by John Zada
On arrival, I’m given a small one-person tent and told to pitch it among those of various staff members. A large campfire ringed with benches is lit and will be kept alive for the whole week. One of the co-owners of Qqs, Marge Housty, organizes the nearly round-the-clock operations of the cookhouse with her staff. Marge’s husband, Larry Jorgensen, a pensive and bespectacled man in a baseball cap, delegates tasks and is clearly the linchpin of the operation.
I remember seeing Larry and Marge shortly after I arrived in Bella Bella about four weeks ago. They had been sitting outside the burned-down band store, grief-stricken, staring unblinkingly at the partially collapsed building before them. For them, the tragedy carried the weight of two disasters. Just a few years earlier, the lodge at Koeye camp had also been burned down, this time by a troubled night watchman. Since then, a huge effort had been put into rebuilding the camp facilities—and now their offices.
Many of the activities of this camp session are run by staffers from the Raincoast Conservation Foundation—a grassroots collective of local scientists and environmentalists working to protect the coastal ecosystem of British Columbia. They’ll be arriving soon in their flagship research vessel, Achiever, a sixty-six-foot steel-hulled sloop. In addition to learning about birds and fish along the river, the young campers will be taken out on the Achiever to explore the adjacent coast.
After pitching my tent, I follow a short trail leading down from the lodge—walking past two large Great Pyrenees guard dogs patrolling the periphery of the camp—through the forest to the sandy beach below. I reach the Heiltsuk big house, decorated in Northwest native motifs. Piles of driftwood, some of it like polished art sculptures, lie beside languid strands of bullwhip kelp beneath the towering conifers. Halfway to the end of the beach, I come across a large sign posted at the edge of the trees proclaiming Koeye to be part of Heiltsuk territory.
In the 1990s, an exclusive sportfishing lodge had occupied the mouth of the Koeye. For the Heiltsuk, it was a deeply insulting project, made more heinous by its staff’s attempts to keep nonpaying guests—including the Heiltsuk themselves—out of the area. Incensed, the Heiltsuk mounted numerous protests against the lodge. With time, the business went bankrupt. The property was then purchased, with donor money, by an NGO called Ecotrust and then given to the Heiltsuk, who transformed the facilities into a summer camp. The sign is partly a declaration of that earlier victory.
I reach the end of the beach, where the river meets the ocean, and enter the forest through a gap in the trees. I come across the cluster of cabins where the kids are staying, set in a small clearing surrounded by thick, moss-covered forest. The campers are away, and the forest is eerily calm.
A tall teenager wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and a black woolen cap exits one of the cabins holding a broom and dustpan. He walks over to me and introduces himself as Rob Duncan, one of the camp counselors. Alvina, it turns out, is his grandmother.
“You’re the Sasquatch man!” he says, breaking into a smile. “My nan told me about you. She mentioned you were coming to Koeye. I thought: ‘He’s going to the right place.’“
“I heard about what happened here last year,” I say, referring to the late-night Bigfoot encounter.
“Yeah. Tip of the iceberg,” he says.
Rob tells me he’s just returned from two months’ camping a couple of miles up the Koeye, counting salmon at a traditional fish weir on the river. He says he heard screams there that he can’t explain. When I ask if he’s sure it wasn’t cougars or wolves, he tells me he’s positive. He’d heard the same screaming the previous summer, up close. He and other staffers were setting up camp that week in preparation for the kids’ arrival.
“We were sleeping in the cabins,” he says. “I woke up a little after two a.m. The camp dogs had followed us down that night, which they don’t usually do. They were barking a lot. I figured that’s just what they did: they’re here to scare away wildlife. They kept barking, and I was just trying to ignore them and fall back asleep.
“Then out of nowhere came this roar-like scream. It was loud and echoed all through the valley. It petrified me. My heart started pounding. I didn’t know what to think. The dogs were still barking and I convinced myself it was just an auditory illusion—that maybe the dogs were somehow throwing their voices. I was in denial.
