This is a fiction short story which was previously published in Bigfoot Mystery Magazine in their February 2024 issue. I retained all the author’s rights and am happy to share it with everyone.
THEY CALL ME A MONSTER, by Maria Hernandez-Portillo.
They call me a monster. They say I kill their kind. They are called Man. Man lies. I am not a monster. I am only me. Yes, I kill. I kill to eat and feed my family. They kill my prey and take our food. I know Man does not need to kill my prey for food. I have been close to where they live. I spy on them from the edge of the forest and watch them come in and out of big block structures where they live. I can smell their food. I see that they keep their food alive, trapped inside fences. They feed them until they are fat and then they kill them and eat them. They also have birds that do not fly but lay lots of eggs. So why do they have to kill our prey? They do not even eat all their food. I can smell the food they throw away in big metal boxes.
They kill my prey for sport. Sometimes, they cut a deer’s head off and take only his antlers. And they call me a monster. I have seen them kill hundreds of ducks and other birds with their firesticks. They do not even take all of them to eat. They leave them on the ground to rot. Then they celebrate. And they call me a monster! Sometimes, when they have killed or frightened all our prey away, I have gone down and killed one of the animals they keep inside the fences, and I take their birds’ eggs. I have to feed my family, too. But they have dogs that bark and make a lot of noise, so sometimes I kill one of their dogs and take him also. They taste better than the coyotes and have more meat on them. By the time Man comes out with his firestick, I am gone. He thinks it was a wolf or a bear who stole his food and took his dog.
Sometimes, when they are hunting our prey in our woods, I follow them. At night, when they stop to rest, they make a fire and sit around it and talk. They think we do not understand their language, but our ancestors taught us long ago so that we would know when they planned to hunt us. They will never understand our language. It is too complicated for them. I throw rocks at them when they are sitting around their campfire. And sometimes I knock on a tree with a big branch. They jump up, scared, their firesticks in their hands. I hear them say “Did you hear that?” I step on sticks to scare them some more. I laugh inside myself.
One of them claims to have seen me. The others laughed at him. They do not know he is telling the truth. Man cannot see me unless I want him to, but sometimes I let one of them see me. He stands frozen in fright like my prey. I could jump on him and kill him with one blow. But mostly, I just like to scare Man.
I know that some Men do not believe my kind and I exist. But some of them do. They hunt me all the time. They look for my tracks, and when they find some, they call me Bigfoot. Poor fools. Many times, it is their own who make fake tracks and laugh at them. I do not cover my tracks. I am not afraid of them. None of their dogs will track me for very long anyway; they sense that I am stronger and fear me. Then I blend back into the forest, and Man can no longer see me. I confess one time I did kill one of them. He made me angry. He was getting too close to my nest, where my children were hiding. I dragged his body to our nest. I was going to feed him to my children. But he smelled funny; he had defecated with fear when he saw me. Then I got a closer look at his face. Shocked, I thought I recognized him as one of my kind. He looked like my reflection in the creek. But he was bald all over. He did not have long, beautiful hair like me. I decided to drag his body away to a cave where I knew there was a bear. I knew the bear would eat him. I had seen this bear kill and eat one of them before.
Confused, I went back to my mate and my children. I took them some rabbits instead. My mate asked me why I did not let them eat the Man. I told her he looked a little like me, and I did not know if he was one of us from another tribe. We do not eat our own kind. I know that some Men kill their own and eat them. My grandfather told me that we had relatives who lived far, far away, across the great waters, in forests called jungles, where one can barely walk because the vines and the trees grow too close to each other. They told him that the Men in their jungle kill their own kind and eat them. They are called cannibals. Yet they call me and our kind monsters!
My grandfather also told me that a long, long time ago, our forests were connected by a strip of land between the two big waters. That is how our ancestors walked to this land. Some of our relatives decided to go to the swampy areas with lots of water. Another of our tribes decided to live where the ground is always covered with snow and ice. We stayed in the thick forests with many trees and caves where we could hide. The rest of our relatives decided to stay in their jungles. Then, the waters flowed over the land that connected us, and we never saw our relatives again.
