A Creature

Stacie hit the search button on Bing.com. She was trying to prove a point but knew that if her colleague, Jack, did not believe her now, he would not believe the “evidence” she would show him. It was like trying to convince someone that aliens exist. That was how Jack had put it, but Stacie thought that bigfoot was much more reasonable. “Look at this,” she said to Jack, “It’s a site where people who have actually encountered it can look at other accounts and write their own.” She scrolled down the list, “Looks like most are from Arkansas.”
“Most of those are probably people just craving attention,” Jack replied. He could not accept that there might just be something out there that large that has gone undescovered for so long. “I can’t believe you would think that somewhere out there is some kind of missing link-”
“Not a ‘missing link,’” Stacie interrupted, “Evolution is as illogical as a bird with a toothed beak.”
“Actually, a mythical bird called the roc has a toothed beak in some interpretations,” Alysen said as she walked into the room with a bowl of popcorn.
“Don’t analyze my analogy,” Stacie said, grabbing a handful of popcorn.
“Can’t help it,” Alysen said, “Personally, I think that if thereis something like a bigfoot or whatever, everyone should just leave it alone.” Alysen, Stacie’s roommate, tended to stay non-opinionated when topics like this came up. She offered Jack some popcorn which he politely declined.
Stacie smiled, it was evident that an idea had just taken form in her mind. “We’ll see who’s wrong and who’s right,” she said. Everyone looked at her. “Jack, you’ve been talking for days now about finding the time to go buy an iPhone. I’ll bet that if we go to Arkansas, we’ll find bigfoot. If I’m wrong, I’ll buy you that iPhone, but if I’m right, you have to buy me one.”
Jack smirked. The prospect of Stacie buying the iPhone for him was a wonderful one, and he was sure that there was no way that he could lose. “You’re on,” he said, “but we have to take Alysen as our witness.” Jack did not seem to care whether or not Alysen agreed to go, just whether Stacie would agree to his condition. Stacie nodded.
“Hey,” Alysen contested, “do I get no say in this?” Stacie looked at her with eyes begging her to go. “Fine,” Alysen gave in, “I’ll find the next flight from Illinois to Arkansas.” She walked over to the computer while Stacie began to pack, and Jack left with a promise to be back later.
...
Finding the flight was easy. Alysen, Jack, and Stacie were in their seats paying no attention as flight attendants slowly explained emergency procedure. Finally, the plane was in the air, and they were on their way to Arkansas.
After they landed, they found transportation to Fouke and decided to stay in a hotel for the first night, and when morning came, the three brought their camping gear and hiked out to the forest. They had planned to stay for at least three days.
The first day was uneventful. No one saw anything suspicious and the fish out in the lake were not biting. The night was as slow as the day and Jack was getting all the more confident about that iPhone. They had stayed up for half of the night on Stacie’s insistence that they could not just sit around waiting for bigfoot to find them, but instead they had to go find it. She had even made a list of things that she had found online to attract bigfoot.
The next morning, Stacie was the first one awake. She started making breakfast as Jack came out of his tent. Stacie looked over to see who had come out, smiled, and returned to her cooking.
When breakfast was ready and Alysen still had not come out, Stacie asked Jack to wake her up. He opened her tent and saw that it was empty. They did not know it, but last night they had been so tired that they had not noticed that Alysen was not with them when they went back to their tents. Jack went back to Stacie and said, “She’s not there.”
Stacie was confused. “Well,” she said, “where could she have gone?” She was not very worried. On previous camping trips, Alysen liked to go hiking early in the morning. She informed Jack of this and they figured that Alysen would come back when she was done with her hike. The two ate breakfast without waiting for Alysen, though.
Around lunch time, Alysen still was not back. Now, Stacie was getting worried. “We should look for here,” she said. Jack agreed, and they set out. They had gone about an hour’s walk from their campsite when they found Alysen’s jacket, blood-stained, hanging from a low tree branch. They called out, but heard no reply as they kept looking throughout the rest of the day into that night. Jack had thought that a bear had gotten to her, but Stacie kept saying that bigfoot had attacked her. Stacie was beginning to become hysterical, rambling on about how they should never have come, how they should never have provoked the bigfoot, and how Alysen was right about leaving it alone. Jack paid little attention to Stacie’s incoherent mumblings.
They had begun to hear growling almost like a bear well into the night, but they both knew that it could not be a bear no matter how many times Jack credited the growls to one.
They managed to survive through the night, fear keeping their senses alert and casting away fatigue. By morning, though, they were hopelessly lost. The only thing that they could think of to do was just to keep moving. The growling had died off along with the night, but the subtle feeling that they were being watched would not leave them.
The two finally had to stop to eat. After their meal, their lack of sleep came at them like a gust of wind and before they knew it, they were sound asleep. They slept for most of the day, waking up around six thirty, startled that they had slept in the first place, but the sleep was good. It brought back enough common sense for them to be able to figure out the general direction of their campsite.
They headed off in that direction and a sudden, terrible odor hit them. They could not get away from the smell and then Jack noticed that all the animals seemed to be missing. No birds chirping in the trees, no squirrels or other rodents scurrying around, nothing. He decided to keep it to himself. Stacie’s got enough to worry about already, and it’s probably nothing, he thought.
Stacie stopped in her tracks. She saw something moving in the trees. Bigfoot. She knew without a doubt. It had to be bigfoot.
“What’s wrong?” Jack whispered.
“Bigfoot,” Stacie replied. Then, as if Stacie had called it out of its hiding, the creatureattacked.
...
Several weeks later, search parties found the bodies of three people, identified as Alysen James, Jack Thomas, and Stacie Watkins, found in the forests of Fouke, Arkansas. The coroner’s report said that they were victims of a bear mauling, but you and I know the truth.