Bigfoot Mystery

Written by Moe Zilla, Published on 11/6/2008, Re-published on 5/14/2010

The fire crackled and the campsite glowed. I stared at the strange orange light and its long, scary shadows as my older brother talked to his friends about the Bigfoot monster.

"It prowls for food at night," Burt was saying. "You hear branches breaking and then silence. It's a predatory animal with keen senses, and it smells you before you even know it's there."

"Why can't I smell it?" joked Jerry. "Since it hasn't taken a bath in a hundred years!"

Everyone laughed -- even Leng, a foreign exchange student who hadn't even heard of Bigfoot. Leng was staying with Jerry's family, and this was his first camping trip in the woods. Jerry was our school's best athlete, and he'd brought along his best friend on the trip -- a skinny quiet kid named Winston. They all laughed and made jokes about the monster as Burt tried to describe it.

"A friend of mine saw it!” Burt said seriously, "and he said it was very dangerous!” Winston and Jerry had heard the same story, but they weren't sure that it was true.

"Maybe your friend saw a grizzly bear," I suggested, "and it was just walking on its hind legs.” Leng and Jerry nodded in agreement, but Burt just shook his head. There weren't any grizzly bears in this forest. Only a hungry, prowling Bigfoot monster.

And that was when Winston pointed to his camera, and Jerry finished the thought. "If we can take a picture of the Bigfoot monster, we'll be rich!"

"You'll be too busy running," Burt said, half-defensively. Everyone laughed -- even Leng -- and Jerry teased that maybe Burt would be doing the running, since he'd spent so much time worrying about the monster. The five of us kept making jokes, and if there were any monsters in the woods, they could hear us laughing.

Jerry was the one making most of the jokes. Winston was kind of shy at school, since he wasn't a popular athlete like Jerry -- but he seemed to enjoy finally being part of a group. I knew how Winston felt, since my older brother sometimes didn't invite me to do things with him. And because it was Leng's first camping trip, the whole day had been a new adventure. Jerry had led us to his favorite camping site, and it offered a spectacular view of the whole valley. That night as the five of us stared into the dark night sky, we even spotted a shooting star. It had been a long, fun evening, and soon we'd set up our sleeping bags and were ready to get some sleep.

But in less than an hour later, we'd find out who would run when they heard the Bigfoot monster...

Burt was already asleep -- I'd heard him snoring ever since we went to bed -- but other than that, the woods around us were quiet. Maybe a little too quiet, I thought. The insects had stopped chirping, as though they sensed something coming by.

And then I heard branches snapping.

I lay still, trying to listen for more noises -- and also, because I was terrified. I was glad when Jerry finally whispered something in the night.

"Was that you, Winston?"

"No," Winston whispered back.

"It wasn't me either," said Leng.

The silence was agonizing -- but then we heard something even scarier. We heard an animal growling -- and then it turned into an angry snarl. Branches cracked, and Winston and Jerry screamed. But it was so dark that we couldn't see what was coming towards us.

I grabbed Winston's camera, hoping the flashbulb would light up the camp site. And when the flash went off, there it was -- a huge furry Bigfoot monster, with its claws raised over its head! It snarled as the light disappeared, but I'd seen its dirty brown fur. It must've been at least seven feet tall.

I snapped the camera again, and the flash showed the monster again, still raising its claws. In the exact same position. And still snarling in the same way.

I flashed the flash bulb again, and then made a startling observation about the Bigfoot monster.

"It isn't moving."

Burt had found his flashlight, and pointed its light at the seven-foot monster. It wasn't moving at all. Its giant claws seemed frozen in place over its head. Leng threw a rock at its body, and the rock bounced off with a hollow thud.

"It's stuffed," Leng said.

Winston had found a stick, and tapped it against the monster's chest. Surprisingly, this Bigfoot monster wasn't the least bit annoyed when you poked it with a stick.

We heard snarling, and branches breaking, but it wasn't from this giant stuffed monster. Burt pointed his flashlight around the camp site, and we looked for the source of the noises until we realized they were coming from inside the monster's stomach.

"A tape recorder," Winston guessed. He had his ear against the monster's stomach now. "It plays the sounds of a monster snarling, and the sounds of the branches breaking."

And we all felt pretty stupid.

Leng found some logs for the fire, and soon we'd filled up the camp site with a friendly orange light. But someone had played a mean trick on us -- and we wanted to figure out whom.

"I guess that answers our question," Jerry said sheepishly. "We ALL got scared when we heard the Bigfoot monster." Everyone laughed -- even Burt, though he seemed determined to figure out how he'd been tricked. He pointed his flashlight around the back of the monster -- and made a startling discovery. The fur stopped halfway down its back, and the rest of its "body" was just a mesh of "chicken wire" hexagons -- a framework to hang the fur on. Inside its body was completely hollow, except for a seven-foot pole that was propping up the whole framework. The Bigfoot monster was an old hat rack holding up some fur and a scary mask.

"Look," said Jerry, "I'm carrying Bigfoot!" He'd grabbed the base of the hat rack, and was able to lift the lightweight framework.

"Take my picture with the monster!" said Leng. He wanted to be able to tell the story to his friends back home. Winston tried to carry the monster, but he couldn't lift it without Burt's help. The tape recorder had stopped growling, but now we were making our own monster noises.

"Hey! Put me down!” Jerry said in a monster voice. "I'm afraid of flash bulbs!"

"And you haven't had a bath in 100 years," Leng added. And we all laughed some more. The monster wasn't scary any more.

But I could tell that my brother was still a little upset about the evening. I grabbed the flash light, determined to see if I could find any more clues about where the stuffed monster had come from.

If it had been hidden near the camp, we would've seen it before we went to sleep -- so it had to be moved it into position afterwards. But there was an enormous rock just up the trail, which is probably where the statue had been hidden. The "tape recorder" had been running for about an hour, but the first 30 minutes of the tape were blank, before the tape had switched to a few seconds of snarling and snapping branches. I looked for signs that the monster had been slid along the ground, but the ground hadn't been disturbed.

I heard laughter from the campfire, and my brother Burt asked me if I'd found any more monsters.

"No," I shouted back. "But I've figured out which one of you created this one!"