The Beast and the Bairns, Part Iii

III. Scott bought the farm and some dairy cows, and set about building himself up. He soon made a name for quality milk, local wholesalers could not get enough! One summer day he took to the plow, preparing and old field to grow hay. The plow hit something, twisting it hard, just badly enough to ruin his day. He grumbled loud, went back to look, and saw there, to his great surprise, a hole in the ground, empty and long. A new cavern there before his eyes! Now caves were quite common where he lived, several were open to tourists for show. The thought of building up just such a place made the dollar signs in his head grow. The next day he returned with lanterns and lines, carefully descending into the dim. When he touched bottom and lighted it up, what he saw laying close by shocked him. Two skeletons lay just five feet away, it was a miracle he hadn’t crushed one. Both looked human and one of the dead lay with the moldering remains of a gun. The other was huge, at least eight feet, and the bones too thick, impossibly large. The skull was giant, the teeth oversized, Scott found the sight of it quite bizarre. In the middle of the great ribs did lay two balls, the kind from old muskets. And near the spine was the rusty head of an aged and battered hatchet. Turning to the other, Scott Bairns saw they were the bones of a normal man. The ribs were broken, every one, so were both of the man’s hands. And on the stock of the old gun, Scott found an old, tin name plate. He bent down low to read it clearly, ‘Amos Bairns’ in the metal was scraped! Scott flinched back, remembering tales told in childhood long, long ago, Campfire stories of bigfoots run wild, to his mind they all started to flow. And now when he stared at either of them, both the large and the small skeletons, he realized the truth behind all the myths, he was staring down onto his kin! Scott hurried out, and filled in the hole, then gave the field over to brambles and berries. He never plowed there, or spoke of it at all, for some truths are better left buried...