Bigloft

Samanda blew out misty breath in front of her. It was painfully cold so near the mountain’s peak, but she didn’t mind. In truth, she relished it. The sting of the frost on her skin was a nostalgic feeling. Even so, she pulled her new wooly cap down an inch further. She had brought a well-used one to the honeymoon skiing trip, but it had vanished a few days ago when Bran had tackled her out on a piste. The cap must have fallen off her when she tumbled, laughing, to the snow. As they headed back to the resort-lodge for a new cap, Bran had joked that maybe it was Bigfoot that had stolen her cap while they weren’t looking. Luckily the resort was no stranger to guests losing items of clothing and provided her with a new cap free of charge. Samanda had written them a five-star review an hour later. 

They were out on the piste again today to break it in. Being fresh off the rack, it was an itchy thing, but it was quite warm. After a warm-up on a medium piste, Samanda and Bran were now close to the peak, on the second-most difficult piste the resort had to offer. They would have gone one step further, but the hardest piste, dubbed ‘Fimbul’ by the resident instructors, was closed due to both risk of ice and avalanches. The second-most, called ‘Bankbreaker’, would have to do. 

Bankbreaker was indeed difficult, but nothing that Samanda and Bran couldn’t handle. After a few plain runs, they decided on a competition; get to the bottom of the piste and steal an item of clothing from the other, not necessarily in that order. First to accomplish both, wins. Loser pays for dinner. And so they set off on two separate routes, each planning to ambush the other at some point. Samanda had ducked into the off-piste area and was weaving through trees when she saw the snowbank. A space beneath it was cleared of trees and other obstructions, and the snowbank was solid enough to support her. With a whoop of joy she built up speed and soared off the top of the snowbank.

And crashed right through the snow when she landed.

The snow crunched and gave way under her skis. Instinctively she readied herself for the landing, but it was much softer than she expected. She landed on her feet and slid a little ways before hitting some hard surface with the front of her skis. Piles of snow were drifting down around her, landing on her shoulders and head and obscuring her vision. She coughed and sputtered while she brushed snow out of her eyes to see. She heard a voice approaching and thought Bran must have heard her fall, but quickly realised that the gruff voice could not possibly belong to her fiance. 

“Help! I’ve fallen down this pit!” She shouted and wrestled with the latches on her ski-boots. The lengths of carbon fiber strapped to her feet weren’t doing her any favours in standing up. As the masses of falling snow began to diminish, she noticed weird elements about the ‘pit of ice’ she had fallen into. The walls themselves looked like one might expect, but they were straighter than she had thought. And as she worked her ski-boots, the snow shifted under her feet to reveal a blanket or duvet, lying atop a wooden bed. 

The gruff voice called out, quite close now, muffled by the wall. “It ain’t no bloody pit, you idiot, it’s my bedroom.” 

The snowfall decreased further, showing the compacted-snow walls covered in posters and memorabilia. The posters were a wild ecletic mix of any band that had ever advertised in the country and the pictures would not have looked out of place in a conspiracy theorist’s home. 

There was a rustle of tarp and a figure entered the room. “How did you find me?” 

“Find you? I don’t even know who you are or where I am.” Samanda said and made to stand up, when a sharp pain shot through her left leg, dropping her back onto the snow-covered bed with a gasp of pain.

The figure was tall and clothed in a matching set of blue ski-coat and leggings. Black-furred boots fitted with a black-fur hood that masked most of their features except for a pair of eyes Samanda could see beneath it all. The man was easily one of the tallest she had ever seen, and broad as well. “Hmmph, pull the other one, it’s got bells on.” He said after looking at her for a moment.

“No, really, I fell in here by accident. I didn’t know there was a house down here.” She replied and gasped again as she tried to put weight on her injured leg. 

“You crash into my house in the middle of nowhere, and you expect me to believe it was an accident?” 

“Yes.”

The big man considered her for a moment, then sighed. “Can you stand?” 

“My leg’s hurt, I don’t know how bad.” She replied. 

Without saying another word, the man picked her up and slung her over his shoulder as easily as one would handle a sack of rice.

“Hey! Let me down, what is this!?” Samanda shouted and tried to push herself off his shoulder. When that had no effect, she tried punching him in the back, but it was like punching a brick wall. A moment later she was deposited carefully on a battered sofa that stood with its back against a wall of snow.

The man grumbled something about a bedroom and, grabbing a snow-shovel by the door, went into the bedroom. A moment later she could hear sounds of shovelling from inside the bedroom. Her leg still stung, but not so much that she could not distract herself by looking around the room she had been left in. Like the bedroom, the walls were made of compacted snow. An oil lantern hung from the ceiling and provided plenty of light to look at the rows of posters that adorned the walls of this room as well. They were held in plastic frames, presumably to protect against the snow, and depicted a wealth of movies and musical bands, though Samanda noted that they were all old. The running theme seemed to be that there was no theme; metal bands shared the walls with pop singers and country bands, and posters for horror movies hung interspersed with rom-coms and crime thrillers. The furniture, too, was a mixed bag of old and contemporary designs. A modern-looking flatscreen TV stood by the far wall, though Samanda could not see how it would be connected to anything. Samanda continued looking around until her eyes fell on an object lying alongside the TV; a woolen cap in the exact design that she had brought with her to the resort. She glanced towards the bedroom door where she could see the big man still busy shovelling snow off of his bed. Samanda experimentally put weight on her, finding that it was painful but that she could hobble just fine. She steadied herself against an 80’s coffee table as she moved across the room and picked up the cap. Inverting it, she could see that the info-tag on the inside had been cut diagonally. Just like she remembered doing way back when she had been given the cap as a gift. It was, without a doubt, her cap. Bran’s joke came back to her. “Maybe Bigfoot stole it.”

