by John Zada
In the
VALLEYS
of the
NOBLE
BEYOND
IN SEARCH OF THE SASQUATCH
JOHN ZADA
Copyright © 2019 by John Zada
Maps and illustrations © 2019 by Briony Penn
Cover design by Cindy Hernandez
Cover photograph © John Zada
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].
FIRST EDITION
Printed in the United States of America
First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: July 2019
Quotations from Caravan of Dreams (© 1968, 2015 Idries Shah) and
Learning How to Learn (© 1978, 2017 Idries Shah) printed
with permission of The Idries Shah Foundation
Quotation from Mystical Poems of Rumi (© 1968 by A. J. Arberry) printed
with permission of the University of Chicago Press
This book was designed by Norman E. Tuttle
at Alpha Design & Composition.
This book was set in 12.5-pt. Bembo
by Alpha Design & Composition of Pittsfield, NH.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.
ISBN 978-0-8021-2935-2
eISBN 978-0-8021-4716-5
Atlantic Monthly Press
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
groveatlantic.com
19 20 21 22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For the people of the coast.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The journeys chronicled here took place before the most recent changes in government in Canada and British Columbia, and among First Nations mentioned here; the narrative is told in the present tense and reflects some political and economic details specific to that period. In addition, a few names have been changed to respect the privacy of individuals living in the smallest of communities I visited.
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Author’s Note
Map
Epigraph
PART I
1 The Beckoning
2 The Strangest Thing
3 Sasqualogy
PART II
4 Bella Bella (Waglisla)
5 Koeye (Kvai)
PART III
6 Wuikinuxv
7 Ocean Falls (Laiq)
8 Bella Coola (Q’umk’uts’)
9 The Reckoning
Epilogue: The Noise
Postscript
Addenda
Acknowledgments
References
Endnotes
Index
Back Cover
They said, “He is not to be found, we too have searched.”
He answered, “He who is not to be found is my desire.”
—Jalal ad-Din Rumi, Masnavi-i Ma’navi
All Faith is false, all Faith is true:
Truth is the shattered mirror strown
in myriad bits; while each believes
his little bit the whole to own.
—Sir Richard Francis Burton,
The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi
PART I
1
THE BECKONING
In any field, find the strangest thing and then explore it.
—John Archibald Wheeler, physicist
A froth of dark, roiling clouds churns above the swaying canopy. The rain begins, but as a gentle caress.
I am trudging through ground moss and rotting blowdown to the symphonic pitter-patter of reconstituted sea. Shouldering a flimsy daypack and holding a single-barreled shotgun, Clark Hans, my hiking partner, leads me along a high, forested bluff overlooking an expansive valley. We reach a lookout on the edge of the bluff with a commanding view across the floodplain, where limestone mountains dressed in a patchwork of cedar, spruce, and hemlock vanish under strangleholds of mist. To our right, the river meets the ocean, a sullen, blotted-out void.
Clark stares into the distance.
“Here is right where it stood,” he says. “Where it looked down at me.”
I say nothing, bearing witness to a reverie I can barely understand.
A cool gust of wind washes over us. The rain increases.
“Let’s go,” Clark says, coming out of his trance. “We’ll follow the creek back.”
“The creek?” I say. “But you said there’s bears there. Why don’t we go back down the rock face?”
“Too slippery now from the rain.”
Clark heads back into the forest and marches in the opposite direction from which we came. I follow behind him, barely able to keep up. We come to the edge of a steep ravine, the slopes of which are filled with colonies of devil’s club, a spiky shrub as tall as a man. We skirt around the sharp-spined, broad-leaved plant, grasping at smaller trees and shrubs to avoid slipping down the hill in the ever-intensifying downpour.
We reach the bottom of the ravine, a narrow gully between the moss-encrusted walls of two mountains. We’re completely drenched. All around us, a nightmarish tangle of salal and salmonberry bushes rises above our heads, partly concealing enormous conifers reaching for the narrow opening of sky above the gorge. We can hear the nearby creek running, but it is nowhere to be seen.
Clark, exhaling plumes of foggy breath, scours the surroundings. Suddenly his eyes dart left. There is a rustling in the bushes up the gulch. It’s followed by the sound of something heavy moving.
Da-thump. Da-thump. Da-thump.
Fear clenches my chest. Clark remains frozen, his head cocked in the direction of the sound.
Da-thump.
There is something near us, waiting, watching, listening. I pick up what I think is a gamy animal smell mingling with the aroma of drenched evergreen. Clark takes hold of his gun with both hands. In almost zero visibility, the weapon offers little, if any, protection. Clark turns to me with an expression of muted alarm, trying to gauge my reaction.
Then: Da-thump! Da-thump! Da-thump!
“Go!” Clark yells, dashing through the berry bushes to a faint game trail. As I run behind him into the thicket sharp branches tear at my face and rain gear. All I can see is Clark’s backside a few feet in front of me.
A heaving, growling bark explodes around us.
