Chapter Ten ~ One Sasquatch - or Two?

as told to Jstar8 by Cap

Cap crossed the campground, heading for the river, intent on his task. That didn’t stop him from exercising common courtesy, waving to Diana and Miss Trask and assuring them he’d be right back. He’d completed his objective when he felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up. Something was watching him.

Cap moved to the bank of the river, crouching like he was going to dip his hand in for a drink. He actually did that, but it was just cover for scanning the reflected image. There, movement. It was barely any warning, but enough that Cap stood up into the attack, ramming the creature in the ribs before it could swipe at his head.

He kicked out, mostly to get a sense of size. The creature bellowed in rage, but Cap frowned. The proportions – and the amount of time it was spending on its hind legs – were all wrong for a bear, but the Sasquatch hadn’t shown any aggressive tendencies, and had a distinctive odor and sound, neither of which were present now. That wasn’t all of it. The “flesh” his leg had connected with hung loose and free on the creature’s frame, with the actual meat of the leg much deeper than the size of the leg implied, as if the Sasquatch had recently lost a great deal of weight. Natural creations didn’t lose weight like that and thrive.

Cap did something he’d never have done with a non-primate animal and shoved the thing in the chest. There, too, the fur hung limp over a smaller frame. The fur twisted and bunched at the neck in a way that wasn’t natural. Cap’s brain was just supplying the obvious answer – the “creature” was a human dressed in a fur suit to scare tourists – when his attacker mule kicked Cap toward the creek. Cap fell on his back, hand scrambling for purchase and catching on the pipsisswa vine.

He scrambled to his feet, able to spare only a moment’s regret on how much of the vine he pulled out by the roots. His assailant was tangled in a mess of broken ferns and seemed disinclined to try again. Cap breathed deep, debating his options, when an option he’d never considered slammed into the back of his head. Stars burst across his vision, which went white, and then black. He didn’t even feel his impact with the ground.

He woke up in the bed of a pickup that wasn’t as well-maintained as Knut’s. His head was throbbing but that wasn’t a surprise. The loss of consciousness implied a concussion that certainly wasn’t being helped by bouncing it off the bed of the truck every time they hit a rock or hole and whoever was driving clearly didn’t know how to drive the mountain roads, because they were hitting what felt like every hole and rock. Cap had been on worse roads, but those times he’d been able to brace himself. His hands were tied behind his back, and he thought his ankles were bound.

Cap rolled his wrists, exploring the limits of his restraints. He could probably get out of them, but was it wise to do so now? He probably couldn’t get out of the truck bed without them noticing and he’d probably hurt himself in the attempt. Once they got wherever they were going, he’d have opportunities to disappear into the wilds. They weren’t going to kill him right off. They wouldn’t have bothered with tying him up and dragging his unconscious body to their truck if they just wanted him dead.

They took another switchback hard. Cap slid across the truck bed, scrabbling for purchase with his hands and feet positioned all wrong. His shoulder hit the side of truck first, but his head wasn’t far behind. White lights danced across his vision, but he managed to stay conscious this time. He wasn’t sure that would last. He tried to get his hands under himself enough to at least work himself up into a leaning position where his head was above the sidewall, but they roared around the other half of the switchback and he was sliding across the bed of the pickup again.

Finally, they skidded to a stop in a spray of woodchips. Cap lay back in the bed of the truck, breathing hard, for a moment. He tried to sit up but his head spun. The concussion isn’t news, but something I have to keep in mind, he reminded himself. It could slow him down when he made his escape.

Hands grabbed his ankles, yanking him across the truck bed to the tailgate. He lifted his head and got his first good look at his captors. The “sasquatch” was the older Swisher, in a fur suit that, on closer inspection, looked suspiciously like it was sourced from Tank’s new winter yammers. The younger Swisher was the one who had him by the ankles.

“Come on. Get him out so we can get going.”

But the younger Swisher eyed Cap. “They say moccasins are supposed to be better than boots out here. All the advantages without having to break them in.”

“Are you still moaning about the boots giving you blisters? Stop being such a baby! If you want the kid’s footwear, take it. Ain’t like he’ll be needing them where he’s going, but I don’t want to hear you whining about your feet anymore.”

Cap wanted to fight – he’d need footwear for his escape – but he was too likely to get hurt without winning. He could figure out footwear easier than broken bones if he pissed off his captors. Besides, he had to get them to leave him alone long enough to get out of the ropes. How better to convince them he was safely contained than to be barefoot?

