These pikas seemed to have colonized logging slash! The closest one led me a slow chase all around the slash pile (or “cull deck,” as the Forest Service fuels crews call them), sometimes right below my feet but always escaping. We exchanged calls, as I’ve so often done in arctic-alpine locales: “Squeek?” “Geek!” I gained one or two fleeting glimpses but no definitive look. The call was unmistakable, and the behavior was just like that of pikas on a rockslide.
When I thought about it, I saw that the structure of the log dump was not so different from a rockslide. Crumbling white plastic netting covered the little-burned slash of mostly large, broken logs. These culls involve much biomass, and of course it doesn’t all burn. I’d seen scores of slash piles covered with slick black plastic in recent weeks. I shook my head to see that they sometimes burned the plastic along with the slash, releasing not only scarce nitrogen but also toxins to the clear, high air.
In the afternoon I again walked past the unit. Hearing no pika calls, I threw a stick and exacted a few “geeks,” which led me to the creature’s haystack. Beneath a slanted log two feet across, providing protection overhead but open to the northeast sun, lay the herbaceous mound. It was about a yard across and a foot deep and composted on the bottom. It was probably several years old. I recognized the plants in it: lots of pearly everlasting flowers, stems, and leaves; bunchberry dogwood; sword fern; fireweed; oval-leaved huckleberry; a little noble fir. Also salmonberry, alder, and willow. The harvester had urinated atop its stack. Concerned “weets” sounded at a distance, moving around me as I examined the hoard.
Following a little stream some fifteen yards away to the north, I found a secondary stack under a log with the same orientation, containing mostly bunchberry strung out in a line. A varied thrush strummed in the distance as the light softened. I got a flicker of a sighting as a pika dashed beneath the charred gray logs. More than one report has described Bigfoot shifting rocks, catching pikas, nibbling their heads off. It would have to be a very clever creature to do that.
That slash pile should be acceptable pika habitat for a long time to come. Nothing much was growing there, and what was, they were eating. By the time these trees rot there should be another clear-cut to move into nearby. That part was depressing, since the unit next door comprised the finest noble fir forest I’d ever been in.
Over an ale at my camp, I pondered this adaptive shift. I’d seen pikas among basalt boulders near sea level, down at Beacon Rock on the Columbia, so the altitude didn’t surprise me as much as the substrate. Later, in a dusty junk and book shop in Carson, I checked the pika entry in Victor Cahalane’s Mammals of North America. He wrote that pikas have been known to live in sawmill slab piles or logjams in streams. Even though I’d studied, watched, and written of pikas for years, I didn’t know this. Clearly, this dun little critter has a broader ecological amplitude—more ways to live—than I’d appreciated. This rockslide specialist seems to be one of the few creatures that has made an adaptive shift to take advantage of at least some kinds of logging. As the pikas retired beneath their logs, what I knew to be true expanded.
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If a lagomorph most often identified with alpine granite can thrive in sea-level basalt and mid-elevation woodpiles, what does that say for a primate’s chances of switching from forest to scrub? Any beast that has lasted this long in our busy midst would have to be fairly adaptable. And some of the most convincing reports of Bigfoot come not from dense forest but from the lavalands and shrub steppe east of the Cascade Crest. These reports argue for a creature that could tolerate second growth or even embrace it, as in Jim Hewkin’s view.
However, Peter Byrne counters convincingly that Yeti was never a “snowman,” abominable or otherwise, except on rare occasion; he believes the Himalayan Bigfoot to be a forest dweller who occasionally climbs the heights. If he is correct, our animal might logically be construed as a woodland species too. Most signs of Sasquatch have been found in the deepwood and along roads and streams penetrating it. And there is the question of food. As I saw over and over in my journey, a matrix of old and young forest, with meadows and blow-downs and burns, provides a more abundant and varied diet for a foraging primate than clear-cuts and plantations alone. But for me the strongest argument in favor of big apes staying with big trees has to do with cover and privacy. Every animal needs cover, and the bigger the animal, the more cover it needs.
