by John Zada
Brian surrenders the helm to Nick and heads to the bow. The whale stays close to the boat. At one point the creature surfaces to within six feet of the vessel and lets out a shrill scream. We can see the gill net draped tightly over the whale’s wet, glistening head, trapping its mouth shut. That indescribable sound, a kind of painful screech, echoes in my mind.
Brian says the scream is a distress signal. He shakes his head and clenches his fist. “Damn it! Too many fishing boats!”
Brian continues to shout out orders to Nick, who’s steering the boat, as the whale bobs in and out of the water around us. I approach him and ask if anything can be done. He shakes his head.
“Not now,” he says. “The whale is panicked. It’s too dangerous to go near it. Maybe later when it gets tired someone might be able to get close enough to cut or remove the net. The important thing is not to lose sight of the whale. It’s already beginning to drift with the current. If it escapes our view, it’ll flounder for a few more days and then probably die of exhaustion.”
Brian gets on the VHF and reports the whale to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) field station on Denny Island. Its staffers respond, saying they’re dispatching a speedboat to the scene.
Jess reminds Brian that it’s getting late and that the kids have to return to camp. Brian asks Nick and Megan to track the whale in the Zodiac until the fisheries people arrive. He instructs them to bring extra gas and provisions.
“We’ll come back and get you after dropping the kids off,” Brian says to them. “If the fog gets heavy, and we can’t find you, follow the shoreline back. Do not go into deep water.”
News of the entangled humpback has spread back to camp. Larry Jorgensen, with whom I haven’t spoken much until now, tells me how many times he’d found himself in the very same situation in the past.
“Back in the day we used to jump into the water like heroes to try and save those whales,” he says, “but it seldom worked.” He too complains about the number of fishing boats, and says that the DFO is to blame for not having a better response capability—and for not equipping and training local communities to disentangle whales.*
At dusk we hear that Achiever and its crew have arrived safely back—and that Nick and Megan lost sight of the whale in the choppy waters of the sound. Neither they nor the DFO people were able to relocate it.
No sooner has word gotten out of their return than another drama fills the evening’s growing void. Audrey and her small team of researchers have gone back up the Koeye to spend the night at the fish weir so they can get an early start on mapping work the next day. She radios to the camp in a panic, saying there is crashing in the bushes and loud vocalizations all around them. In a repeat of the other night, Larry requests Achiever Mobile to fetch the women. This time it’s a lightning-quick extraction. When they arrive back at camp, I watch as a shell-shocked Audrey, holding back tears, tells someone: “I’ve never heard a noise like that in my entire life. It was like a roaring scream that went on and on and on. I can’t even describe it. It was so horrible.”
Koeye’s guard dogs bark up a storm at the edge of camp the entire night.
I’m invited to join William Housty, Jess’s older, thirty-two-year-old brother, in long-line fishing for halibut out in the sound. Jess and others tell me that William, more than anyone else, is the man to speak to among the Heiltsuk about traditional culture. He also knows, I am told, about Sasquatch.
On a morning as thick with fog as any I’ve seen on the coast, we depart in William’s twenty-seven-foot converted aluminum herring skiff. Three Heiltsuk teenagers are with us. Within moments of turning north out of the bay, we’re lost in a mist-choked void of gray punctuated by phantom intimations of evergreen. The ocean is remarkably, almost frighteningly still, like a tepid, vaporous River Styx. A squadron of mergansers flits into view. The ducks race their reflections inches above the water before vanishing back into the ether. William maneuvers slowly, methodically, to avoid colliding with driftwood.
Though generally a man of few words, William is among the most active and vocal figures on the coast, a storyteller, a repository of culture, and a leader in the science of conservation, in charge of keeping track of the territory’s salmon and bear populations. He often spends his summers at Koeye counting the area’s fish and managing a bear DNA collection project, for which grizzly and black bear hairs are extracted from barbed-wire traps and analyzed to track the animals’ health and movements. In 2014, William made international headlines after publishing a Heiltsuk study about Koeye’s grizzlies, in which he wrote that the animals travel along ancient multigenerational ruts in the ground he called “bear highways,” stepping into the same track impressions over and over again.
