by John Zada
Wuikinuxv is small to begin with, but the vast scale of the surroundings and the difficulties of life shrink the village even further. The skyline of towering conifers across the river is dwarfed by rocky bluffs, which serve as the bases of mountains that rise ever higher, toward the white, glaciated alpine zone. As Lena had mentioned, there are no fully stocked stores here. All provisions are ordered in advance and either flown in by plane or delivered by sea barge. Telephone landlines arrived here only in 2000, and service remains temperamental. The Internet is also unreliable, and mobile-phone service is nonexistent. As a result, people still prefer to communicate with one another by way of VHF radio, the simplest and most dependable technology. As no power lines reach Wuikinuxv, electricity for the community has to come from a large diesel generator, droning day and night behind the homes. The village school has nine students, who fall into grade levels ranging from kindergarten to twelfth grade. They all attend class in the same room, share the same teacher, and hang out with one another at recess.
From the perspective of my boisterous city existence, Wuikinuxv is eerily quiet—like a town abandoned. The muffled sound of a child’s laugh or the distant howling of a dog only amplifies the feeling of solitude, as does the area’s signature feature: a blustery wind coming in off the inlet. It blows almost incessantly, effervescently, rattling the chimes hanging on Lena’s porch. There is a wise and knowing quality to the wind, a rhythmic push and pull that make it sound as if it is speaking in tongues. When the wind is paired with the heart-stopping red and orange sunsets that cast the mountains in dark silhouette, the majesty of it all can be overwhelming. I understand why, in spite of the remoteness and the sacrifices needed to keep a community and nation alive, people continue live here.
For days, I pace up and down the road, visiting with Wuikinuxv’s residents. Armed with a casual referral from Lena, overcoming my natural hesitancy, I make impromptu appearances at people’s front doors and in their garages and backyards. I’m more than welcomed. Maybe it’s due in part to the isolation and the novelty of a new face, but people are warm and open in the extreme.
I discover there are few, if any, recent Sasquatch reports from the village itself. There were reports decades back, however, and more than one of them involved a white-haired Sasquatch often seen at the edge of Owikeno Lake. But no one claims to have seen it personally. More recent reports involve incidents at lakeside cabins near the mouths of creeks in the middle of the night. They’re hauntingly similar to the stories I heard in Koeye.
In Wuikinuxv, as well as the territory of the Kwakwaka’wakw people farther south, Sasquatch is known as Dzonoqua (pronounced Joon-ah-kwah)—the wild cannibal woman of the woods. The hairy and unruly giantess, a malevolent being of the highest order, is nearly identical to the Heiltsuk Thla’thla in appearance and behavior. Many old masks and pole carvings of the Dzonoqua depict her with a wide-open mouth, pursed lips, and deep-set eyes.*
Discussions with villagers, who view the creatures in somewhat more folkloric terms than the Heiltsuk do, don’t last long and often taper off into politics. Again I’m assailed with complaints, similar to Lena’s, about the current state of the reserve, its uncertain future, and the indifference of its leaders. I am told the details of an alleged Heiltsuk slave raid and massacre near Wuikinuxv in 1848—an episode that continues to be a thorn in the side of relations between the two nations. The incident, referred to locally as the “slaughter Illahie,” is named after the entrance to ocean narrows near the mouth of Rivers Inlet, where the Wuikinuxv claim the Heiltsuk ambushed them in their canoes after inviting them to a potlatch.
But of all the stories, the one that stands out for me is about an obscure valley that runs into Owikeno Lake. I hear about it for the first time while speaking with Dennis Hanuse, Lena’s next-door neighbor. The topic comes up in a discussion about old Bigfoot reports from local loggers.
“There was another logging camp on the lake that was reporting some really strange stuff,” Hanuse says. “It happened in a place called the Hoodoo Valley.”
“The what valley?” I ask, not sure that I’d heard correctly.
“Hoo-doo. It’s a short valley up the lake, on the north side, several miles out. More than one logging company went in there back in the 1950s and ‘60s. All of them went broke. The last crew that went in left suddenly, scared shitless.”
I ask if he’d seen or met the loggers.
He shakes his head. “I was just a kid. But the older folks said the men got on their boats, tore into the village, and flew straight out. They were as pale as ghosts. Their equipment is still up there.”
“Did anyone here know these guys personally?”
“Doubt it. They were mostly strangers. When they left, they just flew back to Vancouver, or Victoria, or wherever they came from. I don’t think anyone recalls who they were.”
I wonder if the story is Sasquatch-related, and I ask Dennis. He shrugs his shoulders. “Dunno,” he says. “We don’t really go up there. Two white guys later went into the valley not long afterward to retrieve the equipment. But they didn’t stay. They said it was too scary.”
I press Dennis for names, hoping for even a sliver of a lead.
“If you ask around, someone might know.”
I jot the words Hoodoo Valley into my notebook, underscoring them with two lines. It’s as hokey and ominous a name for a valley as could be.
“Have you met Johnny Johnson yet?” Dennis asks.
