A father said to his double-seeing son: “Son, you see two instead of one.” “How can that be?” the boy replied. “If I did, there would be four moons up there in the place of two.”
—Hakim Sanai of Ghazni, in Idries Shah’s Caravan of Dreams
“That is a very dangerous lake, Mulla,” said a local fisherman, “and people who swim in it are always found at the bottom.” “That’s all right, friend,” said Mulla Nasrudin, “I’ll keep well away from the bottom.”
—Idries Shah, Learning How to Learn
I travel by floatplane to the village of Wuikinuxv (Wee-kin-no)—a First Nation community of roughly forty people located at the head of Rivers Inlet on the mainland coast, sixty miles southeast of Bella Bella. It’s no more than a row of homes situated along a rough gravel road that runs beside the two-and-a-half-mile-long Wanukv River, which empties into the Pacific. From the air, the village appears so diminutive it makes Bella seem like a sprawling metropolis.
Just behind the town lies Owikeno Lake—a thirty-mile-long body of fresh water ringed by high mountains and fed by dozens of rivers and creeks. Epic in size, the lake was once the site of numerous indigenous settlements before the twin blows of disease and population amalgamation under colonial rule cleared its shores of inhabitants starting in the late nineteenth century. The area is noted for its Sasquatch lore, which people attribute, in part, to the lake’s acting as a kind of travel corridor between neighboring regions within the Great Bear Rainforest.
Wuikinuxv is difficult to get to. Located far to the side of the Inside Passage route, it is completely bypassed by the ferry. The only way to get here is by boat or by chartering a floatplane from Vancouver Island. I made inquiries prior to my trip to Koeye about catching a boat ride from Heiltsuk territory to Wuikinuxv. The feedback from the Heiltsuk, usually friendly and helpful, ranged from shrugged shoulders to flat-out refusal. It became apparent that there is no regular traffic between the two communities. Similarly, when I reached out to contacts in Wuikinuxv to hire a boat pickup from nearby Koeye, no one responded.
At first I made little of this awkwardness. But then I started hearing murmurs of a falling-out between the two nations.
“You should be careful when you go there,” warned one Bella teenager at Koeye who learned I was leaving for Rivers Inlet in a few days.
“Be careful of what?” I asked, unable to imagine what would constitute a danger there.
“The Wuikinuxv. They’re still angry,” she said.
“Angry about what?” I pressed.
“Being conquered.”
I’m staying at Grizzly’s Den, a bed-and-breakfast located on the eastern end of the Wuikinuxv strip. It’s a comfortable two-story home. A flag showing the profile of an indigenous warrior on top of a Canadian maple leaf stands in the front yard. My host is Lena Collins, a petite, middle-aged woman of mixed Wuikinuxv and Heiltsuk ancestry. There is a youthful vigor about Lena, who loves to dialogue. From the moment she picks me up at the floatplane dock, I am flooded with information and trivia about the town: the lack of cell-phone service, the absence of a proper grocery store, the packs of rowdy street dogs that patrol the gravel road. When we reach her home, I finally manage to squeeze in a question, asking if she does anything else apart from running the seasonal B and B.
“Ha!” she snickers, unpacking a crate full of food that arrived on the plane. “You’ve obviously never been to a place this small before. Everybody’s got a million jobs here. You should be asking me: What don’t you do? Let’s see,” she says, before counting on her fingers. “I work at the band office. I’m a language and culture teacher at the school. I’m also the custodian there—that translates to glorified janitor. I pick up people and goods that come in on the plane. They call that position the ‘band van driver.’ And I happen to be the volunteer fire chief. That was a job I was tricked into doing. Oh, and I’m also a mom.”
Then our chat turns to politics. Lena complains that the people in power in the village aren’t doing enough to better the community. That segues into a long digression about the conflict I’d heard about earlier. The Wuikinuxv and the Heiltsuk, she tells me, are locked in a complicated dispute, part of it territorial, involving, among other places, Koeye, which was once populated by villages from both nations.
“I hope that’s resolved soon,” I say, deciding to steer the conversation away from the thorny subject of tribal politics. “Do you know why I’m here?”
Lena looks at me in shock. “Oh, I’m sorry! I haven’t even asked about you yet. When you called you mentioned you were working on a book, right?”
I explain that I’m collecting stories related to Sasquatch and ask if she has seen or heard anything.
“No, not me,” she says. “I think it’s been quiet around here lately with regard to that. But I know people you could talk to.”
She fires off several names, which I scribble into my notebook.
“I’m really sorry for going off on that tirade just now,” she says. “I’m a bit worn down by everything. In spite of the difficulties, we really are a great nation. We just keep getting the short end of the stick. And not just politically.”
Like other parts of British Columbia, Rivers Inlet and Owikeno Lake used to be blessed with bountiful salmon runs. In years gone by, every salmon species returned in droves in the autumn to spawn in the area’s many connecting rivers, streams, and lakes. Foremost among them was the sockeye, in numbers up to three million strong. The homecoming of this keystone species, a grand gesture of nature’s benefaction, made the region’s waters crimson with hurtling bodies. The Rivers Inlet salmon run was once among the largest and most dramatic in the province.
But by the 1970s, after decades of unchecked commercial exploitation, the numbers of these fish, so crucial to the well-being of the ecosystem, began a dramatic decline. It was a trend seen across the Pacific Northwest coast. Overharvesting by commercial and sport fisheries, combined with damage to habitat caused by the introduction of clear-cut logging, was thought to have had a negative impact on the salmon runs. By the 1990s, sockeye salmon were returning to the area in just the tens of thousands. It was barely enough fish to provide Wuikinuxv’s residents with their main winter sustenance. Those foreboding signs were mitigated only by the knowledge that salmon runs had declined and rebounded naturally in the past.
But in 1999, something inconceivable happened: the legendary Rivers Inlet salmon run collapsed. For the first time in the town’s memory, sockeye salmon, a mainstay of the diet and culture of the local people, stopped turning up in fishing nets. Roughly thirty-six hundred salmon, about 0.1 percent of historic levels, returned to the Rivers Inlet ecosystem that year.
“It was devastating to walk by the river knowing there was no fish,” Lena tells me. “Because that’s part of who we are—and what we look forward to. But that was only part of the problem. We knew that if we weren’t going to get any fish—neither would the bears.”
Local grizzly and black bears congregate at rivers and streams in the late summer and early fall to gorge themselves on spawning salmon. During the several-week feeding frenzy, an adult bear will consume many dozens of fish, to get the fat reserves it needs to survive the winter hibernation. Because of the historically bountiful salmon runs, and the huge size of some of the fish, Owikeno’s grizzlies had a reputation as some of the largest on the coast. To say that bears once thrived here is an understatement.
Every year, the animals passed through the village to access feeding spots along the Wanukv River. But in the autumn of 1999, when the salmon didn’t return, hungry grizzlies invaded the town. In a last-ditch effort to find food, around two dozen weak and disoriented bears, some with cubs, took up residence in and around Wuikinuxv. Some foraged for scraps at the town’s garbage dump. Others ventured close to homes, digging through people’s front yards. At first, residents tolerated the invasion. But as the weeks went on, the bears became bolder and more unpredictable, sleeping on people’s porches and trying to break through doors and windows.
