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  “I don’t care what happened!” I yelled. “Can you fix my stepdad?”

  I still couldn’t figure out WHY all of a sudden I was so all-fired worried about what happened to Warren – but I was.

  “That’s what we do best,” Coyote said. “Fixing things.”

  “Fixing and saving,” Bigfoot added. “That’s our job. But you really ought to hear that story of mine. It’s an awfully interesting tale.”

  “I don’t want to hear any stupid stories,” I said. “I want you to fix my stepdad.”

  “It’s a pretty good story,” Bigfoot said. “You really don’t know what you’re missing.”

  “What I’m missing is HOME,” I said, loudly. “I want to go home, right now. I want you to fix my stepdad and then you can take me home.”

  “Nope,” Bigfoot said, shaking his head. “You need to stay with us. You see, when that Raven took that part of your stepdad’s spirit he took part of yours, too.”

  “You’ve been touched by the Raven’s shadow,” Coyote said. “Which means that if we don’t fix this situation fast than you and he are most likely going to die.”

  That didn’t help much.

  “Die, or worse,” Bigfoot added. “Like I said, there are a WHOLE lot worse things out there than just dying.”

  That helped even less.

  But I guess beggars can’t be choosers.

  Especially beggars who’d been touched by a raven.

  The light that was hiding in the heart of the Warren-cocoon that had used to be my step-dad glowed just a little in agreement.

  “So what should we do?” Coyote asked.

  “What do you think we ought to do?” Bigfoot replied. “It’s time to call in the boss. If anybody knows what to do it would be the ghost of Sam Steele.”

  Which made about as much sense to me as anything else had the whole day long.

  Chapter Six – The Ghost of Sam Steele

  Bigfoot stepped out of the pink mystical motor home with the slow, heavy and hairy majesty of seven unshaven gunslingers stepping into a High Noon street.

  He took three steps forward.

  I saw his eyes glaze over like he was squinting hard into some sort of middle-distance sandstorm trying hard to focus on something that wasn’t really there.

  He leaned back and opened his mouth wide enough to swallow a medium sized steam roller. Then he took a deep breath and yelled about as loud of a yell as was humanly possible for a nine foot tall Sasquatch.

  “Hey BOSSSSSS!!!”

  The trees shook just a little.

  Maybe I did too.

  “Loud, isn’t he?” Coyote asked.

  “Don’t you have some sort of a radio or a cell phone that you could use?” I asked Coyote. “Yelling like that seems awfully undignified.”

  It was hard on the ears, too.

  “Sure we’ve got a radio – or at the very least we’ve got SOMETHING almost like a radio.” Coyote said. “In fact, we’ve got nearly everything that we need – but the big guy likes this way better. He says that the yelling helps him to think clearly.”

  Only by now he had stopped yelling and was just standing there and staring out into the forest as if he thought something was about to come walking out from the shadows.

  And then all at once something did.

  “I’m never sure if I hate seeing him walking out like that or love it,” Coyote said. “But it sure is hard to forget – once you’ve seen it happen.”

  I could understand why.

  A long tall figure came walking slowly out of the woods. It was a little like he had just stepped out of the tree bark and the foliage – in almost the same way as the Spirit Bear had stepped out of the birch tree – only this was a little slower like he was wading out of the deep end of a swimming pool full of pitch black midnight.

  “Yes sir,” Coyote said. “It is pretty nearly unforgettable once you’ve seen it.”

  He was one of the tallest men that I had ever seen. Not NBA tall, you understand. It was more in the way that he held himself. He had a sort of strength and a presence and a quiet kind of dignity – something like a preacher crossed with a WWE professional wrestler and a twelve man SWAT team, with a heavy helping of John Wayne thrown into the mix. He was wearing an old-fashioned Canadian Mountie uniform that looked about a hundred years old with a tall black fur hat that added about another twelve and a half feet to his altitude. He had a heavy cavalry-style sabre – long and sharp enough to settle any sort of an argument – as well as an impressive looking pistol in a leather holster with an ammo belt with about a hundred bullets – and each of those bullets were growling – like a row of tiny brass-covered pit bulls.

