What He Heard

Chapter 15

            The grey afternoon sky brought a faint chill to the air, the first warning of winter’s encroaching presence. Willow revelled in the coolness as she took the steps up to the porch of two at a time, Rune following her but much more slowly. Standing in front of the door the blue and white house, one of the ones in the innermost circle of the property with a view of the meeting hall, Willow turned to smile at Rune. “Ready to get interrogated?”

            “No. And don’t think I don’t notice how much you’re enjoying this.”

            She grinned. “It’s not often I get to see Uncle Allistair do the third degree on someone else. Mostly he’s grilling me about my lessons or springing surprise tests on me, and sometimes, he likes to put me through practices by manufacturing problems and leaving me to deal with them. He’s a bit of a sadist like that.”

            Rune crossed his arms over his chest, his eyebrows up. “If you’re trying to reassure me, let me tell you, you suck at it.”

            Chuckling, Willow turned back to the door and hit it with a flurry of knocks. For a second there was no sign besides the cawing of some crows, and the distant shouts of her cousins at play. Then they both heard the muffled shout of “Come in.”

            Willow opened the door, hitting it with her hip as it stuck in the same place as always, and led the way into the dimly lit front hallway. Wood floors and dark green walls didn’t help make the place seem any brighter. Willow didn’t even pause, instead aiming them both down the hall and towards the kitchen.

            As if to make up for the cave-like entrance, the kitchen was painted a light yellow, two of its walls lined with windows that looked out into the yard and the edge of the trees. A massive kitchen table, scarred from years of use, sat surrounded by chairs, just in front of the door that led out the back. Willow paid the kitchen’s décor no attention, her eyes going immediately to the man who leaned against the white counters, a steaming mug in one hand.

            “Hello, Willow, Rune. What brings the two of you here today? It can’t be anything to do with your lessons, niece, or you wouldn’t have brought your friend along.”

            Willow, who up until now had still been wearing a smile left over from finally getting the truth out of Rune, sobered in an instant. “We’ve got a problem, Uncle Allistair. A serious one.”

            Her uncle looked her and Rune over for a moment, then nodded. “Sit down. I’ll pour you both some tea. If it’s serious, we’ll probably be here for a while.”

            Moments later, all three of them sat around the table, hands clasped loosely around mugs. Willow blew on her tea, took a quick sip to wet her suddenly dry mouth, and spoke. “We’ve got sasquatch hunters in the forest. If I’m not completely crazy, I think they’re the same people Fitch came to warn me about. He said they’d told him that they were bird watchers, but he didn’t believe them. I let Aunt Celeste know, but she didn’t think they were a serious threat. Neither did I.”

            Allistair’s grey eyebrows disappeared under the floppy end of his hair as he stared at his niece. “Sasquatch hunters? You’re sure?”

            Willow nodded. “I got the first warning from Fitch, then Rune overhead them talking about looking for sasquatch, so we’re sure that that’s what they are.”

            “They’re camped near the waterfall for now. I don’t know how long they’ll be there, but they’re definitely searching the woods. I don’t know if the ones I heard are all of them, but there are at least four of them. They seem pretty excited,” Rune said, eyes on the milky brown colour of his tea.

            Allistair leaned back in his chair and sighed. “Well, this certainly complicates things. Thank you both for bringing this to my attention. Celeste had mentioned this group, but she thought they were more poachers, or geocachers or the like.  I don’t even think she suspected they were cryptozoologists.”

            Willow rubbed one arm. “What should we do? Should we try and mess with their campsite so they leave, or destroy their supplies, or get the rangers to run them off?”

            Her uncle shook his head. “No. We leave them be. I’ll spread word to stay out of the woods without silver, and to limit even that as much as possible. We’ll stay on high alert and wait for them to get bored and leave. As long as they don’t find any evidence of us, they’ll eventually move on.”

            “But isn’t it more dangerous to leave them to get comfortable here? What if they decide to set up shop here for a while? We’ll all be trapped on the property.”

            “This isn’t the first group like this we’ve dealt with, niece. You might be my likely successor, but that doesn’t mean you’ve learned all my tricks,” He said, grinning. “And I have experience with this. Leaving them to get bored is the best. I am curious though, what brought them here in the first place. You didn’t hear anything about that, did you Rune?”

            He shook his head, only Willow, who was beside him, feeling the way his hands tensed up under the table. “No, just about finding sasquatches and that they were near the waterfall. If I hear more, I’ll let Willow know.”

           Allistair nodded. “Thank you. Now you two,” he said, noticing their serious expressions. “Look at it this way, the family’s going to accept Rune here all the faster since he helped warn us of a threat. Every cloud has a silver lining.”

            The two of them exchanged a glance before shrugging almost in unison. “I suppose it could be worse,” Rune said.

            Willow’s uncle chuckled darkly. “Oh believe me, it can always be worse.”