Page 20 of Snow Creek

Neither did the Jefferson County Sheriff.

It took her two trips to bring the body parts to the firepit, a location that had been the center of activity when she and Amy still had visitors. S’mores. Puffs of marijuana. Long, drunken stories about people they loved and hated.

Regina used some fat rendered from a goat she’d slaughtered to help ignite the pieces of what remained of the nameless dead man. She piled on the wood and set the fire. She knew it would take a long time, probably all night. When they first moved there one of their friends hit a doe and someone came up with the bright idea of cremating the animal’s remains. The worst idea ever. It sent up a stream of acrid smoke and the fire hissed as the animal’s fat was consumed. A person’s pre-burned body couldn’t be that bad. Or could it? When the night was over the deer was gone. Even some of the bones had burned.Gone.That’s just what she needed. She knew that no one would pay any attention to the pyre. Once she’d burned a mattress sending a tornado of black smoke into the sky. No one said a word. No one complained of the smell either. In Snow Creek, she mused, burning a body was a private, do-not-disturb affair. Like a lot of things out there. She watched the blaze take off and then hurried inside to tell Amy that she was finally getting to some of that trash that had piled up in the barn.

“How’d it go? Did you bury the body?”

“Yes. I did.”

“In the woods?”

“Yes, baby, in the woods.”

Regina felt Amy’s lips against hers. So warm and lovely. So perfect.

“You get some rest. I’m going to watch the fire.”

“I love you.”

“I love you forever and a day.”

Their love, they both knew, was everlasting.

Eight

Not a single cloud marred the blue of the sky the morning Dante York and his off-and-on girlfriend, Maddie Cohen, took off from Port Hadlock to scope out the wilds above Snow Creek. Dante had become obsessed with cryptozoology. He was sure that he could be the first person to get an irrefutable photograph of a Sasquatch. Maddie was pretty interested in the idea too, although felt that the new fascination was taking up too much time out of their romantic life.

Everything they did lately centered around Sasquatch.

A logger had reported seeing tracks there in the late eighties. Sam Otis had even been photographed and featured in the Port TownsendLeader.

PT Man Says He Found Bigfoot Tracks

Last Friday was like any other day for Sam Otis, 36, of Port Townsend, with one big exception.

Make that one Bigfoot exception.

Otis had just got off his shift as a sawyer for Puget Logging Co. at the timber giant’s Snow Creek property. While returning to his truck, he says he stumbled upon a trail of large humanoid tracks.

“I knew what I was seeing right away,” he told the Leader. “I’ve always had a feeling that Bigfoot was out there, you know, watching the crew. Now there’s proof.”

Otis’s proof is in the form of two photographs of the tracks. In one, he put a dollar bill in the frame to show scale…

“We’re going to find something,” Dante insisted as he downed a bottle of Mexican Coke.

Maddie smiled encouragingly from her cell phone.

“Yeah,” she said as she clicked a deluge of Likes on her friend’s Instagram posts. “Something.”

The ride was rough going up the old logging road. Puget Logging had intended harvesting more timber there, but an endangered species, the spotted owl, put an abrupt stop to those plans. The irony was the little bird was discovered by a group of crypto-hunters in search of Sasquatch.

Sam Otis’s story cost him and everyone on his crew their jobs.

Maddie looked down at her phone.

“No service,” she announced.

Dante looked over at her. “You don’t always need to be on your phone. Let’s enjoy the moment.”

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