by John Zada
Those big trees are sages of the forest and veritable agents of planetary life support. They produce oxygen, sequester carbon, stop soil erosion, trap and distill rainwater, provide shelter and habitat for animals, create microclimates, foster decay that fertilizes the soil, and ultimately self-replicate—their inanimate poses belying all of this. Beneath these titans, stratified worlds and their creatures overlap and intermingle. Concealed by undergrowth and the detritus of the forest floor is the rain forest’s soil. It is a repository of nutrients and a seething cosmopolis of interactions. Ants, bacteria, fungi, and a host of microscopic entities churn and mince the carbon-rich soil that is the ecosystem’s pillar of health, facilitating the decomposition of organic matter and bringing rich minerals to the surface. In his book The Clouded Leopard, Canadian anthropologist, ethnobotanist, and author Wade Davis describes a square meter of productive rain-forest terrain as supporting approximately “2,000 earth-worms, 40,000 insects, 120,000 mites, 120 million nematodes and millions upon millions of protozoa and bacteria, all alive, moving through the earth, feeding, digesting, reproducing, and dying.”4
Between the timeless, slow-motion gyrations of the soil and the iron steadfastness of the giants that root in it is the tangle of wild undergrowth consisting of hundreds of plant species, including edible and medicinal herbs. A host of invertebrates and amphibians dwell and travel within it, from lungless salamanders to tailed frogs to slugs growing up to eight inches long, providing food for rodents and birds. Mammals like deer, porcupines, beavers, rabbits, elk, wild sheep, and mountain goats are preyed upon by the large hunters: grizzly bears, black bears, coastal wolves, and cougars.
This seemingly endless litany of terrestrial ecology is matched in the nearby ocean. For here land and water are extensions of each other. Old-growth conifers find their underwater counterparts in each vast, undulating kelp forests that give sanctuary to what Davis calls “the greatest coastal marine diversity on Earth.” Countless species of fish, marine invertebrates, and aquatic mammals—dolphins, whales, seals—rove, drift, and reside, sometimes within a stone’s throw of shore. The shellfish-encrusted rocks of the intertidal zone—the most fertile in the world—are exposed in a vibrant display of textures and colors: blackish-blue mussels, clusters of off-white barnacles, green anemones, and colonies of starfish painted orange, blue, and green.
Several keystone species—creatures with intense relevance to everything in the ecosystem—reside in the ocean. The five major species of Pacific salmon—pink, coho, sockeye, Chinook, and chum—range for years before returning to spawn and die in the rivers and creeks of their birth. No less miraculous than the salmon’s cyclical return is the annual spawning of the Pacific herring, whose arrival on the shores of the Great Bear during the spring snowmelt is a landmark event. The fish return by the thousands of tons, each female laying up to twenty thousand eggs, which attach to underwater plants. Males discharge milt, or sperm, over the eggs in such quantities that the entire surrounding sea turns white for weeks.
As all things exist in relation to all other things, no creature or any process in which it partakes subsists in isolation here. The interrelation of all aspects of life in the Great Bear is its greatest spectacle. The sea bestows rain upon the land: rain which both sinks nutrients into the soil and in turn washes them out to sea to feed aquatic life. The big trees modulate the flow of that rain, preventing soil erosion and torrents along delicate creeks from blowing out salmon spawn. By helping the salmon survive, the big trees help themselves and other animals. Bears, eagles, and wolves feed on the salmon and deposit their carcasses, which act as fertilizer in the soil, encouraging the growth of berry shrubs.
Like complex, weaving motifs in arabesque art, each aspect of rain-forest life, each playing its own tune, combines with all the others to create a grand symphony of ecology.
I need no more than a minute to claim my bag and leave the confines of the Bella Bella airport—one of the smallest I’ve traveled through. The terminal comprises a small building with a check-in desk and a coffee counter situated on a strip of asphalt running through the bog forest coniferous jungles of Campbell Island.
