Marcel Cagey is a member of the Lummi tribe whose lands are on the Pacific coast of Washington State, not far south of the Canadian border. He is involved in some capacity in the luxurious Skagit Valley Casino Resort, which is owned and run by the Lummi. Rhett Mullis has been going to the Lummi peninsula for several years, following up the frequent sasquatch sightings that occur there. He has been patiently cultivating the tribal leaders and getting them interested in what must be one of the most productive sasquatch sites in America, judging by the number of reported encounters. That surprised me when we drove up from Seattle, over the Skagit River and onto the Lummi tribal land. For a start the landscape was completely flat, though the sunlit peak of Mount Baker was not far away on the eastern horizon. A pair of handsome bald eagles flew overhead, heading for the mudflats exposed by the retreating tide to join others perched on stranded tree trunks carried down by the river.
Marcel's home overlooked the bay. Like most of the others spaced out along the road, it was a functional single-storey dwelling, certainly not fancy. Outside, however, were parked an enormous yellow Hummer and a new Mercedes. Marcel, a man in his thirties with thick black hair cut so as to leave a crest on top, came out to greet us. He made us feel very welcome, but frankly the house was a mess. What looked like rubbish strewn around the garden, Marcel explained, was actually a gift to the local sasquatch that came into his property to feed. We headed round to the back garden as Marcel pointed out a gap in the hedge through which the squatches came and went. It certainly had the trampled look of a game trail, but I couldn't find any hairs clinging to the shrubs on either side. In the trees beyond the hedge was where the sasquatches lived. Lots of them, we were assured.
The woods didn't look very promising. They were open, mainly deciduous and, according to the map, didn't stretch all that far. Marcel then began a ritual to call in the local squatch. He told us that he had already done a little praying and singing to welcome them in and bless the air before we all got together. He had assembled a lot of expensive equipment to help him with a microphone and a bank of speakers ready to broadcast his calls far and wide. Like the Vietnam veteran Dan Shirley, he favoured wood knocking over howling as a way of attracting the squatches' attention. But there was another important element in the ritual. Marcel took out a sheaf of dried Californian desert sage, lit it and hung it on a line from the branch of an apple tree. The air was still, and soon a column of sweet-smelling smoke curled up into the evening sky, white against the setting sun. As the sage swayed back and forth, Marcel began his incantations in a language I could not recognise. A few minutes later he took a stick of wood and knocked it against the apple tree. The amplified sound boomed from the speakers and out into the darkening woods. Then Marcel explained what he was doing, and why the sasquatch was so important to him.
‘I like giving back to it. It's never harmed me yet because I respect it and I don't go looking in the woods much anymore because of this respect we both have. I like singing it songs and welcoming it to my life. Thinking how it's touched my life spiritually. I'm just thankful for that. Thank you for allowing me to share all these great teachings and things that you have shown me, it's kept me on my right path.
‘It did change my life 360 degrees. Two and a half years ago I was pretty much like any American, out for making lots of money, and you're not happy till you have all the money in the world I guess. But when I had this creature come to my house it really shook my cultural beliefs. It made me understand who I am. Kind of like a message from the Creator. “Money's not for you. This is for you.” You know because natives struggle so much in this world, in this life. All we got is our spirituality to let us know we're going to be all right. So this creature has been very spiritual for me. It changed my life. I lost a lot of people before. You know I just lost my mother just before that creature came here.
‘It's almost like a message. Don't go after that world, son. Stay who you are. I had to take a step back and look at my beliefs, because a lot of these teachings are here but I was never there to receive them. It kind of shook my world and I need to be in contact and thank him for restoring my culture. I was being assimilated, I was going through assimilation, I was shedding my native ways and my teachings. I was becoming like all the other people out there. Being successful and trying to provide for their future by owning all these things . . . just corporate America, you know?’
By the time Marcel had completed his ritual, it was getting quite dark. I had been scanning the unkempt lawn for some of the sticks Marcel told us the squatch was in the habit of throwing into the garden. I had seen a short one about eight inches long, but I didn't want to move while Marcel was in full flow. While he and Rhett were talking I walked over to the stick and picked it up. It was too dark to see if there were any hairs caught on its surface, so I took it over to Rhett's car, switched on the headlights and held the stick in the bright beam. Most of the bark had been stripped away, but trapped under the small fragment that remained was a single very fine hair. It was dead straight, about three inches and a light red-brown colour. When I showed the stick to Marcel he immediately confirmed that it had been thrown onto the lawn by the sasquatch very recently. It was typical of the gifts he had been finding for several weeks now and he assured me it did not belong to the apple tree or anything else that was growing in the garden. Fetching my tweezers, I gingerly removed the hair from beneath the bark. Being careful not to drop it and lose it for ever in the grass, I slipped the sasquatch hair into an evidence bag ready to go to the lab.
The following day, Marcel and Sam, a Lummi neighbour, took us on a tour of the sasquatch hotspots on the peninsula. We saw plenty of evidence. A red cedar stump that had been gnawed by a squatch going after grubs living under the bark. Tree limbs bent and twisted in a characteristic way as the creatures stomped through the undergrowth. Impressions in the ground that were surely giant footprints. The place on the road where the school bus driver had seen a squatch cross only yesterday. A river bank from which Sam had clearly seen three of the creatures on the opposite bank a month before while he was fishing for salmon. Everywhere we looked there were signs of sasquatch, if only you had the eyes to see them. Not being blessed with this facility, I clutched the evidence bag a little tighter.