WOOF-WOOF-WOOAHHF!
WOOF-WOOF-WOOAHHFFF!
I break into a sprint with my arms held up to my head to protect myself from whatever beast is nearly upon us. The barking resumes—louder now—and the terror spikes. Then I realize it’s Clark making the noises. He stops and cups his hands to his mouth.
“Hey, bear! Hey, grizzly-grizzly-grizzly!” he hollers at the top of his voice, a ploy to ward off any bears nearby.
Clark drops his arms and ducks into a waist-high tunnel-like trail in the brush. We’re forced to crawl on our hands and knees,
past sprawling blooms of wet, rotting skunk cabbage, making loud noises, and occasionally having to untangle ourselves from the branches that snag our packs. I realize that at any moment we might be ambushed and mauled by a startled grizzly. I’m awash in regret for what feels like a foolish undertaking—revisiting the perch of a legendary creature that also happens to be in the heart of bear country.
We come into a relatively dry enclosure of gargantuan Sitka spruces. Beneath a few of the trees, the forest floor is packed down. Clark wanders over to one of the impressions and moves his open palm over it.
“Day bed,” he says. “A mother and cub were just here.”
Clark gets up and heads into the younger brushy alder forest at the edge of the spruces, barking and yelping like a man possessed. I follow into yet another gauntlet of thorns. The novelty of exploring one of the last intact wilderness regions on the planet gives way to silent cursing.
And then reprieve. We emerge, bleary-eyed, from the darkness onto a bright, open estuary dotted with driftwood, mature berry bushes, and half-eaten salmon carcasses. Several bear trails interweave through the tall sedge grass. The invisible creek we were following appears, emptying into a wide, fast-moving river running gray with glacial silt into a fjord-like Pacific channel to our west. Clark stops, rests the butt of his gun on the ground, and turns to me with the smiling satisfaction of a man grateful to have come through.
“Nickle-Sqwanny,” he says.
Before us is the confluence of the Necleetsconnay River and the Bella Coola River, which drains an epic, fifty-mile-long valley of the same name. We are in the Great Bear Rainforest, a wilderness region the size of Ireland located along Canada’s rugged British Columbia coast. The partially protected area, touted as the largest expanse of unspoiled temperate rain forest left in the world, extends some 250 miles between Vancouver Island and the Alaska Panhandle.
Days earlier, I had arrived in the town of Bella Coola—a Nuxalk Nation community situated just a short distance from where we’re standing. A series of serendipitous encounters led me to Clark, who, people told me, had once seen a Sasquatch—a member of the alleged race of half-man, half-ape giants believed by some to inhabit the wilds of North America. The reputed hair-covered bipeds, known more colloquially as Bigfoots, don’t officially exist. No physical specimen, living or dead, has ever been produced. Because of that, mainstream science scoffs at the idea of such creatures, which are also considered by most people to be no more real than fairies or gnomes.
But like other residents of the Great Bear Rainforest, Clark Hans, a soft-spoken, fifty-one-year-old father of four, and erstwhile hunting guide turned artist, is convinced that the animals exist—and that he saw one. He agreed to take me to the location of his sighting; a spot he had been too afraid to revisit since the incident thirty years prior.
On that day in the spring of 1983, Clark had been on a duck-hunting trip in the Bella Coola estuary with two of his cousins. Upon arrival there, the group decided to split up. Clark would remain at the mouth of the Bella Coola River, and the others would head up the Necleetsconnay River. They agreed to meet later back at their boat.
Clark remembers that day as being eerily quiet. Nothing moved.
“All day I never seen a bird, I never seen a duck, I never heard nothing,” he said, recounting the story before taking me up the bluff. “It was just silence all day. And I couldn’t make no sense of it.”
The experience was made stranger by a memory from the week before, when Clark had ventured up the creek alone to check his animal traps. While there he had felt an unusual presence. Someone, or something, he felt, was watching him. He then discovered a cluster of young alders whose tops had been snapped back at the nine-foot level. It was something he’d never seen before, nor could he explain it.
The day he was hunting with his cousins, Clark continued to scour the estuary but found no birds. As he decided what to do next, his eye caught a distant movement on a moss-covered bluff on the mountain facing him. He saw what looked like a person moving into and out of the trees. Clark thought it might be one of his cousins, but he couldn’t tell for sure. Whoever it was kept weaving amid the foliage. After disappearing again, this time for much longer, the figure reemerged along the bluff closer to Clark. He estimates it was no more than two hundred feet away when it stepped into the open.
But what he saw caused him to shake his head and blink in disbelief. Directly ahead was not a person but a large, muscular humanoid, covered in jet-black hair, with wide shoulders and long arms, standing on two legs. Though it looked human, it had a menacing, bestial appearance.
“I never seen any person that big before in my life,” Clark said. “It was massive. It just stopped on the mountain and stared at me. And I stood there frozen.”
