by J. J. Dupuis
I stay a half step behind Aunt Barb while Saad trails behind us. Two black birds fly overhead; their silhouettes against the red-purple sky look like those of waterfowl, but I can’t be sure. There’s a crowd outside the ranger station. A silver-haired superintendent stands at the front, pointing clusters of people to different trails. We approach as the search parties split up. He spots Aunt Barb and walks toward us. One younger ranger, a man with a tawny beard and sharp blue eyes, also joins us and stands at attention like a soldier.
“Good morning, ma’am,” the superintendent says, taking his hat off to reveal his widow’s peak.
“Hello,” Aunt Barb says. “This is …”
She points toward me but her words fail.
“I’m Laura Reagan, this is my friend, Saad Javed.”
“Thank you for coming. I’m told you have some insight into where Professor Sorel may have been hiking.”
“He told Aunt Barb that he was going to a spot my father filmed back in the nineties. My dad never drew a map or anything, but he brought me there enough times that I think I can find it by memory.”
“We sent out three teams in that general area yesterday, but they came up empty.”
“Perhaps we will have better luck,” I say.
“Do you have any prior SAR experience?” the superintendent asks, his tone too flat for me to decipher any implications.
“No, sir,” I say. “I have hiked these mountains since I was six years old, I’ve taken part in several field expeditions tracking different forms of wildlife, mainly weasels and muskrats. I have first aid and lifeguard training and I run at least two marathons a year. I figure I’m good enough to sidekick one of your rangers.”
“What about your friend there?” he says, pointing to Saad.
“Well,” I say, looking at Saad. Even his sighs cry out bookworm. “He’s an experienced hiker and rock climber, with several degrees.”
The superintendent turns and waves the younger ranger closer. The tawny-bearded man — who hasn’t moved a muscle the entire time we’ve been here, just studied us coldly with his ice-blue eyes — sidles up next to his boss and looks us both over, those eyes shooting from me to Saad and back. He holds his head still the whole time. He reminds me of Joshua Jackson, but more handsome, less baby-faced.
“This is Ted Cassavetes, he’ll be escorting you up the mountain with Moira Hearn, a paramedic.” The superintendent tugs on his sleeve to get a better look at the face of his watch. “She’ll be joining us shortly.”
Ranger Cassavetes gives a little half bow to me and nods at Saad. He holds his hands behind his back, sticking his chest out. The name Ted doesn’t seem to fit a man in his early thirties, and a Greek surname like Cassavetes seems at odds with his blue eyes and light features. He’s athletic looking without being musclebound, and he looks sure of himself.
“How much SAR experience does Ranger Cassavetes have, if you don’t mind my asking?” You’ve got to be ready to jump right into the jargon when you write or blog about science. I can see it’s no different here. I doubt either of these men have said search and rescue out loud for years.
“He’s the best on my staff. He’s even done aerial and sea SAR when he was in the navy,” the superintendent says.
A minute later, we stand in front of Ranger Ted’s truck. Laid out on the hood is a map of green blotches, with blue cracks for each river and wrinkles to signify the topography. Ted draws two fingers in a circle around Roanoke Ridge.
“No emergency beacon, no GPS, not even a cellphone,” Ted says. “It’s like your professor wanted to get lost.”
“How about a little compassion? We can worry about blaming the victim later,” I say.
Ranger Ted raises his eyebrows and opens his hands at me like I’ve just pulled a gun on him.
“Still, a man his age has no business up here alone.”
“Professor Sorel’s been hiking around these mountains since before you were born.”
“Like Ali versus Holmes.”
“What?”
“They’re boxers —”
“I know who they are, I don’t see the parallel,” I say.
“Meaning no matter how good you were, you have to know when to quit.” He checks his watch, gazes off at the mountains beyond the trees.
Moira the paramedic finally arrives with a small backpack and a medical kit slung over her shoulder. She nods at Ranger Ted and makes a quick introduction to Saad and I. Before we finish introductions, Ted is already inside his truck and turning the engine. Saad and I squeeze into the back of Ted’s truck, he and Moira sit in the front.