A house made of snow in the middle of nowhere on a snow-covered mountain. The black-fur jacket that she was beginning to realise was no jacket at all. And now that she thought back to them, the pictures adorning the wall of the man’s bedroom were all blurry images of the same creature; the mythical Bigfoot.

“You can stand.”

Samanda started at the sound, the motion causing a jolt of pain to run up her leg. The big man was standing in the doorway leading to the bedroom holding the snow-shovel. Maybe it was the guilt from snooping around, but the line sounded like an accusation. 

“That is good.” He said and put the shovel back, then passed through the room and through another doorway. 

“Are you Bigfoot?” The words tumbled out of her mouth before she had fully considered them. The way the man’s shoulders bunched up and his posture tensed, she regretted the words immediately. 

There was an awkward silence as the man fidgetted with drawers and cups before taking them to the coffee table Samanda had used to steady herself. She was still standing by the TV-table, the pain in her leg slowly subsiding. The cups went on the coffee table alongside a pair of colourful cans.

“Coffee.” The man said by way of explanation and opened one. The smell of cold coffee began to drift up from the cup as he poured the coffee. 

“So you’re really Bigfoot?” She asked and took the remaining can. Decaf. 

“Denying it won’t change it.” He said and took a sip of the coffee.

“The legendary Bigfoot. I never thought you actually existed, let alone that I would meet you, or that–.” She let it trail off, finishing the sentence in the privacy of her own mind.

“That I could talk? That I’m not some animal?” He said and drained the rest of the can into the cup. 

Samanda took a sip of the coffee and looked away to hide her embarrasment. 

“You wouldn’t be the first to think it.” Bigfoot said, then leaned back in the couch, the furniture creaking dangerously. 

“And to be honest, it’s best that way. Makes it easier to evade detection if you think I’m some dumb beast.” He continued.

“So all those blurry photos and terrible videos are because you don’t want to be seen?” Samanda asked.

“No, it’s because I have magical powers.” Bigfoot replied and wiggled his fingers. 

“Sorry, that was a silly question.” She said and sat down on the couch. She cradled the cup in her hands, but being cold and decaf, it did little to alleviate the cold that was beginning to creep up on her. 

“It was,” He replied, the continued, “But yes, I would prefer to be left alone. Just part of who I am.” 

“But you would be world-famous. A centuries-old fairy-tale that turns out to be flesh and blood.” Samanda said. She could already imagine the headlines.

“And have my privacy destroyed forever. Wherever I chose to live would become a one-beast zoo.” Bigfoot said and put down his now-empty cup.

“You’re a sentient being, we would respect that.” Samanda said, but the words rang hollow, even to herself.

“Sapient. And I don’t think you yourself even believe that.” Bigfoot said.

Samanda leaned back on the couch and finished the coffee, thinking about what she should do. A part of her wanted to tell the world. This was sensational, a find to end over 100 years of speculation and pursuit. But on the other hand, she could not deny what Bigfoot was saying. Even if the scientific community decided to respect the big man’s privacy, there would be hordes of tourists, the vast majority not sparing a thought for what they were seeing beyond the spectacle and the novelty. In a bleak moment, she considered that poachers might make an attempt on his life before authorities could make a decision on his rights. He was as conscious and intellegent as any human, but ultimately not one. 

“How is your leg?” Bigfoot asked, jolting Samanda out of her train of thought so severely that the cup fell from her hands. Had the floor not been more snow, it would have shattered. 

As it was, Bigfoot reached down to pick it up while Samanda responded. “It’s getting better, I think it’s just a bruise.”

“Good, good.” He replied and rose from the couch with both cups in hand. 

“Mr. Bigfoot,” Samanda started, not sure how to pose her question. 

“No need for Mr.” He replied as he returned and grabbed the empty cans. In the blink of an eye he crushed them flat. 

For a moment she thought that was a threat, but the way he did not make eye contact made her decide she was just being paranoid. “Isn’t it risky to let me go, since I know where you live and what you look like?” 

“Who said I’m letting you go?” He said at first, then laughed at Samanda’s horrified expression. “Don’t worry, I’m a hermit, not a monster. If you do tell someone, I’ll just move somewhere else. It won’t be the first time, nor the last. You’re free to go when you’re well enough.”

“Then I better go.” Samanda said and stood up, testing her leg. There was a little pain still, but nothing that would inhibit her. “My fiance could be scouting here any minute now. If he finds me, he finds this place too.”

“Before you go,” Bigfoot said and crossed the room.

“I believe this is yours.” He said and, taking the wooly cap from the TV-table, handed it to her.

Samanda almost took it, but then thought better of it. “Keep it, I have others. Think of it as a gift.”

Bigfoot stood a moment, then smiled. “I will. I never caught your name?”

“Samanda. Have a nice day, Bigfoot.”

“You too, Samanda.”

Bigfoot ducked back behind the snow-covered tarp and closed it up. Samanda knew it was there and still only just perceived it. Scanning the mountainside around her, she pulled her cap down and skied down the mountain to the end point of the piste. A few moments later Bran erupted from the bushes on the flanks of the piste and ambushed her, pulling off her cap with a cry of victory. Samanda pushed her thoughts of Bigfoot’s home from her mind and gave pursuit.