My fellow passengers, a mix of locals and visitors, mill outside with the residents who have arrived to pick them up. We’re at the foot of the road that runs into town through a rough-and-tumble forest flanked by glittering ocean on one side and a pair of mysterious-looking hills on the other.
I hop into the back of a taxi van with a few others. The young driver asks my destination.
“Alvina Duncan’s bed-and-breakfast,” I tell him.
“Alvina!” he exclaims, chuckling cryptically to himself.
We drive up and down thickly forested hills with views of the sea. Huge ravens crisscross the sky above us. We enter town, passing aged wooden bungalows and two-story homes that sit spaciously beside one another on plots of unfenced land. There are signs in many of the windows: No to Enbridge Pipeline. Heiltsuk Nation Bans Oil Tankers in Our Waters.
We turn onto another street and pull into the driveway of a brown-and-white two-story corner house—the B and B. When I arrive at the front door, I find a note saying Alvina, the proprietor, is out of town. There are instructions to phone someone to let me into the house. I do so, and minutes later a young Heiltsuk woman, in her mid-twenties, with short black hair and wearing a white summer dress and flip-flops, arrives.
“I’m really, really sorry,” she says, as she scampers from her car, holding plastic shopping bags and fumbling for a key. “Alvina’s down in Nanaimo. She’ll be back in a few days.”
We enter the house and climb a staircase to the second floor, where I find a nicely furnished apartment with three bedrooms. A large window in the living room overlooks part of the town and the ocean just beyond. I drop my bags in the largest of the three rooms, which are all unoccupied.
“Here’s your key,” the woman says as I come out. “The shower’s broken, so you’ll have to use the one downstairs, where Alvina sleeps. No plumbers in Bella these days.”
The woman unpacks her shopping onto the kitchen counter, and then stops abruptly and turns to me.
“I’m so sorry. My name’s Sierra,” she says, laughing and extending her hand. “I’m Alvina’s grandniece. I watch the place and cook for guests when she’s away. I’d have been here when you arrived, but things have been so crazy the last few days with the fire.”
“Fire?” I ask.
“You didn’t hear? One of our big buildings by the wharf burned down the other day. The supermarket, the post office, the liquor store—all gone.”
“Was anyone hurt?”
“No, it happened in the middle of the night. Everyone was asleep. Three girls set fire to the place. They said it was an accident. The cops are investigating.”
I remember the building from my past visit. The afflicted structure also housed a café run by a local nonprofit, which I had visited.
“There was a coffee shop in that building,” I say.
“Yeah, the Koeye Café,” she says, frowning. “Gone as well. Including their offices and library. The whole town’s upside down. Everyone’s on edge. They’ve turned our church into a makeshift store.”
I tell her about my last trip to the area, including my interest in collecting Sasquatch stories.
“There’s been a lot of activity in the last few months,” she says, chopping celery on a cutting board. “People hearing screams and smelling that bad stink.”
I ask if she thinks the creatures exist.
She shrugs. “I don’t know. The problem here is that sometimes stories get passed along from person to person and get bigger and bigger with each telling. You never really know what to believe. That’s kinda how it is with small towns. And Bella Bella’s no different.”
Bella Bella, though small, is the largest community on British Columbia’s central coast. It’s a way station appearing like a mirage in the ethereal blue-green dreamscapes of the Inside Passage route to Alaska—a coas
tal thoroughfare for cruise ships, ferries, freighters, yachts, and fishing boats. The town sits near the outer edge of a knot of channels and passes, next to the open ocean.
Bella Bella is split between two precincts, reflecting the area’s fractured landscape. The main town, straddling the northeastern corner of Campbell Island, is Bella Bella proper, the seat of the Heiltsuk First Nation. A smaller community of nonindigenous residents clusters around the village of Shearwater, a fishing lodge and marina built on the site of a World War II naval base on neighboring Denny Island. All together, some fifteen hundred people call the area home.
