote looked away, like he wanted to change the subject.

  Only I wouldn’t let him get away with changing it.

  “Did I use too many syllables for you?” I asked. “Would it help if I explained my question just a little more slowly?”

  “Raven is smart,” Coyote said. “That’s a fact that is as true as the sky is blue – but he is something else besides that.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He is confident,” Coyote said. “A little confidence can go a very LONG way.”

  Now I got it.

  “You mean that he is over-confident,” I said. “He thinks he’s too good or too strong to worry about what we can do to him. Is that it?”

  Coyote still looked like he wanted to talk about anything besides Raven.

  “Is that it?” I repeated.

  Finally he spoke.

  “I didn’t say he was over-confident,” Coyote allowed. “The truth is he is every bit as powerful as he imagines himself to be. You have got to remember that it was Raven who stole the sun from the North Wind. It was Raven who ate the Father of the Whale People from the inside out. It was Raven who peeled the color from off of the Polar Bear’s coat.”

  “So what color did polar bears used to be?” I asked.

  “It depended on which way the wind was blowing,” Coyote explained. “Sometimes green, sometimes red, sometimes blue when they were feeling sad.”

  Thinking about a green polar bear made me giggle just a little bit, which seemed awfully close to Coyote changing the subject so I decided that I didn’t really want to know the answer to that particular question right now.

  “So you’re saying that this Raven character is pretty bad news,” I said.

  Coyote nodded.

  “He’s a trickster god – one of the oldest ones there are,” Coyote said. “That means he usually thinks about four or five steps beyond our wildest dreams.”

  “Yeah, but you’re a trickster god too, aren’t you?”

  Coyote shook his head and looked down at his feet.

  “I’m not in that line of work anymore.”

  There was a story there. I knew there was but until I figured out how to read between the lines I’d have to settle for listening to just what he saw fit to tell me.

  So I tried another approach.

  “You seem to know an awful lot about this Raven,” I pointed out. “Are you and he good friends?”

  Coyote thought about that.

  I let him think for as long as he needed

  I wasn’t in that much of a hurry.

  “I wouldn’t say we were exactly friends,” Coyote finally decided. “But I know him about as closely as I know my own shadow.”

  I thought about that.

  “And we can’t take him, is that it?”

  Coyote shrugged, just ever so slightly.

  “But we are still following him,” I went on.

  Coyote nodded – barely moving a muscle in his neck.

  “And when we catch up to him?” I asked.

  He grinned.

  “Well then we will see,” Coyote said. “Now won’t we?”

  And then he smiled the kind of wild and crafty smile that sort of gave me the feeling that he might know just a little bit more than he was l
etting on.

  Which was either a good thing – or not.

  “Have I ever told you just how much I truly hate someone who answers a question with a question?” I asked.

  “I suppose that I ought to do my best to remember that particular fact,” Coyote replied. “Now shouldn’t I?”

  And then we were there.

  Right back to where we started from.

  Chapter Eighteen – A Billion Searches to the God of all Googles

  I took a long look around at where we had come to.

  “This looks just exactly like Nova Scotia,” I said. “In fact, it looks like the very same place that we started from. Are you really sure we are getting anywhere?”

  “Give the kid a genuine cheap candy cigar,” Bigfoot said. “Congratulations. You finally guessed something right.”

  “I guess there is a first time for everything,” Coyote allowed. “There might even be a chance that hell will freeze over.”

  Ha-ha.

  “So we went all the way from Cape Breton to Thunder Bay and then we came back again to the Cape Breton Highlands?” I said.

  “Right again. Your sense of direction is nearly infallible,” Bigfoot said. “Truly I stand in awe of your awesome-as-apple-sauce awesomeness.”

  I was getting used to his sarcasm in the same way as you might get used to the reek of an old rain-soaked sheepdog. That didn’t mean that I liked it any better – that just meant that I was getting used to it which I guess goes to show that you could get used to anything.

  “That’s so funny I might even have to laugh at it for two or three times,” I twice-as-sarcastically replied. “But maybe while you are in the mood for explaining things – do you could tell me who in their mind would EVER call this the highlands? None of it really looks one bit like a mountain range to me.”

  Coyote giggled.

  “Kid,” Bigfoot explained. “The Cape Breton Mountains are some of the oldest mountains on the Eastern coastline. They used to be a whole lot taller – until age and erosion and glaciers wore them down to what you see now – but if you look at them in a certain kind of manner you’ll see the memory of the mountains they used to be.”

  “Are you trying to tell me that these are really the ghosts of mountains?” I asked.

  “Actually,” Bigfoot said. “They’re more exactly the stories of mountains that used to be.”