Stop! Thief!
- Feb 23
- 10 min read
Updated: Feb 25
“Don’t let Batsquatch get those chips,” I told them before chasing after Mom.
As we walked back down the mountain, we met more Oscar fans. They turned their faces away from Mom to shine big smiles at me, oohing and aahing at my trendy bandana and itching to pat my rippling muscles. Behind me, Mom pulled up her muzzle and did weird things with her neck to keep it from falling off her nose. Fashion is awkward sometimes.
Here in Forgotten California, everyone hiked with naked faces. “I don’t think you need to wear that here,” I told Mom. “You would need Friends to catch It from, and you never let anyone that close. Remember what the Witch told you about how the boogeyvirus blows away outdoors?”
“True,” Mom said. “But have you noticed that whenever I pull up the mask, people not wearing masks step off the trail for us?”
I hadn’t noticed it before, but now that she pointed it out, Mom’s muzzle was sort of like a superhero mask that magically cleared people from the trail like cars making way for an ambulance. With Mom’s muzzle up, I didn’t have to up-up on a rock every time we saw someone coming, and Mom didn’t have to stand with her back to the trail stuffing me full of kibbles until they passed.
The Oscar fans stared agog, thinking Look! Is it a turd? Is it insane? At least it has a cute dog!
“Make way! Make way!” I trumpeted as I paraded down the center of the trail.
They cheered, “Awwwww!” and “What a cute dog!” and “Hey there, fella!” as I trotted by. But none of them reached out to pet me.
“Yield! Yield, I say! She’s got a muzzle and doesn’t know how to use it. It could drop at any moment, so nobody’s safe. Please, step off the trail and turn your back for safety… and Hey big fella, right back atcha, ma’am!”
Only one group carelessly stayed on the trail as Mom approached. A pair of stray turtles were wandering in circles in a little meadow, looking at the ground and not paying any attention to what masked bandidos were charging at them. Mom stopped. Her superhero muzzle fell from her nose. With her whole face showing, Mom stepped back off the trail and I stepped into the gap so the strangers would have someone to pat.
“Your car’s not gonna be all the way up here,” I told them. “You’ve got to go farther down the mountain. Go get your packpack and I’ll show you the way.”
“Lose something?” Mom asked.
The more flustered one raised her arm and our eyes followed it toward a flat rock in the shade of a tree. “We were having lunch on those rocks over there when a bear came along.” She raised her arm by a whisker. “We ran into those trees to hide, but it got into our packs.”
“Oh no!” I said. “Was your lunch okay? Need me to help you look for it?”
“Did you see which way he went?” Mom asked.
“He dragged my pack into those trees down there,” the hungrier one said, swiveling her arm toward a clump of bushes. The branches were too thick for even an ant to slip through, let alone a bear. I sniffed the air for signs of sammiches, but the trail went cold in the marshy water under the thicket.
“Next I saw him, he was running straight up that slope to the ridge,” the less hungry one added. We all followed her eyes to where the peak was crumbling one stone at a time into the valley.
“He ran up that?” Mom eeped like she didn’t believe it, yet didn’t think the ladies were lying either. “It seems too loose to hold a 500 pound bear.”
“Oh yeah,” the Hungry One said. “He was flying.”
“Another suspect!” I said. Both Batsquatch and a flying bear would have the motive, means, and opportunity to carry a family of deer into the sky and drop them on the rocks to get at the deliciousness inside.
“My car keys were in there,” the Less Hungry One added. Her eyes dropped from the far-off slope to search the grass around her shoes.
“Oh no! If he has your car keys, he could be anywhere in Nevada or Oregon by now,” I said. “This is very serious. We’ll have to ask the freeway-sign people to tell everyone to look out for a brown bear driving a Subaru Forester. Don’t cry, you’re about to be famous!”
Mom looked from the marshy thicket up the treacherous landslide beyond. The wheels between her ears spun, working out that if it took her an average of fifteen minutes to find her keys in the Stuck House, how long would it take to find them in all this wilder-ness? “Do you want me to—” she started to say, when all of a sudden her arm flapped and she screamed, “DUCK!”
My new Friends didn’t duck, but stepped back from a social distance to an anti-social distance.
“Ow! Duck!” Mom shouted again, wiping her elbow jerkily against her hip and holding it up to inspect the problem up close. “Get off me, you sucker!” She flicked the fingers of her other hand at the spot where her eyes were pointing.
