by Tim Cahill
The last resort is called tuba. This is the rapidly fermenting sap of the coconut palm, colored with mangrove bark. In the morning, the tuba gatherers bring in the daily crop. Fresh, the liquor is sweet, orange, and there's a white frost on the top. It is not very alcoholic and of little use to a snake diver. Tuba of a more aristocratic vintage—say three days— is more suited to your purpose. It's bitter as a lemon and will set you howling at the moon.
The Work: A few hours before sunset, you will head out across the bloodwarm Vasayan Sea in a dugout outrigger called a banca, powered by an eighteen-horsepower Briggs & Stratton engine. You'll relax in the bow and have some more rum—it takes an hour to cover the twelve miles to Gato.
The island is a little over an acre and perhaps two hundred feet high. Sheer rock walls rise about eighty feet, then give way to an inward-sloping tangle of dense brush. At
water level, you will see many caves set deep into the rock walls. The water inside the caves is a deep blue—the same shade of blue you see inside of fastidious people's toilet bowls.
The snakes hide in little nooks and crannies during the day. You will do your diving at night, when they swarm inside the caves in their serpentine mating ballet.
Take one last sip of tuba, switch on your flashlight, slip into the dark water, and duck into the cave. Train your light on the water. Drop down about twenty feet to a ledge and hang there. On a really lucky night, you'll be in the midst of a maelstrom of snakes. Grab one just behind the head. The skin will be dry to the touch, not at all slimy.
To train yourself in the proper technique, grab your left thumb just below the knuckle with the thumb and first two fingers of your right hand. The snake is larger of course, but there is a knucklelike swelling just below the head where you want to grab him.
Now take the snake and slip his head under one of the rubber bracelets on your wrist. Find another snake. A good diver will surface with three snakes on either wrist.
What To Do If You Get Bit: Review Preparing for Work. Whether your medicine is rum, wine, or tuba, ingest an improbably excessive quantity. The boatmen will take you back in the banca. You will be lying on your back, drinking three-day tuba and singing some song half-remembered from your childhood. There will be a nasty paralytic numbness in your arm and it will swell like a goiter. You will probably not die. Snake divers seldom die. Keep repeating, "I will probably not die."
MONSTERS
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To the east the land opens to treeless rolling hills. Great high-tension towers converge on the Chenowith Converter and scar the land as far as the eye can see. There was no cover for him there. But to swim the river from here, four miles west of The Dalles, he had only to cross two roads: the old highway to Portland, US 30, and the new Interstate, 80N.
Things had changed since he had last been down to the river. There was an aluminum plant nearby, a new shopping center, a Rocket gas station, a new and used car lot, and—strangest of all for him during the nights—The Dalles drive-in, which specializes in films like Deathmaster and The Two-Headed Thing. In the early daylight hours of this first day of June 1971, he stood in a small meadow above what had been a large foothill apple orchard. It was now filled with flat electrified platforms and called The Pinewood Mobile Manor.
Joe Mederios, maintenance man for the trailer court, was watering flowers near his trailer that morning. Directly across US 30 is a large fenced meadow. At about one hundred fifty yards a rock ledge of perhaps thirty-five feet banks a higher meadow. Mederios caught a movement along the edge from a corner of his eye. He assumed it was George Johnson, the owner of the land, and went back to watering his flowers. But his mind was engaged in a curious and unconscious arithmetic. He had seen Johnson on the land previously—it wasn't unusual—but this figure was too big . . . the arms were too long . . . the shoulders too broad.
Mederios turned to the ridge for a longer look. What he saw was a shaggy, gray figure he took to be at least ten feet tall. It had an oval face and crest or dorsal ridge along the top of its head. The face was flat, brown, and hairless.
The man turned back to his flowers and considered his situation. He was responsible to some Portland businessmen who would be down to The Dalles the next day. If he
were to report the sighting, there would be deputies and curiosity-seekers tromping all over his carefully watered flowers about the time his bosses arrived. Mederios later told the sheriff's deputy Rich Carlson that he didn't report the incident for fear he'd "be called a nut."