Lena, living in another home in Wuikinuxv at the time, had one starving grizzly sow with cubs in her yard. “One day,” she recalls, “one of the cubs came right up to my window—and I looked into its eyes. It was a powerful moment. I felt I was looking into the face of a family member, and not being able to do anything to help. We had nothing to give them.”
When the bears started breaking into trailers and threatening people, the decision was made to put them down. By early winter, sixteen grizzlies had been shot dead. One black bear, among the many that had wandered through town on the heels of grizzlies, was also put down, bringing the total to seventeen bears. Locals say they’re certain many more bears starved in the forests during the winter months.
The ecological chain of events resulting from the salmon die-off—a symptom, in part, of a rapidly changing habitat—ran deeper than even the residents of Wuikinuxv initially suspected. Only in retrospect did a few locals realize that the bald eagles had gone missing that autumn. Like the bears, they had always been plentiful around Wuikinuxv during salmon season, perched on conifers by the dozen, their white heads gleaming like ornaments on a Christmas tree.
Take any street in small-town North America and transplant it into an impossibly rugged terrain that smacks of some northwest coast version of Jurassic Park and you’ll have Wuikinuxv. The physical village—a collection of homes set on spacious plots of unfenced, overgrown land along a gravel road—nestles in the shores of the Wanukv River, with the slopes of craggy mountains towering over it. The nation’s school, government building, and cultural big house cluster at its center. The main road continues past the town in both directions through thick, brushy rain forest before dead-ending at Wuikinuxv’s two points of arrival and departure: the government dock at the head of Rivers Inlet at one end and the airstrip and an abandoned logging depot on Owikeno Lake at the other.
Wuikinuxv is small to begin with, but the vast scale of the surroundings and the difficulties of life shrink the village even further. The skyline of towering conifers across the river is dwarfed by rocky bluffs, which serve as the bases of mountains that rise ever higher, toward the white, glaciated alpine zone. As Lena had mentioned, there are no fully stocked stores here. All provisions are ordered in advance and either flown in by plane or delivered by sea barge. Telephone landlines arrived here only in 2000, and service remains temperamental. The Internet is also unreliable, and mobile-phone service is nonexistent. As a result, people still prefer to communicate with one another by way of VHF radio, the simplest and most dependable technology. As no power lines reach Wuikinuxv, electricity for the community has to come from a large diesel generator, droning day and night behind the homes. The village school has nine students, who fall into grade levels ranging from kindergarten to twelfth grade. They all attend class in the same room, share the same teacher, and hang out with one another at recess.
From the perspective of my boisterous city existence, Wuikinuxv is eerily quiet—like a town abandoned. The muffled sound of a child’s laugh or the distant howling of a dog only amplifies the feeling of solitude, as does the area’s signature feature: a blustery wind coming in off the inlet. It blows almost incessantly, effervescently, rattling the chimes hanging on Lena’s porch. There is a wise and knowing quality to the wind, a rhythmic push and pull that make it sound as if it is speaking in tongues. When the wind is paired with the heart-stopping red and orange sunsets that cast the mountains in dark silhouette, the majesty of it all can be overwhelming. I understand why, in spite of the remoteness and the sacrifices needed to keep a community and nation alive, people continue live here.
For days, I pace up and down the road, visiting with Wuikinuxv’s residents. Armed with a casual referral from Lena, overcoming my natural hesitancy, I make impromptu appearances at people’s front doors and in their garages and backyards. I’m more than welcomed. Maybe it’s due in part to the isolation and the novelty of a new face, but people are warm and open in the extreme.
I discover there are few, if any, recent Sasquatch reports from the village itself. There were reports decades back, however, and more than one of them involved a white-haired Sasquatch often seen at the edge of Owikeno Lake. But no one claims to have seen it personally. More recent reports involve incidents at lakeside cabins near the mouths of creeks in the middle of the night. They’re hauntingly similar to the stories I heard in Koeye.
In Wuikinuxv, as well as the territory of the Kwakwaka’wakw people farther south, Sasquatch is known as Dzonoqua (pronounced Joon-ah-kwah)—the wild cannibal woman of the woods. The hairy and unruly giantess, a malevolent being of the highest order, is nearly identical to the Heiltsuk Thla’thla in appearance and behavior. Many old masks and pole carvings of the Dzonoqua depict her with a wide-open mouth, pursed lips, and deep-set eyes.*
Discussions with villagers, who view the creatures in somewhat more folkloric terms than the Heiltsuk do, don’t last long and often taper off into politics. Again I’m assailed with complaints, similar to Lena’s, about the current state of the reserve, its uncertain future, and the indifference of its leaders. I am told the details of an alleged Heiltsuk slave raid and massacre near Wuikinuxv in 1848—an episode that continues to be a thorn in the side of relations between the two nations. The incident, referred to locally as the “slaughter Illahie,” is named after the entrance to ocean narrows near the mouth of Rivers Inlet, where the Wuikinuxv claim the Heiltsuk ambushed them in their canoes after inviting them to a potlatch.
But of all the stories, the one that stands out for me is about an obscure valley that runs into Owikeno Lake. I hear about it for the first time while speaking with Dennis Hanuse, Lena’s next-door neighbor. The topic comes up in a discussion about old Bigfoot reports from local loggers.
“There was another logging camp on the lake that was reporting some really strange stuff,” Hanuse says. “It happened in a place called the Hoodoo Valley.”
“The what valley?” I ask, not sure that I’d heard correctly.
“Hoo-doo. It’s a short valley up the lake, on the north side, several miles out. More than one logging company went in there back in the 1950s and ‘60s. All of them went broke. The last crew that went in left suddenly, scared shitless.”
I ask if he’d seen or met the loggers.
He shakes his head. “I was just a kid. But the older folks said the men got on their boats, tore into the village, and flew straight out. They were as pale as ghosts. Their equipment is still up there.”
“Did anyone here know these guys personally?”
“Doubt it. They were mostly strangers. When they left, they just flew back to Vancouver, or Victoria, or wherever they came from. I don’t think anyone recalls who they were.”
I wonder if the story is Sasquatch-related, and I ask Dennis. He shrugs his shoulders. “Dunno,” he says. “We don’t really go up there. Two white guys later went into the valley not long afterward to retrieve the equipment. But they didn’t stay. They said it was too scary.”
I press Dennis for names, hoping for even a sliver of a lead.
“If you ask around, someone might know.”
I jot the words Hoodoo Valley into my notebook, underscoring them with two lines. It’s as hokey and ominous a name for a valley as could be.
“Have you met Johnny Johnson yet?” Dennis asks.
I shake my head.
“He’s famous around here. He survived a bad grizzly attack a couple of years ago. His dad knew the lake and that area well. Talk to him. I think he has a Sasquatch story of his own.”
Since my time in Koeye, I’ve been thinking more and more about the role our minds play in mediating what we see and believe—and how these processes work. Contrary to our assumptions, humans don’t perceive the world in the way we think we do. The manner in which we register our surroundings is at best convoluted. That may sound strange. After all, when we look at things around us—the environments, people, and situations—we feel that what we see is a comprehensive picture of things. But it’s not. There’s a huge gap in the education we receive in school about how our minds work. To discover the real nature of how we make sense of reality is to realize that each of us is, in a way, fumbling around blindly.