A blob of something waspy flew into the grass.
“That wasn’t very cool, Mom,” I whispered. “What are you always telling me about barking at strangers? You’ll frighten them.”
“You saw it, right?” Mom asked the searchers. When she saw the frozen look in their eyes, she pulled her muzzle back up to show she wasn’t a threat. Mom may not like people to see her weirdness any more than she wants them to smell her farts, but sometimes there’s just no holding it in. “The bee? Or wasp?” she hinted hopefully.
The Less Hungry One sized Mom up, probably trying to decide if she could overpower her in case of another outburst. “You looked like something bit you…” she said cautiously.
Mom hid her arm behind her back where our would-be Friends couldn’t see her rubbing the sore spot. “Do you want me to call Triple A when I get back to the parking lot? It’ll probably take them a while to get all the way up here. Can’t hurt to get a head start.”
“It’s okay,” the Less Hungry One said. “I’ll keep looking a little longer. It’s a bright teal backpack, I’m sure we’ll spot it eventually.”
Save me! said her companion’s eyes. “Thanks for your help,” said her companion’s mouth.
“Okay, well, I’ll let people know there was a bear sighting in the area on my way out,” Mom promised. When we were out of hearing range, she added, “That sucks.”
“I know!” I said. “They’re gonna have to share their snacks from now on.”
“Funny how you can be prepared for anything in the wilderness, but coming back to civilization is usually the hard part.” Mom lifted her elbow to inspect the puffy lump growing there. She squinted at it like she was trying to turn her eyeballs into microscopes. “I always forget how much bee stings hurt.” She pinched the bump so hard that her whole elbow turned white.
This was strange behavior, even for Mom. “What are you doing?” I asked, checking the trail ahead to make sure no one was watching.
“I’m trying to squeeze the venom out like a zit. That’s what you’re supposed to do, right?”
“I thought that was spaghetti monsters.” A spaghetti monster is like a leash come to life. It wags its tail and hisses a warning before the clip end bites you and ends your zoomies forever.
“Oh. Maybe you’re right.” She tried to put her elbow in her mouth. “Do you think I can suck out bee venom like snake venom? I read about that in a book somewhere.”
“I don’t know. Dogs don’t suck.”
Despite all her squeezing and sucking, a white patch the size of my pawtip bubbled up on her arm. By the time we came back to the car kennel, an angry lump the size of a chicken breast had swelled around the white center, until her elbow looked like the Batsquatch of zits.
Mom forgot to be grateful that the keys were still in her pocket because her mind was scattered across the mountains, searching her memory for clues about who made the deer graveyard. She squirmed under the mounting suspense as the road twisted down the mountain.
As soon as the road straightened, the Witch interrupted Mom’s puzzling. “You’re back online. You will arrive in—”
“Take me to the nearest gas station!” Mom ordered urgently. “We have some googling to do.” A dog knows that the fun of a mystery is in the not-knowing, and that it’s more exciting to bark through a closed door than to open it and find that the mailman has already gone, but Mom isn’t so wise.
A short time later, we sat in a sliver of shade outside a small-town Sinclair station. There was a table just a few steps away, but the electricity was hidden behind the ice machine, so we sat on the ground while the Witch sucked juice from the laptop and the laptop sucked juice from the wall. With nothing to distract her curious fingers, Mom couldn’t take the suspense any longer.
“What do you know about dead deer in these here parts?” Mom interrogated.
“Would you like to know about all the Bigfoot sightings in the area?” the Witch asked innocently.
“Yes!” I barked. “Mom, Bigfoot is Batsquatch’s nickname. She’s saying Batsquatch did it!”
Both Mom and the Witch ignored me. The suspense heightened.
“Are you looking for UFO sightings?” the Witch asked.
“Aliens!” I solved. “That explains everything!”
“There’s all kinds of paranormal activity in this area,” the Witch agreed. “There have been many reports of unidentified creatures and objects disappearing into solid rock and—”
“That’s exactly what I didn’t-see!” I said. “What happens next?”
Mom hushed the Witch with a flick before she leaked any spoilers. “Cheese, isn’t there anything real on the internet?”
“I found this,” the Witch said a moment later, like she expected a treat for it.
Mom looked into the Witch’s screen for answers and her face turned a deeper shade of grey.