A ghostly mist rises through the forest canopy and a woodpecker’s call echoes between the trees. We start out from the ranger station with the sun at our backs and the mountain before us. Ted drives up a steep and bumpy dirt road once used by miners to access their claims scattered over the eastern face of the mountain. There’s been something of a clampdown on mining in this area by the Bureau of Land Management after a slew of new by-laws and the enforcement of those by-laws. There have been small protests covered by local news, but limited coverage nationally speaking. I only know about it because I always pay a special bit of attention to this area.
The landscape has changed in the years since my last visit. We drive along a dirt road taking us northwest and soon it’s like there was no ranger station, no paved road, nothing but wilderness. The beauty, of the trees beginning to bloom, the stream that runs alongside the road we’re on, the mountain peaks in the distance — it makes it easy to see why people believe in God. It’s hard to believe such perfection could happen by accident. Looking down into the stream, the cold, fresh water flowing from high in the mountain, I see purity. I see it as my father would, prime cold-water fishing, like a vein on the surface of the earth just waiting for someone to come along and scoop up a bull trout. A month from now the spring chinook fishery will open and this whole area will be overrun by a bait-and-tackle army.
“Do you get a lot of folks coming through here looking for Sasquatch?” I ask, leaning forward, holding the back of Ted’s seat.
“We get our share,” he says. “They burst in here loud and proud, with patches on their jackets and stickers on their gear that say Bigfoot Hunters’ Squad, Operation Sasquatch Search, or Northwest Cryptozoological Society. Then you get the undercovers.”
“The undercovers?”
“The people who try to act like regular outdoorsmen, hikers or fisherman or what have you. But then they start to pal up to you, start asking questions like ‘seen anything strange out here?’ Or my favourite, ‘how many bear skeletons have you come across?’ Listen, if there’s something like a Bigfoot out here, I’d have heard it by now, or seen its tracks,” Ted says.
Saad, who has been staring out the window at the beauty passing him by, chuckles and turns toward me. I meet him with a smile. He started this trip as a Bigfoot novice, but I have a feeling he’ll be a full-blown expert by the time we’re through.
“What gets me,” Ted says, “is the number of people who visit here for the wilderness, the hiking trails and wildlife, and who see Sasquatch as a fringe benefit. They don’t come here to see the beast, but they accept that he exists and would consider it a huge bonus if they saw him. Like seeing a grizzly bear or something.”
“So he’s become tacitly accepted,” I say as we hit a bump on the road.
“I think the more people live in cities, their eyes glued to screens, the less they know about what actually exists. The woods become a mystery, and since ninety-nine percent of the population don’t come out here and see the deer and the bears and the wolves, Bigfoot or Sasquatch becomes just as possible to them.”
“There are wolves out here?” Saad asks, a tremor in his voice.
Ted winks into the rear-view mirror. “You bet. According to the latest wolf report, the state’s wolf population has increased by thirty-six percent in the last year. That makes one hundred and ten individuals. Isn’t that great?”
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br /> All of a sudden, the road stops. The parallel tire ruts come to an end and there’s nothing but a wall of trees ahead of us. We get out and slam the truck doors shut in rhythm, and the woods go silent. It takes a few seconds for nature’s symphony to begin anew. Backpack straps are securely fastened, clicked into place. Ted’s GPS unit is clipped to the left strap of his pack. He radios the station to report our exact location and time of arrival.
Growing out of the tire ruts is a footpath leading up into the mountains. As we follow the path, branches hosting the first buds of spring brush against us. Lindsay Chiu’s words swim through my head, circling like sharks. She was right. The winters in western North America just aren’t as cold as they used to be, and each branch that wipes across my arms or thighs may carry a tick just waiting to latch on and give me Lyme disease.
