They believe in a race of giants, which inhabit a certain mountain off to the west of us. This mountain is covered with perpetual snow. They inhabit the snow peaks. They hunt and do all their work at night. They are men stealers. They come to the people’s lodges at night when the people are asleep and take them and put them under their skins and to their place of abode without even waking. Their track is a foot and a half long. They steal salmon from Indian nets and eat them raw as the bears do. If the people are awake, they always know when they are coming very near by their strong smell that is most intolerable. It is not uncommon for them to come in the night and give three whistles and then the stones will begin to hit their houses.
—Diary of Elkanah Walker, a missionary among the
Spokane people of the Pacific Northwest, 1840
The flight from Port Hardy, near the northern tip of Vancouver Island, to Bella Bella is short, taking just over forty minutes. But the distance covered feels immeasurable. Within moments we soar over the blue abyss of the Pacific, crossing some invisible boundary separating humanity’s neat grids from the sprawling folds and rising humps of a free-flowing hinterland. We skip over Labouchere Channel, banking north across the thickly carpeted mainland coast and the islands that huddle around it like pottery shards. Our small twin-engine turboprop flies low, revealing the landscape in the clearest detail. Long stretches of yellow sandy beach, clusters of rocks foaming with breakers, and stands of old growth—all breathtakingly intact—roll past in succession. Occasionally, fjords—cliff-lined coastal inlets of the sea—appear, snaking eastward, before vanishing into distant scrums of mountains.
This wilderness in my sights is a powerful spectacle, amplified, I suspect, by my own predispositions and experiences. I’ve spent much time living and working in the Middle East, with its austere, bone-dry deserts, which I’ve not only become accustomed to but also accepted—as a child of Arab parents—as part of my genetic makeup. The Great Bear Rainforest is the antithesis of that barren topography. Placing images of the two regions side by side, you would be hard-pressed to find a more stark contrast. Because it is so wonderfully different from everything I’m used to, the Edenic lushness below resonates deeply with me.
We dip bumpily into fingers of low-lying cloud, emerging high above gnarled, tangled treetops in miniature. Soon a road appears, then a cluster of homes. A water reservoir and a marina finally hurtle by as the plane sinks into an outlying, tinder-dry bog jungle, meeting its shadow on a solitary strip of pavement.
When I returned to Toronto after my first trip to the area and tried to describe the Great Bear Rainforest—an environment so dynamic, so complex, and so possessed of intelligence that to be in it is to be subsumed into a living, breathing thing—I got mostly blank stares and perfunctory nods from my listeners. For most people, there was no comparable point of reference.
Maps, though useful for navigation, are crude approximations of reality, visual guides to only one aspect of spatial and temporal experience. To read a description of the Great Bear Rainforest as a wilderness extending 250 miles along British Columbia’s central and north coast, or to see it delineated on a map, may give some vague impression of its dimensions. But it won’t convey the area’s topography, its density of foliage, and its internal immensity. Even a flight over the region fails to reveal its hierarchal complexity. The Great Bear’s matrix of lakes, rivers, valleys, islands, mountains, and seemingly endless tracts of tangled forest is a universe unto itself. If longevity, sustenance, and the ability to swim in numbingly cold water weren’t an issue, a human could enter that wilderness and conceivably ramble through it forever. A winding trajectory would result in space turning in on itself, creating a kind of infinity for the wanderer.
The Great Bear Rainforest is the largest tract of intact coastal temperate rain forest in the world—one so rich and prolific that it supports more organic matter per square meter than any other place on the planet. Receiving as much as two hundred inches of rainfall a year, its most productive areas generate up to four times the biomass (the total quantity or weight of organisms in a given area) of the Amazon, the Congo basin, or the rain forests of Borneo or New Guinea. Wading through the fluorescent green of coniferous old growth, among trees both living and dead and thickly carpeted with mosses and lichens, must rank among the most stirring and profound of human experiences.
Some of the tallest and oldest trees in the world have grown here. Western redcedar, Douglas fir, Sitka spruce, western hemlock, shore pine, and amabilis fir are the mainstays of a great blanket of green that, in times gone by, covered most of North America’s western coastline. Though many of their number have been lost to logging, these trees are capable of growing to a few hundred feet in height and can live well over a thousand years.
Those big trees are sages of the forest and veritable agents of planetary life support. They produce oxygen, sequester carbon, stop soil erosion, trap and distill rainwater, provide shelter and habitat for animals, create microclimates, foster decay that fertilizes the soil, and ultimately self-replicate—their inanimate poses belying all of this. Beneath these titans, stratified worlds and their creatures overlap and intermingle. Concealed by undergrowth and the detritus of the forest floor is the rain forest’s soil. It is a repository of nutrients and a seething cosmopolis of interactions. Ants, bacteria, fungi, and a host of microscopic entities churn and mince the carbon-rich soil that is the ecosystem’s pillar of health, facilitating the decomposition of organic matter and bringing rich minerals to the surface. In his book The Clouded Leopard, Canadian anthropologist, ethnobotanist, and author Wade Davis describes a square meter of productive rain-forest terrain as supporting approximately “2,000 earth-worms, 40,000 insects, 120,000 mites, 120 million nematodes and millions upon millions of protozoa and bacteria, all alive, moving through the earth, feeding, digesting, reproducing, and dying.”4
Between the timeless, slow-motion gyrations of the soil and the iron steadfastness of the giants that root in it is the tangle of wild undergrowth consisting of hundreds of plant species, including edible and medicinal herbs. A host of invertebrates and amphibians dwell and travel within it, from lungless salamanders to tailed frogs to slugs growing up to eight inches long, providing food for rodents and birds. Mammals like deer, porcupines, beavers, rabbits, elk, wild sheep, and mountain goats are preyed upon by the large hunters: grizzly bears, black bears, coastal wolves, and cougars.
This seemingly endless litany of terrestrial ecology is matched in the nearby ocean. For here land and water are extensions of each other. Old-growth conifers find their underwater counterparts in each vast, undulating kelp forests that give sanctuary to what Davis calls “the greatest coastal marine diversity on Earth.” Countless species of fish, marine invertebrates, and aquatic mammals—dolphins, whales, seals—rove, drift, and reside, sometimes within a stone’s throw of shore. The shellfish-encrusted rocks of the intertidal zone—the most fertile in the world—are exposed in a vibrant display of textures and colors: blackish-blue mussels, clusters of off-white barnacles, green anemones, and colonies of starfish painted orange, blue, and green.
Several keystone species—creatures with intense relevance to everything in the ecosystem—reside in the ocean. The five major species of Pacific salmon—pink, coho, sockeye, Chinook, and chum—range for years before returning to spawn and die in the rivers and creeks of their birth. No less miraculous than the salmon’s cyclical return is the annual spawning of the Pacific herring, whose arrival on the shores of the Great Bear during the spring snowmelt is a landmark event. The fish return by the thousands of tons, each female laying up to twenty thousand eggs, which attach to underwater plants. Males discharge milt, or sperm, over the eggs in such quantities that the entire surrounding sea turns white for weeks.
As all things exist in relation to all other things, no creature or any process in which it partakes subsists in isolation here. The interrelation of all aspects of life in the Great Bear is its greatest spectacle. The sea bestows rain upon the land: rain which both sinks nutrients into the soil and in turn washes them out to sea to feed aquatic life. The big trees modulate the flow of that rain, preventing soil erosion and torrents along delicate creeks from blowing out salmon spawn. By helping the salmon survive, the big trees help themselves and other animals. Bears, eagles, and wolves feed on the salmon and deposit their carcasses, which act as fertilizer in the soil, encouraging the growth of berry shrubs.
Like complex, weaving motifs in arabesque art, each aspect of rain-forest life, each playing its own tune, combines with all the others to create a grand symphony of ecology.
I need no more than a minute to claim my bag and leave the confines of the Bella Bella airport—one of the smallest I’ve traveled through. The terminal comprises a small building with a check-in desk and a coffee counter situated on a strip of asphalt running through the bog forest coniferous jungles of Campbell Island.
My fellow passengers, a mix of locals and visitors, mill outside with the residents who have arrived to pick them up. We’re at the foot of the road that runs into town through a rough-and-tumble forest flanked by glittering ocean on one side and a pair of mysterious-looking hills on the other.
I hop into the back of a taxi van with a few others. The young driver asks my destination.
“Alvina Duncan’s bed-and-breakfast,” I tell him.
“Alvina!” he exclaims, chuckling cryptically to himself.
We drive up and down thickly forested hills with views of the sea. Huge ravens crisscross the sky above us. We enter town, passing aged wooden bungalows and two-story homes that sit spaciously beside one another on plots of unfenced land. There are signs in many of the windows: No to Enbridge Pipeline. Heiltsuk Nation Bans Oil Tankers in Our Waters.
We turn onto another street and pull into the driveway of a brown-and-white two-story corner house—the B and B. When I arrive at the front door, I find a note saying Alvina, the proprietor, is out of town. There are instructions to phone someone to let me into the house. I do so, and minutes later a young Heiltsuk woman, in her mid-twenties, with short black hair and wearing a white summer dress and flip-flops, arrives.
“I’m really, really sorry,” she says, as she scampers from her car, holding plastic shopping bags and fumbling for a key. “Alvina’s down in Nanaimo. She’ll be back in a few days.”
We enter the house and climb a staircase to the second floor, where I find a nicely furnished apartment with three bedrooms. A large window in the living room overlooks part of the town and the ocean just beyond. I drop my bags in the largest of the three rooms, which are all unoccupied.
“Here’s your key,” the woman says as I come out. “The shower’s broken, so you’ll have to use the one downstairs, where Alvina sleeps. No plumbers in Bella these days.”
