It was out in the wilderness, away from the sweat and the noise of the city, that Curt felt most alive. In urban areas there was too much manufacture; sodium lights, growling car engines, unnaturally straight lines. There were no straight lines in nature, nothing to denote a definite edge between one area and the next. In nature, there were no borders.

Curt had spent most of his adult life in the vast forests of Northern California. As a child he had been shown the shaky footage of a creature that was purported to be a Bigfoot as it loped through the bare trees. With three friends, he had travelled the 700-mile round trip from Sacramento to the place the film had been shot, Bluff Creek along the Klamath River. That was Curt’s first taste of the great outdoors and his heart had been forever stolen.

From that point on, he spent whatever time he could in the nearby National Forests, often bunking off school to spend days wandering the trails through Eldorado and Tahoe. Though two of the friends he first visited Bluff Creek with never made it to adulthood – drugs and gangs were another sickness that Mother Nature did not suffer – he and Phillipa had bought a beaten down campervan together and spent their time traversing the thousands of acres of forests. For Phillipa, the exercise was to find Bigfoot, but Curt’s motive was not as grand. He just wanted to be outdoors.

After several years with no success in her search, Phillipa grew despondent. She asked Curt to return to Sacramento with her, to re-join their families, but Curt was unable to.

‘The city is suffocating,’ he’d told her. ‘It’s unclean and big and crowded, and nobody cares.’

‘I care,’ Phillipa whispered.

‘Out here, we’re free. There are no rules, there is no conflict. Here we can be what we are meant to be.’

‘And what are you meant to be, Curt?’ Phillipa grew angry. ‘We cannot live out here forever. We need money and clothing. We need a life, a real life not this fantasy.’

‘Pip, don’t you see? This is real life. This is more real than anything you will find cooped up in stone houses and concrete mazes. This is where we belong.’

‘Not me. Not anymore.’

‘You won’t leave,’ Curt said, truly believing the call of nature would win her over.

When Phillipa turned away from him, his fear of losing her overcame him. He pounced. And she left him forever.

*

Curt still visited the spot where Phillipa had died but he could not say if he returned on the anniversary or not. Time meant less to him now that he lived with the woodland creatures. He was not driven by hours and dates but by seasons and moons. Even years no longer had any meaning to him.

In the time since Pip’s death, Curt’s hair and beard had grown wild. He walked naked; his clothes, having quickly become tattered and frayed, were now things of a past which had no hold on him. Curt lived only for the present, only for the joy of living under the firs and pines and cedars.

Within the National Forest, there were many camping sites and recreational areas which brought people into his domain. Curt learned to avoid these places, to keep away from the visitors from a different world. They could not appreciate the truth of being at one with the trees and the mountains, the streams and the rocks.

Occasionally, experienced hikers would venture further into the deep woodlands. Curt was usually able to evade them, alerted of their presence by the stench of civilisation that hung around them; the smells of stringent soap and acrid bug-spray. On the very rare instances they wandered too close, Curt would raise himself up like a wild beast or ululate a throaty cry and send them scurrying away in fear.

*

Curt was awoken by furtive movement. Something was creeping towards him. He sniffed the air – humans.

‘Use ta be ’squatch all ove’ these parts.’ A gruff whisper. ‘Gone now. Hammond’s doin’, if ya ask me.’

‘Hammond’s fulla crap. No way he cr’ated a life.’

‘Summa’s killin’ ’em off, an’ it ain’t us.’

As the hunters moved away from him, his presence undiscovered, Curt tried to make sense of their words. Though he no longer used English himself, knowledge of the language had not left him. From what he surmised, the first man was complaining that there were no more Bigfoots to find, blaming the depletion of their number on a fellow named Hammond.

Curt smirked at their stupidity. He knew the true reason they were unable to find a Bigfoot; it was a hoax. For seasons beyond his counting, he had traversed the forestlands of California and Oregon, exploring the deeper recesses in which humankind rarely trod, and had never encountered a live bigfoot. Bears, elks, horses and dozens of other animals shared his habitat but nothing as strange as the mythical man-ape.

The only time he found something vaguely odd was when he chanced upon a severed leg. The foot was twice the size of his own, the five toes indicating it was not that of a bear. It was covered in matted brown hair and the end of the limb, halfway up the shin, appeared to have been chewed. The shape and size of the multiple bite marks were too small to have been from a large predator. To Curt, they seemed more the work of minks.

While the gruesome discovery did not belong to any natural inhabitant of the forests, Curt believed it to have been either that of an overgrown human, perhaps shunned from society for his or her grotesque size, or a manmade artefact designed and made to perpetuate the Bigfoot myth.

A guttural cry cut through his thoughts and brought him back to the present. The noise came from the direction the hunters had gone. Curt realised that they were mimicking the noise he made when scaring off unwanted hikers. They probably assumed it was a Bigfoot mating call.

Knowing that he could not frighten these men away, that any attempt to do so would only bring them closer to him, Curt quietly stalked away from them. He crept steadily and silently, having expertly learned to move stealthily in the past decades.

When the imitation call came again, Curt was happy that he had put distance between him and the men.

Ahead of him, the underbrush stirred as something small came his way. A scent reached him, something he did not recognise. This was not the smell of a vole or a beaver or a racoon.

The hunters forgotten, Curt squatted down to see this new animal. What woodland denizen could have escaped his notice for all these years, he wondered.

The men sounded another fake Bigfoot call.

The creature burst from its cover.

Its size was that of a stoat, though it was hairless and had oversize ears. The digits of its paws were webbed, which Curt knew aided with both swimming and burrowing through earth. As it pounced at him, exposing its underbelly in the leap, Curt noticed the lack of sexual organs.

The aim was true and its fangs slid easily into Curt’s throat. He tumbled backwards, the thing ripping and tearing at his flesh with its teeth and claws. Before it severed his larynx, Curt was able to make one final sound – the perfect death rattle of a Bigfoot.

Three hunters ran through the forest, dodging low branches and skidding under or jumping over fallen trees.

The two on the side of the leader split in different directions, and the leader ran into a doe.

He jumped on his front legs and stopped the deer while the two who broke from their formation attacked on either side of the doe and braught her to her knees.

They killed the deer and ate her, running back into the bushes.

Hunter: A brown coyote like creature that rarely scavenges and is usually in packs of four to six wil two males at most