Geographical isolation, human catastrophes, and a history of government exploitation and abuse have left social and economic scars on the community. In the winter of 1862–63, a deadly smallpox epidemic broke out in the city of Victoria and spread—killing tens of thousands of indigenous people across British Columbia. It nearly destroyed the Heiltsuk, whose surviving members from across the territory resettled near today’s Bella Bella.* Over a decade later, the Canadian government, bent on controlling and assimilating the country’s indigenous populations, drove residents of First Nations onto reserves and began to set up residential schools to Christianize and “civilize” them. For more than a century, children nationwide—150,000 in all—were forcibly separated from their parents and placed in these church-run education centers, which strictly forbade them to speak their languages and practice their cultures under threat of punishment. Abuse—physical, psychological, and sexual—was rife in the schools. Thousands of students died in abhorrent, spartan conditions. Meanwhile, the logging and commercial fishing industries expanded their operations on the coast in the twentieth century, extracting huge numbers of trees and fish without much thought for the long-term environmental consequences, giving little more than employment to nearby communities.
In spite of everything, Bella Bella doesn’t resemble other indigenous communities in Canada, many of which have fared worse under the same circumstances. The Heiltsuk are blessed with an abundance of resources, an accessible location, and picture-postcard surroundings that draw in tourists. The nation’s territory is not ceded through any treaty, and its political life is vibrant and organized. The Heiltsuk are a proud and social people. Ethnic and family bonds are tight. Cultural events, including those tied to ceremonial food harvesting (collecting herring spawn and seaweed, canning fish, and digging clams), only fortify that cohesion.
Unfathomably deep roots are the basis of Bella Bella’s extraordinary resilience. The Heiltsuk have occupied their territory for at least fourteen thousand years.* For millennia, prior to European contact, they and their neighbors forged one of the most sophisticated nonagricultural societies on the planet. Like the ancient Greeks or the Polynesians, the Heiltsuk have always been a maritime people, known for the enormous oceangoing canoes that whisked them between coastal settlements at the mouths of creeks and rivers, and beyond into the open sea. Before disease dwindled the nation’s numbers, as many as twenty thousand people are believed to have inhabited up to fifty villages and seasonal camps spread across thousands of square miles of territory.
During the previous visit for my magazine assignment, I had spent my few days in Heiltsuk territory almost exclusively at the fishing lodge on the Denny Island side. I had managed a short day trip to Bella Bella, where I’d come across that first Sasquatch report, which set my travels on the coast that summer on a new trajectory.
I first spy Alvina in her backyard on the morning of her return from Vancouver Island: a large-framed woman with short gray hair, wearing an orange sleeveless shirt and laying assault to her lawn with a droning weed cutter. She is tough and brawny, often stopping to pick up and move garden furniture and other heavy items with astonishing ease. At one point she looks up at me on the balcony as if suddenly intuiting my presence. I raise my hand to wave just as she turns, uninterested, to continue her attack on the foliage. Soon the weed cutter goes silent, and the woman begins climbing the stairs to the balcony, where I’m seated eating breakfast.
“Boy, what a workout,” she says. “With all the grandkids coming through this house, you’d think a seventy-year-old woman would catch a break.” Once at the top, she stops and gives me a serious once-over.
“You must be Alvina Duncan,” I say, breaking the ice.
She cracks a slight grin. “And you must be the Sasquatch Man.”
We proceed to chat over coffee, while bumblebees and hummingbirds flit over the many potted plants and flowers around us.
There’s an inexplicably grand, dignified quality to Alvina. Her charisma and confidence are of the type found in movie heroes: strong, silent, understated—yet direct. I’d heard that Alvina, a retired tribal councillor and Heiltsuk matriarch, commands much respect in the community for her purposeful, no-nonsense approach to dealing with others. Beneath her firm demeanor, however, is a warmth that frequently rises to the surface.
Our conversation, unavoidably, turns to hair-covered giants.
“Have you ever seen one?” I ask.