The woman unpacks her shopping onto the kitchen counter, and then stops abruptly and turns to me.
“I’m so sorry. My name’s Sierra,” she says, laughing and extending her hand. “I’m Alvina’s grandniece. I watch the place and cook for guests when she’s away. I’d have been here when you arrived, but things have been so crazy the last few days with the fire.”
“Fire?” I ask.
“You didn’t hear? One of our big buildings by the wharf burned down the other day. The supermarket, the post office, the liquor store—all gone.”
“Was anyone hurt?”
“No, it happened in the middle of the night. Everyone was asleep. Three girls set fire to the place. They said it was an accident. The cops are investigating.”
I remember the building from my past visit. The afflicted structure also housed a café run by a local nonprofit, which I had visited.
“There was a coffee shop in that building,” I say.
“Yeah, the Koeye Café,” she says, frowning. “Gone as well. Including their offices and library. The whole town’s upside down. Everyone’s on edge. They’ve turned our church into a makeshift store.”
I tell her about my last trip to the area, including my interest in collecting Sasquatch stories.
“There’s been a lot of activity in the last few months,” she says, chopping celery on a cutting board. “People hearing screams and smelling that bad stink.”
I ask if she thinks the creatures exist.
She shrugs. “I don’t know. The problem here is that sometimes stories get passed along from person to person and get bigger and bigger with each telling. You never really know what to believe. That’s kinda how it is with small towns. And Bella Bella’s no different.”
Bella Bella, though small, is the largest community on British Columbia’s central coast. It’s a way station appearing like a mirage in the ethereal blue-green dreamscapes of the Inside Passage route to Alaska—a coastal thoroughfare for cruise ships, ferries, freighters, yachts, and fishing boats. The town sits near the outer edge of a knot of channels and passes, next to the open ocean.
Bella Bella is split between two precincts, reflecting the area’s fractured landscape. The main town, straddling the northeastern corner of Campbell Island, is Bella Bella proper, the seat of the Heiltsuk First Nation. A smaller community of nonindigenous residents clusters around the village of Shearwater, a fishing lodge and marina built on the site of a World War II naval base on neighboring Denny Island. All together, some fifteen hundred people call the area home.
Geographical isolation, human catastrophes, and a history of government exploitation and abuse have left social and economic scars on the community. In the winter of 1862–63, a deadly smallpox epidemic broke out in the city of Victoria and spread—killing tens of thousands of indigenous people across British Columbia. It nearly destroyed the Heiltsuk, whose surviving members from across the territory resettled near today’s Bella Bella.* Over a decade later, the Canadian government, bent on controlling and assimilating the country’s indigenous populations, drove residents of First Nations onto reserves and began to set up residential schools to Christianize and “civilize” them. For more than a century, children nationwide—150,000 in all—were forcibly separated from their parents and placed in these church-run education centers, which strictly forbade them to speak their languages and practice their cultures under threat of punishment. Abuse—physical, psychological, and sexual—was rife in the schools. Thousands of students died in abhorrent, spartan conditions. Meanwhile, the logging and commercial fishing industries expanded their operations on the coast in the twentieth century, extracting huge numbers of trees and fish without much thought for the long-term environmental consequences, giving little more than employment to nearby communities.
In spite of everything, Bella Bella doesn’t resemble other indigenous communities in Canada, many of which have fared worse under the same circumstances. The Heiltsuk are blessed with an abundance of resources, an accessible location, and picture-postcard surroundings that draw in tourists. The nation’s territory is not ceded through any treaty, and its political life is vibrant and organized. The Heiltsuk are a proud and social people. Ethnic and family bonds are tight. Cultural events, including those tied to ceremonial food harvesting (collecting herring spawn and seaweed, canning fish, and digging clams), only fortify that cohesion.
Unfathomably deep roots are the basis of Bella Bella’s extraordinary resilience. The Heiltsuk have occupied their territory for at least fourteen thousand years.* For millennia, prior to European contact, they and their neighbors forged one of the most sophisticated nonagricultural societies on the planet. Like the ancient Greeks or the Polynesians, the Heiltsuk have always been a maritime people, known for the enormous oceangoing canoes that whisked them between coastal settlements at the mouths of creeks and rivers, and beyond into the open sea. Before disease dwindled the nation’s numbers, as many as twenty thousand people are believed to have inhabited up to fifty villages and seasonal camps spread across thousands of square miles of territory.
During the previous visit for my magazine assignment, I had spent my few days in Heiltsuk territory almost exclusively at the fishing lodge on the Denny Island side. I had managed a short day trip to Bella Bella, where I’d come across that first Sasquatch report, which set my travels on the coast that summer on a new trajectory.
I first spy Alvina in her backyard on the morning of her return from Vancouver Island: a large-framed woman with short gray hair, wearing an orange sleeveless shirt and laying assault to her lawn with a droning weed cutter. She is tough and brawny, often stopping to pick up and move garden furniture and other heavy items with astonishing ease. At one point she looks up at me on the balcony as if suddenly intuiting my presence. I raise my hand to wave just as she turns, uninterested, to continue her attack on the foliage. Soon the weed cutter goes silent, and the woman begins climbing the stairs to the balcony, where I’m seated eating breakfast.
“Boy, what a workout,” she says. “With all the grandkids coming through this house, you’d think a seventy-year-old woman would catch a break.” Once at the top, she stops and gives me a serious once-over.
“You must be Alvina Duncan,” I say, breaking the ice.
She cracks a slight grin. “And you must be the Sasquatch Man.”
We proceed to chat over coffee, while bumblebees and hummingbirds flit over the many potted plants and flowers around us.
There’s an inexplicably grand, dignified quality to Alvina. Her charisma and confidence are of the type found in movie heroes: strong, silent, understated—yet direct. I’d heard that Alvina, a retired tribal councillor and Heiltsuk matriarch, commands much respect in the community for her purposeful, no-nonsense approach to dealing with others. Beneath her firm demeanor, however, is a warmth that frequently rises to the surface.
Our conversation, unavoidably, turns to hair-covered giants.
“Have you ever seen one?” I ask.
“No,” she says. “But I’ve seen tracks. And Don, my late husband of thirty years—he and I once heard one whistling when we lived on Hunter Island.”
“So, you’re convinced they exist.”
“There are too many reports. You know that. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be here.”
“I’m trying to weigh the arguments as objectively as possible. To get as close to the truth as I can.”
“If you want the truth, just ask us,” she says. “We’ll tell you everything.”
“What about physical proof?”
Alvina snickers. “This is our backyard. We know it better than anyone else. That should be proof enough.”
“But your word alone won’t convince others,” I say.
“That’s all right, we’re not trying to convince anybody.”
Despite our congenial sparring, Alvina and I have taken to each other, and I realize I’ll need her help facilitating introductions with other people in town. An outsider suddenly appearing in a small, tight-knit community and asking questions is bound to cause discomfort and arouse suspicion.
I mention this to Alvina, and she responds with an understanding nod. “I’ll put in a good word, whenever I can.
“I’m no expert on the Sasquatch,” Alvina continues. “But there’s one thing I do know for sure. And you should write this down in your notebook: there’s always been an understanding between us and them.”
“Between your people and the Sasquatches?”
“Yup,” she says. “That’s what the elders say. It’s unspoken. We leave them alone, and they leave us alone. They don’t bother us, and we don’t bother them. That’s about it, and that’s the way it works.”
A few days later, I go to interview my first eyewitness: a Heiltsuk civil servant named Mary Brown. In the spring of 2008, Mary and two other adults led a group of nine girls from Bella Bella on a weekend camping trip to a wilderness cabin in Roscoe Inlet, a conservancy area north of town. A waterway flanked by mountainous fjords, Roscoe is legendary for its stunning beauty. Because old village sites are found there, it’s also culturally and historically important for the Heiltsuk. Mary claims she and her group had a frightening encounter with a Sasquatch during their trip to the area.
I’ve heard about Mary’s story from someone else in the community. When I phone her, she happily agrees to share her experience and invites me to her second-floor office in what she half-jokingly calls “downtown Bella Bella,” a short walk from Alvina’s.
On the way there, I pass the scene of the fire that consumed the band store complex. Though still standing, the building is largely destroyed, its charred remains reeking of the wet decay of food and garbage that hadn’t been consumed by the fire. The forlorn sight stands in stark contrast to my own fleeting memories of the hundred-year-old blue-and-white building with WAGLISLA (the Heiltsuk name for Bella Bella) emblazoned over the front entrance.
“It’s a huge tragedy,” Mary says of the fire as I arrive, greeting me with a long face. As we enter her office and sit down, she tells me she is working on the case to help the three girls accused of setting the blaze.
Mary is Bella Bella’s restorative justice coordinator. She’s an advocate for community members going through Canada’s criminal justice system while also acting as a representative of the tribal justice arm of the band, helping rehabilitate offenders in ways more in line with Heiltsuk culture. Mary is confident and self-assured, probably in her mid-forties, and has a bubbly personality. The nine teenage girls she accompanied to the cabin in Roscoe in 2008, she says, were at-risk youth, and the camping trip was part of her work.
“I haven’t told this story for a few years,” she begins somewhat nervously. “I sometimes can’t believe it happened—but it did. And I wasn’t the only person there.”
Traveling by boat, the group arrived at the bayside cabin during low tide in the late afternoon on the Friday of the weekend outing. After dropping crab traps at one end of the bay, Mary and the other adults took the girls to the cabin located at the other end. There they set up camp and showed the girls how to dig for clams on the beach. As dusk neared, Mary, the two other adults, and one of the girls got back into the boat to retrieve the crab traps. The tide was still low. The rocky, forested shore, maybe a hundred yards away at the most, rose a bit above their heads.
