Cynthia Felice - Track of a legend

“Go back and plug your gloves into the recharger,” Dad said without glancing up.

But Mom must have looked up because she said right away, “Both of them.”

“I lost one,” I said.

“Go back and find it.”

Timothy and I looked at each other.

Mom was still watching me. “It won’t do any good,” I said finally. “We were up on the hill, and Timothy’s aunt sicced the grass cutter on us.”

“Why would she do a thing like that?”

Timothy and I shrugged.

“Well, I’ll call her and ask her to let you get your glove,” Dad said, rolling his chair to the comm console.

“The grass cutter got it,” I said, more willing to face punishment for losing a glove than what might happen if Dad found out the day before Christmas that we’d closed her house’s eyes.

“I told you she was getting crazier by the minute,” Dad said.

“She isn’t dangerous.”

“How do you know that? The grass cutter, of all things.”

“She has too much dread to be deliberately mean. I don’t doubt for a second that she knew a couple of kids could outrun the grass cutter, and what else could she do? Go outside and ask them to go away?” Mom shook her head. “Her heart would stop from the anxiety of leaving her little sanctuary.”

“She left the clinic fast enough when it caught on fire, and when she first came back that was as much her sanctuary as her spaceship house is now.”

“You can’t expect her to have enough energy to treat every minor day-to-day incident like an emergency.”

“I think she should go back where she came from.”

“Hush, dear. We voted for the treaty.”

“They ought to have sent them to L-5.”

“Couldn’t, and you know—”

Timothy and I left them talking about his aunt, but I knew I’d probably not heard the end of the glove. That was the problem with sexagenarian parents; they knew all the tricks from the first set of kids, and they had very good memories.

In the kitchen we had hot chocolate, slopping some on the puzzle my big sister had broken back into a thousand pieces before she gave it to me.

“What are you getting for Christmas?” Timothy asked me, his cheeks still pink from being outdoors and his eyes as bright as tinsel fluttering in the warm convection currents of the house.

I shrugged. My parents were firm about keeping the Christmas list up-to-date, and that started every year on December twenty-sixth. I still wanted the fighting kite I’d keyed into the list last March, and the bicycle sail and the knife and the Adventure Station with vitalized figures and voice control. I also wanted the two hundred and eighty other items on my list and knew I’d be lucky if ten were under the tree tomorrow morning and that some of them would be clothes, which I never asked for but always received. “An Adventure Station,” I finally said, more hopeful than certain. It was the one thing I’d talked about a lot, but Dad kept saying it was too much like the Hovercraft Depot set I’d gotten last year.

“Me too,” Timothy said, “and a sled. Which should we play with first?”

A sled! I didn’t have to go to the terminal and ask for a display of my Christmas list to know that a sled was not on it. My old one had worked just fine all last winter, but I’d used it in June to dam up Cotton Creek to make a pond for my race boats, and a flood had swelled the creek waters and carried it off and busted the runners. Too late to be remembering on Christmas Eve, because I didn’t believe in Santa Claus or Kris Kringle. Only in Bigfoot, because I had seen the footprints with my own eyes.

“We should play with the sleds first,” Timothy said, “before the other kids come out and ruin the snow.”

“I’m going to get a knife with a real L-5 crystal handle.”

Timothy shrugged. “My aunt’s going to give me one of hers someday.

She has lots of stuff from when she was a spacer.”

“Yeah, but my knife will be new. Then I’d like to see Bigfoot get away from me!”

“We can bring Bigfoot back on my sled,” Timothy said excitedly. He chugalugged the rest of his chocolate. “Early, right after presents. Meet me at the hill.”

“Why at the hill?” I said suspiciously. But Timothy was already heading for the door and pulling on his boots.

“Best place for sledding.”

“But what about your aunt’s mower?” I said, whispering now.

“Early,” he reminded me as he stepped out into the snow. I followed him, holding the door open. “And bring your sled.”

“What time do you open presents?” I said. But if Timothy answered, I didn’t hear.

The snow was falling in fat flakes, and the wind had come up and the snow was starting to drift over the hedges. Funny how it wasn’t really dark with all that white around, and funny, too, how I wasn’t so glad that it was coming down. What good was it without a sled? I could use the cardboard if I could find it again, which I doubted, for I could tell that if it kept snowing at the rate I was seeing from my doorway, there would be half a meter or more by morning, which also meant the grass cutter would get clogged before it got five meters from Timothy’s crazy aunt’s house. Timothy would let me try his sled if I pulled it up the hill, ‘cause if he didn’t I wouldn’t let him hold my L-5 crystal-handled knife… if I got one.

“Close the door!” my father shouted, and I closed it and went to bed early, knowing I couldn’t sleep but wanting to because morning would come sooner if I did, and when it did I would not have a sled — maybe not even an L-5 crystal-handled knife — only an old Adventure Station that Timothy didn’t want to play until after lunch, and who cared about snow anyhow, even if it did come down so fast and hard that it was catching on my bedroom window like a blanket before my sleepy eyes.

I woke to silence and the sure knowledge that it was Christmas morning. I didn’t know whether to look out the window or check under the tree first, until I heard my sister in the hall and made a dash to beat her to the living room, where my parents had piled all the packages, with their red bows and wrappings, under the tree.