We know that our brains sketch only the most basic impressions of the outside world—mental models containing only the information most relevant to our survival. The late American psychologist Robert Ornstein, known for his pioneering research on the hemispherical specializations of the brain, wrote numerous books about consciousness and perception. He explains that, contrary to what we think, we experience reality not as it actually is—but as a simplified model. The reason for this? Reality is far too complex. Infinitely complex in fact. If our minds tried to process everything around us, we’d be hopelessly overwhelmed. We’d get lost in labyrinths within labyrinths of stimuli, unable to find food, safety, shelter, or mates. Our species would quickly die out. As a result, our minds evolved to construct a deeply simplified version of all that surrounds us: a virtual reality made up of only the important information—perhaps a trillionth of the possible external stimuli. And we make do with that.
“Our experience of the world assembles in a fleeting instant,” Ornstein writes in The Evolution of Consciousness, “with no time for thinking but just enough for producing a best guess of the world.”13
Our mental habits are subject to the same shortcuts. Much of our thinking, for instance, involves the use of assumptions, which are wrong as often as they are right. We confidently form opinions and draw conclusions about subjects and events of which we have little or no knowledge. All of this came about as a survival strategy. Our prehistoric ancestors had no time to gather all data methodically and work through the various possibilities of a situation. If they did they might have become a meal for a tiger or been impaled by an enemy’s spear.
So we evolved the habit of jumping to conclusions. The price of this inherited shortcut reflex, valuable as it can be, is frequent inaccuracy in our perceptions. And no matter how often we are proved wrong, we just aren’t clued into it, because our self-image is subject to this same modeling. Of all the simplifications the mind creates, the most powerful and convincing is the illusion that we are psychologically consistent—that our perceptions are complete and reliable. It’s the ultimate hoodwink.
How many of us know, for instance, that our memories are affected by the same generalizations and are notoriously poor? Memory, we know, is at best a rough, dreamlike reconstruction of select details skewed by interpretation. Our memories are constantly being reworked, changed, and subjected to new suggestions in the present. Humans as eyewitnesses have been described as “in the disaster class.” Individual eyewitness testimonies, for instance, are unreliable and are responsible for many of the wrongful legal convictions in the United States. Experiments in which subjects are told to watch something and are tested afterward show that people hardly ever know what they have seen.14
Apart from the issue of memory, we tend to fool ourselves into thinking we are younger, and better looking, than we actually are and that we have more friends and will live longer than we actually do. If something has not happened to us, we tend to delude ourselves into thinking it never will happen. If we have a positive or negative experience, we trick ourselves into thinking it will infallibly recur. The fact alone that most of us are unaware of these facts—part of a much larger body of knowledge about how we tick—is a serious indictment of our perceptual abilities.*
The most obvious implication for my investigation of the Sasquatch is that the accuracy of our perceptions and recollections is unreliable. We cut too many corners in seeing and drawing conclusions about what we see. In at least some cases, what people take to be a Sasquatch, or signs of one, are likely nothing of the sort.
On Denny Island weeks before, I had come across what I was convinced was a large Sasquatch track. It wasn’t enormous, but it was larger than my size-ten foot and looked a lot like the classic Bigfoot tracks you see on the Internet and in books. But as I examined the track more closely, I was shocked to see that it was actually composed of different overlapping prints. The toes were actually tracks of a wolf that had stepped right at the top of an old boot print, making it look like a Sasquatch track. My mind had played a trick on me.
Hardened skeptics and debunkers rightfully remind us that these sorts of tricks happen. But seldom do they tell us exactly how the tricks work. The mechanics of misperception, however, are now coming to light.
In their book Human Givens, Irish psychologist Joe Griffin and English author Ivan Tyrrell describe the human brain as a “metaphorical pattern-matching organ.” We see, or otherwise discern something, they say, when the brain matches up stimuli in the outside world to templates—patterns—which we’ve inherited genetically and/or collected since birth. Infants, for instance, can distinguish human faces and will recognize the smiles of their care-givers, often smiling in return. This is a “pattern match.” As infants we have genetically inherited the innate pattern, or template, for the human face and its emotions. When that pattern is matched to the same, or a similar enough, pattern in the external world, the baby will “see” and experience a flash of consciousness. The same process occurs with other patterns, which we all pick up throughout life—patterns for every conceivable object, idea, or circumstance. Everything we can see is by way of patterns we’ve acquired in our mental storehouse that find their matches in the outside world.
But here’s the kicker: because our templates exist as metaphors (and not literal blueprints precise down to the last detail) and because our minds already oversimplify reality, our pattern matches are subject to considerable error. Our brains, operating on a best-guess basis, tend automatically to match things that come close enough to the patterns we hold. This creates “pattern mismatches.” We easily confuse one thing for another. When a few people in Bella Bella took me for a Big Oil or government spy, they were matching a pattern at the forefront of their minds to something seemingly approximate. One form of pattern mismatching, known as pareidolia, happens when we see faces or the shapes of animals in clouds, rock formations, or stucco. It’s the reason spelling mistakes in our writing can often be invisible to us even while we’re proofreading: we see the words we had intended to write.
More than 90 percent of reported unidentified flying object (UFO) incidents, when scrutinized or looked at again in light of new information, have been shown to have mundane explanations: satellites, weather events, meteors, stars, planets, conventional aircraft, flocks of large birds reflecting light, balloons, hoaxes. In other words, the sightings are pattern mismatches. In fact, the UFO phenomenon arose only after the idea of aliens and extraterrestrials—a pattern—took hold in the collective mind by way of the first media reports about alleged spacecraft. The different physical descriptions of spaceships and aliens recounted by eyewitnesses often followed the first visual prototypes described or illustrated initially in science-fiction writing, art, movies, and TV shows—not the other way around. It’s an example of life imitating art.
This knowledge is useful regardless of one’s position on Bigfoot; it at least will explain some spurious reports of the Sasquatch: flashes of fur in the bush, odd sounds, impressions in the dirt, and misidentifications of bears standing in the distance. Pattern matching may also account for the apparent universality of the wild-man archetypes that have existed across numerous cultures. After all, our earlier ancestors coexisted with other primate beings, including perhaps Gigantopithecus itself.* It would not be surprising if the patterns of these Bigfoot-like beings reside in our collective consciousness and memory.
But can we say that perceptual mistakes alone dismiss the Sasquatch phenomenon? How could lengthier sightings at close range by multiple witnesses, like that of Mary Brown, be explained with this knowledge? Wouldn’t bears, with their long snout, upright ears, and short legs, be hard to misidentify at close range? Similarly, what should I make of the many reports I’ve collected so far that begin with the eyewitnesses thinking they were seeing a bear, only to be shocked when an apparent humanoid stood up, looked at them, and walked or ran away, sometimes in view for hundreds of yards?
I call Johnny Johnson later that day and am invited to his home, a few doors down from Lena’s. I’m greeted by a smiling man with a shaved head, wearing a brown T-shirt with cut-off sleeves. We climb a flight of stairs to his sparsely decorated living room and sit on his couch. I give him the spiel about what I’m up to. He looks at me penetratingly, almost sadly.