“As I was pulling up one of the traps I had this really eerie feeling something was watching us,” Mary says. “I began to look around. The others felt the same.”
As Mary pulled her trap out of the water, one of the adults, her friend Marilyn, screamed, “Look! Look!“ and pointed toward the shore.
“I looked up and couldn’t believe what I saw—there was a Thla’thla right at the tip of the rock!” she says. “Sorry, a what on the rock?”
“A Thla’thla. That’s the word in our language for a Sasquatch. It was crouched down with its arms hanging around its knees, which were up past its shoulders. It was brown in color and just huge. It looked just like that character in Star Trek.“
“You mean Chewbacca? In Star Wars?”
“That’s it. It was like a giant monkey with a human-shaped head. And it was watching us in what looked like amazement. It was leaning forward, just staring at us. And at first we were just in awe.”
Both the boaters and the creature were frozen in shock. But then the gravity of the situation sank in. Marilyn, who had first spotted the creature, started screaming in horror, yelling hysterically at her husband to start the motor so they could escape. That surge of fright startled the animal, and it stood up. At that moment the boaters saw the creature in its full dimensions: roughly eight feet in height, with long arms, broad shoulders, and a barrel chest.
“Its arms were so long, and its hands were so big,” Mary recalls. “It stood up and looked over its shoulder at us as it walked off. After three or four steps it was gone, into the forest.”
The relief at seeing the animal leave turned into renewed terror when the adults realized that the girls digging clams on the beach were now in danger. Mary paints a scene of utter pandemonium, as the boaters, in an effort to alert the girls, drove their vessel at full throttle onto the beach—with the impact nearly throwing them out. They then sprinted down the shoreline yelling to the girls at the top of their lungs to get into the cabin as quickly as possible, because they’d seen a Thla’thla. Seeing the adults in hysterics, and well versed in old stories about Sasquatches, the teenagers were whipped into paroxysms of fright. Everyone fled inside.
Safe and in the cabin, the group went over and over the details of the encounter in amazement and disbelief. Once everyone had calmed down, a few hours later, the group agreed that the creature was likely gone and wouldn’t return. As evening fell, the adults set about making dinner, while the girls climbed into the bunks in the loft area of the cabin. After dark the campers started hearing something moving through the bushes outside. They thought the smell of food had attracted a nearby bear. But whatever had come around soon crawled beneath the cabin, which was raised on stilts.
“The floorboard has cracks in it,” Mary says. “And we were overcome by this incredible stench. You know how a dirty, wet dog smells, right? But this was like ten times stronger. It was so stink.”
Aware of the bad smell associated with the creature, the campers concluded that the Sasquatch had returned and was now just a few feet beneath them. They became terrified. Seeking protection, the adults climbed up onto the bunks with the girls. For over an hour nobody moved, as they all listened to the animal beneath the cabin shifting around and occasionally knocking and scratching at the floor. It remained there and seemed to have no intention of going away.
“And then Marilyn lost it again,” Mary says, chuckling. “She screamed, ‘I can’t handle this anymore! Grab the gun!’ She ordered her husband to confront the Thla’thla. So the poor guy climbs down and takes the gun out of the case. He’s literally shaking, trying to load his twenty-two. He then swings the door open—and I swear he probably had his eyes closed because he was so terrified of what would be out there—and shoots his gun into the darkness. Bang-bang-bang-bang-bang! He then slams the door, pushes the dining table against it, and piles any movable objects on top to barricade us in.” Mary, engrossed in her own story, bursts into laughter. “As if that was going to help us,” she says. “If that thing wanted to get into the cabin that night, it would have.”
But it worked. The animal retreated from beneath the cabin, taking its rancid odor with it. At the crack of dawn, the terrified, sleepless campers took their things and piled into their boats and returned to Bella Bella.
When I ask Mary what most sticks out in her mind about the experience, she tells me it is the creature’s face. Its expression, she says, showed no intent to harm. Instead, it revealed only an intense curiosity.
“I think the only reason we were scared is what we learned growing up,” she says. “As kids we were told stories in which the Thla’thla—a wild woman of the woods—kidnaps children and puts them in a big basket she carries on her back. Those tales were used as cultural teachings—to teach the kids to listen to and respect their parents. And to discourage them from wandering too far off.”
“Do you think the Sasquatch is a supernatural being?”
“No, they’re normal flesh-and-blood creatures. The others would probably agree. I think they’re just smart and cautious animals that live deep in the woods. Nothing more.”
In my new capacity as the impartial Sasquatch investigator, I try to be detached as I consider Mary’s story, to play the devil’s advocate, as I had done with John Bindernagel. But there are few loose strings with which to pull the story apart.
I ask if she’s sure they hadn’t seen or smelled a bear.
“A hundred percent,” she says.
Did they look for tracks the next morning?
“No.”
Why not?
“There was no time. We were running for our lives. Plus we knew what we’d seen.”
I am fascinated by Mary’s story. It makes sense, concordant with all I know and have heard before about the animals: the typical crouching posture, the bad smell, the sometimes mischievous behavior. Plus, four witnesses were involved in the initial sighting. It is all too compelling.
I go over the arguments for and against the creature’s existence in an attempt to ground myself. In doing so, I’m reminded of how intractable the debate is. On one side you have the disciples of the rational notion that anything that can’t be shown to exist physically cannot exist. On the other is the view that when something can’t be seen, or can’t be shown to exist, this doesn’t prove it’s not there. As with the scripted debates between parliamentarians, the Sisyphean back-and-forth between the two always reaches an impasse: just when one side seems to get the upper hand, the other has a comment or answer that parries it, or a maneuver to deflect it, and everyone is back to square one.
Alvina’s place becomes a home away from home. Lots of people pass through on a daily basis. Grandchildren drop in, at any and all hours, for a snippet of conversation with their “Nan” while not so surreptitiously raiding her fridge. Friends, neighbors, and extended family make similarly unpredictable cameos, often just as Alvina is putting the finishing touches on some home cooking. Many come bearing gifts of seafood: jars of salmon, steamed crab, halibut, seaweed, or herring roe prepared with butter and garlic. Alvina giddily stashes the treasures deep in her fridge, only to share them with me later, selflessly, along with a glass of wine, on her hummingbird-graced balcony.
My host’s generosity is not limited to the kitchen. Having an interest in my researches, she takes an active role in facilitating them, by finding stories and easing access into the community. Alvina shakes down every person who drops into her place for a Sasquatch story or for tips on whom else I might speak to. After a while, I can barely keep up with the leads. I accumulate my own dossier of reports and quickly become familiar with many of the names and places in the territory. In my mental map, and later on Google Earth, I plug tacks into every creek valley, secluded cove, clam beach, and old village site tied to the creatures. Sasquatches, if they exist, seem to be omnipresent on the coast. No island or islet is too remote. No valley is free of their potential presence.
One night, during a backyard barbecue at the house, Alvina appears behind me and grabs my arm. “I want you to meet someone,” she says, leading me to a bonfire around which several people are seated on lawn chairs. She introduces me to her former son-in-law.
“Tell him your Stryker Island story, Larry,” Alvina says, before smiling at me and disappearing into the dark.
The tall, heavyset man in his late fifties is reluctant to speak at first but then tells me that he and his father had encountered an albino Sasquatch on the island. It happened, he said, while the two men were clam digging.
“Suddenly, Dad came running to me, all hysterical, saying a white Sasquatch had come after him,” Larry says. “He said it was trying to protect its clams.” Larry goes silent, reliving the memory.
“Then what happened?” I prompt him.
“The thing chased us outta there is what,” he says. “My dad was really affected by it. He got really freaked out after. So I performed a smoke ceremony to cleanse him.”
“Did he recover?”
“He was, well, different after.”
I notice a man beside us listening intently to the conversation, his stern, heavily contoured face reflecting the dim orange light coming from the embers of the fire. He is staring at me, and I turn my gaze to meet his.
“You say you’re some kinda writer?” he interjects.
“I am.”
“You’re on an Indian reservation and this is the kind of thing you want to write about?” His tone is hostile.
“It’s for a book project. I’m collecting stories—”
“Look around you!” he says, cutting me off. “We’re hurting here! There aren’t any jobs. Groceries are expensive. Do you know how much it costs to buy a bottle of ketchup? Ten bucks! And that was back when we had ketchup! Our goddamn band store just burned down and no government is lifting a finger to help us. The next-nearest supermarket is a hundred miles away!”
Everyone around the fire is listening now. The truth of what he’s saying dawns on me, and I suddenly feel embarrassed and a bit ashamed.
“You come from the big city, and all you can do is ask about Sasquatches!” he says. “Sasquatch this, and Bigfoot that! I have news for you: there is no Sasquatch! It doesn’t exist! Why don’t you do everyone a favor and write about what life is like around here—and how tough things are?”
He stands up, flicks his beer bottle into the fire, and walks away.
Prior to my trip, people acquainted with the coast told me that I’d face an adjustment period. That things work differently here. That the pace and tempo of coastal life are radically at odds with those of the city. I find that to be true. Life in Bella Bella is less structured around clock time. Outside of official business, there is less emphasis on setting up and holding to firm appointments. Plans with others have an almost hypothetical quality to them, until they actually happen. When I complain to Alvina and others that some scheduled meetings don’t come to pass, they all tell me to forgo plans and just go look for people, show up unannounced. More often than not, they add, I’ll find them. And experience bears that out.
The rhythms of life here are also different. People are more relaxed. They walk slowly and tread lightly. Dialogue is easygoing and peppered with natural pauses. It is also not hampered by loud ambient noises—traffic, construction, music, and the ruckus of crowds—that compel people in cities to raise their voices unconsciously. More than once, embarrassingly, I have to ask people to repeat themselves because I can’t hear their quiet words.
