The Bigfoot Boys packed their gear and loaded it into Slugfoot Sal’s Ford F-250 — it was time to hunt some Not Deer.

  According to the Mother Cat, the Not Deer had taken up residence somewhere in the Cherokee reservation, right on the North Carolina-Tennessee border, so that’s where they were headed.

  “That’s a pretty big goddamn area that Wampus gave us to search,” grumbled Chuck from the backseat of the truck.

  “They don’t tend to stay in one place,” Bill Jones replied from the seat next to him. “If they hang around too long, people tend to get suspicious. They don’t tend to want that kind of attention.”

  “You seen one before?” Chuck asked.

  “Sure have. Lots of times. You’ve probably seen a couple yourself and just didn’t know it. From far away they don’t look any different than your average deer. And they’ll act like one too, until they decide not to.”

  Chuck was enthralled. “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve heard the stories. They’re mostly true, but not entirely. I’ve never seen one with what I’d describe as a human face, but they do look… off… in a way that’s hard to articulate. Something in your gut just tells you ‘That’s not a fuckin’ deer’. What really gives them away, though, is when they move. Everything you’ve heard about that is true.”

  “I saw on the news one time,” Slugfoot Sal interjected, “when a troop of Boy Scouts were campin’ in the woods, a Not Deer snatched one of the kids up out of his tent while he was sleeping and it ran away on its hind legs.”

  “You saw that on the news?” Woodrow asked. He was looking out the window and not paying much attention to the conversation, but that part stuck in his ear.

  “Sure did,” Sal said. “Probably ‘bout five, six years back now.”

  “I feel like I’d remember hearin’ about that,” Woodrow said.

  “You just don’t pay attention to current events the way I do, I suppose,” Sal insisted.

  “Nah I remember that story,” Bill Jones said. “Pretty sure it was a bear that snatched that boy up.”

  “Wasn’t it two boys?” Chuck added.

  The four of them squabbled over this all the way up the narrow mountain road until they reached a little parking lot that people generally stopped at to take in the scenery — the view of the mountains, green and fuzzy and rolling along beyond the horizon. The boys, on the other hand, just needed a place to leave their truck.

  There was a hiking trail just to the side of the parking lot that went up about a mile and connected with the Appalachian Trail. The boys made their way up. Other than Slugfoot, who hissed and moaned and leaned heavily on his cane the whole way up, most people would be surprised at the stamina the old men had — especially Woodrow, who had a hard, round beer gut that protruded from his flannel. It was a relatively easy path compared to the way to the Wampus den. Even with bags on their backs and guns slung over their shoulders, they passed groups of red-faced tourists with only minor huffs and puffs. Woodrow, Bill Jones and Chuck sat on a large rock just off the path until Sal caught up with them, and when nobody else was around, they disappeared off into the trees.

  Well off the beaten path, the boys pushed past untamed brush and crossed shallow streams flowing over mossy rocks until they found a spot that could fit a couple of tents and had a steep drop off at their backs — they didn’t want anything sneaking up behind them when they weren’t expecting it.

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  It wasn’t exactly legal to shoot off guns where they were, being so close to the national park, and the Not Deer would probably refuse to show themselves in the daylight anyhow, so once the boys had set up their tents, they had no choice but to sit around and wait for the sun to go down.

  “You know, I could fix that foot for you Sal,” Bill Jones said while the four of them huddled around a small fire for warmth. Sal had been complaining about his foot for the last two hours and the rest of them were just about sick of hearing about it.

  “I don’t want a real surgeon cuttin’ me up. No way in Hell I’m lettin’ you do it,” Sal replied. He sat with his can stuck through the belt loop of his jeans and his foot propped up on the cooler. It was red and angry from the day’s hike. Looking at it, Woodrow felt a sympathetic pulse in the side of his head. He was mostly able to ignore the discomfort of his new eye by this time, but if he ever got to thinking about it, the pressure in his head would make him feel a bit lopsided.

  He sat with his back turned to the rest of the boys and looked into the woods. Nothing out of the ordinary so far. Part of him was hoping that a Not Deer would just come out to say hello and they wouldn’t have to go searching very far, but that was wishful thinking to say the least. If that were the case, the boys would’ve run into one at some point on one of their previous hunting trips — there’d been a lot of those. Not Deer tend to not want to be seen. Fortunately, Woodrow could see just about everything.

  They decided that it would be best to go to sleep while the sun was still up so that they’d have enough energy to make it through the night, so they each splayed out on top of their sleeping bags and closed their eyes for a few hours — each of them except for Bill Jones. He kept watch, though they tried to tell him that nothing was going to show up for them in the middle of the day.

  It was barely dusk when he shook Woodrow awake.

  “We got company.”

  Woodrow pulled his revolver from his belt and got out of his tent, ready to put a bullet right between a Not Deer’s eyes. But there were no Not Deer to be seen, just a family of white goats staring at them from far out in the distance.

  “Bill Jones, you’re losin’ it if you can’t tell a goat from a deer,” Woodrow said.

  “I know they’re fuckin’ goats,” he snapped back. “But what are they doing here, and why are they staring at us like that?”

  It was a good question. Wild goats weren’t seen often around these parts, and the nearest farm would’ve been at least an hour’s drive away. And they were certainly fixated on the boys. They were stiller than still, and eyes hadn’t moved away from them for a second as far as Woodrow could tell.

  “Goatmen?” Chuck asked, looking at them down the sight of his rifle, hoping one of them would say yes so he could pull the trigger.

  “Put that down,” Bill Jones replied and grabbed Chuck’s barrel. “Even if they are, that’s not what we’re here for. Shoot one of them and you’ll scare away every Not Deer within ten miles.”

  “What if they’re here for the Not Deer?” Chuck countered. “Spyin’ on us for them?”

  “Then they probably wouldn’t just be sitting there out in the open, would they?”

  “Guess not.” Chuck lowered his gun.

  Woodrow, on the other hand, kept his firmly raised. The more he looked at them, the stranger they looked. They were too still. He couldn’t even see their chests moving to breathe. For a moment, he wondered if they were taxidermies, but then one of their lips started to move.

  “Those aren’t regular goats,” he said. “They’re talking.”

  “What are they saying?” Bill Jones asked.

  “Don’t know. Can’t read lips.”

  “Shit.”

  They were depending on the element of surprise, on the Not Deer not knowing that they were there looking for them, but it seemed that that was not going to be the case. Woodrow didn’t think they were Goatmen — there wasn’t a whole lot of man in these goats — but they certainly weren’t runaways from a nearby farm, that was for sure. Could Goatmen breed with regular goats, make Goat-half-men? And even if they could, why would they be here looking at the boys like this? Goatmen weren’t very confrontational and would usually prefer to hide from humans if they could. He turned to ask Bill Jones what he thought about all this, when the goats scattered like cockroaches and disappeared from sight.

  “Shit!”

  There was a loud crash behind Woodrow. He turned around to see a big brown buck standing on his two back feet and wrapping the other two around Slugfoot Sal. Sal flailed his arms and legs and kicked the cooler over in the struggle but the Not Deer would not relent. Before the boys could decide if they wanted to risk shooting their friend to hit the Not Deer, he slunk down off the side of the cliff, dragging Sal along with him.

  When they turned back around, the goats were gone