Who Goes There?

 

The beguiling Skagit River from Sauk mountain.

            Life had been looking good lately for Officer Mark F. Schwartz of the Washington Dept of Fish and Wildlife Police.
            Some mornings he had to report to the North Puget Sound Regional office in Mill Creek. But most of his working days were spent on the Skagit River itself. A name denoting a people, a language, a place.
            Officer Schwartz loved it. He didn’t encounter very many people out on the river or the small two lane highways. He checked licenses and responded to calls for some kind of wildlife related assistance. It was so much better than an indoor job. This is where our story begins.
            There was a call to the Mill Creek office. Some lady with a weird and probably highly subjective experience to report had called. They took her information and relayed the story to Mark who was parked at his favorite county park, communing with the river.
            As it happened, the call came from the small town of Concrete, location of the very park where the officer was taking his lunchtime break.
            This lady was a long time resident of Concrete. She lived near enough to the park that an animal problem was a WDFW problem. It had to be an animal problem, he thought, though that was not what she said.
            Mary Smith, not an alias, had been at the park having a picnic lunch with her grandchildren. An eight year old girl and a six year old boy. Mary insisted that a huge hairy bipedal extremely sassy hominid had approached the picnic table and had taken the sandwiches, after eating the cookies right in front of them. She had been forced to take the children back to the house to fix them a lunch of tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches.
            Mary, outraged, said that this “manlike critter” had aped all sorts of ladeedah gestures and giggled a lot like he thought he was just devastatingly funny. Then he wandered down to the river, sat on the gravel, ate all six sandwiches and then dove into the Skagit river like it was the most natural thing in the world.
            The office told her that they would send an officer to take the report and investigate.
            An occasional call like this made him miss the army where, most things were as they were described.
            So Officer Schwartz contacted Mary at her house. He took notes with a deadpan look on his face, but he didn’t believe a bit of it. She had to be crazy or lying in his opinion. Perhaps she just wanted some attention. Bears steal picnics too, Mark thought. "Think of Yogi!"
            She said the encounter had frightened the children so much that the girl had gotten hiccups, and the boy had wet himself. She wanted something done about this big joker.
            Since the mystery creature was last seen down by the river, that is where he decided to “investigate.” He knew he wouldn’t find anything.
            It wouldn’t be long before it was time to go home and be done with this charade. The afternoon was getting on. The river flowed by smoothly over its gravel bed and the sun twinkled off of the water. Some crows were arguing about something up in a tree. He yawned.
            He walked along the gravel riverbank in the late afternoon light looking for footprints or whatever. He kept his nose pointed at the ground as he searched. He didn’t see any footprints because he knew they didn’t exist.
            He heard gravel shift and landed on his butt. He looked around. But you can’t see something which doesn’t exist. So Mark saw no reason for his fall and position there on the river bank. He assumed that he must have stepped on a rock that twisted and dumped him.
            He decided that he had had enough investigation for today and headed up to the parking lot and his state SUV. Sometimes he thought he might have heard something, but he sure didn’t see anything. A pungent odor drifted by about the time he got to his car.
            He opened the passenger side door because it was the first one he came to and threw in his little laptop computer and his hat. When he went to slam the door shut it wouldn’t go for a few seconds, like it was stuck open for some reason, but finally he was able to shut the door.
            He walked around to his side and hopped in. He didn’t remember throwing the laptop or his hat on the floorboards, but there they were. Also, he smelled more of that strong biological scent. Mark wondered if he had stepped in something, maybe a dead mouse or bear fewmets. He couldn’t see anything on his shoes while he was sitting there, so he decided to just drive home. It was a pretty good drive to get back to Milltown. It would take most of an hour. Highway 20 was busy these days, slowing things down.
            Someone was humming a little tune. Mark didn’t think that it was himself, but it had to be. He drove on. It was funny. Hallucinating sounds?
            “I’m here,” said Benny, since that was his name.
            “What?” said Mark. “No one is here but me!”
            “Wanna bet?” said that annoying voice.
            “I’m gonna make you see me, yes I will, yes I will,” yodeled that voice that wasn’t really there, and was getting kinda noisy.
            Mark drove on.
            The steering wheel jerked to the right and he couldn’t put it back! Not knowing what else to do about it, Mark started braking as his SUV went racing onto the shoulder of the little highway. Before heading totally off the road he managed to stop.
            “See?  I’m here. You might as well see me,” said Benny, the big joker.
            “OK, fine. You’re there, dammit,” said Mark the WDFW officer reluctantly.
            Mark looked over to the passenger side. Yup. He was there. Big, hairy and grinning.
            “You know, I ought to arrest you for theft of a picnic and endangering an officer,” said Mark.
            “Oh, that never works. They wouldn’t see me either and your rep. would be shot to hell, officer” Benny was really enjoying his revelation.
            “Do you have to smell like that?” said Mark, rolling down his window.
            “Hm. I did it special for you. You like this better?” Soon the cab was full of the scent of roses.
            “You’re so damn weird. What’s your name? Do you have a name?” said Mark.
            “Benny. You’re plenty weird yourself. I knocked you on your butt and you didn’t even get it!” said Benny.
            “It’s a definition thing,” said Mark.
            “Hey, leave the old lady and those two kids alone, alright? Pick on somebody that wants to see Squatches. There are plenty of them. They make TV shows about those characters. Why don’t you go give them a thrill?” said Mark. He could see, now that he’d been beside him for a while that Benny was just a huge kid himself.
            “Oh, yeah, that would be fun. They’d probably love it. Say, do you have a name, officer?” inquired Benny. “If I see the old lady and the kids again I’ll just sing love songs to them!”
            “You do you, Benny. But go give those bigfoot hunters a thrill. And yeah, I have a name. My mamma and daddy called me Mark Elliot Schwartz.”
            “Maybe I’ll run into you again when you least expect it, Mark,” said Benny as he climbed out of the SUV, leaving nothing but a scuffed up hat on the floor and the lingering scent of roses.
            Mark watched Benny walk into the forest and vanish.
            He shook his head. But he still liked his job. It was a great job, and usually quite easy.
            Not so easy was the report he was going to have to file. Well, he’d figure that out tomorrow.

Rasar Park, scene of the action.