Because of their hard opposition to the Big Oil projects on the coast, the Heiltsuk have garnered a reputation, a stereotype even, among those who don’t know them, for being naturally antagonistic. But I find Bella Bellans to be friendly, open-minded, and extroverted. Nearly every driver who passes me in the street waves. People strolling by on the road also say hello and ask how I’m doing. If a conversation is struck up, and I mention that I’m staying with Alvina, who is widely respected, there is an instant happy glimmer of recognition. My interest in Sasquatch further bridges any real or perceived chasms. I quickly gain the nickname “Sasquatch Man,” which I wrongly believed was Alvina’s coinage and usage alone.
But just when I think I’ve reached acceptance in the community, I’m reminded of the limits of being an outsider. Rumors reach my ears that some people in town think I’m an informer, trying to infiltrate the community to report on any threatening activist opposition to those Big Oil megaprojects. My supposed affiliations vary depending on the person harboring the suspicion: the police, the government, the Big Oil companies. Most of the rumors have me working for Enbridge, the Canadian multinational energy-transportation company, whose Northern Gateway pipeline program the Heiltsuk and other First Nations are determined to stop at any cost. The whole “Sasquatch getup,” I am told, is believed to be a clever ruse to help me gain access to the community.*
One Saturday night, I head to the Fisherman’s Bar and Grill in nearby Shearwater—the main watering hole in the area. Dance-floor revelers bounce to a live band playing 1980s covers, while scruffy-looking commercial fishermen from out of town, wild-eyed and worn by time, brood idly in the corners, nursing their beers.
I grab a drink at the bar and get invited to a game of pool with some new friends I’ve made. Sasquatch almost invariably comes up, and throughout the night people share names of contacts and places related to Bigfoot sightings. I jot down the small leads and anecdotes in my notebook.
Within days word gets back to me that I’ve acquired a new nickname: “The Notetaker.” And I hear from some that my scribbling in the bar that night has aroused further suspicions. Perhaps I’m reporting on certain people?
In the more conspiracy-prone Middle East, I faced similar allegations—the often good-humored, half-joking quips about espionage made by local friends and colleagues that are de rigueur in that part of the world. As in the Middle East, the history here of damaging interactions with exploitative outsiders makes the reflex understandable. But it also makes me wonder what would happen if a critical mass of suspicion were to gather around me. I do my best to shake these thoughts and redirect my attention to an important and promising meeting.
If anyone knows the mazelike interstices of the Great Bear Rainforest, it’s environmentalist Ian McAllister. Originally from Victoria, the award-winning photographer, filmmaker, and author of several books on the Great Bear is also the director of Pacific Wild—a coastal conservation group he cofounded with his wife, Karen, in 2008. Ian was part of a clique of environmentalists who came to prominence during the Vancouver Island anti-logging protests of the 1980s and 90s and went on to wage the campaign that eventually created the Great Bear Rainforest in 2006. He also coined the area’s name.
Ian’s famous, jaw-dropping photos of coastal wolves and grizzlies come at the price of weeks alone in the bush, often sitting hidden with his camera in estuary grasses or in stands of old growth—endlessly watching and waiting. Much of his work takes place in some of the areas where sightings of Sasquatches have been reported.
Ian’s forty-six-foot catamaran and field operations center, Habitat, docked at his Denny Island home, is strewn with diving equipment and gizmos. He and an assistant are on board packing duffel bags. Sunburned from his time out on the water, the forty-nine-year-old, with his curly red hair and freckles, projects the image of a relaxed surfer. But there’s also something imposing and brazen about his manner.
“We’re gearing up for a multiday expedition to monitor a pod of fin whales that appeared on our remote cameras,” Ian says.
At a table covered in marine charts, he finishes telling me about his involvement in the anti-logging protests at Clayoquot Sound, on the western coast of Vancouver Island, in the late 1980s and early ‘90s. Those demonstrations, known as the War in the Woods, received worldwide media attention and propelled Ian into his current role, fighting for the Great Bear.
“After Vancouver Island, we thought for sure that when the public saw this place, it would only take a few years to protect it. But it didn’t work out that way. It took some really heavy hands to get the government to even recognize that this was a special place. They spent an incredible amount of time trying to convince the public that it didn’t exist.”
“In what sense?”
“In an official sense. They’re on record as saying, ‘There is no such place as the Great Bear Rainforest.’ So we responded, ‘Well, then there’s no such place as the Great Barrier Reef—or the Grand Canyon.’ People have names for places. And they’re not necessarily gazetted or legal names. Fortunately, the idea that Canada was destroying this fabled wilderness full of spirit bears, salmon, and towering trees in order to sell products to Europe and the United States was totally unacceptable to the public,” he says. “And so we managed to force an agreement.”
“It’s a big achievement.”
“Yeah, except we’re now back to square one.”
“The pipeline?” I say, referring to the Northern Gateway project.
“Pipelines. Plural. Several have been proposed. They effectively want to drive hundreds of supertankers carrying liquefied natural gas and bitumen condensate right through the very heart of this rain forest. The impact would be catastrophic if one of these fully laden tankers slammed into a reef. Statistically it will happen.”
“What do you plan to do?”
“What we’ve done before. Dig in. Fight till the end.”
“You have your work cut out for you.”
“Well, there are a few conservationists, like myself, roaming about. We’re hardly an army. And the communities here are some of the smallest and most isolated in Canada. If you consider the sympathetic and highly motivated provincial and federal governments, the resources of China, and every major oil company in the world that’s heavily invested in the Alberta tar sands, it’s pretty hard to come up with a bigger level of opposition. It’s a pure David-and-Goliath situation.”
Ian turns to look at his assistant, and I can tell he is impatiently gauging how much time he has left to give me. “So, you’re here for some other information,” he says, moving the discussion forward.
I tell Ian about my interest in Sasquatch. I feel almost silly doing so, in light of the seriousness of the conversation we’ve just had. I expect Ian, a de facto biologist and a practical, hands-on man, to make a dour or mocking face. But he maintains his well-honed professional, almost diplomatic, composure. He seems to mull his next words before speaking.
“Are you a believer?” he asks.
“I’m trying to decide where I stand.”
He nods, sympathetically. “Well, I haven’t seen anything myself. And I’ve been everywhere on this coast. I don’t entirely discount the existence of such animals. Parts of this place could easily support them. On the other hand, a bear standing on its hinds on a foggy morning reaching for crab apples can look incredibly humanlike. I’ve seen it myself.”
I nod.
“With all the remote-camera sites in estuaries and creek mouths, and with all the academics doing fieldwork around here, you’d think there’d be some better evidence.”
Everything he says is compelling—in the way that Mary Brown’s story was compelling. There’s weight and authority to his words. But I’m left with a pang of disappointment—as well as the stirrings of bewilderment.
In the world of Bigfoot, there are stories. And then there are stories. The former involve encounters of the run-of-the-mill variety. They are the brief, unexpected, and often perplexing brushes between man and beast that occur with little fanfare and end all too quickly, leaving a trail of questions in their wake. The discovery of tracks, the screams, the glimpses of fur and form, the sound of footsteps around the tent at night—these are the more common, dime-a-dozen experiences. Had my early exposure to the phenomenon been limited to a few of these sorts of accounts, Bigfoot perhaps would not have left its indelible impression on me.
The bigger and brasher tales—the classics, as they’re called—are what fueled my journey to believerdom. These yarns were so outlandish, so seemingly preposterous, that they could only be relegated to that borderland where reality segues into fantasy.
No Bigfoot connoisseur worth his night-vision equipment doesn’t know the story of Albert Ostman—a Sasqualogy cause célèbre second only to the 1967 Patterson-Gimlin film. Ostman, a Swedish Canadian logger, claimed he was kidnapped in his sleeping bag one night while prospecting in the wilderness at the head of Toba Inlet, British Columbia (just south of the Great Bear), in 1924. Ostman alleged that after being picked up in his bag and dragged through the mountains for most of the night, he was dropped in a clearing in a small valley where the light of the rising sun revealed a nuclear family of Bigfoots—a father, mother, son, and daughter—staring at him in the faint light of dawn. His otherwise curious and mostly benevolent hosts, chattering in an incomprehensible patois, kept him prisoner there for almost a week. Ostman finally made a successful dash for freedom after poisoning “the Old Man,” as he called him, by feeding him a can of chewing tobacco he happened to have in his sleeping bag.
In 1957, Ostman came forward and related the incident to journalist John Green, just before the humanoid tracks discovered in Bluff Creek, in northern California, propelled Bigfoot into popular awareness. “I Was Kidnapped by a Sasquatch,” the title of Green’s dead-serious newspaper story on Ostman’s encounter, appearing on the front page of the Agassiz-Harrison Advance, foreshadowed every chintzy supermarket-tabloid headline to ever appear on the subject.5
Soon after Ostman’s tale came to light, another yarn, also reported to have occurred in 1924, resurfaced to take its rightful place in Sasqualogy’s annals of the unforgettable.