He looked around as they yanked him onto his feet, less his moccasins. He recognized the abandoned buildings. It was an old logging camp on Cedar Mountain. Hiking back to his family at Champion Creek would be a chore and a half, especially in improvised footwear, but he did know the area. He could absolutely disappear, leaving no trail the Swishers could follow. It would have to wait, of course, until the Swishers wouldn’t notice him leaving, which meant putting meaningful distance between him and them in the dark without a fire or flashlight. That was less than ideal, but ideal had left the station when he lost consciousness back at Champion Creek.

They marched him toward one of the buildings as fast as he could go with no shoes and only about a foot of give in the ropes around his ankles. The logging camp had only been deserted a few months prior when the new sustainable forestry law came into effect. Too soon for even grasses to reclaim the gravel parking area, so gravel and bark and bits of wood debris that had fallen off the good lumber processed here nipped painfully into Cap’s feet.

The sawdust inside the building they took him into offered only a different, not altogether better, attack on his feet, but soon enough they shoved him down by one of the pillars and tied his wrists to it. They obviously weren’t expert kidnappers, since they did so by tying the rope already around his wrists to the pole, rather than untying his wrists and retying them behind the pole, which would have made his escape considerably harder, and significantly reduced his ability to move, but Cap wasn’t going to look the gift horse in the mouth.

Nor did he see any reason to comment when they promptly left the building, leaving Cap entirely alone. He promptly started working on getting himself out of the ropes. He was so focused on that he almost didn’t realize what he was hearing when the truck doors slammed and then the truck started up and rumbled its way back down Cedar Mountain.

They can’t be that stupid, Cap cautioned himself. One of them is still out there.

Cap looked mournfully at his feet when he was free of the ropes. He should probably get away first, before whoever was still up here “standing guard” checked on him, before he stopped long enough to improvise himself some footwear. He really didn’t want to go anywhere, even within this sawdusty room without footwear, though.

If they realize you have a knife, they’ll take it for sure, and you need it to get back. Cap debated with himself, visualizing the area, and what he knew of the buildings. If he remembered correctly from the last time he’d been up here, a few years ago, the next building over had a back door in the direction of his escape route from the logging camp. It had the main mill in it, which was likely too big to take when the loggers abandoned the site. He could hide in there, make himself new footwear, and be on his way. If anyone noticed he was missing, he should hear the commotion in time to make his escape before they found him.

Cap couldn’t see anyone from the doorway of the building he’d been dumped in, but he could see the building he intended to hole up in, and the door was open, so he wouldn’t get caught in the open by a locked door, at least. Still, he’d rather creep past someone whose location he was certain of than try to sneak by someone who could be anywhere (including inside the building he hoped to make his refuge).

Successfully reaching the second building and finding no one inside only made him more nervous. Where were the Swishers? They couldn’t really have both gone in the truck, could they?

It felt as though it took forever for Cap to remove the splinters from his feet, cut leather and fringe from his coat, and fashion primitive shoes. In all that time he heard no human sounds from anywhere in the camp, and no one found him.

It would take more than a day to hike back to his family and the Champion Creek campground. There was a cave he could spend tomorrow night in that would be warm and dry, especially if he built a small fire at the entrance. The question was where he would spend tonight. If he could be certain that the Swishers were really gone, and for good, his best camp site was right here, with a roof and walls. More likely, even if they had both gone away after dumping him up here, they’d come back for the night. It was better than any camp site they were likely to make for themselves, given their clear inexperience with wilderness.

Cap almost ignored the Mill Foreman’s office, next to the door that would be his final escape. Only the fleeting thought that there might be a first-aid kit in there, with pain relief for his pounding head and aching feet, and maybe iodine to help stave off infections from the splinters (he’d need his feet to get out of this!), made him pause long enough to explore the barren room. He found nothing of the things he’d hoped for – or at least nothing he was willing to use for the purposes he’d thought of – but he did find an old, battered, canteen and a mostly empty bottle of gin.

Cap checked the label, confirming the spirits weren’t past any documented freshness date and had a high enough alcohol content to be useful in sanitizing the canteen of whatever the previous owner and months of neglect had left behind. At the last minute, Cap dumped the remaining liquid and took the gin bottle, too. He could go without food for the time it would take him to get back where he belonged, but water was critical, and he couldn’t have too much of it, or too many containers, especially if he had to boil water to purify it. Since he didn’t know where he was stopping tonight, he wasn’t sure what his water supply would look like.

If he was going, he had to get going. He needed to get enough distance to risk a dry-wood, low-smoke fire, if he was going to sleep in the open tonight. He’d also need time to build a camp before full dark, and that wasn’t so far off anymore.