Big Friendly, BF7

This is for Belle's unofficial challenge Inside the Animal's Mind

I don't know why humans think I smell. Odors from my kind are delicious, reflecting what we've eaten, the dirt in our fur, the intestines of our prey that we rub all over ourselves, and our excrement. Humans are the ones who stink. Females smell better than males, but sometimes, their acrid odor makes me sneeze; it seems to be once every change in the moon cycle.

The female who found me in the forest, Felicity, has become my friend and teacher. She shows me photos of creatures like me that wear white fur. She taught me sign language, and she showed me a movie about some brown and white Sasquatch and Yeti running. The white ones are fascinating because I live in the snow half the year, but I'm brown, not white. The mountains where the white one was running looked very high, but my mountains are rugged to traverse and tall. I wasn't here when one of the mountains blew up, but my mother died in that explosion. She was coming around the lake, and I waited in the woods to the north. When the mountain blew, it threw the trees all over, covering the lake's edges and filling it with mud and logs. I howled for days when she didn't come, and I knew she was underneath the mud.

Afterward, I learned to stay hidden and hunt for food at night, traveling far from where we preferred to stay. Many humans came to see the destruction, and the workers in the green shirts were everywhere in their white trucks, making me realize I needed to be much more secretive and concealed from their eyes.

When I finally returned to my birthplace, a woman was in a cabin, and I secretly watched her from high in a tree. It is easy for me to climb tall trees because I jump up to the lowest branch, four times the height of the tallest man I have seen. I watched her through the window, cooking and eating. The food smelled pleasant, but I prefer raw food from elk and rabbits; I love nettles and huckleberries, too.

She surprised me one day when I was drinking at the river, and I bounded far from her. She tried but couldn't keep up. When the sun set, I made my way back and found her sitting at the base of a tree, talking to herself. Accidentally, I stepped on a branch, and she was alerted to my presence. She jumped and began following me, speaking softly, so I stopped and let her come closer. I missed my mother and our tribe. I was lonely; it had been so long since I had any company.

After that, Felicity and I became friends, so it worried me when I saw the two men and that horrid-smelling furry animal. The first time the four-legged charged me, I kicked it. The next time, the man held out some food to me, and the four-legged couldn't charge because the man held him on a rope.

This afternoon, Felicity had given me some of her food, and I threw it at the four-legged, which caught it in its jaws. I wanted to share food, like the man had done for me. Then I bent over, showing them my male genitalia, our Sasquatch form of greeting.

Felicity came out of the woods and talked to the men, asking me to show them the sign language she had taught me.

"Big Friendly, come meet Mike and Myron. The furry one is Badger. It's okay, they are all friendly, like you. Remember the pictures I showed you."

I closed in on them, my shadow falling across the furry animal and its humans. The animal stood still but whined. Curiously, the men's noses wrinkled; they coughed and then covered their mouths as I stood next to Felicity.

Author note: to read a story about BF from another point of view, check out the two below (there were 6 in total before this):