At six and a half feet tall, William is big, burly, and imposing. During my time with the Heiltsuk, I’ve seen him jovial and playful as well as critical and brusque—speaking out against meddlesome outsiders, politicians, and industrial interests. He’s proud of his culture, unencumbered by fear, and speaks his mind without mincing words.
By the time we arrive at our fishing spot, the sunlight has started to drill through the fog. William kills the engines and goes to the front of the boat, where he and two others prepare the longline, tying a weight to one end that will sink the line to the bottom of the ocean. Attached to the other end is a floating buoy, which will allow William to return later and find the line. William sits on an upturned bucket beside two containers holding about a hundred big, baited hooks, and begins attaching them along the length of the line. One of his assistants, holding the weighted end, slowly releases the line into the water.
“Halibut love salmon,” William says in his deep voice, engrossed in the work. “But I’ve thrown in some octopus this time, which they love even more.”
“This must be something most men learn to do growing up here,” I say.
“Everything we do has been passed down from our elders,” he says, adding another hook to the line. “Both the old knowledge and the new. My own grandfather taught me a lot.”
“Is that why you have so much respect for them in your culture?”
“We take care of our elders because they’re our link to the past. They’re the ones that can validate information and reaffirm knowledge. They’re the source of strength for everything that we do. So you look after them.”
William gets up to untangle the line behind him. As the fog thins into sinewy streaks, I begin to see the ruins of the abandoned fishing port and cannery town of Namu in the distance. It’s also the location of a Heiltsuk village site that dates back at least eleven thousand years.
“So, you’re here to find out about the Sasquatch?” William says, redirecting my attention. “I hope you’re not here to make fun of us.”
“No, that’s not my intention. I’m trying to understand the whole thing better. And to come to terms with a childhood interest in it.”
“Our culture really reveres the Sasquatch because it’s a reminder that at one point in time, we were living in the same way that Sasquatches are living. It’s also a reminder of our connection to the land and everything that exists in our territory. It’s not something to be afraid of. It’s something that teaches you things.”
I ask him about the idea that seeing one might be a reflection of a personal crisis.
“This is more the case when someone sees a Bukwus—not a Sasquatch.”
“But I thought Bukwus was just another coastal indigenous name for Sasquatch.”
“Some nations on the coast call Sasquatch Bukwus. For us Heiltsuk, the Bukwus is the little woodsman. A small man, which is really a form of evil. If people are really struggling in life and are imbalanced, they tend to be the ones more likely to see a Bukwus. But for us, they’re two completely different things.”
Is this another reference to the smaller footprints I saw at Old Town? I mention them to William, and he tells me that if the tracks were in fact Bukwus prints, my seeing them may be indication of some inner tu
rmoil in my own life. He looks at me with a grin while attaching another hook.
“Have you ever had any encounters with these animals?” I ask him.
“Oh yeah. One of them took place when I used to run the kids’ camp at Koeye. It was a really foggy night. We had a big camp that week, so our cabins were totally full. Two of the staff members slept outside under a big cedar shelter whose roof is ten feet off the ground. They were in a tent underneath it.
“That night the guys in the tent were woken up at around three a.m. by something moving outside. They thought it was a bear, so they climbed on top of the shelter. They couldn’t see it, but they could hear whatever it was moving beneath them. It was messing with the tent.
“Once it went away, they jumped down and ran into our cabin and told us what happened. Everyone was freaked out. But then we all calmed down and went back to sleep. About an hour later, one of the kids in our cabin, hearing a noise, woke us up, and we could hear it walking beside the cabin, dragging its hand along the outside walls. You could hear it stepping on twigs and branches. It would also tap its nails—or a stick—on the walls. It was right there—nothing but a two-by-six between us and the Sasquatch.”