I shake my head.
“He’s famous around here. He survived a bad grizzly attack a couple of years ago. His dad knew the lake and that area well. Talk to him. I think he has a Sasquatch story of his own.”
Since my time in Koeye, I’ve been thinking more and more about the role our minds play in mediating what we see and believe—and how these processes work. Contrary to our assumptions, humans don’t perceive the world in the way we think we do. The manner in which we register our surroundings is at best convoluted. That may sound strange. After all, when we look at things around us—the environments, people, and situations—we feel that what we see is a comprehensive picture of things. But it’s not. There’s a huge gap in the education we receive in school about how our minds work. To discover the real nature of how we make sense of reality is to realize that each of us is, in a way, fumbling around blindly.
We know that our brains sketch only the most basic impressions of the outside world—mental models containing only the information most relevant to our survival. The late American psychologist Robert Ornstein, known for his pioneering research on the hemispherical specializations of the brain, wrote numerous books about consciousness and perception. He explains that, contrary to what we think, we experience reality not as it actually is—but as a simplified model. The reason for this? Reality is far too complex. Infinitely complex in fact. If our minds tried to process everything around us, we’d be hopelessly overwhelmed. We’d get lost in labyrinths within labyrinths of stimuli, unable to find food, safety, shelter, or mates. Our species would quickly die out. As a result, our minds evolved to construct a deeply simplified version of all that surrounds us: a virtual reality made up of only the important information—perhaps a trillionth of the possible external stimuli. And we make do with that.
“Our experience of the world assembles in a fleeting instant,” Ornstein writes in The Evolution of Consciousness, “with no time for thinking but just enough for producing a best guess of the world.”13
Our mental habits are subject to the same shortcuts. Much of our thinking, for instance, involves the use of assumptions, which are wrong as often as they are right. We confidently form opinions and draw conclusions about subjects and events of which we have little or no knowledge. All of this came about as a survival strategy. Our prehistoric ancestors had no time to gather all data methodically and work through the various possibilities of a situation. If they did they might have become a meal for a tiger or been impaled by an enemy’s spear.
So we
evolved the habit of jumping to conclusions. The price of this inherited shortcut reflex, valuable as it can be, is frequent inaccuracy in our perceptions. And no matter how often we are proved wrong, we just aren’t clued into it, because our self-image is subject to this same modeling. Of all the simplifications the mind creates, the most powerful and convincing is the illusion that we are psychologically consistent—that our perceptions are complete and reliable. It’s the ultimate hoodwink.
How many of us know, for instance, that our memories are affected by the same generalizations and are notoriously poor? Memory, we know, is at best a rough, dreamlike reconstruction of select details skewed by interpretation. Our memories are constantly being reworked, changed, and subjected to new suggestions in the present. Humans as eyewitnesses have been described as “in the disaster class.” Individual eyewitness testimonies, for instance, are unreliable and are responsible for many of the wrongful legal convictions in the United States. Experiments in which subjects are told to watch something and are tested afterward show that people hardly ever know what they have seen.14
Apart from the issue of memory, we tend to fool ourselves into thinking we are younger, and better looking, than we actually are and that we have more friends and will live longer than we actually do. If something has not happened to us, we tend to delude ourselves into thinking it never will happen. If we have a positive or negative experience, we trick ourselves into thinking it will infallibly recur. The fact alone that most of us are unaware of these facts—part of a much larger body of knowledge about how we tick—is a serious indictment of our perceptual abilities.*
The most obvious implication for my investigation of the Sasquatch is that the accuracy of our perceptions and recollections is unreliable. We cut too many corners in seeing and drawing conclusions about what we see. In at least some cases, what people take to be a Sasquatch, or signs of one, are likely nothing of the sort.
On Denny Island weeks before, I had come across what I was convinced was a large Sasquatch track. It wasn’t enormous, but it was larger than my size-ten foot and looked a lot like the classic Bigfoot tracks you see on the Internet and in books. But as I examined the track more closely, I was shocked to see that it was actually composed of different overlapping prints. The toes were actually tracks of a wolf that had stepped right at the top of an old boot print, making it look like a Sasquatch track. My mind had played a trick on me.
Hardened skeptics and debunkers rightfully remind us that these sorts of tricks happen. But seldom do they tell us exactly how the tricks work. The mechanics of misperception, however, are now coming to light.
In their book Human Givens, Irish psychologist Joe Griffin and English author Ivan Tyrrell describe the human brain as a “metaphorical pattern-matching organ.” We see, or otherwise discern something, they say, when the brain matches up stimuli in the outside world to templates—patterns—which we’ve inherited genetically and/or collected since birth. Infants, for instance, can distinguish human faces and will recognize the smiles of their care-givers, often smiling in return. This is a “pattern match.” As infants we have genetically inherited the innate pattern, or template, for the human face and its emotions. When that pattern is matched to the same, or a similar enough, pattern in the external world, the baby will “see” and experience a flash of consciousness. The same process occurs with other patterns, which we all pick up throughout life—patterns for every conceivable object, idea, or circumstance. Everything we can see is by way of patterns we’ve acquired in our mental storehouse that find their matches in the outside world.
