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There was a war raging all around.
Even here, though at first glance it looked like nature had been intact for decades.
Rogers no longer remembered the scorcher they'd been in this time. All around were steep, rocky shores that led to a sea bay.
Slip and fall - quick death.
But still, there was peace and silence. Not a shot was fired, not a scream - it was as if everything froze with them.
Dum Dum Dugan stood beside him, smoking a cigar. Where he got it was still a mystery to Steve.
"Ah, it's beautiful," he panted. "Why did the Germans come to these spaces?"
Steve shrugged, adjusting the shield on his arm. Strap's loose, he'd better get Stark to fix it.
"I heard," Jim Morita came up leisurely, adjusting the microphone to his ear. "There's Bigfoot in these parts. How about that?"
Dugan grinned, choking on the smoke.
Jim waved his arms, and took the scary crawl to the rock-sitting Juniper.
"Not afraid, Spiny?" Junior was new to the crew, and that gave rise to a lot of jokes about him.
"Where'd you hear that? At the brewpub after your fifth mug of dark, unfiltered?" the shooter's mood matched his nickname.
"Uh-oh! The kid's biting us!"
Steve was doing his best not to smile. Dugan didn't bother and laughed. The Frenchie chuckled, too.
"Night is coming on. I think we ought to make a fire - it'll be a long time to sit there," Gabe Jones said as if he hadn't heard them squabble, anxiously surveying the expanse. He was always the sanest of them all.
"Oh! Then have Junior go get the brushwood," James Montgomery appeared as if from nowhere. "I've checked the area; it's quiet."
"Why didn't you get the wood? Been walking around anyway," Juniper grumbled, not wanting to get out of his seat.
"I was tired from patrolling. And how you talk to your elders, anyway!"
The remark had a point - not only was Juniper the last one to join the team, but he was the youngest, too.
Steve smiled after all and put his hand on Juniper's shoulder.
"Sit down, I can go."
Standing nearby, Bucky Barnes disagreed with that plan.
"Uh, no! Who's going to shoot our supper then?"
"What good would a sniper do us if he couldn't shoot our supper from a distance?" Dugan asked with surprise, alluding to Barnes' position.
"What good would a supersoldier with his hawk-vision do us, that he could shoot our supper without a scope?" Bucky parried.
They would have kept arguing, but Junior stood up and gently but insistently threw off the Captain's arm.
"It's all right, Cap, I'll go," he added as he walked away. "Don't eat it all without me, you gluttons."
There were some hard words and laughter in his wake.
As luck would have it, he wandered for a long time.
There were no dry or suitable branches for a fire near where they were camping. Junior would have wandered into the night if he hadn't found something interesting.
Footprints.
And not human boot prints or animal paw prints. Rather a mixture of a bear's foot and a human heel.
Morita's stupid scare stories about Bigfoot came to mind. What nonsense was that? But they came back into his head more and more often, pushing out all other conjectures.
The sun was setting lower and lower. The twilight made the trees look more and more bizarre.
Junior tried to walk slowly and quietly until he stopped altogether. He wondered if he should follow these trails at all.
The answer came of its own accord, from somewhere not expected.
Right in front of the gunslinger arose a huge figure. As tall as two Junipers and as thick as all four, it straightened and roared, startling the nearby birds.
The lack of sunlight made it impossible to see anything but the silhouette and the white fangs that were pointed in Juniper's face.
He yelled in unison and, turning abruptly, sprinted toward his squad. He'd forgotten he was holding a weapon, and was cradling it to his chest like a soft toy.
On the run, he bumped into something. Before he knew it he'd reached the camping lot and knocked Montgomery to the ground.
"Junior, what was all the yelling about?" Steve quickly lifted the boy by the shoulder.
At first the squad started to get worried about Junior's long absence, and then they heard a roar and a scream, and moved toward the sounds. And they met a stuttering newcomer.
"T-t-t-there..." The guy was shaking and clutched at Cap's shield mounts.
"Juniper, you're white as a ghost," Bucky interjected, looking around him in surprise. "What's out there? Germans?"
"N-n-n-n-no," Juniper shook his head so hard it would have fallen off if he had been so close. "B-b-bigfoot. Bigfoot. There's Bigfoot."
Everyone froze.
Morita wanted to smile, thinking that the newcomer was just kidding, but when he looked at Juniper's terrified eyes, he realized that this was no joke.
Everyone looked anxiously at the captain. They waited to see what he would say.
He looked around and gestured with his hand for them all to move forward in silence.
Junior was one of the last to go. He was shaking, but he walked steadily and quietly anyway.
When they reached the same spot, they saw a very different sight.
On the ground lay a huge carcass. Only now they could see that it was no Bigfoot, but a regular bear.
And above it stood German soldiers.
Fortunately, Steve and his team had spotted them earlier, and had time to take cover behind trees and boulders when the shooting began.
"Bigfoot, eh, Spike?" Morita shouted angrily to Junior, trying to shout down the gunfire.
He had already realized that he had been foolish.
"Shut up and give me your communicator and microphone," Juniper quickly came to his senses when he realized what had happened. "I have an idea. Hold them off!"
There was nothing to do. There were too few of them, so any idea was worth its weight in gold.
Jim scolded and pulled the headphones off his head and tossed the new guy along with the communicator.
A few minutes later the first sound was heard.
It was half a moan, half a roar, so loud it sounded like it was coming from the ground itself. The rocky banks and woods only added to the echo, making it walk around.
The shots paused.
Everyone listened.
The sound repeated itself. This time there was a slight whistling added to it, as if whatever was making the sounds was struggling to draw air into their lungs.
The Germans looked around apprehensively, their frightened conversations audible. But Rogers' team had more visibility than the enemy.
And Juniper was getting a taste for it. He pressed the microphone firmly to his mouth and let out another roar.
Montgomery figured it out first. He crouched low to the ground so he could not be seen and let out a piercing scream, full of pain and rapidly subsiding, as if something had dragged the poor soldier into the woods.
The roar continued.
The screams repeated from different directions.
Bucky. Gabe. Montgomery. Dugan. Frenchie. Even Steve.
And then German cries were heard. They were full of terror and accompanied by the stomping of rapidly fleeing feet.
A final thunderous roar followed them.
Only when it was clear that all the enemy soldiers had disappeared from sight did the scene of battle become filled with laughter.
They laughed until their stomachs hurt. Someone patted Junior on the shoulder. Morita, wiping away the tears of laughter, picked up his gear and began to quickly transmit data about the enemy army, pausing intermittently, trying to hold back laughter.
"Why was there some sort of howl heard on the transmission line, commandos?"
There was an explosion of laughter in response.
Since that day, Captain America's squad has gone down in history as the Howling Commandos.
And the story of the origin of that name became one of the most popular in pubs and bars. It has been twisted and retold many times, but even seventy years later Steve Rogers remembered the story as one of his happiest memories of his life.