“Did you make it down to Koeye?” he asks.
I nod.
“Beyond words.”
“My family, the Johnson family, are from Koeye,” he says, with a flicker of pride. “From the south side of the river.”
With Johnny I feel I’m in the presence of a close friend, even a family member. He’s fifty-three, gentle, and hospitable. But he’s also intimidating: solidly built, with faded tattoos on his shoulders and forearms and large scars on his head, back, and arms. Johnny, I had been told, had survived a terrible grizzly bear attack a few years ago.
When I ask what he does for a living, he tells me that he assists archaeologists excavating old village sites along the coast. He says he hasn’t worked much recently, owing to his health.
“You heard what happened to me, right?” he asks.
“I have. Are those scars from the attack?”
He nods self-consciously.
Johnny’s brush with death took place in the summer of 2011. He was out picking salmonberries by the side of the road on the edge of town one day. Earlier that morning, the village dogs had been harassing a grizzly sow and her cubs, which had wandered into the community. Johnny had waited for things to quiet down before going into the bush. Soon after he began gathering berries, he was struck by a force so powerful it threw him into the air. When he sat up, he saw a huge grizzly coming directly at him.
“She was mad,” he says. “I put my arms up to block her. But half of my forearm went into her mouth. She chomped on me and then tried to get into my stomach. I almost popped out both my shoulders trying to keep her back.”
Johnny says his memory of the attack is hazy and fragmented, but he’s certain that it unfolded in waves. After each assault, the bear ran out onto the road, where the village dogs were barking madly. Johnny realized the dogs had returned and were attacking the cubs, and the sow was simultaneously trying to fend them off. Every time he tried to take advantage of those intervals to escape, the bear was on him again. At one point the grizzly bit into his leg.
“I remember thinking: ‘If she breaks my leg, I’m not making it home.’ And I’m not one of these guys who like to quit.”
In desperation, Johnny jabbed her in the eye with his finger. The bear roared in pain, slapped him in the head, and then broke off the attack to go fight the dogs that were harassing her cubs.
Johnny took advantage of that pause to make a final attempt to save himself. He began rolling his body, trying to get as far away as he could, until he reached a nearby creek bed. Before he could get any farther, he heard the heavy panting of the sow. Soon she was in view again, growling, gnashing her teeth, and frothing at the mouth. She charged at full speed.
“The last thing I remember was kicking up my feet and catapulting her with my legs,” he says. “But the strain was so great that I blacked out.”
When Johnny regained consciousness, it was dark. He was covered with a pile of tree branches a foot high. The bear had buried him until she could return later to feed on him. His final memory before waking up in the Royal Jubilee Hospital in Victoria ten days later was clambering to his feet and stumbling down the road into town in the pitch black of night. Although he has no recollection of it now, Johnny made it a mile to a neighbor’s place and used his first-aid training, which he learned as a logger, to instruct the gathering crowd of villagers on how to keep him alive until the air ambulance arrived.
Johnny spent two months in the hospital. He’d suffered serious bite and claw injuries on his head, neck, back, torso, and thighs. The doctors told him one of the claw marks had missed his spinal cord by just a millimeter.
I ask Johnny what happened to the bear.
“The game wardens got her,” he says. “But it was a year later. And after she chased a kid in the village—and also me.”
“What?”
He nods.
“She ran after me by the band office. I escaped by climbing into one of the trucks parked there. She knew who I was, too. I could see it in her eyes. She remembered me from my smell.”
Johnny tilts his neck to one side and winces, then massages it with his hand.
“I felt relieved when they got her. I didn’t have to look over my shoulder anymore. But when they shot her I felt physically sick. I felt bad. I don’t hate her for what she did. Bears are just animals. They don’t have the rational thoughts we do.”
Johnny tells me he has to leave to go fishing with a friend visiting from out of town. I quickly ask him what he knows about Sasquatches—and the so-called Hoodoo Valley.
“I don’t know much about the place,” he says, gathering his gear. “Only that loggers got spooked in there—and left. It was a long time ago. People here stay away from that place.”
“And Bigfoots?”
“One story,” he says. “I was staying a few nights at a cabin on the lake, at a place called Kwap. It’s an old village site. About five miles down, on the north side. Near Hoodoo. We were doing work at the lake. This was about twenty years ago. We were sleeping one night, and then all of a sudden we heard this deafening banging on the walls: Boom! Boom! Boom! It went all the way around the cabin. It felt like the cabin was gonna fall apart. It kept pounding on and off for about ten minutes. We had a couple of bear dogs with us, sleeping outside. They were 120 pounds each. When we finally opened the door to find out what was going on, the dogs bolted into the cabin. They didn’t bark once. It was definitely not a bear.”
“Nothing. The banging just stopped.”
“So you didn’t actually see the culprit. But you’re assuming it was a Sasquatch?”
“Bears don’t walk around cabins banging on walls. Besides, my dad and uncle had seen a Sasquatch around the same time, bathing in the creek behind that same cabin.”
“And the cabin’s still there?”
“It is. But nobody’s been there for ten years now. People are afraid of the place. Some students didn’t believe my story until they went on a camping trip there. The next morning they were back here with their tails between their legs. But they weren’t as lucky as we were. They lost one of their dogs.”
“Lost?”
“Their dog chased after whatever was bothering them. It never came back.”
There’s a long pause. Johnny throws me a serious yet commiserating look that seems to say: Have you got your fill of stories yet? He cuts the silence by saying he has to leave.
“Wait,” I say, getting up. “Is there any way I can get to these places?”
“Where?” he says, exasperated.
“Hoodoo. The cabin.”
He chuckles sarcastically. “If you can find anyone here willing to go with you to Hoodoo, or that cabin, I’ll give you everything I own.”
“What about you? Could you take me?”
Johnny makes a cringing face and shakes his head. “I’m not going out there. I’ve been through enough.”
“Can you suggest anyone?”
Johnny thinks a moment. “Do you know Alex Chartrand Jr.?”
“He’s one of our Guardian Watchmen. He patrols our territorial waters. I heard him say he’s going out that way in a few days. You can ask him to guide you into Hoodoo.”
“What’s the chance he’ll agree?”
Johnny gives me a deadpan look. “About zero.”
Despite my continued attempts to remain neutral and objective, I still find myself being yanked back into that comfort zone of credulity—as if tied to it by bungee cord. Every time I hear a new yarn, something clicks inside me. I’m especially enraptured by the old rumor of the Hoodoo Valley. How is it that I—though I’ve neither seen Sasquatches nor come across my own hard evidence of any—am so easily swayed by arguments of their existence? And why does part of me stubbornly refuse to budge from that position?
I’m not alone. There are perhaps millions like me who have read the Sasquatch books and watched the Bigfoot TV shows—none of us have ever seen the creatures, but we are certain they exist. And no amount of contradictory information, no assemblage of reasonable doubts, can change that.
How can that be? One likely answer, I discover, boils down to one thing: our need to remain sane.