“I calmed myself down and tried to go back to sleep. But then twenty minutes later I heard it again. But instead of one scream, I heard five. They came one after another:
“Ruuooooaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh!
“Ruuooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh!
“There was no wind, and no surf breaking on the beach. It was totally quiet, and the screams were just echoing everywhere.”
I ask Rob if anyone else heard the screams that night. He shakes his head and tells me that the other camp staff members were sound asleep.
“Are those the only experiences you’ve had?”
“No. There’s another thing that happens around here,” Rob adds. “The term we have for it is ‘wood on wood.’ Sometimes at night, you can hear the sound of a large stick being struck against the side of a tree. It can be one hit, two, or even five. It’s like a really loud smack: Tchshh! Tchshh! This has been going on since the camp started fifteen years ago.”
“So, you believe in these animals, then?”
“Now I do. We used to hear stories about the Thla’thla as children. I always thought it was just a way to scare kids to keep them from misbehaving. But when I got older I learned that there was some truth to these creatures. My great-uncle told me once that the Thla’thla do what they do deliberately to torment you. They taunt people who don’t live their lives correctly. Some of us think they may be drawn to negativity.”
“Why is that?”
“The word Heiltsuk—the name of our people—translates to ‘those who live and speak in a proper manner.’“
“So, you’re saying that Sasquatches help keep your people on the right path?”
“Yeah, something like that,” he says. “I know it sounds crazy to outsiders, but I know a lot of family members who’ve had experiences. Most of those people have credibility linked to their names and would never make up stories like that. Believe me when I say the Sasquatch is here. It’s always around.”
Our expanding paleoanthropological knowledge tells us that modern humans coexisted with other hominins in prehistory. As recently as thirty thousand years ago, Homo sapiens may have overlapped with as many as half a dozen other related species. Neanderthals and Denisovans are among the better-known examples. Might there remain an existing overlap between humans and an unclassified bipedal primate?
The possibility that a relict hominoid species might have survived in remote areas to this day bumps up against the feasibility of its continuing to avoid official detection in the modern world. Anyone who has expressed skepticism about Sasquatches has focused on this point—that it’s too far-fetched for them to have remained hidden in a world that has been fully mapped, and explored, and is now under the watchful eye of every technological gizmo.
But is it really that far-fetched?
An American professor of anatomy and anthropology at Idaho State University, Jeff Meldrum, in his book Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science, reminds us that new species not previously detected are still being regularly classified by science. The saola—a rare, forest-dwelling bovine—was first photographed in a remote mountainous region in Vietnam in 1999. The Riwoche, a horse breed found in northeastern Tibet, was initially observed by nonlocals in an equally far-flung region in 1995. The kipunji monkey of Tanzania, first seen by scientists in 2003 and considered Africa’s rarest monkey, was once believed to be a myth—a spirit animal of the indigenous people of the country’s southern highlands. Those are just three of the many, albeit smaller creatures that are “classified” every year. Perhaps it is because Bigfoots are said to be extraordinarily evasive that they haven’t been officially found yet.
How far-fetched (or not) we deem t
he Sasquatch might also hinge on our perception of space. Bigfoots may be unbelievable to so many people simply because most of us are disconnected from the true depths and expanses of the earth and its wild areas. We simply may not be able to conceive of Sasquatch habitat. Two-dimensional maps completely downplay the surface area that exists in three-dimensional terms, especially where mountains are concerned. Few, if any, seasoned travelers or explorers think the planet has been comprehensively probed. I find it is mostly those living in and around big cities, with little or no experience with or appreciation for remote, unpopulated areas, who most often declare, “But the world has been explored!” Their limited urban or suburban existence has deeply conditioned them to this view.