  “The growling bullets were Sam’s idea,” Coyote said. “Ghosts can do that sort of thing. The bullets don’t shoot any straighter, you understand, but their growling can sure intimidate the heck out of any possible perpetrator.”

  Bigfoot just stood there, like he didn’t even actually notice the tall man’s bullet-growling approach.

  “Did you boys forget how to do your job again?” the tall man asked, in a voice that probably could have registered on the Richter scale.

  “Sam,” Coyote said, stepping forward to greet the tall man. “It’s like this.”

  Only before Coyote could say another word the tall man just stepped directly through him.

  Coyote fell on the dirt and lay there shaking like he had climbed out of a refrigerator sunk onto the bottom of the Arctic Ocean.

  I went to him and helped him back up to his feet.

  “I hate it when he does that to me,” Coyote said. “But that’s something else that ghosts do nearly any chance that they get. He likes walking through people and giving them the shiver-shakes just the same way as the big guy likes to yell.”

  “You shouldn’t really ought to stand in the way of the law,” the tall man said over his shoulder, towards Coyote and me. “I’ve warned you plenty about standing in my way before.”

  “We’ve got a situation here, Sam.” Bigfoot said. “We thought maybe you could help.”

  “There is no help for the likes of you,” Sam replied.

  “So he is supposed to be some kind of a ghost?” I whispered to Coyote.

  “That’s the ghost of Sam Steele,” Coyote told me – as if I should have known that in the first place.

  “If we leave him out in the rain will he rust up?” I asked – trying to sound a little more braver than I actually felt. “What with him being made of steel, and all.”

  Only nobody laughed at my “steel” pun – which wasn’t all that funny in the first place – but I had a bad habit of making jokes every time that I got scared.

  And if I got any more scared than I was right now I ought to think about making myself a lifelong career as a stand-up comedian.

  “Sam is a story, just the same as us,” Bigfoot explained. “The real Sam Steele was one of Canada’s very first Mounties. He died way back in 1919 – almost a hundred years ago – after fighting with the Fenians, chasing Louis Riel during the Red River Rebellion, meeting in a sit-down wiki-up with the great Sitting Bull himself, single-handedly taming the Klondike and fighting a half a thousand Boers over in Boerland.”

  He was a story?

  I tried very hard to swallow that.

  It went down like a mouth full of fresh frozen octopus.

  “Is that true?” I asked the tall man.

  The tall man snorted in amusement.

  “Most of it is true,” he told me. “Not all of it, you understand, but the gist of it is mostly true – if you squint at it awful fearsome and hold your mouth just a little to the left.”

  “In certain parts of Canada,” Coyote went on. “Sam’s actual stories have grown to a near mythic stature – thanks to a handful of novels and a half a thousand newspaper articles and a movie or two and campfire tales and once even a CBC minute vignette commercial.”

  “They even named
a mountain after Old Sam,” Bigfoot said. “That’s more than I can say about me.”

  “They got it wrong, though,” the ghost of Sam Steele said. “Mount Steele is actually only Canada’s FIFTH tallest mountain. The way I see it they ought to have saved the tallest peak for hanging the name of Steele upon.”

  “It only stands to reason,” Bigfoot said wryly. “I expect it must have been nothing more than an oversight.”

  “That’s one more way that a story can be born into this world,” Coyote further elaborated. “After Sam’s adventures had been told and retold and inevitably exaggerated upon, his legend had slowly taken form and his ghost rose up and eventually assumed control of the Spiritual Operations Branch – otherwise known as the SOB’s. The three of us – me, Coyote and Winnie are part of their tactical branch – otherwise known as the Creep Squad.”

  “Sometimes known as the Canadian Creep Squad,” Bigfoot added. “Not that there is actually an American Creep Squad.”

  “We’re unique,” Coyote said.

  “Actually, it is only known as the Creep Squad by those small-minded folk who don’t have any sort of a sense of ceremonious propriety,” the ghost of Sam Steele replied.