On July 13, 1924, the Oregonian, a Portland daily, reported that a group of five miners, prospecting on the southeastern slopes of Mount Saint Helens in Washington State, had been attacked in their cabin by a group of “Mountain Devils.” The story later came to be known as the “Ape Canyon incident,” named after the gorge where the attack took place and where gorilla-like creatures had been seen for as long as anyone could remember.*
Early Sasquatch investigators found and interviewed the last surviving member of that drama, Fred Beck, after digging up the old Oregonian article in the mid-1960s. Beck told them the assault on the cabin came in response to the prospectors’ firing on creatures that had been shadowing them in the woods for several days. The account of the cabin attack, which came in the dead of night and continued in unrelenting waves until daylight, is worthy of its own horror film. The mob of ape-men swarmed the outside of the cabin, banging on its door and walls, stomping on the roof, pelting it with rocks, and reaching in with their shaggy arms through gaps in the logs. The terrified miners barely kept the creatures at bay, firing their rifles at the walls and ceiling all night, until the attack finally came to an end with the rising sun. The Oregonian reported that the miners “were so upset by the incidents of the night, they left the cabin without making breakfast.” The forest ranger who was assigned to that district, and who claimed to have met the men as they were fleeing, later told investigators, in the 1960s, that he’d never seen grown men more frightened.6
Stories like these fed my fascination when I was a child. What sets them apart from other Sasquatch tales is the drama, danger, and emotional tension built into them—and a narrative flamboyance that fires the imagination. Raising the emotional pitch, research shows, leads to gullibility and conditioning. But something fundamental to these tales is key to understanding every Sasquatch enthusiast’s fascination. These stories depict Bigfoots as quasi-human, intelligent, self-aware, and calculating. Even more, they insinuate a shadowy and almost forbidden parallel world, which the creatures inhabit.
When I was a kid, there was no skepticism, no weighing of evidence, no sense of whether any of it jibed with reality. At no time while reading these stories did I find it strange that Ostman, in the account of his kidnapping, never said he felt fear or terror. Or that despite also having a gun in his sleeping bag, he didn’t attempt to shoot his way out. Or that the creatures that attacked Beck and his colleagues didn’t simply break through the cabin door, or ambush the men later during their retreat (or indeed why most Sasquatch encounters do not—as far as we know—end in violence or death). Nor would my opinion have changed had I known that in 1966, Beck, infected by the growing vogue of Eastern religious cults sweeping the Western world, had self-published a New Age manifesto entitled I Fought the Apemen of Mt. St. Helens, in which he claimed psychic powers, argued for the existence of UFOs, and alleged that his party made contact during their Ape Canyon trip with native spirit guides wearing buckskin.*
The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, a science-minded organization of debunkers, has run articles in its flagship publication, Skeptical Inquirer, taking potshots at claims of the existence of Sasquatches. The idea the magazine espouses most frequently, to which Ian McAllister alluded, is that Bigfoots are often no more than misidentified bears.
“Mistaken identifications,” writes Joe Nickell, the author of one such piece, “could be due to poor viewing conditions, such as the creature being seen only briefly, or from a distance, in shadow or at nighttime, through foliage, or the like—especially while the observer is, naturally, excited.”7
The idea that Sasquatch is nothing more than a misidentified bear isn’t new. But this argument gained significant traction after the publication, in 2000, of My Quest for the Yeti, by Italian alpinist Reinhold Messner. The celebrated mountain virtuoso and explorer—known for the first solo ascent of Mount Everest without supplemental oxygen, in 1980—has spent his life exploring the Himalayan region. His conquest of all fourteen Himalayan peaks that top eight thousand meters, the highest on earth, has made him a legend among alpinists. After scaling every major summit in the area, the mountain-obsessed Italian turned his sights to a formidable new challenge: the mystery of the Yeti.
In his book, Messner claims that he encountered a Yeti in eastern Tibet in 1986. The incident took place in the evening, while he was on a solo expedition, tracing an old Sherpa route through a series of valleys. As he was trekking up a forested ravine, trying to reach a clearing above the tree line, Messner was startled by a fleet-footed, upright silhouette, which was stealthily darting back and forth between the trees. At first he thought he’d come across a yak and its owners, but the nature of its movements soon convinced him otherwise.
“It moved upright,” he writes. “It was as if my own shadow had been projected onto the thicket. For one heartbeat it stood motionless, then turned away and disappeared into the dusk.”8
Messner then found large tracks going up the mountainside, before the same or a similar creature reappeared and now whistled angrily at him. This time Messner got a slightly better look at it: “Covered with hair, it stood upright on two short legs and had powerful arms that hung down almost to its knees. I guessed it to be over seven feet tall. Its body looked much heavier than that of a man that size, but it moved with such agility and power toward the edge of the escarpment that I was both startled and relieved. Mostly I was stunned. No human would have been able to run like that in the middle of the night.”9
After making inquiries with villagers, Messner discovered that he had encountered what locals referred to, fearfully, as a chemo—a creature comparable to the Nepalese Yeti. Messner was fascinated. He decided to embark on a new mission to find and make sense of the mysterious animal.
After twelve long years of research and excursions with local guides in both Pakistan and Tibet, the alpinist concluded that the animal he had encountered in 1986 was not the Yeti but none other than the rare and elusive Tibetan blue bear (thought to be a subspecies of brown bear). The bear’s mix of unusual qualities and behaviors matched those of the alleged man-beast:
1. The Tibetan bear often walks upright. When on all fours, it places its back foot into the print of its forepaw (as bears in North America occasionally do), causing the two tracks to merge into one humanoid-looking footprint.
2. It is nocturnally active.
3. Its vocalizations are high-pitched.
4. It is known to kill yaks with one blow of its paw (yak predation is another purported Yeti pastime).
5. The Tibetan bear is red when young, becoming black when it grows into adulthood. So too is the Yeti.*
To Messner, his discovery made absolute sense. The Tibetan blue bear was no regular bear. The animal was highly idiosyncratic, and when people were influenced by ignorance, fear, and superstition, it morphed into a beast of the imagination whose reputation spanned generations and continents.
“I hasten to add that this is an extraordinary animal—fearsome and preternaturally intelligent, as far as possible from the cuddly image people in the West sometimes have of bears,” he writes. “These animals are nearly impossible to track, and for all their reality they remain deeply enigmatic. They avoid all contact with humans and are partly bipedal, nocturnal omnivores.”10
American conservationist Daniel C. Taylor, who lived and worked for much of his life in the Himalayas, spent sixty years meticulously researching the Yeti mystery, starting long before Messner and beginning as a wild-man enthusiast himself. After traveling in the region’s most remote valley systems and himself coming across a set of mysterious tracks, he concluded similarly that snow prints purported to be Yeti impressions were made by Asiatic black bears and other local bear species. He demonstrated convincingly that the tracks, including an iconic set of prints photographed by explorer Eric Shipton on the Nepal-Tibet border in 1951 (photos that set off the worldwide Yeti craze), were double impressions of a bear’s forepaws and hind paws. Taylor even managed to find a never-before-published photo of the Shipton tracks that shows claw marks in the snow—which are not seen in the famous photo.11
Since it’s assumed by most people that the Yeti and the Sasquatch are generally the same creature, these bear theories have been taken up and applied wholesale to Bigfoot. Reinhold Messner himself personally led the charge. “Believe me,” the mountain climber declared in an interview with National Geographic Adventure magazine on the eve of his book’s publication in 2000. “Bigfoot is in reality the grizzly. Somebody will prove it like I proved the Yeti story. It’s very logical, the whole thing.”12
Even if Himalayan bear theories are correct, which I suspect they are, the Himalayas are not the Pacific Northwest. The grizzly bear is not the Tibetan bear. And amorphous impressions in the snow are not the same as detailed humanoid tracks in dirt or mud. Time and again in my discussions with eyewitnesses in the Great Bear Rainforest, I am told in no uncertain terms: We live with bears. They are our relatives. We know how they look and act. Believe me: what I saw was no bear.
One of the more frequently brandished and more convincing arguments for the existence of Sasquatch is its apparent presence in North American aboriginal folklore. More than a few indigenous communities, particularly in the Pacific Northwest, allege that Bigfoot-type creatures do exist and can cite names and descriptions for them in their own traditions. For proponents of the Sasquatch, this is almost tantamount to hard proof; if such a species exists, it would have been known to local inhabitants before European colonization.
When early Bigfoot researchers managed to get past walls of secrecy and reticence, they were told by indigenous people that the creatures were greatly feared and respected. Some cast them as cannibal spirits. Others described them as thief-like, preying on women and children. In most depictions, the animals were said to have special powers, including the ability to hypnotize, induce insanity, and cause physical harm. The power to shape-shift or transform into other creatures, many said, is what accounted for their elusiveness. These sorts of cultural beliefs were often of secondary importance to conventional Bigfoot investigators, who were—and still are—more interested in confirming the apelike qualities of the animal, as evinced in some indigenous carvings, masks, and dances.*
There are many permutations of indigenous wild-man beings along the North American west coast. The Sasquatch, of course—its name derived from a Coast Salish word, Sasq’ets, meaning “wild man”—is the most famous. Among the Heiltsuk, as Mary Brown told me, the creatures are known as Thla’thla.† In folklore, the Thla’thla is depicted as a large, hair-covered, forest-dwelling supernatural humanoid. Stories usually cast it as female. Its trademark quality is a penchant for abducting and eating children. It carries a large basket on its back with an inwardly spiked lid in which to stash abductees and transport them back to its lair. Parents often used the stories of the Thla’thla to prod or frighten their children into obedience. Mary’s memory of those childhood tales added to the terror she and the others experienced that day in Roscoe Inlet.
For a long time, like many Sasquatch enthusiasts, I’d taken it for granted that any humanoid or bogeyman-type creature that is part of an indigenous group’s pantheon of supernatural beings must be the same as what people today call Bigfoot, since some, like Thla’thla and Sasq’ets, seem to fit the bill.
A few of the beings nowadays equated with the Sasquatch are the Gagiit of the Haida, a human who has succumbed to fatigue, cold, or hunger to become a ghostly wilderness dweller; the Kooshdaa Khaa of the Tlingit, who is likened to a land-dwelling otter and is believed to be the embodiment of a drowned or lost relative; and the Wendigo of Algonquian-speaking peoples—a troublemaking spirit of the woods that can possess people and cause them to perpetrate acts of insatiable greed, murder, and cannibalism.