The next day, around noon, the three businessmen met Mederios and were in the midst of discussions in a trailer-office fronting the meadow when Mederios again saw an erect apelike figure through a window. The four men ran outside and watched from across the road as it moved through a break in the ridge and came into the lower meadow, where it walked among the sparse scrub oak near the rocks. It stopped near a small tree, and from where the men stood, it appeared to be somewhat taller than the tree. The four men and the other creature stared at one another for perhaps a minute, before it turned, went up through the break in the rocks, and disappeared into the upper meadow.
This time the sighting was reported and deputy Carlson went out to investigate.
From Carlson's report filed on June second, 1971: "Mr. Mederios ... described it as being about ten feet tall, greyish in color, real wide shoulders and arms that hung way down. He went on to say it looked like an overgrown ape. He stated it was not a bear. The creature was walking upright at the time of the sighting."
The Portland men, solid citizens all, confirmed the sighting and description.
The same night, about 9:30, when the last summer light was fading in the meadow, a man named Rich Brown, a high school music teacher, and his wife were returning from a choir practice he had been conducting. At the entrance to the trailer court, Brown's wife either shouted or screamed and pointed to a figure in the lower meadow. Brown swung his car around and put the headlights stark into the meadow. He was joined by a second car, and eventually Mederios, who stepped out of the office to see why the cars were blocking the entrance.
At a distance of about sixty-five yards the creature froze and stared into the lights. Brown sprinted for his trailer,
grabbed a Winchester 30.06 with a four-power scope. He opened his car door and steadied the rifle. He considered a shot to the heart, then the head. With the scope cross-hairs squarely between the thing's expressionless flat black eyes, he released the safety. Like any good marksman, Brown squeezes the trigger slowly. In the moment between the final squeeze and the shot, Rich Brown, who had just come from a church, made a complicated moral decision.
"I couldn't shoot it," he said later, "because it looked more human than animal."
Aside from Indian legends, which are virtually timeless, the Bigfoot saga on the North American Continent begins in 1811 when the explorer David Thompson noted in his daily journal the track of "a large animal . . . the whole is about fourteen inches by eight inches wide," in the Canadian Rockies by the site of what is now Jasper, Alberta. Several months later Thompson found similar tracks which he followed for nearly one hundred yards. "Reports from the old time," he noted offhandedly, "had made the head branches of this river and the mountains in the vicinity the abode of apes or more very large animals."
In July 1884, a Victoria, British Columbia, newspaper, the Daily Colonist, published an account of the capture of a gorilla-type animal the miners called Jacko. About four foot seven inches tall and weighing about 125 pounds, the animal may have been born a Bigfoot. No other mention can be found of Jacko in the Daily Colonist.
The Seattle Times reported a series of bizarre great ape sightings around Mount St. Lawrence near Kelso, Washington, in July 1918. In 1924, a group of miners camped near Mount St. Helens in Washington claimed a horde of giant apelike creatures attacked them in the middle of the night. One was shot and rolled into a deep canyon that is known today as Ap
e Canyon. Also in 1924, a prospector named Albert Ostman claimed that while camping near Vancou-
ver he was picked up in his sleeping bag and carried twenty-five miles by a giant hairy ape. They arrived in a sheltered valley where he was curiously observed for several days by a family of four Bigfeet. He eventually fed them chewing tobacco and escaped while they were sick.
In 1940, the Chapmans, an American Indian family living near the Fraser River in British Columbia, claimed a giant hairy ape walked out of the woods and turned over a massive barrel of salt fish in the shed. Footprints were left, and local residents reported they were sixteen inches long and eight inches wide. The stride length was about four feet. Mrs. Chapman said the creature was about eight feet tall.