  “Which makes Sam my boss of the Creep Squad,” Bigfoot said. “Which makes him the fellow that I sometimes have to listen to.”

  “That and a generous helping of intelligence coupled with manly good looks,” the ghost of Sam Steele added. “As far as I can tell I am a natural-born leader – but enough about me. Why don’t you tell me what the problem is?”

  Coyote and Bigfoot told the ghost of Sam Steele everything that had happened.

  They told him about the Spirit Bear and Raven and the mauling of my stepdad Warren.

  The whole thing didn’t sound any more plausible than it had while I was actually experiencing the entire sequence of events.

  “What do you think, Prophet?” the ghost of Sam Steele asked the travel home. “Do you think that you can actually track the Raven?”

  “Might be I can,” the Prophet replied. “But I would need a whiff of his scent.”

  “Be a good boy and go get that for me – now would you Fuzzy?” Sam Steele asked Bigfoot.

  I did my best not to chuckle over his use of Fuzzy.

  Bigfoot stepped back outside of the giant pink Winnebago.

  “Are you coming?” he asked the Coyote.

  “I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Coyote said. “But somebody had better stay close to the kid, just to be safe.”

  By “kid” he meant me.

  I didn’t like the sound of them using that word “kid” but there really didn’t seem to be much I could do to correct it.

  “Allow me,” the ghost of Sam Steele said.

  Before I could say anything like “No” or “Let me think about this.” or “I want an adult.” or “I think I hear my mother calling me” the ghost of Sam Steele picked me up by the scruff of my Batman backpack and unceremoniously carried me on outside the motor home quicker than you say “Quick, to the Batmobile, Robin.”

  “Remain calm, boy. You have just been duly apprehended,” Sam Steele said. “Kindly restrain yourself – or I will have to do it for you.”

  He was being awfully polite for a jerk, I thought.

  “I liked you a whole lot better when you were just being a Mountie ghost walking through stray coyotes,” I said. “Do you think maybe now you might want to put me down?”

  “What makes you think I will do anything of that sort?” Sam Steele asked.

  “Well, for starters, I might cry a whole lot and that might hurt your ears,” I said. “Not to mention how hard it is to get tear stains and snot streaks from off of red serge.”

  Sam Steele chuckled softly to himself and then he dropped me down in the dirt, almost directly beside the dead bear.

  Which was right about the moment when that dead bear opened his eyes and stood back up on his feet and growled.

  Mostly at me.

  Chapter Seven – There is more than one way to skin a dead bear

  So I just lay there looking up at what looked to me to be a totally-zombified back-from-the-dead ursoid Spirit Bear – standing directly in front of me so close to my nose that I could smell the deep-crusted toe jam percolating nastily between the claws of his bottom feet.

  “Hey bear – don’t you know when you’re supposed to be dead?” Bigfoot warned. “Am I really going to have to knock you back down again?”

  The bear didn’t look nearly as lively as it had before. It had turned a distinct shade of blue – like that funky old blue Gorgonzola cheese that my Great Uncle Wilbert used to like crammed in between slices of burnt pumpernickel toast. The bear’s eyes had gone all flat and dark, like a sheet of slate after it had been rained on for about a dozen years – and then maybe dipped in black paint.

  The bear shambled over towards us.

  “There is just no way that he should be up and walking,” Coyote said. “Not after a hit like that from a fully-grown Bigfoot.”

  Bigfoot growled a little.

  “It might be that you’re losing your edge, Old Fuzzy,” Sam Steele taunted, drawing his pistol. “Not being able to knock down a Spirit Bear. They say that’s the first thing to go in a Bigfoot – is his punch. Do you want me to maybe shoot him a few times and maybe soften him up a little bit before you try again?”

  “Yes!” I frantically shouted. “Will somebody please just freaking shoot this big ugly zombie bear before he eats me?”

  It lumbered a little closer.

