The fire crackled and the campsite glowed. I stared at the strange orange light and its long, scary shadows as my older brother talked to his friends about the Bigfoot monster.

"It prowls for food at night," Burt was saying. "You hear branches breaking and then silence. It's a predatory animal with keen senses, and it smells you before you even know it's there."

"Why can't I smell it?" joked Jerry. "Since it hasn't taken a bath in a hundred years!"

Everyone laughed -- even Leng, a foreign exchange student who hadn't even heard of Bigfoot. Leng was staying with Jerry's family, and this was his first camping trip in the woods. Jerry was our school's best athlete, and he'd brought along his best friend on the trip -- a skinny quiet kid named Winston. They all laughed and made jokes about the monster as Burt tried to describe it.