Modernity and technology have further eroded our ability to judge space. Cars, trains, and planes make it possible for us to cover huge distances in very little time, rendering the spaces we travel through inconsequential by comparison. Whereas, for example, a medieval religious pilgrim from Morocco would have needed several months filled with hardships and ordeals to travel overland to Mecca on the Arabian Peninsula, today it takes only several uneventful hours to get there by plane (a form of teleportation by comparison). When you or I fleetingly fly over, or even drive through, a large wilderness area, we experience almost nothing of its real depths or dimensions, compared with someone who covers that distance on foot. Even hikers experience only the immediate environs of their narrow trajectory: a mere sliver of a wide expanse.
In March 2014, I was working as a TV newswriter when Malaysia Airlines flight 370 mysteriously disappeared off the radar shortly after takeoff from Kuala Lumpur. Several days after the tragedy, when neither the plane nor any of its wreckage was found, the newsroom, like much of the astonished world, was shocked and bewildered.* “How could a commercial airliner simply vanish?” the newsmongers asked in the story meetings, as if Harry Houdini or aliens had a hand in it. But no one had conceived of the idea that the airliner had possibly, or probably, wound up in the middle of the Indian Ocean—an immense body of water. Even when we learned later that indeed that was where the plane most likely had crashed, it still didn’t occur to anyone that maybe the plane had come down fully, or largely, intact—and thus couldn’t easily be found, especially if it sank underwater. Many of us know oceans only as bodies of water we leapfrog during airplane flights. Any sense of scale is conditioned out of us.
A similar conditioning occurs when we watch TV or a movie or read a children’s storybook that depicts someone moving through a forest. Fictional characters in forests are often shown traveling unimpeded along a more or less easily navigable trail or through wide-open spaces between trees. Our frequent exposure to these backdrops in the media makes them seem normal. Though some forests may look like that, the reality is that much backcountry wilderness is dense, overgrown, and obstacle-littered, with little visibility and sometimes rent with cliffs, gorges, gullies, and canyons. It’s hard for humans to travel through in the best of times. A friend who works on a remote stretch of the British Columbia coast once tried to hike up a creek bed to a mountaintop. It took him eight hours to cover just one mile. He gave up and turned back. Many of the areas I have seen are no less impenetrable.
If the Sasquatch exists, perhaps the reason it hasn’t yet been discovered in the eyes of the establishment boils down to the creature’s reported determination to avoid people in those vast and difficult terrains to which it has adapted. Being a rare and mostly nocturnal animal would only make it that much more difficult to find.*
That evening we all loiter impatiently around the cookhouse in the soft light of dusk, waiting to swoop down on the dinner in its final stages of tending. The campfire crackles and pops, drawing in camp staffers clutching mugs of hot tea. Down in the bay is a scene of perfect tranquillity: the curving beach and its unflinching bodyguard of hemlocks and cedars bask in the honey-tinted rays of the setting sun.
The crew of Achiever, the Raincoast Conservation Foundation’s research vessel, has arrived. The captain, Brian Falconer, a tall man in his mid- to late fifties, is surrounded by several younger members of his crew. They stand in a row, almost at attention, decked out in colorful, top-of-the-line North Face and Patagonia fashions and gum boots. The young Heiltsuk campers arrive in single file after spending half the day on the river and are served dinner first.
Conversations about the day’s events bloom, but I’m encumbered by my own thoughts. Since embarking on this trip, I’ve been trying to keep myself open to all possibilities and explanations regarding the existence of the Sasquatch. The effort has felt largely forced, and I’ve found myself again and again seduced into comfortable awe by the accounts I’ve heard. But new questions are bubbling up.
I wonder whether the frightening Sasquatch stories First Nations people hear as children have an influence on what they see, and I ponder the role of belief and suggestion in all of this. Everyone I’ve spoken to so far has mentioned growing up with those tales. Even Mary Brown had said that, in the midst of the Sasquatch encounter with the group of girls she had led to the cabin in Roscoe, she panicked when she remembered those childhood stories. Granted, plenty of nonindigenous people who have claimed to have seen the creatures were not raised on those tales, but perhaps a similar triggering mechanism is in play in some of those cases.
