“The little brats,” Timothy muttered, throwing down a slushball. I suspect he was less upset that the little ones had decided to team up with the big kids than that one of them was crying and making his way to the school building, and someone was sure to come checking to see who was making ice balls. “Come on,” he said, still feigning disgust. “Let’s go build our own fort and get ready for Bigfoot.”
The creature of yore was not so legendary in our parts, where we kids often found footprints in mud after rainstorms and in the snows of winter, especially in the woods surrounding the school. The grown-ups just shook their heads and said someone was playing a joke, that nobody wore shoes that big and that a real Bigfoot would be barefoot, like in the video show.
But no one really knew what Bigfoot’s toes looked like. My dad said even the video maker just guessed. We kids figured Bigfoot’s foot was full of matted hair or lumpy skin that left those strange-looking ridges. And we just knew that Bigfoot came out in the dark storms looking for a stray child to eat, and that gingerbread cookies merely whetted the creature’s appetite.
Leaving the school behind us, we made our way toward the greenway along the hoverpath, where the freighters sprayed us with a blizzard of snow when they whooshed by.
“Look here,” Timothy shouted, tugging at something’ he’d stepped on in the snow. Both of us scratched at the snow and pulled until we freed a great piece of cardboard. It was frozen stiff.
“Let’s go to the hill,” I said.
Dragging our cardboard sled behind us, we trudged along Bigfoot’s own trail through the woods. You could tell the creature had passed here from time to time because branches were broken back wider than any kid could cause, and the path circled the hill outside a wire-and-picket fence, and the gate was always locked to keep Bigfoot and everyone else out.
The hill was treeless, acres of grass manicured by robots with great rotary blades in summer and smooth as a cue ball in winter. Perfect for sledding.
The only trouble with the hill was that Timothy’s aunt lived in the shiny tin-can-lying-on-its-side house at the top. I knew she was weird because Timothy said she never came outside or went anywhere, and my parents would shake their heads when they talked about her. But we had the cardboard sled in our hands, and he was pulling strongly; so I guess he didn’t care about his weird aunt.
