Mike Draper’s dad wasn’t in his tent. He lurked somewhere in the night, making gruff howls to channel a myth. Mike shut his eyes, focusing on the lingering effects of his weed gummy to help him sleep through a night in the wilderness. Wind gusts rained pine needles on the tent’s nylon. He rubbed his legs together, harmonizing with the needles’ pattering. Rubbing his legs meant he was still stoned. He continued this ankle cricket cross until he fabricated a singular image: his mother’s face. He never understood her acceptance of his father’s ridiculous obsession with the sasquatch, with Bigfoot, or as it’s referred to in Hocking Hills, the Ohio Grassman. “It’s good to believe in something,” she’d say. “Believing breeds faith, and faith should make us better, and becoming better is always real.” He’d counter with how Dad never went to church with her but then she’d smile, pat his leg, and ask about his students. Mike had never been much of a drinker and had never tried recreational drugs, but then teaching during the pandemic happened, and here he was, camping with his sasquatch-searching father in southern Ohio, savoring the midnight stillness of the autumn air as his homemade edible reimagined his dead mother’s face, before slipping back to the fragility of his vodka-induced dreams.

A dry log crackling woke Mike in the morning. Thanks to the gummy, he’d avoided a hangover. During the pandemic he bought his own grow locker and soon learned to yield his own cannabis. He didn’t like smoking it, so he watched YouTube videos to learn how to make weed gummies. For getting a ‘D’ in his college botany class, he’d grown quite deft in growing pot, harvesting the seeds, and making his own edibles. He started microdosing with a quarter of a gummy in the mornings just to take the edge off. Now he was taking half a gummy when he woke and another half during lunch, making the job bearable.

“You still like your eggs runny?”

His dad asked loudly enough to make sure he was awake, a tactic he’d used since Mike was a teenager. Even though his dad retired at forty-eight, thirty years in the army meant he was not only awake, but a productive soldier, alert and focused by 5 AM In high school, Mike would ignore his dad’s passive aggressiveness by stealing a few more minutes of sleep before the student zombie routine began. Now he taught the same novels he felt weren’t important when he was a kid to teens who don’t feel anything’s important unless it’s trapped in their phones. As an adult, he found the literature very important, and tried to help his students see what he’d missed about life’s commentary when he was their age, but their complete indifference to everything he said became an impenetrable wall. Instead of modeling passion for the literature, hoping it’d impact his students, he’d let the gummy do its work, entertaining himself, letting the day slip by.

“Runny is fine.”

Mike didn’t care how the eggs were cooked. He didn’t eat breakfast anymore. He thought he’d feel better about himself if he lost weight, so he tried intermittent fasting. He only ate between five and eight PM And it worked. Three months later he was down 30 pounds, and at forty-two, he was in the best shape of his life. But his 32-inch waist and sudden jawline didn’t change the way he felt about himself, nor did the compliments he’d gotten from his colleagues and students. Wow! Mr. Draper, way to wait for middle age for a glow-up. For some reason, these comments made him feel worse about things. He thought about quitting the fasting and returning to eating Hot Tamales throughout the day to compensate for the stress of his students’ detachment, but he’d grown dependent on the fasting’s conditioning and no longer felt bloated—the last thing he needed during the school day was another annoyance. At lunch, instead of going to the lounge to pretend to be a part of things, he’d make a green tea, eat the other half of the gummy, and go for a walk. The worst part of his day became when he’d reenter the building and those humming fluorescent lights attacked his eyes as they transitioned back to reality.

His dad’s face poked through the tent. His peppered stubble reached the base of his neck. He gave a wink, drawing attention to his blue eyes, his one gift to Mike. “For hating camping, you sure slept sound.” He clapped his hands. “Enough shut eye. Up and at ‘em. Need to show you what I found last night.”

After defecating below a maple tree twenty yards from camp, he found his dad finishing the last of his eggs, mopping bread into the yolk. “You snooze, you lose.”