There may be something to these linkages with Sasquatch. After all, much indigenous oral history and traditional knowledge has been shown to be accurate—long antedating the same scientific or academic “discoveries.” But is it possible that the Sasquatch—simply one indigenous version of the wild man, whose name was Anglicized by nonindigenous people—has become so prominent and universal a story in its own right that it has come to be mixed up with and grafted onto other unique aboriginal traditions? Could the deluge of media coverage and the long-standing pop-cultural aspects of the Sasquatch story have influenced some indigenous people, and also Sasqualogists, to see more of “Bigfoot” in some supernatural beings than is actually there? Several such creatures don’t overlap much with Bigfoot apart from being humanoid or semi-humanoid.
Muddying the waters is the fact that common forest creatures are, in certain native stories, imbued with human qualities. Some can transform themselves into humans. The idea of a creature that bridges the human and animal spheres is in a sense commonplace.
When I ask Alvina if she can tell me more about the Thla’thla, she replies, “Maybe you should go to Old Town.”
I ask what that is.
“It’s the name we give to our old village site on the island,” she says. “It’s just south of here, down the main road near McLoughlin Bay. It’s where the Thla’thla is seen the most. Who knows, if you spend enough time there, you might see one yourself.”
The next day I phone Ian to tell him that I’ve left my mini camera tripod on his boat. He tells me his assistant is going to the Heiltsuk Elders Building in Bella Bella that day for a meeting and suggests I pick up the tripod from her there.
When I arrive at the single-story cedar lodge, I find a gathering in progress. Alberta representatives from the energy multinational Chevron are giving a presentation on a liquefied natural gas project in Haisla Nation territory, up the coast. The project will transport natural gas that has been extracted by fracking along a pipeline to a coastal facility, near the port town of Kitimat, that will cool the gas into a liquid for shipping in supertankers to buyers overseas. Chevron’s presentation about tanker safety is meant to win over the Heiltsuk, who vehemently oppose the project.
It’s an exceptionally tense scene. Six clean-shaven men, dressed in loafers, impeccably ironed button-down shirts, and slacks, some wearing spectacles, sit rigidly in front of microphones at a large table at the front of the hall. On a large screen behind them, a PowerPoint presentation churns out fancy diagrams and blueprints of various supertankers. The men brag that these new, state-of-the-art ships, some over a thousand feet long, are virtually accident-proof. Not only are the boats built to international safety standards, they say, but they also have double hulls that can withstand huge impacts. They add that the ships will be driven by local pilots familiar with the tricky coastal passages they must navigate. Over and over they tell the audience that there is nothing to fear. Even if an accident were to occur, the gas, they say, would simply evaporate from the water. Presto! No mess! This isn’t oil.
The audience looks restless, gloomy-faced, and unimpressed. A palpable sense of fear and foreboding hovers over the room. After an endless succession of blueprints, diagrams, graphs, pie charts, and factoids plugging the virtues of the indestructible superships, the PowerPoint ends.
“Does anyone in the audience have questions?” the panel asks, with a hint of trepidation. A flurry of hands shoots up. A microphone is brought to the floor. One by one, audience members make their voices heard:
Greed is running this boat. All you people want is to come here and take what you want—and then just leave! We can’t even watch Hockey Night in Canada anymore without being bombarded by oil company commercials saying how great they are!
An older woman takes the microphone and stands. Her lips begin to quiver as she speaks:
We live off of this land. We fish and harvest seaweed. This is all we have. It defines who we are. If there’s a spill, who will look after us? Who will help us? What … what will we do?
She breaks into tears, and sits down sobbing. People gather to console her. The panel members stare uncomfortably. Another man reaches for the mic:
You people have no idea! Even with five or six tugs, those tankers are going to be in a lot of trouble in a storm. One spill would probably devastate hundreds of miles of coast. If that happens we’ll never see anything for it. This whole community, which has fended for itself for thousands of years, will then be standing on its last legs. We’ll be living off wieners and beans!
An uncomfortable murmur rises from the audience. The distraught panel members, who have been listening in stunned silence, thank the community for its hospitality and feedback before abruptly ending the meeting and scattering.
The strong sense of kinship in Bella Bella, the level of cohesion in the community, is new and astonishing to me as a city person who has spent little time in a small town. Within weeks I notice that everyone I meet is related or somehow connected to at least one other person I’ve previously met. Bella Bella’s human landscape turns into a vast web of interconnectivity. This latticework of relations extends to other nearby communities, and it dawns on me that everyone living on this section of coast is part of one large family.
There’s also an unusual synchronicity, or serendipity, at play here. It’s as if a kind of force, or an undercurrent, is constantly orchestrating coincidences. Often, when the name of someone I should speak to comes up during the course of my research, that same individual suddenly appears unbidden, and turns out to be connected to some other obscure story I’m pursuing, mentioned earlier by someone else. Or if a location comes up in relation to a Sasquatch report, I will hear more about that same place again and again in the following days, entirely by chance.
At first I considered these incidents to be random, isolated events of chance made more likely by the small size of the community. But now I think otherwise. Their frequency is uncanny. The connections that recur are often too vague and obscure to be coincidence. Also, Bella Bella is not that small. Despite all the people milling about in town, I still see and meet, on a weekly basis, only a small fraction of the overall population. By the time I leave I still will not have met most of the town’s residents. I seldom experience this kind of profound connectivity back home in the grind of the city.
This is underscored when I order lunch at Alexa’s Diner—Bella Bella’s only eatery—from a young server who is one of Alvina’s granddaughters. As I wait, I look through the window and watch as a funeral procession moves slowly by, led by a man and woman holding a wooden cross. A pickup truck follows, carrying a coffin and pallbearers. Crowds of mourners trail behind, heading in the direction of the government dock.
I spot Alvina coming out of the variety store that shares space with the diner. I call her over, and she sits down beside me, taking a quick break from her errands.
“What’s happening outside?” I ask.
“A young woman from the community died during a heart operation the other day. She’s being taken to Pole Island, where we have our graveyard.”
“The town seemed more crowded today. It must be people here for the funeral.”
“Not all of them,” she says. “There’s also a big three-day potlatch being put on by one of our chiefs in a few days. So the guests are starting to arrive.”
“A potlatch?” I’d heard the word before.
“It’s a gift-giving feast, a celebration of culture,” she explains, “put on by families on the coast to mark births, deaths, adoptions, and weddings—that sort of thing. It’s also a kind of economic system, where wealth, actual material items, will be distributed to the community, and where family business gets done. Potlatches are a big deal around here. Originally, in our culture, prestige and status didn’t come from who accumulated the most wealth but came from who gave away the most. The potlatch host is the one doing the giving.”
Alvina tells me the potlatch is being held in honor of the chief’s mother, who had died a short time ago. I ask her if I can attend.
“Everyone’s invited,” she says, before giving me a penetrating look. “Maybe a chance for you to take a break from all your Sasquatch snooping and learn something different about us for a change.”
For three consecutive days, Bella Bella is taken over by the feast, which draws many spectators to the bleachers and floor of the town’s gymnasium. I arrive during a break on the first day, just moments before the organizers lock the doors for what they say will be a sacred observance.
Singers and musicians, sitting around a long, polished cedar log, begin to stir. An eerie whistling of reed instruments rises like the distant hooting of faraway steam locomotives. Shakers come alive, rattling along with the rumbling and prattling of drums that follow in their wake.
The murmuring audience goes silent.
Then heavy drums and wooden mallets on cedar explode in thunderous unison. The harmony of chanting male voices fills the gymnasium. A line of four men, Heiltsuk elders, dressed in black and wearing red cloaks with animal motifs etched in sequins, emerges from behind a large drapery with an illustration of a thunderbird grappling with a whale. The men’s cloaks jingle with copper as they march piously, methodically, and with heavy hearts toward a denouement, enrapturing the audience. A large, towering young man holding a rattle—the master of ceremonies—leads them.
A guest sitting beside me, a woman from Quadra Island, tells me that the audience is hugely important in a potlatch, as its members not only bear witness to the proceedings but also are an indication of the importance and influence of the family holding it. The larger the audience, the more powerful and prestigious the family.
Canada banned the ceremony in 1884 as part of its policy of assimilating indigenous people and alienating them from their cultures. Potlatch materials were confiscated from their owners and scattered among museums and private collections. Indigenous people caught with potlatch regalia, or practicing the tradition, were imprisoned. But the potlatch merely went underground, where it was practiced clandestinely for three generations before the law was struck quietly from the codes in 1951 (but not officially repealed). Because of this needless persecution, an air of secrecy and sensitivity pervades the tradition to this day.
Events in this potlatch run rapid-fire, back to back, each day between morning and midnight: Sacred mourning hymns for the deceased. The distribution of gifts. Origin stories. The bestowal of formal Heiltsuk names—once owned by others who had since died—upon new honorees. There is the “showing of the copper,” in which the potlatch host’s family members sing while parading a large shield of hammered copper as evidence of their rights and privileges.*
The centerpiece drama common to most Northwest potlatches is also one of the most sacred. The Hamatsa, also known as the redcedar-bark dance or the cannibal dance, takes numerous forms and reenacts the story of the meeting and spiritual combat between a Heiltsuk ancestor and the man-eating cannibal spirit of the north, the Baxbakwalanuksiwe, whose earthly representatives, four enormous birds, fight to take the soul of the ancestor.
But the most poignant and moving event at this potlatch, to me, is the masked dance of the deceased. Here the spirit of the woman who has died—for whom the potlatch is held—returns to the material world one last time to say good-bye to family and friends before taking her final place in the abode of the ancestors.