Our brains construct simplified versions of reality, helping us to see just enough of what we need to survive, but those simplifications apply not only to our sensory world. They also affect our understanding of events. The narratives and stories we use to explain the world are also caricatures. It’s what we call our “worldview.”
We spend our early lives building mental models of how the world works, using our education, experiences, predispositions, and intuition as brick and mortar. How and why do certain things happen in the world? What is possible, and what is impossible? Because we don’t have access to all information—no human can be all-knowing—our ideas are always a best guess. We fill in the many blanks with our hunches, opinions, and assumptions. Any new information that conforms with our ideas, our worldview, is easily incorporated.
In his book Brain and Culture, Yale psychiatry professor Bruce Wexler tells us that up until adulthood our brain is exquisitely skilled at building its models. But once that task is complete, the brain is far less skilled at changing them. Most adult brain activity from that point forward, he writes, is “devoted to making the environment conform to established structures.”15 In other words: we work to set our views in stone. We all have our own internal models for what’s going on in the world. These models can be seemingly reasonable or outlandish in their assumptions. We might believe that oil companies, Freemasons, or Zionists rule the planet. We may allot blame for the problems in society to white men, immigrants, or liberals. The perceived rights and wrongs in any given conflict—such as those that underscore the Wuikinuxv’s grievances against the Heiltsuk, and vice versa—also constitute a mental model. For most of us, sooner or later, these cobbled positions become rigid, fixed, inviolable.
So what happens when we eventually come across information that contradicts our simplified narratives?
“One option,” writes Indian neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran in Phantoms in the Brain, “is to revise your story and create a new model about the world and about yourself. The problem,” he adds, “is that if you did this for every little piece of threatening information, your behavior would soon become chaotic and unstable. You would go mad.”16
Our tendency is to look away when our hard-won and cherished narratives are faced with information that undermines them and the way we live.
Investigative journalist Will Storr says our brain adores our models and “guards them like a bitter curmudgeon.” It reworks them only when absolutely necessary. “Your brain,” he writes in The Heretics, “is surprisingly reluctant to change its mind. Rather than going through the difficulties involved in rearranging itself to reflect truth, it often prefers to fool you. So it distorts. It forgets. It projects. It lies.”17
Similarly, Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind, argues that our intuitive reflexes are the basis for much of what we believe, and that those reflexes seek rationalization. Reasoning, he says, “evolved not to help us find truth but to help us engage in arguments, persuasion, and manipulation in the context of discussions with other people.” The good reasoner, he adds, is really good at one thing: “Finding evidence to support the position he or she already holds, usually for intuitive reasons.”18
There is a term to describe the mental discomfort that arises when we hold two pieces of contradictory knowledge at the same time: cognitive dissonance. Instead of going back to the drawing board or recomputing in the face of new information, we resort to chicanery. We reject, ignore, rationalize, or distort the new data, becoming even more hardened in our position. We cherry-pick, find additional evidence, and reinterpret facts that support our position—a process known as confirmation bias. In more extreme cases, in which political power or wealth is at stake, we simply marginalize, penalize, cast away, or kill the messengers responsible for the dissonant information. Turkish journalists who write critically of their regime are labeled “terrorists” and thrown into jail. Environmentalists who loudly protest deforestation in certain Latin American countries are often killed by police or thugs hired by logging companies.
This devotion to what we think we know and what we think should be runs deep. Margaret Heffernan, author of Willful Blindness, says that at the root is a fundamental preference in our lives for what is known and familiar to us, whether real or imaginary. Anything that falls outside that—the unknown, the dissonant, the alien—is seen as an enemy. “Embedded within our self-definition, we build relationships, institutions, cities, systems, and cultures that, in reaffirming our values, blind us to alternatives,” she writes. “This is where our willful blindness originates: in the innate human desire for familiarity, for likeness, that is fundamental to the ways our minds work.”*
This is partly why many members of the ever-growing congregation of Bigfooters, never having seen a creature for themselves, push aside the dissonance caused by the fact that a Sasquatch body has never been presented. Even John Bindernagel and his Bigfoot-positive scientist colleagues, who are not pure “believers” because their arguments stem from professional assessment of the Sasquatch data, are still working with their own cherished models of reality. Their emotions and intuitions are fully engaged. Their minds are no less like Storr’s “bitter curmudgeon,” defending their models to the end.
All of this also applies to debunkers or conservative scientists. The desire to discredit or deliberately disbelieve, whether rightly or wrongly, is also a mental posture. Because science operates within the convenient circle of what fits with its preconceptions—which is anathema to what science is supposed to be about—it has rejected the work of Bindernagel and his colleagues outright.
Alex, the Guardian Watchman, it turns out, is hard to find. He’s never at his place. When I ask Lena about him, she tells me he has no phone and that he uses only the radio. I try calling out to him on the VHF channel, but I get no response save for some unintelligible, static-filled chatter coming from the sportfishing camps out in the inlet.
While at Lena’s I find myself restless and unable to stay put. I decide to walk to a place called “the reload”—the old logging depot at the edge of Owikeno Lake. Lena advises me not to make the hour-long walk. A huge grizzly, she says, was seen earlier on this side of town. She tells me to take her pickup instead and throws me the keys with a smile.
I drive along the heavily potholed gravel road through a stretch of forest that separates the village from the lake. The approach is dark and a touch ominous: a landscape of silhouetted, mossy trees, streaked with sunbeams, towering above huge spiderlike ferns. I drive out of the forest and into a wide clearing strewn with old logs and rusting equipment. Before me are the azure waters of Owikeno Lake, a long, flooded alpine valley stretching far into the distance. About a dozen seals are sunning themselves, lazily, on a log boom a few feet offshore.
Once I step out of the pickup I hear voices from behind a pile of timber and the sound of an engine starting. Then I see a motorboat drone away from the edge of the reload toward the distant reaches of the lake. That’s followed by laughter and a dog yelping. I walk over to the other side of the woodpile and find a man and two women, all in their forties, sitting on logs around a small fire. A tiny, rodent-like dog with puffy brown fur is running around them, barking madly. Parked behind them is a truck. All three are holding cans of Budweiser beer, and they stare at me as if I were an apparition.
“You’re that guy from New York who’s staying at Lena’s,” exclaims the man, who’s dressed in a T-shirt and jeans. The two women pull at their cigarettes and stare at me with fascination.
“Toronto,” I say.
“Same thing,” he replies. The women chuckle. “I’m Alex,” he says, breaking into a smile and extending his hand.
“Alex Chartrand?” I say, shaking it, taken aback by the coincidence.
“Yup, Junior. Alex Senior is my dad.”
I mention the referral from Johnny Johnson—and my interest in exploring the lake and the Hoodoo Valley. The women’s faces drop at the mention of Sasquatches and the valley. Alex nods, straight-faced.
“I heard that you were asking about that,” he says. “Want a beer?” He reaches into a box beside him and fishes out a warm can, handing it to me. “I’m one of the Guardian Watchmen in the village,” he adds. “Many of the communities on this coast have watchmen. We patrol our waters. Keep an eye on our resources, on the environment. Tomorrow we’re going out on the lake looking for poachers.”
“Poachers?“ My imagination instantly conjures up ragtag groups of men in pickup trucks stalking elephants and rhinos in the Serengeti with AK-47s.