Since his dad retired, he’d been searching for proof of Bigfoot’s existence. That’s all he ever spoke about: Bigfoot. He never spoke about his missions, or the people he’d saved, or even Mike or Mike’s brother Freddy, or how he missed his dead wife. One time, in high school, after Mike had hit the game-winning shot, a half court miracle bomb to beat the Shamrocks, he stood enveloped in the shadow of Mike’s bedroom doorway and said, “It was the way you positioned your feet. Something about your feet told me you’d make it.” It was one-thirty in the morning. He mumbled for a few more minutes before falling silent but he didn’t leave. It was as if he was daring himself to say something true to his son, but all Mike could decipher from the tempered sobs was something about muscle memory.

Sipping coffee softened the silence as he followed his dad “two clicks northwest” under the orange, yellow, and red dying autumn foliage. His mother had loved the fall. It was her favorite season. Since her death, sometimes he felt her presence in the trees, nesting in its kaleidoscope of colors, humming a ditty of her own creation. She’d like to do that. Make up a tune and hum it. “Never waste a moment to create,” she’d say, and continue humming.

“Ohio is now ranked fourth in sightings,” his dad said. “Only Washington, California, and Florida have more.”

For Mike, this just meant Ohio was getting crazier. He sees it in his students, their parents, the community. Last year when he taught a contemporary black Muslim poet, one parent complained on a community Facebook page—a torpedo to a teacher’s career—stating it’s nothing more than brainwashing liberal agenda highlighting negative thoughts and alienating Christian whites. A hearing was set, and Mike almost lost his job:

“The parent is a lunatic.” Doesn’t matter.

“She actively looks for ways to get teachers fired. She even has a name for her cabal. We know this because she posts as much on Facebook.” Doesn’t matter.

“The students liked the poetry. It led to great discussions, the only good discussions I’ve had in years.” Doesn’t matter.

“It highlights underprivileged voices and how they feel stereotyped by America and not truly seen.” Doesn’t matter.

“It echoes all the statements we created in our D.E.I. work.” Doesn’t matter.

Mike was now on a Personal Improvement Plan and if he had any missteps over the next five years, he could be terminated without question. Just don’t fuck up, was the advice he’d received from his union president. When Mike suggested how to use the language in the contract to challenge the system, to change things for the better, the union president scoffed and said, I don’t do that. The following day was the first time Mike took an edible before work and when it kicked in, he looked at his students staring at their phones and wondered if teaching, real teaching, the academic learning part, was dead.

“Dad, what am I looking at?”

His dad bent down with a stick and rolled over a giant turd.

“Too big for anything around here.” His dad grinned.

“A bear.”

He shook his head. “Sure, a black bear could have migrated from West Virginia or Pennsylvania, but bear feces are full of berries. This doesn’t have any berries. Besides, when’s the last time anyone saw a bear in Hocking Hills?”

More likely than Bigfoot.

“Human then. I just shit outside.”

“You ever have a dump this big?” He brought the stick way too close to Mike’s face. “You ever have a dump full of hair?” He scratched his peppered stubble chin. “This is the best evidence I’ve seen since the footprint.”

The footprint made his dad a celebrity in the Bigfoot world. The plaster cast hangs pridefully in his home office, the way another person might hang a portrait of their family or a diploma. Anthropologists from OSU confirmed its structural authenticity to be that of a simian creature. Close by, matted hair stuck to a branch, but the sample came back from the lab inconclusive as it couldn’t be determined as bear, wolf, coyote, or something else. The lone print lay impacted in the softened earth, not even half a mile from where they were currently standing. To his dad, the find was an ancient relic, something from the gods, something akin to a Christian finding a fragment of the Ark or a Mormon locating a leaf from the Golden Plates. Now he’s a regular speaker at Bigfoot conventions and has over ten thousand followers on his podcast. Back then, his dad saw the footprint as confirmation of a truth not yet established, as some sort of mental panacea that tied the mysteries of the universe together, a grand token to being so right that he could never be wrong again… about anything. Mike’s mom was first to notice the print; this came after howls drove them from their tent into glowing morning light.