Can you imagine a landscape of seedlings and Christmas trees concealing a viable population of apes larger than ourselves? I can’t—particularly woods worked often and well known to the workers who cruise timber, survey boundaries, build roads, and fell the trees, plant, thin, and fell them again. Whereas a matrix including large tracts of little-trodden older jungle—for jungle it is—could easily conceal some great beast, especially a smart one that knows how to move and how to hide.
In the end we must fall back on imagination. The question then becomes not whether Bigfoot needs old growth but what kind of a forest we can imagine Bigfoot living in. I don’t doubt they could adapt to some degree, employing the brush and the clear-cut, even the doghair reprod, as elements of their home range, faces of their potential habitat, not without rewards. But I can’t see Bigfoot taking to the cut-over land as well as those pikas have. Instead I can see it doing just as the pikas do as a species—using the highlands, the lowlands, the lavalands, the forest floors, and even the cuts—but as a shifting population, not as isolated colonies.
This won’t satisfy my friend who wondered if Bigfoot preferred second growth, except in knowing that I have considered her point carefully. But allocating the remaining old growth based on Bigfoot’s needs couldn’t be any more arbitrary than the traditional method. What is the least form of forest that could conceivably harbor working members of one primate species and foraging members of another that has more use for wild cherries than chain saws? A lot to gamble on a whim? What previous plan has done any better? If we believe in owls but hold them in contempt, perhaps we should adopt a standard that few believe in but would hold in awe if they did. Unable to reconcile the desires and needs of our own species, perhaps we should appoint Bigfoot as arbiter, a species so fabulous that we couldn’t help but take it into account if it ever cared to reveal itself. In this way a maybe-imaginary cousin could serve as an emissary between two family branches with little language in common.
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In the early morning I walked back to the first mossy brook on the Quartz Creek Trail to filter a gallon of water. A cool green pleasure, this chore—to lie on my belly on the cleft-cedar footbridge with devil’s club and old growth overhead, wild ginger, inside-out flower, and violets all around, ferns and moss buffering the brook. I tried the filter’s drinking-straw attachment so I could sip directly from the stream, a delight long denied. The water was cold, clear, fine—better even than the good Kalama ale. And for breakfast more chanterelles along the trail. Across the creek a water ouzel piped in the day, drowning out the helicopters.
7
Monty West and the
Well-Adapted Ape
In this respect man resembles those forms, called by naturalists protean . . . having thus escaped the action of natural selection.
—Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man
When I decided to include a car in my travel plans, I realized that I would have to devote a certain amount of time and resources to keeping it on the road. My venerable Honda, Powdermilk, had never given me trouble in remote places, and I had faith. It was rewarded: the worst that befell me was a weak battery when I left Quartz Creek. On hills, with the little 1,300-cc
engine, I’ve been accused of having hamsters under the hood. This time, when I checked the battery I found a rodent under the hood all right—a pregnant mouse stuck in a hole in the frame. The hole was half an inch in diameter, but her broad belly was at least an inch across. She’d gotten her big-eared head, forelegs, and chest through the hole and
then became stuck. I’d found evidence in the auto of her nibbling before, but what was the attraction of a hole with nothing on the other side? Whatever her plans were, they’d gang all to hell agley.
I thought she was dead. Checking, I found her not only alive but as agitated as you might be under the circumstances. I tugged her by the nape as gently as I could, unable to imagine her belly and pelvic girdle fitting through the perforation in the metal flange. Weakened from the struggle (all night long?), she squeaked but did not resist. Eventually I got her through with no obvious damage. Her hindquarters were wet and numb. I placed her, all sleekit and cow’rin’, on a stump with cheese and crackers, and she came around. Soon, fully restored, the mouse scampered into the woods, and I coasted to a start down the hill.
I thought about this odd but minor incident, which interested me for several reasons, as I cruised the Lewis River road. First, I was struck by how quickly my attitude toward mice could change. I’ve always loved mice, but at home we trap them because of their fondness for crapping in the stove, the dishes, and the food, for making nests in the kitchen linens, and for nibbling wires. With the spread of the deadly hantaviruses, the reasons are more than aesthetic ones. Yet the same creature I would have trapped at home I here had struggled with great care to release from a trap inadvertently set. How relative are our attitudes toward animals!