  “He isn’t a Zombie Bear,” Coyote corrected. “He’s actually a Spirit Bear. They’re a whole lot more trouble than Zombie Bears. Killing Zombie Bears is easy. You just shoot him in the head or use a flamethrower on him or else read the poetry of Stephen Vincent Benet.”

  Sam Steele took careful aim with his cannon-sized pistol.

  “Zombie or Spirit Bear,” Sam Steele said. “I can nail him colder than a fresh frozen flounder if you like.”

  Bigfoot just stood there and laughed.

  “You’ve been firing blanks for way too many years, old man,” Bigfoot said. “You put that big old pistol away before your hurt yourself with it.”

  “Well the way you hit him sure didn’t put him under,” Sam Steele pointed out. “I don’t imagine me shooting him could do any worse of a job.”

  I could not imagine that I was going to die in the middle of a debate between a Sasquatch and the ghost of a retired Mountie.

  “Well, I just guess I’ll have to hit him again until it sticks,” Bigfoot said.

  That bear was getting closer.

  “Somebody please hit him then,” I begged. “Somebody PLEASE just freaking hit him right now.”

  If somebody didn’t hit somebody soon my next home was going to be inside that Spirit Bear’s stomach – and I wasn’t looking forward to that whole experience. I wondered if the Prophet was intending to cocoon me up just the same as Warren – or else maybe they were just figuring on wrapping the two of us up together in the very same cocoon.

  “You just don’t know what’s good for you, now do you – you dirty old Spirit Bear?” Bigfoot asked. “Trying to scare a little boy like that is apt to get me irritated.”

  That did it.

  “Trying?” I shouted. “What makes you think he is TRYING to scare me? He is freaking well succeeded in terrifying the living bejeepers out of me.”

  By now everybody was laughing.

  Bigfoot, Coyote, Prophet – even the Ghost of Sam Steele seemed to think the idea of that big Spirit Bear eating me was funnier than a polka-dot barrel full of drunken howler monkeys. As for me – I was still working on getting used to hearing an eight foot tall dust bunny with teeth talk out loud the way that Bigfoot was doing – much less listening to him laugh at me.

  The Spirit Bear just growled a low wet slobberish sort of growl.

  Or it might have been a chuckle.

  “Oh
go ahead,” I told the Spirit Bear. “I give up. I surrender. Just eat me and put me out of misery why don’t you?”

  Bigfoot ignored my attempted surrender; bending over and picking up a boulder about the size of a good sized stand-up television set.

  “Do you want to play catch, bear?” Bigfoot asked. “Is that what you want?”

  The Spirit Bear kept walking up towards us.

  I could hear great black wings beating darkly with every step that the Spirit Bear took towards me.

  Bigfoot just stood there and waited with that television set sized boulder poised over his big shaggy head.

  The Spirit Bear took two more steps closer.

  And then Bigfoot dropped that big television set sized boulder so that it bounced and landed on the Spirit Bear’s two big sized feet.

  The Spirit Bear opened its mouth and roared in sudden unexpected pain.

  “I saw a waiter in a movie do this once with a tablecloth and a dining room table full of fancy high tea fancy china,” Bigfoot said as he reached out his right hand and crammed it fist-first directly inside of the Spirit Bear’s wide open mouth. He caught hold of something inside that mouth that might have been a jawbone or maybe a set of tonsils or maybe even the inside-end of the bear’s unwashed pooper-hole. Then Bigfoot reached out his left hand and caught the Spirit Bear by the throat and then he yanked that big old Spirit Bear inside-out.

  “Smooth move,” the ghost of Sam Steele complimented. “Did you practice that maneuver much or was it just dumb beginner’s luck?”

  “I think it was a little bit of both,” Coyote said. “With the emphasis on dumb.”

  “You just sit there and take notes, kid,” the ghost of Sam Steele said to me. “You can tell your grandchildren about what you saw today – assuming you live that long.”

  Which wasn’t exactly that comforting of a phrase to hear.

  “I always wanted to try it for myself,” Bigfoot went on – like he was talking about a particular card trick he had just recently mastered. “I’m glad I finally got the chance to try it.”