“Did Mom like coming here with you?”

“What?”

“Mom. This is the spot where you’d take her, right?”

His dad shrugged. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Nothing. I just… I don’t know. Nothing. Sorry.”

Mike looked at the billowing collage of fall foliage. He stepped back and heard the crunch of dead, dried leaves disintegrating into dust under his foot. Maybe he was still a little stoned, but he grew sad at the immense number of dried leaves that once held a magnificent sheen. The morning’s gleam sent glittering reflections in a vibrant array before giving away to a footprint, merging it with the centuries of dust, and dirt, and decaying skin of littered twigs. The loss of this beauty made him study his dad whose eyes were intoxicated with curiosity as he poked at an enormous pile of shit. Mike became jealous of that pile of shit.

“Kneel down, and help me, would ya? Open the baggie wide so we don’t miss any of it.”

His father carefully scooped the hair-infested feces into a baggie. He zip-tied it and held it up close to his face, his eyes darting back and forth with wondrous hope and ambition as if he’d just unearthed a remnant that solved the origin of the human species.

“Discovery Channel here I come.”

Mike kept quiet as he followed his dad, watching his head swivel, scanning for more evidence. The only thing his dad said over the hours of searching before heading back to the campsite was, “You ever think about getting back into coaching?” He looked at Mike when he said this. Mike was so surprised by the eye contact he could only muster a head shake. “Shame.” They continued following the stream, looking for half-eaten animals with bite marks in their fur.

Mike was an assistant basketball coach his first few years teaching. He’d played Division 1 at Kent State. He received solid minutes off the bench as the sixth man until his senior year when he became their starting shooting guard. He scored 34 points in their opening game against the heavily favored Buckeyes but blew out his knee with thirty seconds left in the game. He still wondered why his dad didn’t charge courtside when he screamed in pain at the pop in his knee. When he finally got back to campus, his roommate said, “Your dad called. He made me write down the message.” Mike stared at the message, reading it multiple times, trying to change the words: Your last miss kept you from double digit threes in a game. That would have been elite company. Your feet were positioned wrong. Let muscle memory do the work. Mike quit coaching when he realized he was only doing it in the hopes his dad would come to the games. He never did. Sometimes he wonders if he became a teacher just to be a coach. His dad never missed one of his games in high school. He missed almost everything else, but not one of his games.

For lunch, his dad ate a can of tuna and a chocolate bar and sipped green Gatorade. Mike ate a gummy and poured Tito’s into a can of cranberry seltzer. Fasting had worked. It trained him not to be hungry or even crave food, but he did crave the nostalgia of eating a meal with his dad. He drank fast, chasing a buzz, helping the gummy to act faster than usual. He watched as his dad held the bag of feces to the mid-day light piercing through the trees. A thrilled grin of expectation and triumph bloomed across his face.

“Where does one send scat?” The vodka helped him talk to his dad, something he’d wished he discovered long ago, but his mom had always been there acting as some sort of translator between them. “Let’s say that’s Bigfoot’s shit. Then what?”

“I take it to my guy—”

“You have a feces guy?”

His dad’s annoyance was palpable. “Yeah. I take it to my guy so he can rule out known animals, and if it’s inconclusive, I’ll talk about it on my next show. The rest will take care of itself.” His podcast was called Bigfoot and Other Truths, although he never talked about anything but Bigfoot.

“Does it bother you that others have seen it?”

“It?”

“Bigfoot. Does it bother you that you have all this evidence and all this experience, and are known in the sasquatch community by name, but you have personally never seen it.”

He gave the bag of feces one last long stare.

“I’ve seen its aura.” He shrugged.