The four chiefs and the master of ceremonies cross the gymnasium floor, disappearing behind a door. The chanting stops, but the drums and shakers rattle on, getting louder and louder, stoking the attendants’ anticipation. After a long time, the door finally opens. The master of ceremonies is the first to step out, shaking his rattle. The drumming and singing again erupt. All eyes fall upon a masked woman who appears behind him: the spirit of the deceased. She is small and frail, wearing a black cape, moccasins, and a kerchief that covers her hair. Behind her is another young man rattling a shaker. Trailing them all are the four elders.
The audience falls into a reverie. The chief hosting the potlatch and his family standing on the sidelines are beside themselves with awe and grief. The spirit treads ever so slowly over the floor. The palms of her hands are held close to her chest. She is shaking to the sound of the rattles, taking tiny steps, while stopping to bend her knees every so often. As she moves, she is constantly looking at the audience. At one point she turns in my direction and gives me a gawking, open-eyed glance, one etched with wisdom, surprise, and sorrow. The living expression of emotion jolts me. I sense that she can see right through me—and through all of us. I’m overcome with sadness for the family members, who wipe away tears.
The deceased continues her journey, shuffling across the floor, peering curiously and nostalgically, drawing in the last drafts of her old life before reaching the room from which she emerged. She turns to look over her shoulder, one last time, before taking her final step across the threshold.
After days of immersion in deep traditions with powerful metaphors and connections to other realms that seem alive and ever present, I feel odd returning to the question of the Sasquatch. The idea of an immaterial, preternatural Sasquatch of spirit makes more sense to me now, while more conventional notions of Bigfoot seem awkward and simplistic. Yet, as more reports reach me of what sounds like a flesh-and-blood forest animal, my mind slowly readjusts.
I’d hoped to have a better sense by now of where I stood on this curious issue of ape-men. But all I have is a muddle of compelling reports barely held in check by some less convincing doubts. Running through it all is a desire for the monster stories to be true. Every day I find myself secretly hoping to see a Sasquatch. I envision the creatures staring at me from every thicket and around each tree-lined corner.
I decide to go to the much-talked-about Old Town area, the site of numerous Sasquatch reports, on McLoughlin Lake, a couple of miles south of Bella. Though long abandoned as a settlement, the vicinity is home to a fish-packing plant, the BC Ferries dock, and a salmon hatchery.
Instead of plodding along the paved road to Old Town, I take the scenic route, walking the rocky shoreline from Bella Bella at low tide. For the next two hours I skip across an intertidal obstacle course of moss- and barnacle-covered boulders piled with driftwood. When the shoreline is impassable, I take detours into the woods and follow game trails that run parallel to the coast. At one point I pass a few century-old Heiltsuk graves, their stones faded and covered in moss. I can still make out names and dates.
I emerge at the fish-packing plant, a facility bleating with the ruckus of forklifts and conveyor belts and peopled by workers in rubbery suits and yellow dish-washing gloves. I push on down the road to the salmon hatchery at the edge of the woods. I duck behind the main building and find the forest trail, which runs alongside a gurgling creek leading to McLoughlin Lake. Some tricky footwork over collapsed sections of a wooden bridge and a trudge through a thicket of trees and berry bushes bring me to the end of the trail at the southern edge of the lake.
I’ve heard this place is not frequently visited, yet I find myself standing next to three young people—two men and a woman. They are indigenous, in their early twenties, and look like students, wearing jeans, sneakers, and small backpacks. They all sip leisurely from cans of Kokanee beer, taking in the brush-hemmed views of the lake.
They tell me they’re visiting from the nearby village of Klemtu, before asking who I am. I give them the annotated spiel about my travels and book project without mentioning Bigfoot.
“I hope you don’t write that you met a bunch of Indians drinking by the lake,” one of them says jokingly. We all laugh.
Then one of the young men asks whether he should try making a Sasquatch call.
My ears prick up. I ask him why he’d want to.
“Because,” he says, “someone posted photos of Bigfoot tracks from this lake on Facebook yesterday. Maybe they’re here somewhere.”
My heart skips a beat. “Did the person write where they were?”
“No, but the photo was in mud. Probably on the shore somewhere.”
If this was true, the tracks would probably still be visible. “Have any of you looked for them?” I ask.
The three shake their heads.
I tell them I’m going to scan the shoreline. To our left, high, forested banks meander back to the head of the creek. I turn right into the bushes, toward the flat, muddy shore. I arrive at the water and walk parallel to it, examining the banks carefully. At first I see nothing but twigs and the tracks of birds and deer in the mud. Later I pass what look like children’s footprints in a wide muddy bank. Rocks, large tree roots, and high banks force me to climb up into the muskeg to skirt those obstacles, and I soon find myself on the other side of the tiny bay. It becomes a feverish wild-goose chase, and again I start to feel silly. There are no Bigfoot tracks here. I turn around.
I tell the visitors from Klemtu I found nothing corresponding with giant tracks. One of them suggests that maybe the small footprints I saw belong to a juvenile Sasquatch—a comment I dismiss. But I ask, before leaving, if they remember the name of the person who posted the Facebook photos, and I’m told it’s a young woman with the first name Beth.
Back at Alvina’s, I pull up the woman’s Facebook page. The privacy settings are lax, and I start to shuffle through the deck of selfies and food shots on her wall. I finally come to some photos of human-looking footprints in the mud, and the woman’s caption above them: “Bigfoot lil’ feet.”
In response to a question in the comments section, she says the tracks were found at Old Town’s lake. I realize the tracks may have been the small ones that I attributed to kids playing in the mud.
When I ask Alvina if she knows Beth and where to find her, she scrunches her face into a look of annoyance.
“Why do you keep asking me if I know people around here?” she says. “I know everyone in this town.”
I tell Alvina about the tracks, and she remarks that finding human footprints there is odd. Not many people go up the trail, she says, and it’s almost unheard of for people to walk around in the mud—or wade in the water. “No one ever goes swimming in that lake,” she adds. “A lot of people are afraid of that place. It’s an old village site.”
Alvina picks up the phone and dials Beth’s number for me. There’s no answer. She leaves a message on my behalf.
I decide in the meantime to head back to the lake to take another look with camera in hand. When I get there, I find a flurry of small, bare footprints, about eight or nine inches long, that meander along the muddy shoreline. The area looks completely undisturbed, except for a few sets of shoe prints nearby, including my own from when I’d walked by earlier. One of the shoe prints belongs to a child and is smaller than the barefoot tracks in question.
My first reaction again is to regard the bare prints as made by human children. But as I look closer at them, I begin to wonder.
I discern two distinct sets of footprints. They originate from separate areas on the edges of the mud and come together before going forward into the shallow water. They reappear together in the mud again to the left, moving toward firmer ground and the bush.
One set of tracks is wider, and looks almost like a Birkenstock sandal with toes attached to it. The other is unusually long and narrow. The big toe is a smidgen apart from the four others.
I also notice a green apple sitting on a log behind me onshore.
I take a few photos of the tracks before heading back to try to piece together the story.
Days later, I catch up with Beth and her boyfriend, Carl, a young couple in their mid-twenties. Beth is a stay-at-home mom, and Carl works as a gas-station attendant at the government dock.
I speak to both of them separately about the day they and their young nephew went up to McLoughlin Lake to go fishing for cutthroat trout. They had cast their lines at the end of the trail (where I stood with the people from Klemtu) but got no bites. So they decided to try a different spot, and walked into the bushes farther along the shore until they came to the muddy banks and the collection of small barefoot tracks. They had seen no other footprints, tracks, or disturbances in the area indicating that other people had been there. (It was their shoe prints I’d seen in the mud.)
They had been astonished by the small prints. Echoing Alvina, they say that not many people go to the lake—and even fewer wander into the bushes there. In all their time in Bella they’d never heard of anyone wading or swimming in the water.
And when they looked closer, as I had, the tracks had appeared odd to them. “They didn’t have arches,” Carl says. “I’ve seen arches on my footprints at the beach. These ones were flat-footed. One set of tracks was really narrow. And the heels on the other set seemed wider than normal.”
Knowing the long history of Sasquatch sightings near the lake, the group worried that a Bigfoot mother with kids might be lurking somewhere nearby and decided to get out of the area. But before doing so, they left a green apple on the log as a friendly offering.
I still think, mostly, that human children made the footprints during an anomalous jaunt through the bush and mud, and that Beth and Carl, already believers in Sasquatch, are wrongly attributing them to the animals.
But the tracks are odd-looking—especially the long, narrow set. Could they be tracks of juvenile Thla’thlas? The more I think about it, the more attractive this idea becomes.
The stories of monsters, the fairy-tale landscapes, and the novelty of travel mix to form an intoxicating cocktail. With each story I come across, I find myself more seduced by the mystery. The thrill of the chase is a high. And I want something to show for it. I’m falling prey to the addiction that has ensnared Sasquatch hunters and investigators like quicksand, condemning them to states of obsession that have at times consumed entire lives—sometimes at the expense of marriages and livelihoods.
Hoping to get insight into the tracks at Old Town, I email my photos and a précis of the situation to John Bindernagel in Courtenay. He promptly writes back:
Hi John,
Many thanks for the photos and commentary.
I find these tracks interesting. I can see that the big-name Sasquatch researchers, guys like Jeff Meldrum and Cliff Barackman, would not be very interested in these as I’ve tried similar ones on them before.
On their own, these photos would be a hard sell as Sasquatch tracks—since even the more common larger broader ones are routinely rejected. I guess I would put them on my metaphorical shelf for now, awaiting evidence which more closely approximates to Sasquatch tracks as we think we know them.