When the trees have cleared enough and I can see the summit of the mountain, I remember the one thing about this place — more than ticks, more than any animal — that sends a shiver down my spine. Acrophobia would be fine; fearing heights makes sense and falling down a mountain is a real threat to hikers. Volcanophobia, on the other hand — my rational brain can’t fathom it, yet here it is. The childish fear, from when Dad would tell me about all the active volcanoes here in Oregon and up in Washington. The scariest to me was Three Fingered Jack; it sounded less like a geographical feature and more like a disfigured serial killer stalking teen lovers in parked cars. Mom tried to assure me that I had nothing to worry about, and I know she was right, but the TV news couldn’t help themselves, running footage of the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens every time there was a minor eruption somewhere in the Cascade Range.
The trees grow thick again and I can’t see the mountain anymore. Ted keeps his head down as branches reach out over the trail and take swipes at him. A strange sound fills the trees ahead, impossible to pinpoint. It starts out as a low chuck-chuck-chuck sound, rising into a chukar-chukar-chukar before becoming a loud and intense chuckara-chuckara-chuckara.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“Sssshhh, it’s Bigfoot,” Ted says.
“Funny.”
“It’s a type of partridge called a chukar, for obvious reasons,” Ted says.
“I don’t remember ever hearing that, and I used to camp here a lot.”
“They usually stay in drier areas to the east, but I’ve noticed there are a few around here. With the drought conditions we’ve had the last few years, the chukar is finding itself more and more at home.”
We take a few steps forward. I repeat the name chukar in my head so I won’t forget it. The brush is still dry and crunches underfoot.
“There!” Ted says, jabbing his finger out like he’s drawing a gun.
An oddly handsome bird, smaller than a chicken, with a cinnamon-coloured back and red eyes with a black mask over them, runs out of the tall grass.
“They’re originally from India. Released in Oregon in 1951 for hunting purposes,” Ted says as we keep moving higher and higher up the mountainous terrain.
I will never tell him, but Ted is pretty impressive. He spotted the chukar without slowing down and scanning the area with binoculars; he just knows where to look, and he doesn’t let it interfere with his primary objective. He keeps moving up the mountain, not forgetting that we have a mission. Even his facts are delivered as an afterthought, words just to fill the space as we continue what we set out to do. He has adapted perfectly to his environment.
“There’s nowhere else like this on Earth,” Ted says. “This is where the Cascade, Klamath, and Siskiyou mountain ranges meet. Three unique ecosystems colliding with each other.”
The elevation gain on the mountain is gradual and scaling it requires no special skills and no mountaineering experience. Those who expect the Sasquatch to be a specially adapted superclimber would never look here. The relative ease of hiking this mountain should make it a popular destination, but it doesn’t seem to attract the same number of tourists as the Three Sisters or Broken Top. That’s likely due to its isolation and distance from growing urban centres like Bend and the resort community of Sunriver.
Tree roots exposed by erosion form a tricky latticework, snares like trappers have used all over these parts for over a century. Ted slows down. We all slow down, stop scanning for traces of Professor Sorel in order to place each footstep carefully. Between certain roots are little burrows. The path we follow now is more a game trail than a human one. Ted’s quadriceps bulge in his khaki park ranger pants as he takes the hill.
Ted stops in his tracks and points to the sky. I stop on a dime and Saad crashes into my backpack. Ted kneels down and I peek over his shoulder to get a look at what has captured his attention. He looks back at me.
“A boot print,” he says. “Fresh.”
The track is crisp, clear, like the person who made it wanted us to see the brand name on the arch. It was definitely made after the rain that fell yesterday evening.
“Could it be the professor’s?” I ask.
“Not too many other people have a reason to be out this way, but I can’t prove it.”
Dad taught me to look for intent in tracks. His first lesson was a set of coyote tracks. He asked me if I could tell the difference between coyote tracks and dog tracks. Candice, our black lab, was a still a pup then, about the size of a coyote, and she lived outside, so her claws were not blunt like those of most dogs. I couldn’t see a difference — I tried to notice features in the mud that differed from the prints our own dog made, but there was nothing. Dad said the difference was intent. Dogs are constantly having fun, sniffing every tree, looping around. Coyotes either want to eat or return to their den, that’s all. When you know how an animal moves and why, you can predict where it will move to.
