The Sasquatch Mystery

were joined like grotesque snowballs pushed together to make a snowman. Covered with fur from head to toe, it stood upright like a man and exuded that choking odor of dead fish and meadow mice.
    Even in the midst of her terror, Trixie thought to herself, So this is Cap ’s bee trap!
    Then the monster whined. The sound was like a question. Suddenly Cap brandished his firebrand so violently that fire flared into life. The monster stepped backward. Though it was huge, Trixie did not hear one crackle of a twig snapped under its feet.
    Was this what Knut had meant by an “incident”? What should she do? Trixie pushed all her knuckles against her teeth.
    Cap looked pitifully small and vulnerable beside this grossly huge forest monster. For a long instant, the two eyed each other across the hot ashes. The monster clicked its teeth, shifted its weight uncertainly, then disappeared in the wink of an eye. Only the odor that lingered behind was proof to Trixie that she had not dreamed a nightmare.
    Cap pushed his firebrand back into the hot ashes. He looked so shaken that Trixie left her tent on the run.
    “C-Cap!” she gasped. “Wh-What was it?”
    “The sasquatch,” he said.
    “The what?”
    Cap seemed to see Trixie for the first time. Roughly he told her, “Go get your boots. You’ll freeze to death.”
    Trixie hopped on flinching, tender feet back to her tent and put on her boots. Realizing how ridiculously she was dressed, she snatched up the blanket that covered her bedroll. Snugly wrapped, she went back to Cap. “What’s a sasquatch?” she demanded unceremoniously.
    Cap didn’t answer immediately. “You saw it, didn’t you?” he asked finally.
    Asked a pointblank question, Trixie hesitated. “Why—” She had to stand very close to Cap just to see his features clearly in the early morning light. Even that stump over by Miss Trask’s tent looked like a bear. “I—I think so,” she said.
    Cap pushed his fingertips against his eyes. “So, I wasn’t dreaming.”
    Trixie recalled the eye conversations between Cap and Knut. “Have you seen it before?” she persisted.
    “No, but I’ve heard it several times. I’ve smelled it, and I’ve run across its tracks. But this is my first sighting.”
    “Will it come back?” Trixie asked soberly. “Probably not. It’s a night feeder, and night will soon be gone. Luckily, this was a friendly encounter.”
    “Jeepers, you call that friendly?”
    “Well, it didn’t harm us, did it?” Cap stirred the coals to life. “We’ll need a breakfast fire,” he murmured.
    “Breakfast,” Trixie repeated, lost in a reconstruction of the strange encounter. “Cap, what is a sasquatch?”
    Cap shrugged. “It’s a primate, or mammal, of some kind. It lives in the high country. In Asia they call it yeti or Abominable Snowman. Over here we call it sasquatch or bigfoot.”
    “I’ve heard about the Snowman,” Trixie said, “but I always thought it was some kind of gimmick they made up to get people to go to the Himalayas. You know, like going to Scotland to see the Loch Ness Monster.”
    Cap looked amused.
    Trixie’s cheeks warmed. “Or a legend, like oar Rip Van Winkle back home.”
    Cap jabbed the fire with his stick. “Pretty stinky legend, wouldn’t you say?” Then he faced Trixie. “We aren’t the first ones to see the sasquatch, and we won’t be the last. There’ve been hundreds of recent sightings. Seeing it in the Joe country is what shakes me. I never dreamed I’d see it so far inland!” Cap shook his head to clear away cobwebs of sleeplessness and tension. “To be honest, Trixie, I never dreamed I’d ever see one, period.”
    “Maybe that’s it—we dreamed it,” Trixie said hopefully. As light poured into the campground, her dawn-terror was fading.
    “Some dream,” Cap sniffed. “It was sort of wonderful, though, wasn’t it? Now I know how the scientists feel when they discover something a zillion years old.”
    “Sure, but those things get put in museums. This thing was right here—alive and well!” Trixie felt dizzy. “Maybe—maybe what we saw was an ape.”
    “Too little.”
    “How about a gorilla? He could have escaped from a zoo or a circus train. Have there been any circus accidents in the Northwest recently?”
    Trixie knew she was grasping at straws, but she felt so uncomfortable with the knowledge that a monster, neither man nor beast, had planted its feet on this very soil.
    “The tracks will tell the story,”