The big one wrapped in red plastic had to be the Adventure Station, though my parents were famous for putting little items like L-5 crystal-handled knives in packages the size of CRTs, complete with rocks to weigh it down so you couldn’t tell. I couldn’t wait to find out for sure what was in it, but I had to because my parents came in muttering about coffee and asking if it was even dawn and not caring that it wasn’t when they had their coffee and I put their first presents to open in their laps. I wanted to open the red plastic-covered package, but I couldn’t tear the plastic, and my big sister was hogging the slitter; so I opened a smaller one with my name on it. A shiny blue crystal that was almost mirror bright but not quite, so I could see the steel blade was in the package, and suddenly I felt good about the snow, too, and about looking for Bigfoot even if we did have to carry it back on Timothy’s sled. I got the slitter away from my sister and sliced open the Adventure Station, only it wasn’t. I looked at my parents in complete amazement and saw that they both had that special knowing twinkle in their eyes that parents get when they’ve done something you don’t expect them to do. In the packing popcorn was a new sled, the collapsible kind with a handle for carrying it back up the hill and a retractable towing cord and three runner configurations so that it could be used on hard-packed snow or powder. I extended it to its full length right there in the living room, awed by its metallic gleam and classy black racing stripes.

And then with my knife strapped around the outside of my jacket and my sled in hand, I was off to meet Timothy, determined to have Bigfoot in tow before lunchtime. The going was slow because the drifts were tall and I loved to break their peaks and feel the stuff collapse beneath my feet and to stand under the tallest pines and shake the snow off the branches, as if I were in a blizzard and not in the first sparkling rays of sunshine. I went the long way to the hill, sure I would find traces of Bigfoot so early in the morning, and I did. Huge prints that were bigger than I could make, even though they were filled in with new snow, and the stride sure wasn’t kid-size.

Besides, what grown-up would walk through the woods on Christmas Eve during a snowstorm? I’d follow them, I decided, until I had to turn off for the hill, then Timothy and I would come back and follow the tracks to Bigfoot’s lair. But I didn’t have to turn off. The fat tracks headed right off through the woods along the same shortcut Timothy and I had used yesterday.

Timothy wasn’t there yet, and because I couldn’t wait to try my sled on the hill and not because I was afraid to follow the tracks alone, I stopped at the place we’d climbed over yesterday. The snow had drifted along the inside of the fence, almost hiding the pickets from view. I figured that with just a little more accumulation it would have covered the top, then my silver sled could carry me all the way from the top of the hill, over the fence, and deep into the woods, where the trees would provide a test of steering skill or a fast stop. I climbed the fence, sled in hand, then carried armfuls of snow to the highest drift, scooping and shoving until the tops of the pickets were covered. When I was satisfied the sled would glide over, I looked around for Timothy, who might still be opening his presents for all I knew, then I started to the top of the hill. I was only a little bit wary about the grass cutter, for I figured it would get clogged if it came out in the snow, but you never know what else a crazy lady who sent out grass cutters to hack up kids might have. But the little house at the top was almost completely snow covered, and there was no sign of smoke. Either Timothy’s father got her that new heat exchanger or she froze.

At the top of the hill, not too close to the house in case she was just sleeping and not dead, I extended the sled, putting the runners in their widest configuration to keep me atop the deep snow. I climbed on and took off, the Teflon bottom gliding like ice on ice, and the wind stinging my face, and my heart beating with joy at the sled’s speed on its very first trial run.

Only trouble was that the wide runners didn’t steer very well as I picked up speed, and there being no beaten path in the snow, I wasn’t completely certain I’d be on target to make my fence jump. I pulled hard to the right, and the sled came with it sluggishly, but enough so I started to think again that I would make the jump. I could see the pickets on either side, and those would make a painful stop, but I was going to make it and know what it was like to fly on a sled for a few meters, or I would have known if I hadn’t overcorrected just before hitting the big drift. The sled skidded along the downside of the drift and into a hole. I hit on something that sent me flying. I came down hard, hurt and crying, upside down.

It took me a minute to realize that I wasn’t badly hurt, just scraped and bumped here and there, and stuck. My head felt funny, almost like someone was choking me and pressing against my skull, but it wasn’t so bad that I couldn’t see once I stopped crying. But I couldn’t get loose. I could get hold of the fence and turn a bit but not enough to unhook my foot, which was firmly wedged between two pickets as far as it could go. Try as I would, as nimble as I was, and as desperate in knowing that I was quite alone and there was no one to send for help, I could not get loose. I shouted for Timothy, prayed he would come out of the woods and get me loose, but he never came. I cried again, and my tears froze, and the plug in my mitten power pack must have come loose, because my fingers were cold, too. The woods were things with icy tentacles frozen to the sky, and the sun reflected brightly off the snow-topped world and made me cry again. The wide expanse of sky looked vast and forbidding and somehow confirmed my worst fears that there was no one but me within a million klicks. And I wondered how long a person could live upside down. Didn’t they do that all the time out in space? It had made Timothy’s aunt weird but, oh, Timothy’s aunt! Maybe her house had ears as well as eyes, and I shouted and shouted, promising I’d never throw snowballs at her house again. I thought that all the blood in my body was pooled behind my eyeballs, and if I cried again my tears would be blood, and I wanted to cry again because I knew that Timothy’s aunt never would come because she never went anywhere.