“Bear hunters,” he says, clarifying. “We’ve banned them here. But they still try to slip in.” I remember the discussion with Captain Brian in Koeye.
“Could I tag along?”
“Sure, but we won’t be going into any of those places you mention,” he says, closing the door on discussion about the Hoodoo Valley.
But I press him. “Can you at least tell me something about the Hoodoo Valley? About what happened there?”
Alex tells me he neither has been there nor knows more about the place than anyone else. I can see he doesn’t want to talk about it. The two women avert their eyes when he speaks. When I ask about Sasquatch he’s more forthcoming. He says that once, while spending four days camping alone on the south end of the lake, he came across a huge humanoid footprint beside a creek.
“It was pretty unnerving. I was in the bush purifying myself for a Hamatsa dance I was going to perform at a potlatch. So I couldn’t leave. And I could barely defend myself. The only things I had with me were my sleeping bag, a tent, an ax, lighter, knife, and a water bottle,” he says.
“What did you do?”
“I stayed put,” he says. “Those were the rules. I wasn’t allowed to go upriver, or follow any noises in the bush, because it could be a Dzonoqua—whose track I probably saw—trying to lure me,” he says. “Or even the Little People.”
I do a double take. “The Little People?”
“Yup.”
Alex tells me there are smaller Sasquatch-type creatures inhabiting the valleys around the lake. He describes the same beings I was told about in Bella Bella and Koeye after I mentioned the small tracks I saw in the mud at Old Town. As I did with the others, I ask Alex if the small creatures aren’t just juvenile Sasquatches.
He shakes his head. “They’re a separate race. They even sound different. I heard their laughter behind my tent at night while on that same outing.”
The women follow the conversation, spellbound, clutching their cigarettes, the long ashes dangling precariously from the tips. One of them, itching to say more, interjects: “You gonna tell him what else happened to you out there?”
Alex shoots her a stern look as if she has relinquished a secret. Everyone goes quiet.
I down the rest of my beer and stand up.
“Hold on,” Alex says, getting up with me. He waves me over to his pickup. I look into the back when we get there and see that it’s filled with a dozen large salmon. “A buddy of mine just came over with these.”
“What kind are they?”
“Sockeye,” he says, smiling from ear to ear. Alex grabs one and hands it to me. I hook my fingers into its gills. The heavy fish reaches down to my knees. It’s the first time anyone has casually given me a whole fish. I stand there for a moment, awkwardly, wondering what to do next. The women begin to chuckle.
“Go ahead,” Alex says. “Throw it in the back of Lena’s truck.”
I look at him quizzically.
“It’s a gift,” he says. “Go back and eat it.”
Alex’s mention of voices and laughing in the woods reminds me of extended periods I’d spent alone in the forest and the desert, hiking and camping, when I’d experienced similar phenomena.
In the 1950s, the head of McGill University’s school of psychology in Montreal conducted a series of experiments on paid student volunteers. The goal was to study the effects of isolation on the mind. The experiments were funded by the CIA, which wanted to know more about the role that isolation played in the brainwashing of American prisoners of war held captive by the Chinese during the Korean War. The volunteers were isolated in soundproof cubicles and cut off from all meaningful human contact for up to a week. Researchers deprived them of stimuli, reducing what they could feel, see, hear, and touch, by making them wear opaque visors and cotton gloves. Air-conditioning units were made to hum continuously in order to mask any sounds that might reach them from the hallway. A few hours into the experiment, the volunteers became deeply restless and started to crave stimulation. Most began to talk and sing to themselves to break the monotony. Soon the test subjects began to experience things that weren’t there. This began with nonspecific objects, like points of light and abstract shapes, that then turned into dreamlike scenes replete with dogs, babies, squirrels, and, in one case, eyeglasses marching down a street. Some volunteers heard music and singing, or felt that they were being poked and prodded.
In 2008, British professor Ian Robbins, head of trauma psychology at Saint George’s Hospital in London, conducted a similar experiment in conjunction with the BBC program Horizon. Six people were left in a bomb shelter for forty-eight hours under very similar conditions. All subjects experienced pronounced visual and auditory phenomena.
From these sorts of experiments researchers have determined that when humans experience prolonged social isolation they are susceptible to hallucinating. If there’s a dearth of sensory information reaching the brain—an organ that normally processes a huge amount of data to construct our reality—it tries to make up for those scant signals, and the patterns they evoke, by concocting extra ones of its own.
Charging an eyewitness, who is certain to have experienced something, with having had a “hallucination” can be tantamount to an insult. The word is heavily loaded and wrongly implies a flawed capacity. Yet, I wonder whether some of the more dramatic Bigfoot encounters might be related to the effects of prolonged isolation in the wilderness.
The story of Albert Ostman, the Swedish Canadian prospector who claimed he had been kidnapped and held captive by a family of Sasquatches near Toba Inlet in 1924, stands out. He had been wandering in the woods alone for three whole weeks before he was allegedly abducted in his sleeping bag.
Mary Brown of Bella Bella, who was part of the group sighting at the cabin in Roscoe Inlet, related another secondhand Sasquatch report concerning a different forest cabin that, to my mind, also fits the isolation hypothesis. This one involved a troubled Heiltsuk youth who spent weeks in rehabilitative isolation at the cabin and claimed the building had been attacked by a Bigfoot.* Yet, interestingly, over the course of my researches, I hear of other incidents from campers involving a Sasquatch assailing that very same cabin.
When Lena asks how my Hoodoo Valley research is going, I tell her, resignedly, that the trail has gone cold.
“Have you spoken with Frank Hanuse yet?” she asks.
I had spoken with Frank—a Wuikinuxv elder and elected councillor—several days back about Sasquatches and the Rivers Inlet sockeye collapse. But that had been before I’d heard about the Hoodoo Valley from his brother Dennis.
“Talk to him again,” Lena urges. “Frank’s full of stories, and he knows everything happening around here.” Lena dials his number and hands me the phone. After several rings, the lively, good-humored man answers in his trademark cowboy-like drawl. After a bit of small talk, I tell Frank that I’m trying to find out more about the loggers who fled the Hoodoo Valley and ask whether he knows anything about that episode.
“Know anything? Of course I do!” he says, laughing at the seeming silliness of my question. “I was alive back then. I heard the whole story, which goes back generations, from the old chiefs at the time.”
Frank says the elders told him that sometime in the 1800s, the villages dotting the lake experienced a period of what he terms “bad luck.” It was a combination, he says, of bad weather, poor fish runs, and freak accidents. Malevolent spirits were blamed for the misfortunes. So the heads of all the villages organized an emergency meeting and performed a ceremony to cleanse the village sites of the evil.
“So, what’s the connection to Hoodoo?” I ask, wondering whether I had missed something.
“Well, you can’t just get rid of bad energy. It doesn’t just disappear. You have to move it somewhere. See where I’m coming from?”
It takes me a few seconds to realize what Frank is saying: the evil spirits were cast away by the village chiefs—into the Hoodoo Valley.
“Bingo, kid.”
“But why there?” I ask.