“What about someone playing a practical joke?” I ask. “That sort of thing happens a lot at camp.”
“That’s what we thought at first: that it was someone fooling around. So we banged back against the wall telling him to fuck off. But it kept happening. Finally I said, ‘I’m going to go see what it is.’ So I picked up a big stick I had with me and went outside to the other side of the cabin. I flipped the outside light on. Through the fog and darkness I could see someone step behind one of the big trees near the cabin. All I heard after that was the crunch-crunch-crunch of footsteps running into the distance.
“In the morning we saw its tracks on the beach. It left footprints fourteen or fifteen inches long and had a deformation, like a big bunion, on its left foot.”
“Wow.”
“It was weird because during that one summer we were able to communicate with it,” he says. “Almost every night at around midnight the boys would go to a tree near the cabin and hit the trunk really hard with a stick. You’d listen and hear the same sound come back. Then we’d do it again: Whack! The next time the sound would return a little bit closer. That whole summer it was lingering around.”
“Skeptics would say you’re seeing and hearing what you want to see or hear.”
“We have those sorts of people here too. They’ll say, ‘Ah, that’s bullshit. They don’t exist. There’s nothing out there.’ But some things just can’t be explained. I used to do electrofishing for a logging company when I first finished school. One day in late November we were dropped off in a helicopter twenty-five miles inland along a creek. There was a white guy working with me. It was really dark, rainy, and cold. We were following the creek downhill, when it forked, going around this little island. He went down one side; I went down the other. I got to the bottom before he did and reached this patch of snow and gravel by the riverbed. I found humanlike tracks there, sixteen or seventeen inches long, that went through the snow, into the river, and back up the other side. When that guy made it down I showed him, and he was in total denial—he wouldn’t believe it. He was shaking his head, saying: ‘Nope. There’s no way. It doesn’t exist.’ I said to him: ‘You tell me who was up here with feet that big walking around with no shoes on, buddy! We just got dropped off in a helicopter, for God’s sake! No one’s out here wandering around barefoot!’“
“So why do you think no one’s been able to find or catch one?” I ask him.
“They’re intelligent,” he says. “They’re just like you and me. They’re smart about how they act and where they go.”
“Smarter than the humans looking for them?”
William laughs. “A lot smarter. Which isn’t saying much. Those people that go running around in the bush trying to catch them aren’t smart. They’re being disrespectful. Over here we don’t go looking for them. If you see a Sasquatch out on the land, it’s meant to tell you something. You were supposed to see it. You don’t go looking for it just for the sake of seeing it. If you do, you’ll never find them.” William holds my gaze for emphasis.
“It’s just like in life: when you try too hard to find something, you can’t. But then as soon as you stop looking, stop trying, you become more likely to find it. That’s exactly how it is with the Sasquatch.”
Characters and personalities are legion at Koeye. But the protagonist, the unrivaled character, the one so deceivingly simple to overlook is the river itself.
Koeye Lodge and the camp are perched at the river’s mouth—where its waters meet the sea. That final section of the seven-mile-long waterway is different from the river farther upstream. Concealed at arm’s length, beyond the camp, past a hard and virtually invisible bend in the river, are a broad, grassy open swath, usually referred to in and of itself as “the Koeye estuary,” and the legendary river’s less-visited upper reaches.
There is no overland trail leading from the camp to the estuary. To get there requires a boat. And even then, traveling is subject to the on-again, off-again nature of the tides. If the tide is not high enough, especially in times of little or no rain, gravel bars and exposed riverbed will obstruct the way.
Because of that, the unseen Koeye is spoken of as if it were another locale: far-flung, a place apart, taking on nearly mythic connotations. When it is mentioned, its beauty is invariably cited and spoken of with reverence. In a sense, the farthest reaches of the river are its most sacred. There’s a trail through the old growth that starts beyond the estuary and leads past the salmon weir (where Audrey and her associates were rescued), continuing all the way up to the lake from which the river flows. It’s a daylong trek to get there, requiring an overnight stay. Few people have made the journey to the lake, and stories about the area always seem to be second- or thirdhand.