“No,” she says. “But I’ve seen tracks. And Don, my late husband of thirty years—he and I once heard one whistling when we lived on Hunter Island.”
“So, you’re convinced they exist.”
“There are too many reports. You know that. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be here.”
“I’m trying to weigh the arguments as objectively as possible. To get as close to the truth as I can.”
“If you want the truth, just ask us,” she says. “We’ll tell you everything.”
“What about physical proof?”
Alvina snickers. “This is our backyard. We know it better than anyone else. That should be proof enough.”
“But your word alone won’t convince others,” I say.
“That’s all right, we’re not trying to convince anybody.”
Despite our congenial sparring, Alvina and I have taken to each other, and I realize I’ll need her help facilitating introductions with other people in town. An outsider suddenly appearing in a small, tight-knit community and asking questions is bound to cause discomfort and arouse suspicion.
I mention this to Alvina, and she responds with an understanding nod. “I’ll put in a good word, whenever I can.
“I’m no expert on the Sasquatch,” Alvina continues. “But there’s one thing I do know for sure. And you should write this down in your notebook: there’s always been an understanding between us and them.”
“Between your people and the Sasquatches?”
“Yup,” she says. “That’s what the elders say. It’s unspoken. We leave them alone, and they leave us alone. They don’t bother us, and we don’t bother them. That’s about it, and that’s the way it works.”
A few days later, I go to interview my first eyewitness: a Heiltsuk civil servant named Mary Brown. In the spring of 2008, Mary and two other adults led a group of nine girls from Bella Bella on a weekend camping trip to a wilderness cabin in Roscoe Inlet, a conservancy area north of town. A waterway flanked by mountainous fjords, Roscoe is legendary for its stunning beauty. Because old village sites are found there, it’s also culturally and historically important for the Heiltsuk. Mary claims she and her group had a frightening encounter with a Sasquatch during their trip to the area.
I’ve heard about Mary’s story from someone else in the community. When I phone her, she happily agrees to share her experience and invites me to her second-floor office in what she half-jokingly calls “downtown Bella Bella,” a short walk from Alvina’s.
On the way there, I pass the scene of the fire that consumed the band store complex. Though still standing, the building is largely destroyed, its charred remains reeking of the wet decay of food and garbage that hadn’t been consumed by the fire. The forlorn sight stands in stark contrast to my own fleeting memories of the hundred-year-old blue-and-white building with WAGLISLA (the Heiltsuk name for Bella Bella) emblazoned over the front entrance.
“It’s a huge trage
dy,” Mary says of the fire as I arrive, greeting me with a long face. As we enter her office and sit down, she tells me she is working on the case to help the three girls accused of setting the blaze.
Mary is Bella Bella’s restorative justice coordinator. She’s an advocate for community members going through Canada’s criminal justice system while also acting as a representative of the tribal justice arm of the band, helping rehabilitate offenders in ways more in line with Heiltsuk culture. Mary is confident and self-assured, probably in her mid-forties, and has a bubbly personality. The nine teenage girls she accompanied to the cabin in Roscoe in 2008, she says, were at-risk youth, and the camping trip was part of her work.
“I haven’t told this story for a few years,” she begins somewhat nervously. “I sometimes can’t believe it happened—but it did. And I wasn’t the only person there.”
Traveling by boat, the group arrived at the bayside cabin during low tide in the late afternoon on the Friday of the weekend outing. After dropping crab traps at one end of the bay, Mary and the other adults took the girls to the cabin located at the other end. There they set up camp and showed the girls how to dig for clams on the beach. As dusk neared, Mary, the two other adults, and one of the girls got back into the boat to retrieve the crab traps. The tide was still low. The rocky, forested shore, maybe a hundred yards away at the most, rose a bit above their heads.
“As I was pulling up one of the traps I had this really eerie feeling something was watching us,” Mary says. “I began to look around. The others felt the same.”
As Mary pulled her trap out of the water, one of the adults, her friend Marilyn, screamed, “Look! Look!“ and pointed toward the shore.