I recently spent a week in western Alberta being pressured by another researcher to agree that night bird calls we heard in the field were not actually northern Saw-whet owl calls, but Sasquatch whistles; that fallen saplings hung up in other trees were not natural deadfall but Sasquatch-related; and that indistinct impressions in the moss were Sasquatch tracks.
So I am feeling worn down and a bit depressed as I wish to affirm evidence but am not always able to do so.
Sorry not to be more helpful.
Thanks and all the best,
John
Later that day, Alvina tells me she’s received a phone call from someone working at the Heiltsuk government offices, asking about me.
“They want you to go down there tomorrow,” she says. “They wanna talk to you.”
“Talk to me?” I ask, concerned. “About what?”
“Dunno,” she says unconvincingly, disappearing around the corner and heading down the stairs.
When I arrive at the offices the next day, I’m told to take a seat at a large conference table and wait. All around are posters and charts showing the locations of old village sites and various ongoing research projects. I am told that the office is the natural- and cultural-resources arm of the Heiltsuk government.
Twenty minutes later I’m greeted by three people, a man and two women, and am politely asked to step inside a small office. I recognize the man as the older gentleman who had hosted the potlatch. I don’t know the two people with him: a younger woman and an older lady.
We take a seat in the cramped office. Each of my hosts, with pen unsheathed and notebook at the ready, has a look of displeasure bordering on grimness. I feel cornered and quickly realize something’s hugely amiss. I have the awkward, uncomfortable sense that I’ve done something wrong. There is a long pause, before the gentleman, seated next to me, kicks off the proceeding.
“I heard you were taking notes and photos at my potlatch,” he says, with a deepening frown, eyes cast downward. The two others look sternly at me.
“I did take some pictures,” I say. “A lot of people did.”
“There were parts of the potlatch that we asked people not to photograph or film,” the man continues. “And I’m worried you captured those. People came to me concerned, asking who you were. I didn’t know what to tell them. It was humiliating.”
I feel a stab of commiseration and a pang of anxiety. In the minutes that follow, they demand to know who I am and what I’m doing here—although it’s hard to believe they don’t already know. Maybe they also think I’m an oil company or government informant. I tell them I’m visiting the coast to work on a travel memoir, but this brief explanation changes nothing. The older woman chimes in.
“A project like yours needs our official approval,” she says, eyeing me suspiciously. “There are still a lot of stereotypes and discrimination, and we can’t have people like you coming here and giving whatever impressions suit you.”
I ask what she means.
“A man once came here on an assignment for a magazine. He wrote about the eagles in the trees and described our territory as ‘the land that time forgot’—or some nonsense. It was silly and insulting. From our perspective, this place is the center of the universe—and not someplace forgotten by time.”
“You just show up from out of nowhere,” the man adds. “You come to my potlatch without introducing yourself to me, or asking permission for the things you’re doing.”
I remember introducing myself to the master of ceremonies at the potlatch on the first day but hadn’t thought to approach the host himself. When I put myself in his shoes, I see how that would be upsetting.
I apologize, saying that I didn’t mean to cause any anxiety or show any disrespect by my actions. I add that I abided by the photo ban and took pictures only during permitted moments, as others were doing.
“Those people were photographing their friends and family members,” he replies. “You don’t know them and have no business filming them.”
The younger woman, who hasn’t spoken yet, chimes in: “And what about that notebook of yours? Why are you always scribbling in it?”
“I’m a writer. I use it to record thoughts and research.”
There’s a tense silence. I let myself breathe before again acknowledging my misstep. I say that the outcome surely couldn’t be as grave as they’re making out. Are they not being a bit heavy-handed, I ask?
My words set the older woman off. “Listen, you: You think you know what you’re doing. But you have absolutely no idea. Zero clue. Even the approaches of trained anthropologists are problematic. Just because you have the best intentions, and you think you know what you’re doing, doesn’t mean you’re going about things in the right way.”
They watch me closely. The older woman, who is now leading the charge, continues more calmly:
“At the end of the day, we don’t know you, and gaining our trust takes time,” she says. “Just look at our involvement as a kind of process of reeducating you.”
“Reeducating?” I say.
“Yes, you—and others like you—need to be reeducated,” she says leaning forward.
Though I understand the suspicion of my hosts, and the general public’s unconcern and lack of knowledge about indigenous issues in Canada, all of this strikes me as harsh for a misstep.
I decide to relate some of my own experiences, so they can understand where I’m coming from. I tell them that, as a person of Middle Eastern descent, I’m well aware of racism, cross-cultural conflict, and misunderstanding—because I see it almost every day. Like them, I say, my ancestors were on the receiving end of violent waves of colonial imperialism going very far back. Ottoman Turk occupiers executed my great-grandfather with a sword, lopping his head off during a genocide perpetrated in World War I. Then came the Brits and the French, the Israelis, the Russians, and the Americans, I go on, with their bombs, the redrawing of borders, oil theft, cluster munitions, and depleted uranium. I may have inherited blue eyes from twelfth-century European crusaders, but I’m no white-man supporter of the status quo or of governmental exploitation.
At the end of my brief monologue, the mood in the room lightens. A glint of interest and recognition overlaps with expiring frowns.
“Well,” the older woman says, cutting through the remaining tension. “Sometimes we just need to get everything out into the open and have these somewhat awkward and unpleasant discussions. It’s all a learning process, you know.”
The gentleman gives me a commiserating look. “If you could come by tomorrow and show me the photos you took just to make sure they’re OK, my family and I would really appreciate it.”
“Absolutely. Done.”
Suddenly, it’s as if nothing had happened.
“So, tell us. What’s going on in Cairo?” the older woman asks, referring to yet another postrevolutionary upheaval in the news. “Our deepest sympathies for the difficult situation there.”
Although the meeting ended well enough, the brief display of anger leaves me a bit shell-shocked and with the impression that I’m now under more scrutiny than ever. Part of me wants to pick up and leave Bella Bella and forget everything.
That evening I go for a walk to the water reservoir behind town to get my mind off things. The sun has set and a sky filled with swirls of wispy cirrus clouds is backlit by the receding yellow-orange glare.
As I walk the road to the reservoir, an old Heiltsuk man approaches from the other direction. The wizened senior, wearing a baseball cap, is slightly hunched over, his face animated in thought. I hear the sound of laughter in the distance ahead of me. I stop to greet him.
“There’s kids playing up there by the dam,” he says, turning back to look. “Kinda worried one of them animals will get them.”
“What animals?” I ask.
“Bears,” he says. “Or maybe Sasquatches.”
“Sasquatches?”
“Yeah. You can hear ‘em sometimes screaming from the mountain behind the reservoir. They take that back trail over there into town and look into people’s houses—like a peeping Tom—looking at women.”
The man and I part, and I look around, wondering whether someone is playing a joke on me. As I crunch along the gravel road it dawns on me how surreal things have become. For a moment I feel lost, without bearings, set upon a fruitless, meandering trajectory in search of rumors and visions.
By the time I return to Alvina’s, a thick fog has rolled in, turning the star-filled crispness of night into an impenetrable soupy bog. I crawl into bed, and as I lie there, the coastal ferry, alerting all to its presence, blasts its powerful horn. For half a minute, the horn’s long echo resounds through the deep labyrinth of valleys and channels, an emptiness that seems to stretch forever.
I have set myself on an impossible mission, a fool’s quest, I think to myself.
* The Heiltsuk population at one point dwindled to 250.
* In 2017, an ancient archaeological discovery made on Triquet Island, just southwest of Bella Bella, placed it as one of the oldest sites of human habitation in North America.
* To be fair to the Heiltsuk, in 2013 the mainstream, media revealed that the domestic intelligence arms of the Canadian government had been spying on indigenous activists who opposed the big energy projects slated for the west coast.
* Mount Saint Helens, an active volcano in the Cascade Range in Washington, has long been considered an important node of Sasquatch activity. When the mountain erupted cataclysmically in 1980, much of its northern face was obliterated. Apocryphal stories emerged afterward that US Army helicopters venturing into the disaster zone were airlifting out Sasquatch corpses to undisclosed military facilities.
* Somewhat to his credit, Beck wrote in his manifesto: “No one will ever capture one, and no one will ever kill one… . These questions cannot be answered by expeditions. It can only come by man knowing more about his true self and more about the universe in which he dwells.” See http://www.bigfootencounters.com/classics/beck.htm.
* Messner’s thesis was even backed by Ernst Schäfer, the German zoologist, hunter, and erstwhile Nazi SS officer who spent much of the 1930s in the Himalayas at Heinrich Himmler’s behest, looking for evidence of a proto-Aryan race of giants. Schäfer told Messner that he too was convinced the Yeti was no more than the Tibetan bear, two of which he had shot and brought back to Berlin as specimens. Schäfer added that he kept his Tibetan bear thesis to himself out of fear of being executed by the Nazis, since it contradicted notions at the time that Yetis were Aryan ancestors. See Chamberlain, Ted. “Reinhold Messner: Climbing Legend, Yeti Hunter,” in National Geographic Adventure, May–June 2000.
* One Nisga’a First Nation carving from the Nass River valley of northern British Columbia, made in 1914, is widely recognized by Sasqualogists for its monkey-like appearance, with high brow, deep-set eyes, and thin lips located far below a flat nose. Aboriginal stone carvings of heads found in the Columbia River basin in the United States have a similar primate-like appearance.
† To pronounce Thla’thla, place your tongue where your front teeth and inner gum line meet and speak the word through your cheeks. Interestingly, the name Thla’thla has the same root as the Heiltsuk word for strength or power.
* The copper shield is a symbol of wealth and is also considered a living entity.