Mike leaned forward. He’d never heard this story.

“Its aura?”

“In Europe, they call it The Dark Man. My very first post was in Rota, Spain. One weekend I was on leave, and you know I love camping, so I took a train east to what was supposed to be a great spot, and that night, I just felt something out there. I heard the howls and minutes later there was a silhouette against the tent, something not human, but on two legs. That morning, I found a print in the dusty floor—nowhere near as good as the one I found here. But it was there.” He nodded. “It spared me. It sounded aggressive, territorial, but it spared me.” He broke off a block of chocolate and popped it in his mouth. “Sasquatch. Bigfoot. Yeti. Grassman, Dark Man. It’s real.” He shrugged. “Thirty years in the military, and out of all the very real things I saw and experienced, that’s the one memory I need to be most real.”

He put down the feces gently, maybe like he used to put down Mike when he was a baby, before Mike could be wrong about everything. He leaned back in his chair and smiled with such pride and optimism that he looked real and small, something honest and true, and not guesswork. This transition from cryptozoologist to a real person incited panic in Mike. He was about to learn something he’d always wanted to know but wasn’t sure if he could endure it.

“Your mother saw it once.”

“Mom saw Bigfoot?”

He nodded. “Right before she pointed out the imprint in the mud. I was maybe five feet from her, so, in a way, I feel like I saw it too. I heard its howls, and I heard it scurry away in the brush, which is where I found its fur.”

They sat in silence for some time. His dad methodically ate his lunch and seemed to be turning over decades of thoughts as his expression changed. The gummy began to spike and hit Mike’s brain like it always did, making words feel painless, his body warm, his mouth tick upward. He’d never heard this story before, and he felt closer to his mother. He looked up at the effervescent foliage and smiled. Only his mom could find a way to be closer to him after death.

After a long silence, Mike said, “Mom saw it, huh?” He imagined her brown eyes taking in the beast, this elusive myth, stirring so much commotion from coast to coast from the mountains of the Himalayas to the swamps of the Amazon Rainforest. This ape-like jokester imposing truth, blending fantasy and non-fiction, resurrecting something even stronger than verity: childlike wonder.

“She did indeed.”

“And?”

His dad grinned the way he did before he beat Mike in any game when he was a child. He never let Mike win. He said it’d build character. Mike supposed he thought it’d build even more character as he watched his dad let his little brother always win.

“She said Bigfoot wasn’t as big as she’d thought it’d be. She was surprised by how human it looked. Not in its walk or stance, but by its expression. She said,” he laughed to himself, “she said, ‘It looked downright mischievous.’”

Mike didn’t wipe his tears. He’d always found a peaceful trust in crying. He targeted a vibrant red row of leaves.

“Mischievous?”

“That’s what she said. Like it knew it was playing a game with humans.” He dipped his chin. “Why are you crying?”

“I miss her, Dad. I miss Mom. I miss her so much.”

“You think I don’t?”

“You never talk about it. You never talk about her.”

“I didn’t think missing your mother was something I had to advertise.” He pursed his lips together, looking at their campsite.

Mike suddenly understood that this had been his parents’ spot. Who knows how many times his parents had slept here, cuddling together in the fall air, laughing, making love. Maybe this was where his dad would tell her about his life, his fears, his concerns, his regrets, his years of service. They’d share private jokes and laugh themselves to sleep. His mom always said the most comforting place in the world was his father’s left shoulder which was why she slept on her right side. I used to be strictly a left side sleeper, if you can believe it. It’s amazing to know that sometimes you just fit with someone, and all the misalignments from who we’ve become can still feel congruent at the end of each day. She never pried, but she was always concerned that Mike had never settled down. Mike was grateful she didn’t ask. He didn’t know how to say it didn’t interest him. The coupling. The sex. The communication. The vacations. The posting on social media. Kids. None of it had ever made sense to him.

