Read Online The Littlest Bigfoot by Jennifer Weiner - Free Book Online Page A

Yare expression of regret—and started to scramble down the tree. Tulip’s schoolbooks were arranged in a neat stack beneath her arm, and her light-brown fur, neatly brushed and dressed with a dark-blue bow, was already beginning to darken at the tips of her ears.
    More unfairness, Millie thought. When Millie was born, her birth-fur, called duff, was pure white. No one in the Tribe, not even Old Aunt Yetta, had ever seen a newborn with white duff, and none of them knew what it meant—only that it had never happened before. Her parents tried to assure each other that this was probably normal, and that they’d each had or heard of relatives whose light fur had darkened over time. But Millie’s fur never became a normal Yare shade, brown or chestnut or reddish or black. Instead it stayed silvery gray and was not coarse or curly, but as light and sleek as corn silk.
    Nor did Millie’s oddness stop with her strange fur. Most of the Yare were tall and solid. Millie was short and small. With her thin wrists and delicate fingers, she was the littlest Yare anyone had ever seen. Although Millie had spoken early, she’d been slow to walk, slow to run, and she’d never been able to to keep up with her packmates.Worse than all that, though, was the way she pestered her folks about the No-Fur world and why the Yare lived the way they did, questioning every rule and restriction that other littlies simply accepted.
    â€œWhy are we having to be quiet?” she had asked when she was three years old and Teacher Greenleaf had shushed her six times before morning snackle.
    â€œBecause the No-Furs will hear us,” Teacher Greenleaf lectured, “and then do us harm.”
    â€œWhy can’t I go with you?” she asked Maximus each month, when her father put on his biggest hat and longest coat and put an empty packsack over his back. He was preparing for the Mailing, a dangerous mission entrusted to the Leader of the Tribe. The Yare supported themselves, living off the land, sewing their own clothes, eating the food they’d grown or made . . . but for as long as Millie had been alive, the Yare had earned No-Fur currency by selling things they made in an Etsy shop called Into the Woods. Millie wasn’t sure whether Etsy was a person or a place, but she knew how it worked. Each month the members of the Tribe would give Maximus what they’d made: mittens and caps in bright colors; soft scarves and shrugs and woolen wraps; carved cutting boards and birdhouses; special scrubs and decoctions made with the herbs and leavesand blossoms the Yare would grow and gather—all labeled “Organic” and “Handmade.” They’d wrap and package the goods for mailing, and then carefully glue on the No-Fur addresses that Old Aunt Yetta had printed, weigh each parcel, and cover it with the correct number of stamps.
    Millie loved the night before the Mailing. At three, she’d declared herself the Package Inspector and would carefully examine each labeled parcel, tasting the No-Fur names and addresses on her tongue, imagining the different towns and states where the Yare-made goods would go. The next morning Maximus would gather up the goods and walk ten miles to the town of Standish. He’d drop the packages at the posting-office counter, all stamped and ready to go, and he’d use his key to open up the mailbox and take out whatever goods the Yare had ordered on-the-line—white sugar, and reading glasses, and the Snickers bars that all Yare loved.
    When Millie was four, she’d tried to follow her father on the Mailing. He’d caught her, of course, and she’d been punished most severely: sent to her room every day after lessons were through, and then again after dinner. Worse than the punishment, worse than her father’s anger, was the way her mother had cried until the fur on her face was sodden, holding Millie in a panicky grip and saying, over and