American sightings made national headlines in the Bluff Creek area of Northern California in October 1958. On the ninth of that month, the Humboldt Times reported that Jerry Crew, a road builder for the Granite Logging Company, made a cast of a huge footprint—sixteen inches long—he found on the damp bed of a newly built lumbering access road. The stride was fifty inches long, he said, and ran along the road for a distance of about three quarters of a mile.
Five days later two construction workers for the same company were driving along a remote mountain road late at night when they saw what they took to be the owner of the prints. Ray Kerr, then forty-three, said, "It ran upright like a man, swinging long hairy arms. ... It looked eight to ten feet tall to me." Tracks found the next morning were identical to the first set.
Interviewed in the Humboldt Times, Ray Wallace, a partner in the logging firm, denied that he had perpetrated a hoax. "Who knows anyone foolish enough to ruin their own business," he said. Fifteen men had quit their jobs since the sightings. Workers reported that they saw nothing during the day but that every morning they found huge and apparently curious prints around the equipment. Huge gasoline drums had been turned over. Some workers had the uncomfortable sensation that they were being watched during the day. "I've got three tractors up there without operators, man," Wallace complained. "And all my brush-cutting crew has quit."
Dr. Maurice Tripp, a geophysicist from Los Gatos, California, made casts of the prints which proved that the toes showed mechanical function. After studying the soil and the depth of the print, Tripp estimated the probable creature's weight at eight hundred pounds. None of his casts showed impact ridges, which would have indicated that they were made by some kind of mechanical stamping machine.
Another series of prints, 1,089 in all, were discovered near Bossberg, Washington, in October 1969. The tracks measured seventeen and a half inches by seven inches. The right foot seemed twisted inward and calluses on the outside of the foot and the extrapolated bone structure indicated the creature who made the prints had a clubfoot. Dr. Grover Krantz, a physical anthropologist at Washington State University, studied casts of the Bossberg prints and concluded that if the tracks were hoaxed, the fakers were "absolute experts in human anatomy."
Since the 1958 Bluff Creek sightings, hundreds have been recorded, some less credible than others. While Albert Ost-man only claimed to have been kidnapped by Bigfeet, one Helen Westring confessed right on the front page of the National Bulletin (July 1969), I Was Raped by an Abominable Snowman. Seems that while Helen was out hunting one day in the Minnesota woods she was attacked by a giant horny ape who stripped her of her flimsy clothes in a trice and had his hairy way with her right there on the mute forest loam.
There are many men hunting Bigfoot on a more or less regular basis, and one of the most impressive is a forty-six-year-old, Dublin-born former big-game hunter named Peter Byrne. Financed by Ohio businessman Tom Page and several others who wish to remain anonymous, Byrne has one paid assistant, two young volunteers, two International Scout jeeps, a pickup truck, a helicopter on twenty-four-hour notice, and
a plethora of equipment including infrared nightscopes and sophisticated tranquilizer guns.
Byrne, who does not take a salary from expedition funds but lives off his own income, has a Hemingwayesque history. In World War II he flew for the RAF and subsequently ended up as assistant manager of a tea plantation in Nepal. He once effected the rescue of an Everest expedition stranded by an avalanche at twenty thousand feet. For fifteen years he led big-game hunts in Africa.
In 1968, with the game thinning out (more from poachers than hunters), Byrne wearied of leading bumbling clients through the brush and pointing them at the animals he had come to respect. He organized the nonprofit International Wildlife Conservation Society. As executive director, Byrne spent two years creating two large tiger sanctuaries in Nepal. The project was completed in November 1970.
While in Nepal Byrne had become fascinated with the legend of the Yeti (the perhaps mythical Abominable Snowman, cousin to the perhaps mythical Bigfoot). He disputed the findings of Sir Edmund Hillary's 1960 Yeti-hunting expedition, insisting that a month's search didn't constitute a real effort to find the beast. The Yeti scalp Hillary took from a Tibetan monastery had been analyzed as a goat- and antelope-hair fabrication, proving, to Hillary's satisfaction, that none of the sacred Yeti relics in any of the monasteries were authentic. Byrne felt that the scalp Hillary found was a copy of an original he never saw. Byrne himself had visited half a dozen of the monasteries and in one secretly cut the thumb from a mummified hand. He wired a mummified human thumb to the palm and sent the relic to scientists in Paris, then London, then the United States. In all cases the scientists came up with the inconclusive conclusion that the thumb was not human, that it was animal, and that further, it was unclassifiable.