Similarly, I wonder about Rob Duncan’s idea—that troubled people tend to see the creatures—and whether their sightings are in some way related to their state of distress. Clark Hans, who I went hiking with during my previous visit to Bella Coola, had claimed to have seen a Sasquatch on a bluff and had crossed an icy estuary in terror, later to be hospitalized for anxiety. Could he have been a victim of his own life stresses, or was his breakdown caused by something he really saw? Perhaps that something was a misidentification. For a long time I’ve wondered whether the loud, ambient stomping noises my friend and I heard during that winter hike on the edges of Nelson, which I took to be a Sasquatch, were just a mental distortion of some other sound.
All of this touches upon specific areas of psychology and neurology: perception, cognition, and belief. The way each of us experiences the world—an objective reality outside us—is dependent upon certain mental mechanisms, as well as our proclivities, predispositions, and biases. Understanding those factors must be crucial to properly grasping an issue like this. Up until now I have been scrutinizing the empirical arguments for and against the existence of the Sasquatch, without much success. That approach alone, I’m beginning to see, is going to get me only so far.
That night a thick fog rolls in, and a heavy silence takes hold at Koeye. Not ready for sleep, I park myself beside the campfire. The young campers are gone, ensconced in their cabin hideaways upriver. The lodge area stirs with a handful of nocturnal souls shuffling around with their head lamps on. The hypnotic flames draw a few of them in. Some are smoking cigarettes; others, like myself, cling tightly to steaming mugs. People mostly keep a silent vigil, lost in their thoughts on the drowsy edges of sleep. Occasionally, mechanical clanking or whirring sounds rising from the fishing boats parked in the protective bay break the silence.
“Damn gillnetters,” mutters a large, imposing man in a deep, resonant voice. William Housty, known to his friends as House, is the son of camp owners Marge and Larry. He’s one of the chief ecological researchers at Qqs, specializing in bears and salmon, and is a repository of Heiltsuk cultural knowledge. William was the master of ceremonies at the potlatch in Bella Bella. I watch as he pokes at the fire with a long stick.
“Those boats come up here and take whatever fish we have and then hightail it back south,” he grumbles. “They won’t even sell them to our fish plant.”
“The long arm of capitalism,” I say, offering my drowsy, half-witted commiseration.
“We hold them responsible for a lot of hardship around here.”
“Do you mean because of overfishing?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he says, with a tired look of disgust, turning to the
fire and prodding it with a couple of tough jabs. “In the old days you’d get two million chum salmon up here. The water would be full of them—as far as the eye could see. Now in a really bad year it’s closer to a few thousand. And yet the boats keep coming. This whole ecosystem, which relies on those salmon, is taking a beating.”
The drop in salmon numbers is something I’ve been hearing a lot about since arriving on the coast. Salmon have complex life cycles; the factors affecting their survival are many and varied, and overfishing is deemed to be one of them. For decades, British Columbia’s commercial fishermen have been pillaging these waters, selling their bounty to large, politically connected companies that distribute and sell to the retail market. In more recent years, the Canadian government has imposed restrictions on the areas that can be commercially fished, the amounts of catch that can be taken, and the number of boats permitted to take part. But people here still complain that those decisions—made by desk-bound bureaucrats with little local knowledge working thousands of miles away—are ineffective. Warming ocean and river waters and the proliferation of Atlantic salmon farms (which spread disease) on the British Columbia coast are also believed to have affected the life of local species. The drop in the number of migrating wild salmon has been drastic. “In the old days,” elders on the coast say, “you could walk across the backs of salmon in the river, so many there were.”
Larry shuffles out of the darkness holding onto a VHF radio receiver. He approaches the cookhouse and calls out for Marge. When she steps onto the deck, he tells her he’s concerned about a group of three young staff members who had canoed upriver after dinner to camp at the fish weir. They haven’t radioed in, he says, and they aren’t responding to his calls.