Clark thinks the encounter lasted one whole minute. But at the time, he said, it felt infinitely longer. Though he couldn’t make out the eyes in the general blackness of its face, the creature seemed to impale him with its gaze. A deep chill ran through Clark’s body. His legs became wobbly. And for a moment he felt as though he might pass out. Then the animal released Clark from its visual grip and casually shuffled off.
“It walked into the bush in just a few strides,” he said. “It didn’t run. It just calmly walked away like it couldn’t care less. They tell you not to be scared, but I was afraid.”
Clark had known about these creatures his whole life. Nuxalk traditional tales, passed down through the generations, speak of a pair of supernatural beings known as Boqs and Sninik, humanoids that are analogous to Sasquatches. Some in the community considered the animals to be a bad omen. Others claimed the creature’s very gaze could trigger a coma—or even death. As Clark stood stunned in the aftermath of his sighting, his mind flooded with scenario after terrifying scenario. Was the monster still watching him? Was it planning an ambush? Had it already cursed him? He’d heard that some people who had looked into the creatures’ eyes had gone mad. Maybe his spiraling fear was evidence that he too was now losing his mind.
The mortifying possibilities swirled into a vortex of dread. Clark had to flee. He tore off all his clothes and in an adrenaline-fueled feat of endurance crossed an ice-choked Bella Coola River delta, while holding his shotgun and clothes aloft to keep them dry.
Back in town, Clark’s uncle and grandfather found him slumped at the doorway, frazzled, wide-eyed, and teetering on the brink of hypothermic collapse. When they asked Clark what had happened, he tried to relate his story. But his speech was garbled and nonsensical. What little they did understand of his chattering gibberish was enough to alert them to what had happened.
The men did all they could to warm Clark up and calm him down. Later they burned sage and sang traditional chants to purify him of any negative emanations absorbed from the creature.
“I was naked during the ceremony,” Clark said. “They took my clothes and smoked those too—so the creature wouldn’t bother me. So it wouldn’t haunt me. But it still did.”
Clark’s fear and anguish deepened, and he was hospitalized for anxiety. After being discharged, days later, he underwent a complete transformation. Clark quit both smoking and drinking. He started going to church, and he took up drawing and painting. For a year he refused to go anywhere near the forest. Until he led me on the hike that afternoon, Clark had not once returned to the spot where he’d seen the creature three decades earlier. Neither had he climbed the nearby bluff where the animal, looking down on him, had so deeply altered the course of his life.
“I’d heard lots of Sasquatch stories before,” Clark said. “I used to tell people: ‘I’ll believe it when I see it.’ I never disbelieved it. I just said: ‘I’ll believe it when I see it.’ And when I did see it, I said: ‘Why me?’“
Ten days before meeting Clark, I had traveled from Toronto to British Columbia to work on a magazine story about the Great Bear Rainforest. After gaining a small amount of environmental protection in 2006, this lofty stretch of rugged coastline (best know
n for the white Kermode bear, or “spirit bear”) had been insinuating itself into the mind of the outside world. I had come to write about the area as an up-and-coming travel destination for those interested in seeing grizzly bears, going on hikes in primeval forests, and learning about the first peoples, who have inhabited this coast for at least fourteen thousand years.
But as is often the case with plans, little went as intended.
In the town of Bella Bella, on Campbell Island, the seat of the Heiltsuk First Nation, I found myself more interested in the people—and local goings-on—than in taking part in any touristy adventures on offer at the nonindigenous-owned local fishing lodge. While engaging with residents, I heard about a frightening incident. Months earlier, a monstrous humanoid had been seen on the edge of the community’s youth camp, located nearby at the mouth of the beautiful Koeye River on the mainland coast. It wasn’t the first such incident at the camp, I was told.
Deeply intrigued, I talked to two of the key eyewitnesses, a brother and sister in their teens, and implored them to tell me their stories. The mere mention of the incident caused them to stiffen and etched onto their faces something of the visceral fear they had experienced. They were hesitant to speak at first, but then they agreed. What stood before them that night, they insisted, was not a bear standing on its hind legs, as a few skeptics in the community had alleged—but a Sasquatch. The Koeye valley, they added, was one area Sasquatches inhabited.
At first I thought I’d come across an isolated incident—a spooky bump-in-the-night episode gone sideways. But from that moment forward, without my having made so much as a suggestion or query, Sasquatch stories jumped out at me—both in Bella Bella and in neighboring towns. My arrival on the coast, it seemed, was coinciding with a cyclical rash of creature sightings in every nearby community. And contrary to what I expected, people itched to talk about it.
In the Kitasoo/Xai’xais First Nation community of Klemtu, thirty miles north of Bella Bella, residents claimed that someone, or something, was banging on and shaking their homes in the middle of the night. Bloodcurdling, high-pitched screams emanating from the forest above the town were reported on a weekly basis. Two construction workers from southern British Columbia, newly arrived and ignorant of the experiences of the local residents, told me that they often heard a hollering and stomping on the mountainside above their trailer. Both claimed to be lifelong woodsmen and said it sounded like no animal they knew.