“What does it say?” I asked. “Was it Batsquatch? The flying bear? Aliens? Who dunnit?”
“It says that the deer migration goes through that pass every year,” Mom read, drawing out the suspense.
“No! Don’t tell me! Let me guess…” I tilted my head in a hmmm and waited, because I know how to do suspense, too. “It’s Batsquatch, right? He waits for them in his doorless cave at the tippity-top. When the herd least expects it, he pops out of solid rock and says Boo! Then the deer die quickly of a painless heart attack so they won’t feel it as he rips them to pieces like a stuffy toy. Right?”
“Nothing like that,” Mom said in the voice she uses for bad things that you can make stop by looking away. “They cross the ridge while it’s still buried in snow. Every year, a few of them slip. I guess that’s where they land.”
“That’s so sad. They probably die still hoping that Triple A will come save them at any minute.” I tried to imagine it, but couldn’t. I’d explored the whole ridge, and there hadn’t been anywhere scary enough to turn Mom to stone, so they couldn’t have fallen by accident. “Who pushes them? Is it the bear? Batsquatch? I give up. Tell me!”
“No one pushes them, Spud. Ice is just slippery. Or maybe a cornice collapses when there’s too much weight on top of it.”
“Aaah, the old ice twist,” I nodded. “I should have seen that one coming. It’s the oldest trick in the book: He stabbed her with an icicle… He hanged himself from a block of ice that melted into the puddle at the crime scene… She whacked him over the head with the frozen porkchop and then served it to the detectives…” I let it play out in my imagination like the big reveal at the end of a movie. “But wait, where did they fall from?”
“Remember where we were sitting? That must have been where it happened. There’s no other place on that side that’s so exposed.” She gulped more than just root beer. “Nature is brutal. It doesn’t guarantee a satisfying ending.”
“That’s not a nice story at all.” I tried not to imagine Mom slipping and falling off the mountain, but my imagination got away from me. It found her with eyeballs gone and tongue hanging out before going blank. “I liked it better when Batsquatch was the culprit.”
“We’ve gotten so good at staying safe that we’re surprised danger still exists at all,” Mom said icily. “We think of danger as something that happens out there; that you’ll only find it if you go looking for it, and you can opt out when it gets to be too much.”
“Rules sure are helpful for keeping the danger out of civilization,” I agreed. “… if you’re into that sort of thing.”
“People keep trying to fight off this virus with rules. As if Nature gives a crap,” she went on, forgetting that she was new to following the rules herself. “Now that danger is coming for people where they live, they don’t know how to cope. The idea that their comfort is insignificant is such an unfamiliar concept that they think some shadowy bad guy must be torturing them for sport.” She wagged her head to show how wrong people were. “Deer just accept that danger is part of life and migrate on…”
I wanted to hear what deer-zombies had to teach us about danger, but a medium-sized people-puppy interrupted Mom’s train of thought by politely shoving a bottle of soda and a sammich between her eyes and the Witch.
“Here, these are for you,” he said carefully, like he wasn’t sure if Mom would bite his arm off.
Mom scanned the bags, gnarled wires, gadgets, snacks, and drinks scattered around us. “Oh, uh… I’m not homeless. I just blow a fuse in my van every time I try to charge my laptop.”
“Oh,” said the people-puppy, still holding out the snacks.
They looked at each other while I sniffed the sammich from a safe distance.
Mom unfroze and tried to look harmless as she gently accepted the sammich. “Thanks. Do you like Coke? It’s all yours. Tell your parents you deserve it for being such a big-hearted kid.”
The people-puppy turned and ran back to his car, which lit up like a faithful dog when it saw him. “Well that was awkward,” Mom said, waving to the boy through the window as his car pulled away.
“Yeah, he didn’t even ask if you were a vegetarian,” I said, sniffing at the sammich. “Is that bologna? And cheese?”
Mom peeled the bologna and cheese out of the bread for me and started ratta-tat-tatting on the laptop. Eventually, a man who had been pacing in and out of the gas station for a suspiciously long time stopped pacing beside us.
“Could I offer you 50 bucks to drive us to Yreka?” he asked. “Ap-parently they don’t stock Prius tires at the garages around here. The nearest tire store is in Yreka and they close in a couple of hours. Triple A says that the tow truck can get the car there in time, but we can’t ride inside with the driver.”
Want to keep reading? Grab Oscar’s book, No Place Like Alone on Amazon.