“Mom said she felt Bigfoot was playing a game?”

His dad slapped his thigh. “She said, and I quote, ‘I’m not sure about every Bigfoot, but that Bigfoot, the one I saw, that Bigfoot needed a win.’ Only your mother could break down the psychology of a sasquatch with a single look.”

The gummy made Mike feel light. Free. He searched the trees and the colors blended like a cartoon forest in the fall. Somehow time had passed, and the sunlight was in its final minutes. Somewhere a bird flew from a branch. Somewhere a squirrel skittered across the dried leaves. Somewhere a chipmunk chased up bark. Somewhere a snake slithered. Somewhere an owl perched, waiting for night to hunt prey. And perhaps somewhere, a Sasquatch trekked these woods, feeling confident in being undefeated in the longest game of hide and seek ever.

“What do you miss most about mom?”

His dad’s pupils doubled in size as he stared at the glowing embers of the dying fire.

“Each night she’d whisper something new that she loved about me. She did that every night since the day we got married. She never repeated herself. She’d say, ‘Something new because we’re true,’ and then tell me something new.”

“What was your favorite?”

His dad warded off a grin and then shrugged before finding the stoic normalcy of his face. “Don’t know.”

Sensing vulnerability, Mike leaned in, not relenting.

“What was her last one?”

His dad turned over a stick with his foot and then picked it up only to put it back down.

“She said she liked my Bigfoot howl.” His eyes shimmered in the sinking light. “She said it was real good, real authentic.”

“I didn’t know Mom was such a connoisseur of ape calls.”

His dad changed his voice. “You don’t have to be an expert in anything to feel its truth.” He wiped his face with his flannel sleeve. Mike knew this one. She’d say this aphorism to him about his writing when his stories didn’t get published.

His dad checked his watch. “Gonna sleep for a stint. After midnight is the best time to find Bigfoot.” He unzipped the tent. “You wouldn’t want to come this time, would ya?”

Mike wanted to, but he was so used to never doing anything with his dad he dumbly shook his head.

“Suit yourself.” He pointed at the mess of the campsite. “We’re leaving at daybreak. Might be a good idea to tidy up before you …” he picked his words carefully. “Pass out.” His tone was soft and gentle, and non-obtrusive, which was the way he’d always talked to Freddy.

The gummy hit another stage after he packed up the frying pan and secured all the trash. He’d been making them stronger, and their effects were getting more difficult to hide while teaching, but he was certain he could be on literal fire, juggling puppies, and the students wouldn’t notice, so they wouldn’t notice if he was stoned. However, his colleagues had figured something was off, and he was certain the token department busy body had told administration. He ignored this possibility and closed his eyes. Nature had magically gone quiet, and the fall air cooled his body. He breathed in the dropping temperature, relaxing his entire being. At home student responses over the first act of Inherit the Wind awaited his comments. The play had once been school board approved, and a staple of the tenth-grade curriculum, but he was told not to teach it this year, even though it was technically still part of the curriculum. “In today’s climate it isn’t a good idea to teach that play.” That’s exactly why it should be taught. The Director of Secondary Curriculum said, “I’m not having this conversation again” and walked away. That day, Mike couldn’t stop himself, the gummy hijacked his filtration system. Maybe if you were an active educator instead of this malignant mass of incomprehensible buzzword jargon and actually wanted to make a positive difference in education as opposed to outlining ways in making the district a diploma factory, then maybe we could have a purposeful conversation. But I guess you’re too busy being the fucking antagonist to any teacher trying to be good at the job.

That was two weeks ago. Mike had been on administrative leave since. The official stance was that they were investigating Mike’s use of his classroom curriculum to promote his own political agenda, rather than suspending him as retribution for confronting the Director. The union couldn’t help Mike—not that they would have—because he’d withdrawn his membership. Mike thought about hiring his own lawyer but he was worried that would only intensify the investigation. When the school investigated, it always became about the person and not the inciting incident. He couldn’t think about it anymore. He entered his tent and miraculously found sleep.

