Track of a legend - [3]

We followed the footprints all the way to the Wigginses’ house, only to find little Bobby Wiggles in them, hand-me-down boots overheating and making great puddles with each step.

Bobby stood looked at us, cheeks flushed from heat or stinging wind.

Then he or she — I couldn’t tell if Bobby Wiggles was a boy or a girl — giggled and went running into the house.

Timothy and I stayed out in the snow searching for Bigfoot tracks but found only rabbit tracks, which we followed in hopes that Bigfoot might do likewise, since aside from children there was nothing else for it to eat in our neighborhood, and no children had ever been reported eaten. Bigfoot may not have been hungry, but we had had only a few gingerbread cookies since noon; so when the rabbit tracks zagged near my house, we didn’t turn again. We forgot the rabbit and Bigfoot and walked the rest of the way through the ghost-white woods to my front door, where we kicked off our boots and threw down our jackets and gloves. Mom and Dad were in the media room in front of the kitchen monitor, checking the Christmas menu.

“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.”