Second, this was a deer mouse (Peromyscus maniculatus), the same as our home mice—arguably the most numerous and successful mammal in North America. One way to define something you’re not sure about is to define what it is not; in their numbers and range, you could say that deer mice are the opposite of what we imagine Bigfoot to be. Even if this individual was showing no great talent for survival, on the whole her species has fancy-danced so well to natural selection’s jig that it is the last candidate for endangerment on anyone’s list. Deer mice are also the quintessential generalists, betting their adaptive marbles on reproductivity rather than on specialized gadgets or behavior. Any habitat will do, from hemlocks to houses to Hondas. Not total camp followers like house mice, they do prefer the north-temperate wooded locales; our own habitats are just one option.
Third, I was reminded that deer mice are part of the likely answer to everyone’s biggest question about Bigfoot’s existence: why don’t we ever find a body? In fact we don’t often find the bodies of any big animals, because bears, coyotes, and ravens strip and scatter the bones, and deer mice recycle the calcium in the bones in no time. So these little rodents help us quantify the traits of a large, rare specialist; point out the slippery slope of our own animal ethics; and tidy up the landscape of Bigfoot bones and other litter. That fortunate, wee and tim’rous beastie stuck with me.
−−
I stopped at the North Wood Store at Eagle Cliff to try for distilled water, which they did have. As I paid and went out to refresh my battery, a parade of costumed men alighted from large trucks and came into the store. They were dressed in camouflage jumpsuits, and their faces were painted black in stripes and blotches. New trucks, big men, my age—Vietnam Rangers holding a reunion, or perhaps survivalist gun nuts? I shut my hood as they filed out of the store bearing candy bars and jerky sticks. “Let’s do it,” barked the leader, and they pulled out with a roar and much agitation of gravel. An impressive display of macho so early in the morning.
I spoke with Kevin Landacre, the proprietor of the North Wood Store and Eagle Cliff Cabins for the past eight years. Dressed in jeans and a green alligator shirt, Kevin was balding, with a brown fringe of hair and a short beard, and relaxed. Single, he obviously enjoyed talking at length with folks in the store. Some things still had him buffaloed, though, as when a kid rolled up on a bike and said, “Uh, Kevin, somehow the toilet’s got overfloating.” He told me it was hard to make it with the downturn in logging caused by overcutting on the south side of the Lewis Reservoir, as well as by federal timber withdrawals for spotted owl protection. Even so, he felt that the remaining lowland old growth should be saved—a rare outlook among timberland merchants. It was clear that the forest meant more to Landacre than making a living, as vital as that was.
I asked whether he’d heard any reports of Bigfoot sightings. “Not myself,” he said. “But I’m open-minded about it . . . I’d love to see one.” He said there had been wolf and wolverine sightings in the area, contrary to the beliefs of local mammalogists, and that a wolverine had been found as a roadkill by the Wind River maintenance crew two or three years before. So, he implied, why should we rule out Bigfoot? I agreed that seeing a wolf or wolverine, long thought to be gone from southern Cascadia, might be even rarer than spotting a mere Sasquatch.
Before I left, Kevin told me that the guys in camouflage were bow-hunters. I had heard that some Bigfoot hunters from Vancouver, Washington, pursued their quarry with large trucks, camo, and big guns. I was relieved to hear that these men were merely out to skewer grouse and deer. Kevin excused himself to give careful directions and suggestions to a woman in a rental car who was eager to see Mount St. Helens but was scared of being in “wilderness.” That reminded me I had places to go. “Let’s do it,” I said to no one in particular and pulled out, with only a weak murmur from my charging battery.