I know Professor Sorel will be carrying the same survival kit I am. Old-time woodsmen like Professor Sorel and my father always tout their virtues. A good survival kit can be packed inside a tobacco tin and fit comfortably in your pocket. Dad’s looked effortless, as though they were run-of-the-mill, everyday accessories. Living in Cleveland, I don’t have much need for waterproof matches, flints, candles, fish hooks and line, a compass, snare wire, a flexible saw, or a beta light. Luckily, you can’t drive around the Pacific Northwest without finding plenty of camping-supply stores dotting the highway side. The survival kit shopping list is written in permanent marker on one of the fatty folds of my brain. I do have a magnifying glass at home, and a needle and thread, as well as the old tobacco tin my dad gave me when we made my first survival kit together. I also assembled a rudimentary medical kit with bandages, analgesics, antihistamines, antibiotics, water-sterilizing tablets, and potassium permanganate. I threw in a condom for good measure — a common tactic among soldiers, as they make great expandable water bags.
I have this one memory of my dad before he went off to war. We were in a park, having a picnic, when my mom suddenly shrieked. A big green praying mantis had crawled onto our blanket. Dad reached around behind the critter and plucked it from the blanket, setting it gently down in his palm. He held the insect out to me, not close enough to be really scary, but enough that it felt like bugs were crawling on my skin.
The world is full of wonders, little darling, we gotta appreciate them, he said.
There’s no telling how much of that memory is the truth. Memory is not reliable, there are plenty of studies to back that up. Details get dropped, some added, years and emotions act as editors. I’d like to have known more about the man Dad was before he shipped out to the Persian Gulf to fight in a war, the reasons for which are largely forgotten. When I see photos of him from that time, I realize how truly young he was when he became a husband, a father, and a soldier. He was four years younger than I am now when he went to Iraq.
The war must have changed him — it’s hard to imagine that such a thing hadn’t — but I can’t be sure. Mom assumed that when Dad came out of the army it would only be a matter of time before he worked a nine-to-five and settled into a r
outine. Instead, Dad worked odd jobs while Mom was a receptionist at a nearby elementary school. He never took on commitments that required him to go to a particular jobsite for more than two days in a row. If he weren’t so skilled a man, this may have gone unnoticed. But people around town liked Dad, they loved his work, and he was seen as fundamentally honest, like he’d never rip you off. If anything he charged too little to fix an eavestrough or repair a set of broken stairs.
Still, the days after he got back were some of the happiest of my life. We went camping in the mountains almost every weekend. Sometimes, during the week, when I was in school, Dad would go up to the mountains and fish or hunt, sometimes he’d camp overnight. I loved the father-daughter time, and I learned to love the outdoors. Mom stayed home. As I child, I thought nothing of it. Mom’s not much of a camper, Dad told me. That seemed reasonable. I didn’t like art class or soccer, and if I’d had the option to stay home from them I would have.
The first time I said no to a father-daughter camping trip, Dad looked at me as though I were a stranger on the street asking him for money. That one look still haunts me: I see it when I think of him and I almost feel ill. I was twelve, I had gotten my first period and I couldn’t tell him. I cried in a stall in the washroom at school, knowing he’d be annoyed with me, but I was too embarrassed to tell him why I didn’t feel up to going. How do you explain that to a man who never once saw you as a girl?
It took me years to see that Dad needed these trips more than I did. He needed the peace of the forests, the numbing cold of mountain streams. He even grew to need Bigfoot.
In the trail in front of us, a branch, jeweled with the opening buds of spring, has been snapped. Its tip points downward toward the earth. Ted pauses at this, looks back at me and nods. A rock the size of a softball lies in the middle of the trail, muddy side up. Another sign of recent disturbance. There are no pockmarks in the soil, no gaping hole left missing a rock. There’s no reason, as far as I can tell, to carry a rock and drop it right there in the middle of the trail.