Howls woke him. Mike clicked his Apple Watch: 1:49 AM. Since the pandemic, he hadn’t gotten one note from a student thanking him for his teaching or explaining what his class had meant to them. Before he awoke, he dreamt he’d gotten a student letter, but when he opened it, it was from Central Office, asking for his resignation. He’d always promised himself he’d fight administration if they ever targeted him after seeing too many good teachers forced to resign for optics. But as he heard his dad howling hundreds of yards away, he knew he’d resign to ensure they didn’t investigate him further. Upfront, it’d look like he had resigned for teaching a text he’d taught for almost twenty years, but really, he’d resign so they didn’t discover he’d been selling weed gummies to students, to staff, to whoever needed them. These days, he felt this gift of emotional detachment was the only way he could make a difference. Accepting this fate, he unzipped the tent and moved in the direction of the howls.

His dad’s voice sounded hoarse. Two nights of screaming into the night must’ve strained his vocal cords, so that now he sounded violent and damaged. Once his dad said he never talked on missions, so he just got used to not talking. His mom accepted this without question. Freddy got more words than both he and his mom combined. Maybe talking so infrequently added to the low tension and barbarism in these howls. Mom was right. He was good.

He'd gotten to the spot where his dad bagged the turd, when a hand pressed over his mouth. He smelled his dad’s aftershave and his nerves dissipated.

“I hear it too,” he said softly. He pointed straight ahead into a simmering abyss. The nerves came back, shattering his lightness. The goofy grin he wore as they sauntered in the darkened gloam of the woods vanished. Words his dad had once said as they drove through Pennsylvania invaded him: Very squatchy.

This time the howl seemed closer and more aggressive. Somewhere leaves crunched. Somewhere something scurried. Somewhere something slithered. Somewhere there could be a legendary primate covered in thick black hair striding towards them. Teaching no longer seemed important and all the mementos he’d received over the years—now stuffed in a box in the crawl space of his two-bedroom townhome—no longer defined him. He knew moving forward, this moment would change him, like the moment his dad had had in Spain.

“What’s the truest thing Mom ever said to you before she went to sleep?”

Although he couldn’t see him, he sensed his father’s face growing sincere.

Another gruff howl moved them shoulder to shoulder.

“She said she loved the way I learned from all my mistakes with you which is why I treated Freddy so differently.”

As something in the darkness moved closer, and the quick burst of their breaths synchronized, Mike finally felt like telling his dad the truth. That he took all his high school graduation money and paid an artist to make the molding of Bigfoot’s foot. That he followed his parents to this spot, and after a night of gentle rain, he pushed the lifelike molding into the earth, knowing his father would see it, knowing he wouldn’t care that it was just the left print, that the right one wouldn’t even be considered in his euphoria. That Mike would be able to hold this lie over his dad forever as a punishment for all the things he’d never told him. That at every holiday or birthday celebration, he could look at his dad and feel power over him, knowing that his most concrete proof was just a fake.

But his mom never told his dad. She told him every truth but this one. Because she said that Bigfoot needed a win. He had no idea she’d seen Mike that morning. It must’ve been when he took the clump of hair he’d mangled together from bear, wolf, raccoon, dog, and human together and locked it on a tree limb. Anything can be bought if the price is right.

Close by, a large branch snapped and something huffed.

Mike nudged his dad gently with his elbow. A cosmic pulse of moonlight slipped through the foliage illuminating his dad’s face. His wrinkles were lost to the night, but his eyes shone with mystified spirit. Mike wondered if the sounds in the distance were coming or going. He cupped his hands to his mouth and his dad mirrored him. The last time he’d attempted this sound was that morning over two decades ago. Together, they howled into the night, offering peace to the dying leaves above them and to the thing traipsing in darkness around them.