I wanted to see something of the much-remarked Clear Creek corridor, the longest uncut stand of Douglas fir in southwest Washington. I headed up Clear Creek as far as the road went, then turned onto Spencer Meadows Road and on up into the mist. The day was cloudy, cool, and damp. Scraps of old growth dripped with sodden traceries of short, wispy lichens, like moldy green tinsel. The paved one-lane road had not been built for people to view the Pacific yews, gleaming red in the rain; it was the result of years of fat Forest Service road-building budgets. As I climbed through a patchwork of clear-cuts, I viewed the raison d’être. Unlike the Willapa Hills, my home ground, here the clear-cuts were relatively small and not all contiguous. This showed the attempted restraint of the Forest Service compared to the private companies who hold total sway in my backyard. Some snags had been left, and some of the cutting was selective. This was not forestry at its worst, but I doubted it was the worst I would see.
The only car I’d seen for miles was parked at the Spencer Butte trailhead. An oldie, its bumper stickers read test peace—not nuclear weapons and this is not an abandoned car. It did not belong to the archers. Having heard of parked cars bashed for their owners’ views as expressed on bumper stickers, I had never adorned mine. When the road rose at last into lodgepole pines, a golden-mantled ground squirrel expressed loud opinions that probably weren’t far from my own.
Lichen-swaddled noble firs stood by the Cussed Hollow Trail. Clear-cuts and young plantations of noble fir followed. Light rain fell from a cold gray sky whose dull light slowly strobed as I passed from mountain hemlock and noble fir to clear-cut and back again. At Spencer Meadows the pavement ended. I struck left toward the headwaters of Clear Creek. Now came the steep-slope clear-cuts, bleeding with erosion. This was just about as bad as Willapa, the difference being that trees had been left standing between the scars. The sense of fragmentation became acute, with vistas of ancient-forested mountainsides on the west side of Clear Creek facing slashed and burned foreground on the east. The road ended in the devastation of a partly burned clear-cut with intact forests on all sides.
I parked the car near the headwaters of Clear Creek, below Shark Rock, in the western reaches of the Dark Divide. The rush of water behind me, the soft drip from the trees, ravens gronking far off—these were the only sounds I heard. Driving up, I’d been listening to a tape of natural sounds from the temperate rain forest sent by my friend Gordon Hempton. Known as the Sound Tracker, the Emmy-winning Hempton has rambled the world in search of settings devoid of noise pollution where he could record the native sounds. At just this moment—no saws, no safety horns from a logging job, no engines or airplanes or voices—I felt I was in the middle of Hempy’s tape. I recognized the rarity of the moment and enjoy
ed it for all it was worth.
A strange kind of amphibian, the tailed frog, occupies high, cold streams in the Pacific Northwest—except where the land has been so denuded that the streams silt up and rise in temperature. The tadpoles have suckerlike mouths for holding on to rocks, and the adult male has a cloacal tail to facilitate mating in fast currents. The tailed frog’s nearest relatives, the leiopelmids, live in New Zealand—a much greater biogeographical leap than that represented by a great ape in the New World.
I’d never found the tailed frog and decided to investigate this high tributary of Clear Creek. Into the afternoon I searched the steep little stream, climbing among the stones and chill cascades. Large trees had been felled across the creek from one side, blown down from the inadequate buffer strip on the other. For the cut to follow the creek, more or less, seemed unusual. Nowadays large woody debris is sometimes left in the water for riparian structure to benefit salmon, but this was just the random result of the cut line.
I found no tailed frogs, though I had an unusually good look. Crossing a log, I fell face-first into a pool from a little height when the rotting wood gave way. I continued my search for a while, probing the habitat on the frog’s own level. But soaked and pretty cold, I had to get out and dry off. I went back to the car, stripped, toweled, and was about to don dry clothes and leave when a different impulse took over. The rain had stopped, and the air temperature was in the fifties, comfortable enough for a denizen of the coastal rain forest such as I.
Nude, I walked a little way and climbed a stump. In the dropping light and leaden cool, I regarded the woods around me in a complete circle, peering into mists in the crowns of firs and into the deepest recesses of the forest. I wondered if my naked, furless, puny body was being watched and remarked with wonder. And that’s when I remembered Monty West.
Where Bigfoot Walks Page 9