It is getting harder to hide from Man. More and more of them keep coming. They laugh and make noise and scare all our food away. Sometimes they bring their females and children. When one of their children gets lost, they bring their dogs and horses to search for it. They do not know it was a puma that got him, and they will never find his body because the big cat carried him away to her cave and fed him to her children. When one of their females gets lost, those who believe in us think we took her for a mate. Fools. Why would we want their weak females for a mate? Our mates are as strong as us, and we never mate with those who are not our kind. They keep pushing us back into our forests. But we do not really care. We don’t want to be close to them anyway. Our forests have millions of trees and caves where we can hide. They will never find us. They do not know that we can go underground and travel many miles and come out to another part of our world very far away.
But there is one thing that scares us. There are men who cut down our trees. They have machines that make a lot of noise. Our trees fall, and they cut off all the branches. Then they load them on something that moves and take them away. Then they cut down some more trees, and more. They skin the earth like they skin our deer. It makes us very angry. Sometimes at night, we go down when those Men are asleep, and we tear up their machines and overturn them. We leave our tracks on purpose to scare them. In the morning, when they see the tracks, they say, “Bigfoot was here!” But they don’t stop cutting our trees. We do not know what to do about this.
One day, some very young men and their females came to the place where they were cutting our trees down. One young man climbed a tree that they were about to cut down. He climbed to the very top and tied himself to the tree with a vine. They yelled at him to come down. The young man said he would never come down; he said that he was going to save our trees! The other young men and females that came with him surrounded the tree and held hands. They started singing beautiful words about saving trees. They said they would not let the machines cut down any more trees. Is it possible that not all Men are bad? Maybe Man is like us because although most of us are good, some of us can be very bad. The young people stayed for a long time. They camped around the tree where the young man was. His friends on the ground sent food and water up to him with a vine.
But then more Men arrived. They were dressed in green like the color of our trees in the spring. There were many of them, and they all had big firesticks. They attacked the young people trying to save our trees. They caught them and hit them and tied them up. One of them pointed his firestick at the one in the tree and told the young man that he must come down. He could not let his friends suffer alone. He climbed down. They took them all away. The machines started again. The first tree they cut was the one the young people were trying to save. Then, they cut down the rest. I know now that there are more bad Men than good Men. But I feel a spark of hope. Maybe more young people will come again someday. Maybe one day there will be more good Men than Bad Men. If only I knew what they do with our trees and why they cut them down.
We decide to move where another race of Men live. The bad Men call them Indians or Natives. This tribe of Men does not look like those who hunt us and cut down our trees. My grandfather taught us the languages of the Natives, and I listen to their stories around their campfires, too. They call the bad Men White Man. They say that long ago the White Men came with their firesticks and killed many of their tribes and took away their land and even their children. We let these people see us more often. They respect us and respect our forest home. They do not cut our trees down. They do not call us Bigfoot. They call us Sasquatch. They eat all the prey they kill and always leave us a piece for our children. They have always known about us. They were already here when we arrived in this land. I hear them say that a great Spirit made both of our tribes, that we are just another of the Great Spirit’s creations. They know we are not monsters. Sometimes we see lights in the sky. Not the moon and the stars, but other lights that flash and travel very fast and disappear. I have seen a strange flying craft land in our forest and creatures who do not look like Man or any animal we know come out of it. They collect some small animals, and sometimes they even collect some Men and take them away in their crafts. They do not bother us. My grandfather told us that these flying crafts with flashing lights had been coming to our lands for a long, long time before we made these forests our homes. My grandfather said that was all he knew about them. I think he knew more, but for some reason, he did not want to tell me everything he knew about them. The Men who see them and tell others are not believed, just like no one believes them when they say they saw one of us.
I do not know what will happen to us and our home. What if Man keeps cutting down our trees? What if they decide to build their villages in our forests? They keep leaving their campfires on and starting big fires that burn down hundreds of our trees. We have to hide in our caves when a big fire starts. Will Man eventually destroy us all?
They must never catch one of us because then all the Men will know that we are real, that we exist. We know that some of them already know we are real. Those who cut down our trees know we are real. Those who have seen us and hunt us know we are real. Those who came to take away the young people who were trying to save our trees know we are real. But most Men do not believe in us at all. That is why we do not let them see us, so they can keep believing we are not real.
But I feel that some of those who know we are real have some kind of plan. They do not want to stop cutting down our trees. They do not want their young people to find out we are real. But what if one of their kind kills one of my kind with his firestick and takes the body to his village? Then all the Men of the earth will know we are real! Will they try to capture us and take us away wherever they took the young people who were trying to save our trees? Hah! Let them try! It would take them a long, long time to find us. I will never let them take my children! We are much bigger and stronger than all of them, and many of them will die. Then they can call us real monsters.
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