“Because it’s a good-for-nothing valley. Not too deep. Water barely runs there. And so the elders thought it was a perfect place. No one would have any reason to go in there in the future—except for those poor loggers who all ended up being plagued by mishaps. That’s why they fled the place. All those companies went bankrupt in the end.”
“And the name ‘Hoodoo’—is that the name of the creek?”
“No. The white guys just called it that.”
“Why?”
“Why this and why that! Because it’s bad ‘hoodoo,’ man—that’s why! Maybe ‘hoodoo’ sounds like ‘voodoo’—so they called it that. How should I know?”
“That’s crazy,” I say.
“If you don’t believe me, go and spend the night up there yourself.”
“I can’t! No one will take me there.”
“You know why, kid? Because no one here in their right mind goes up there. And come to think of it, neither should you!”
The next day, the engines of the Guardian Watchmen patrol boat sputter to life as the sun lifts itself above the Coast Mountains. It hovers like a beacon directly in line with the long axis of the lake, turning the water a dazzling gold.
Alex unties the boat and sits in the pilot’s chair, and we roar eastward into the blinding morning. Seated beside Alex is his Guardian Watchman colleague and copilot, Archie—a ginger-haired thirty-something from Vancouver Island who is married to a woman in the village.
Alex inserts his iPhone into a yellow waterproof boom box beside him, and we are bathed in the deep bass rhythms of a rap song. Alex and Archie light up smokes, and their dialogue and laughter are drowned out by the deafening music and growling engines. We’re thrown up and down in wind-whipped swells in rhythm with the thumping baritone poetry and the occasional sound of gunshots. Water drenches the windshield, obscuring the view of mountains ahead, silhouetted in the glaring light.
We are heading east, hugging the lake’s south shore, but my gaze is glued to the distant north shore. I’m wondering which of the valleys we’re passing is the Hoodoo. Surrendering to my momentary obsession, I ask Alex, yelling above the music, where the valley is, but he shrugs his shoulders and says he can’t tell from here.
Our plan is to circumnavigate the lake, looking for bear hunters. Though the trophy hunting of bears in British Columbia remains legal and is backed by an influential hunting lobby, some First Nations in the province have come out strongly against the practice. They say killing grizzlies for trophies is an antiquated, unethical, and inhumane practice that erodes their ecosystems. In 2012, Coastal First Nations, an alliance of nine indigenous nations on British Columbia’s central and northern coast, and including the Wuikinuxv, banned the hunt in their territories, all situated in or near the Great Bear Rainforest.*
When I asked Alex earlier what authority and means he has to enforce the ban, he curtly answered, “Tribal law.”
“What do you do when you find hunters?”
“We politely ask them to leave. And offer to escort them out.”
“But what if they won’t go?” I asked. “You can’t just arrest them.”
“We’ll follow them around. Make a lot of noise. Mess up their hunt. Scare the bears away so they can’t get a shot.”
“And hope,” I add, “that a group of alpha males carrying guns in the woods won’t get pissed off enough to turn them on you.”
A disconcerted look comes over Alex’s face. “Something like that.”
The lighthearted sense of adventure with which we’ve embarked evaporates after we pass the first and second narrows at the far end of the lake. Here Alex cuts the engines and we bob in silence near an abandoned logging camp at the mouth of the Sheemahant River. The mood turns militaristic. Alex and Archie pull out a pair of binoculars. They pass it back and forth and murmur to each other quietly like tense army generals at the front line. Straight ahead, onshore, are a few white trailer-like buildings. The lake is still.
I crouch down next to Alex. “Why the cloak-and-dagger?” I ask.
“It’s hard to tell from here, but that’s a really big camp,” he says, handing me the binoculars. “Lots of buildings. Old vehicle trails. Even an airstrip in the back. They logged the shit out of this area in the seventies. So, it’s like a small town. A group of hunters could easily hide in there.”
I look through the binoculars and see no movement among the trailers and trees. “Who would know about a place this hidden and remote?” I ask.
“Anyone,” Alex says. “It’s easy to find on marine charts or Google Earth. All you need is a floatplane, or chopper, and you can get anywhere in this country.”
“We have a few hunters around here who might be tempted,” Archie says, taking the binoculars from me. “One of them, a guy named Leonard Ellis, lives in Bella Coola.” It’s the same man Captain Brian Falconer had mentioned in Koeye, whom I’d met the previous year.
“You mean the former grizzly hunter who now does bear tours?” I ask.
“Yeah, you should go and write about that guy. Forget the Sasquatch.”
This second reference to Ellis piques my interest. I’d had no idea he was so well known. I make a mental note to seek him out when I get back to Bella Coola.
We restart the engines and crawl slowly up to a long pier at the edge of the abandoned camp. We moor and get off the boat. Alex has put on a Guardian Watchman jacket and cap, both emblazoned with native insignia. He’s holding a 12-gauge shotgun, which has materialized out of nowhere, and has a big knife strapped to his waist. Archie hands me a Velcro belt holding a container of bear spray.
“Just in case,” he says.
We enter the abandoned camp, cautious but determined, like narcotics officers on a raid. No one speaks. We weave around the sides of several large, decaying Alcan trailers set in a wide clearing with sprawling weeds and berry bushes.
Inside the musty-smelling trailers everything seems to have been left just as it was when the loggers were in residence: old teak furniture, a small, bulbous black-and-white turn-dial TV with its antennae up (how did they get any signal out here?), faded fashion magazines featuring Farrah Fawcett–haired women in bell-bottoms, and a beautiful retro silk-screen print of an alpine scene.
I break off from the others and enter the largest trailer—the living quarters. It’s no more than a long hallway lined with bedrooms. Each is a hollow shell containing broken bed frames, filthy mattresses, and collapsing wardrobe closets. Scrawled on each room’s door in colored marker is the name or nickname of its former occupant:
Pin Ball Jason
Davey and the Grinders
Crazy Ray’s Palace: No fags, fruits, or fat chicks
Boom-Boom Man
And on the very last door, to room number 34, scrawled in big, bold caps:
BIGFOOT
Finding no intruders at the camp, we push up the Sheemahant valley. With even greater trepidation we follow an old track out. It’s lined with tall alders concealing a thick, dark forest. At first our hike is easy going. The path, an old dirt road, is covered in moss, short grass, and fallen leaves. But the farther we go the more overgrown it becomes, the weeds reaching up to our knees and even our thighs at times. Our legs become so drenched in morning dew it’s as if we’d waded waist-deep into a lake.
Alex is holding his shotgun nervously across his chest with both hands. The added worry now is bears. And after we see two huge grizzly tracks, the anxiety becomes infectious. Archie walks ahead issuing a rebel yell to ward off any bears. Between howls, no one speaks. The only sound is from our footfalls—and from our breathing, which dispenses small clouds of vapor in the shaded morning cold. Although the area we’re in has been heavily altered by humans, it feels deeper in the bush than anywhere else I’ve been on this trip.
“It’s kinda like walking those city blocks, back home, eh?” Alex says, trying to lighten the mood. I make an effort to imagine Toronto and its sobering blue-gray concrete grid, but I’m unable to. It feels farther away than any real place possibly could.
“I can’t imagine going home,” I tell him.
“You know what it is about the city that’s the real buzzkill?” Alex asks.