In the Himalayas, only two Europeans have claimed Yeti sightings. Byrne, fascinated with the hypothetical creatures to a point just short of obsession, knew that there were hundreds of sightings in the Pacific Northwest. In 1971 he organized the present three-year search. He has, to date,
logged hundreds of thousands of miles on the jeeps, interviewed hundreds of claimants, talked at length to the Indians about their legends and knowledge of the apes, and camped in the woods in various sighting areas nearly a year's worth of elapsed time. Byrne regards as his strongest piece of evidence an eighteen-second piece of film taken by one Roger Patterson near Bluff Creek in the early afternoon hours of October seventh, 1967.
Patterson, a small rancher and weekend Bigfoot hunter from Yakima, Washington, had spent four years and thousands of dollars on his search. He claims to have been on horseback in the Bluff Creek area with Bob Gimlin, his tracker, when they caught sight of a female Bigfoot crouched by a stream. Patterson's horse spooked and nearly threw him. He pulled his camera from his saddlebag and ran toward the creature, trying to focus simultaneously.
The 16mm color film begins with a wild, jerking view of the manzanita underbrush. The camera steadies, pans right, and focuses in on an erect, apelike figure which appears to be about thirty feet away. It walks, at a slight angle to camera, into a thickly wooded area and disappears. It turns once toward the camera and its face shows large black eyes, a small nose, a massive jaw, and a crest or ridge on the head. Muscle movement can be seen in the upper right thigh. When the right arm swings back, large, hair-covered breasts become visible.
Patterson, apparently anxious to validate his film, took a lie detector test, which he passed. He submitted the film to the Smithsonian's director of primate biology, John Napier (now visiting professor of primate biology at the University of London), who had expressed his doubts in the recently published book Bigfoot.
The walk seems to Napier "self-consciously" fluid. The stride is essentially that of a human male while the filmed creature is female. The crest is a male feature on orangutans and gorillas, seldom seen in females. The heavy buttocks seen in the Patterson film are a human feature, out of place on the apelike superstructure. Furthermore, the fourteen-by-seven-inch-prints—on a human scale—would indicate a
creature nearly eight feet tall, while both Byrne and Napier have estimated the height of the Patterson creature at about six foot s
ix. Napier concludes his discussion of the film by saying that he won't proclaim it a hoax almost solely because, "I cannot see the zipper."
Byrne respectfully disagrees. "Napier is using human formulas to deal with an unknown quantity," he says.
(Patterson died of cancer in 1972. Byrne visited him in December when he was a gravely ill man. Patterson continued to insist on the validity of his film. For what it's worth, to my untrained eye, the film is very convincing.)
Byrne published the results of a year's investigation in the prestigious Explorers Journal. His case for the existence of the Giant Apes (which he calls Omah, after the local Indians), briefly and inadequately summarized, is as follows:
1. There are hundreds of thousands of virtually unexplored and roadless wilderness areas in the Pacific Northwest. The habitat of the Omah might be in the steep, thickly wooded gorges of this region.
2. These same areas support black and brown bears. If the Omah were an omnivore, with a diet roughly similar to that of a bear, the forest could easily support a small Omah population.
3. There have been few sightings, because like most primates, the Omah is wary of man. (First reports of African gorillas in the early seventeenth century were treated as folklore. Not until the middle of the nineteenth century did Europeans succeed in tracking down the shy beasts.)
Byrne does not speculate on the origin of Omah, though when pressed he will mention the fossil remains of a Chinese primate anthropologists call Gigantopithecus. "Its estimated height was between ten and twelve feet, and the fossils were discovered in an area of China scientists think