An air of profound mystery hangs over the river, ironically, since the Koeye is not a long or treacherous waterway. Yet the awe it evokes locally—as powerful as that of the world’s great rivers—derives from its deeper, intangible qualities.
My micro-journey up the Koeye comes on our last full day at camp on a balmy, cloud-filled afternoon. We leave on Achiever‘s Zodiac as soon as the tide is high enough to allow us entry into the hidden estuary. Five members of the ship’s crew and I are piled into the raft, which tows two canoes and one kayak carrying Captain Brian. First mate Nick commands the vessel. In silence, we drone past radiant conifers, the camp cabins, and the mudflats that lie beyond.
Everyone is excited. Only Brian and one other crew member have been up the river before. For the rest of us, the trip represents a kind of initiation in our quests to unfurl the mysteries of this coast.
We reach the farthest point upriver that I’ve been to, where the Koeye seems to vanish or end but in fact furtively bends right and bottlenecks into a narrowing, tree-lined corridor. Nick slows the boat as we enter the channel, its banks thick with brush. The sputtering sound of the engine fades away and is replaced by another kind of noise—the sounds of the forest itself: the din of the river, the satisfied croaking of ravens, the rumblings of the breeze.
The shoreline, louder than anything else, is a boisterous, anarchical arrangement of life. Muscle-bound spruces and cedars with lichen beards several feet long loom above clusters of rocks caked in fluorescent-green moss. Snags, deadfalls, and pieces of driftwood, some covered in fungi, also tangle at the water’s edge. These poetic, cacophonous scenes create otherworldly reflections in the water, like Rorschach blots, that glow and pulsate. Along the horizontal axes of those fractal reflections, I see haunting, alien faces wearing transcendent expressions. Whole stretches of shoreline resemble totem poles of the spirit, and I am convinced this vision of the natural world served as the inspiration for the indigenous pole-carving tradition.
I turn to look at the others to register their reactions, but I can make no eye
contact. My fellow travelers—some sitting, others standing—are frozen in incredulity, struck by their own worlds of wonder. It is a spectacle within a spectacle. I gaze down into the clear, shallow water below the boat and am startled by battalions of young Dungeness crabs clambering over one another in panic as the Zodiac sails above them.
The dimness of the cloistered stretch of river lifts when we enter an almost blinding opening at the end of the corridor: the upper Koeye estuary. Here the river valley widens into a grassy expanse, a great hall, hemmed in by distant mountain slopes topped by cloud. We’ve traveled only a few miles, but it feels as if we’ve crossed into a separate world.
In the estuary, we cut Captain Brian loose in his kayak to paddle around on his own. Two Raincoast researchers, Nate and Kyle, hell-bent on seeing a grizzly, park themselves with their camera equipment in the tall grass beside the Zodiac. The rest of us—Nick, Megan, Leah (Achiever‘s cook), and I—paddle farther upriver in the pair of canoes. We get as far upstream as we can until the river becomes a trickle and our vessels hit gravel. We pull the boats ashore and explore the river valley on foot, stepping into monochrome-green patches of old growth filled with astonishingly tall cedars and ten-foot-tall berry bushes. We linger for hours, like children, each exploring our own little corner of the moss-covered immensity.
It is a giant’s domain.
On our way back down the river, our hushed tones and silent gawking are replaced by lively conversation. Nate and Kyle, who had staked out the estuary for grizzlies, tell us, crestfallen, that they haven’t seen a single bear.
We pick up Brian in his kayak. This time he rides with us in the Zodiac. He is beaming with happiness. “It’s just magnificent here,” he says.
Leah looks at Brian with an exaggerated childlike frown. “But we’re leaving so soon,” she says.
“Don’t worry,” Brian says, patting her in consolation. “We’ll be back soon to hunt for bears.”