I laugh. “Take your pick,” I say.
Alex stops in his tracks and looks at me seriously. His eyes widen. “It’s the noise.“
We reach the overgrown airstrip, no more than a long, rectangular clearing in the forest. There is a fork in the trail. Archie and Alex argue about which branch to take.
But suddenly they’re interrupted by the droning of a small plane in the distance. We all stop and cock our ears. Alex and Archie listen intently, meticulously, trying to discern clues in the sound. They glance at each other, volleying questions back and forth with their eyes: What kind of plane? How far? Is it coming or going? Is it headed for the lake?
But just as the droning gets loud enough to arouse real suspicion, the sound crests and trails away in the soft rustling of alder leaves.
By midafternoon we’re sitting on the pier at the abandoned logging camp eating our lunches and preparing to leave. The weather has become stiflingly hot. Alex and Archie take off their wet shoes and socks and lay them on the pier to dry while they stuff themselves with sandwiches.
I strip down to a T-shirt and marvel at the fact that in my several weeks of rain-forest travel, it hasn’t rained once. Drier, warmer weather has become the norm on the coast in summertime. But this is something different—more like a drought.
Alex finishes eating and begins to unload his shotgun. He places several slugs and shells on the pier, in a line next to him. I stare at them in morbid fascination. I tell him that I know nothing about guns or hunting, having lived all of my life in one city or another.
Alex and Archie exchange grins before Alex turns to me. “Wanna try shooting it?” he says.
I’m gripped by an involuntary fear and hesitation. His invitation has the tinge of something taboo. “No. It’s all right,” I find myself saying, in spite of an intense desire to say yes.
The two throw me looks bordering on disbelief, as if to say: Who would turn down the chance to fire a shotgun for the first time?
“It’s easy,” Alex says. “Plus, if you’re going to be wandering around these parts, it’s something you need to learn.”
The decision has been made to initiate me. Alex picks up a shell and grabs the gun before standing up. Both he and Archie have a look of impatient relish on their faces, as if they’re about to play a joke on me. I stand up without protest.
“This is bird shot, but it’ll still have a kick,” Alex says, inserting the shell, loading it, and then handing the gun to me. I take it awkwardly, adjusting my grip to its heavy weight.
“The safety’s off,” Alex says, backing up. “Go ahead.”
“Where should I point it?” I ask, thinking aloud.
“Away from us,” Archie says.
Alex gestures toward the water. “Shoot into the lake.”
I see an old tree stump sticking out of the water, about eighty feet from the side of the pier, and take aim.
“That’s good,” Alex says, approaching and readjusting my grip. “Now hold it like this.”
All skittishness evaporates as my attention is directed outward, focused on the target. I adjust my aim and pull the trigger.
After what feels like not much more than a microsecond, there’s a peal of thunder and an incredible shock wave …
The late Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges wrote a fantastically surreal story called The Aleph. It’s about a tiny orb, the Aleph, which when gazed at allows the observer to see the entire universe from every conceivable angle. The main character describes the moment he peers into it: time stops and in a split second he bears witness to everything that ever existed—and would ever exist—from all visual perspectives, all at once.
No metaphor is exact. But the experience of firing the shotgun feels like Borges’s description of looking into the Aleph. In that instant, a universe of impressions washes over me. Every shooting I’ve ever seen in a film or TV show or read about in a book, from handguns to artillery, is reexperienced, from the perspective of both the shooter and the shot. It’s a profound and debilitating shock. In that moment I understand what it’s like to be on the giving and receiving ends of a deadly projectile weapon. I feel a mishmash of contradictory emotions: the ego-amplifying elation of power merging with disgust. And all of this unfolds within a split second.
The top of the stump and the water around it explode. A gruesome, diabolical thunder runs amok across the lake and mountains, reverberating, repeatedly, back and forth.
“I think you hit it,” Alex says, taking the shotgun out of my hands and patting me on my shoulder. “You all right?”
“I feel a bit jolted.”
“That’s how it always is the first time,” he says. “And that was just bird shot. The slug’s got a lot more kick.”
“What’s the difference between the two?” I ask.
“We carry the slugs to use against bears—in worst-case scenarios. It’s really rare, but if a grizzly is coming at you, and it’s going to kill you, the slug will usually stop it in its tracks.”
That hypothetical scene plays out in my mind. An all-consuming chill runs down my spine, and I quickly shake the thought.
The ride home along the lake’s north shore is a blur. I’m tired. I barely notice the two cabins, sites of alleged Sasquatch attacks, that we pass at different creek mouths.
We barrel again toward the sun, now hanging over the western end of the lake, and pass high precipices of dark, shiny granite with small trees growing in their clefts.
We approach a narrow valley whose entrance is elevated above the water. Alex and Archie slow the boat down and in unison crane their necks and look up at the slope leading to it from the water. Contorted trees, deciduous and coniferous, tangle at its entrance. The men, skittish, speak into each other’s ears, look at me, and then throttle the boat’s engines.
Acting on a hunch, I tap Alex on the shoulder. He turns and looks at me as if caught in a secret act. I jerk my thumb backward, from where we just came.
“Hoo-doo?“ I yell, over the sound of the engines.
He stares at me for a moment and then nods, conceding. I see he wants to say more, but the engines are deafening. It has been a long day. His eyes implore me to leave it alone, to let it go.
I nod. We both turn away. And neither of us mentions it again.*
* The German American cultural anthropologist Franz Boas (1858–1942), who spent forty years traveling through northwest coast communities and documenting traditional tales, wrote of the creatures: “The Dzonoq!wa have black bodies; eyes wide open, but set so deep in the head that they cannot see well. They are twice the size of a man. They are described as giants, and as stout. Their hands are hairy. Generally, the Dzonoq!wa who appears in the story is a female. She has large hanging breasts. She is so strong that she can tear down trees. The Dzonoq!wa can travel underground. When speaking … [her] voice is so loud it makes the roof boards shake” See Boas, Franz. Bella Bella Tales. Boston: American Folklore Society, vol. 25, 1932, pp. 142–45.
* A BBC Two television presenter hoaxed viewers in 1969 by saying he had obtained film clips of a famous 1920s comedian known as “The Great Pismo.” When he showed the fraudulent clips of Pismo to people, and/or asked them about the performer, many remembered him, sometimes vividly.
* “In recent years Gigantopithecus and Homo erectus fossils have been found together at a site in Vietnam and another in China, evidence that the giant ape and humans coexisted,” Michael McLeod reports, in The Anatomy of a Beast: Obsession and Myth on the Trail of Bigfoot, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009, p. 161.
* Heffernan also writes: “People are very resistant to changing what they know how to do, what they have expertise in and certainly what they have economic investment in.” Heffernan, Margaret. Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril. London: Bloomsbury, 2012, p. 51.
* See Addendum 1 for Mary’s interesting, verbatim account of that incident.
* Other First Nations in British Columbia, including the Nisga’a and the Tahltan, oppose bans on the grizzly hunt, largely for economic reasons.
* There’s a remarkable epilogue to my attempts to find out about the strange events surrounding the so-called Hoodoo Valley—proof that all stories find their ending. See Addendum 2.