But here’s the kicker: because our templates exist as metaphors (and not literal blueprints precise down to the last detail) and because our minds already oversimplify reality, our pattern matches are subject to considerable error. Our brains, operating on a best-guess basis, tend automatically to match things that come close enough to the patterns we hold. This creates “pattern mismatches.” We easily confuse one thing for another. When a few people in Bella Bella took me for a Big Oil or government spy, they were matching a pattern at the forefront of their minds to something seemingly approximate. One form of pattern mismatching, known as pareidolia, happens when we see faces or the shapes of animals in clouds, rock formations, or stucco. It’s the reason spelling mistakes in our writing can often be invisible to us even while we’re proofreading: we see the words we had intended to write.
More than 90 percent of reported unidentified flying object (UFO) incidents, when scrutinized or looked at again in light of new information, have been shown to have mundane explanations: satellites, weather events, meteors, stars, planets, conventional aircraft, flocks of large birds reflecting light, balloons, hoaxes. In other words, the sightings are pattern mismatches. In fact, the UFO phenomenon arose only after the idea of aliens and extraterrestrials—a pattern—took hold in the collective mind by way of the first media reports about alleged spacecraft. The different physical descriptions of spaceships and aliens recounted by eyewitnesses often followed the first visual prototypes described or illustrated initially in science-fiction writing, art, movies, and TV shows—not the other way around. It’s an example of life imitating art.
This knowledge is useful regardless of one’s position on Bigfoot; it at least will explain some spurious reports of the Sasquatch: flashes of fur in the bush, odd sounds, impressions in the dirt, and misidentifications of bears standing in the distance. Pattern matching may also account for the apparent universality of the wild-man archetypes that have existed across numerous cultures. After all, our earlier ancestors coexisted with other primate beings, including perhaps Gigantopithecus itself.* It would not be surprising if the patterns of these Bigfoot-like beings reside in our collective consciousness and memory.
But can we say that perceptual mistakes alone dismiss the Sasquatch phenomenon? How could lengthier sightings at close range by multiple witnesses, like that of Mary Brown, be explained with this knowledge? Wouldn’t bears, with their long snout, upright ears, and short legs, be hard to misidentify at close range? Similarly, what should I make of the many reports I’ve collected so far that begin with the eyewitnesses thinking they were seeing a bear, only to be shocked when an apparent humanoid stood up, looked at them, and walked or ran away, sometimes in view for hundreds of yards?
I call Johnny Johnson later that day and am invited to his home, a few doors down from Lena’s. I’m greeted by a smiling man with a shaved head, wearing a brown T-shirt with cut-off sleeves. We climb a flight of stairs to his sparsely decorated living room and sit on his couch. I give him the spiel about what I’m up to. He looks at me penetratingly, almost sadly.
“Did you make it down to Koeye?” he asks.
I nod.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Beyond words.”
“My family, the Johnson family, are from Koeye,” he says, with a flicker of pride. “From the south side of the river.”
With Johnny I feel I’m in the presence of a close friend, even a family member. He’s fifty-three, gentle, and hospitable. But he’s also intimidating: solidly built, with faded tattoos on his shoulders and forearms and large scars on his head, back, and arms. Johnny, I had been told, had survived a terrible grizzly bear attack a few years ago.
When I ask what he does for a living, he tells me that he assists archaeologists excavating old village sites along the coast. He says he hasn’t worked much recently, owing to his health.
“You heard what happened to me, right?” he asks.
“I have. Are those scars from the attack?”
He nods self-consciously.
Johnny’s brush with death took place in the summer of 2011. He was out picking salmonberries by the side of the road on the edge of town one day. Earlier that morning, the village dogs had been harassing a grizzly sow and her cubs, which had wandered into the community. Johnny had waited for things to quiet down before going into the bush. Soon after he began gathering berries, he was struc
k by a force so powerful it threw him into the air. When he sat up, he saw a huge grizzly coming directly at him.
“She was mad,” he says. “I put my arms up to block her. But half of my forearm went into her mouth. She chomped on me and then tried to get into my stomach. I almost popped out both my shoulders trying to keep her back.”
Johnny says his memory of the attack is hazy and fragmented, but he’s certain that it unfolded in waves. After each assault, the bear ran out onto the road, where the village dogs were barking madly. Johnny realized the dogs had returned and were attacking the cubs, and the sow was simultaneously trying to fend them off. Every time he tried to take advantage of those intervals to escape, the bear was on him again. At one point the grizzly bit into his leg.
“I remember thinking: ‘If she breaks my leg, I’m not making it home.’ And I’m not one of these guys who like to quit.”
In desperation, Johnny jabbed her in the eye with his finger. The bear roared in pain, slapped him in the head, and then broke off the attack to go fight the dogs that were harassing her cubs.
Johnny took advantage of that pause to make a final attempt to save himself. He began rolling his body, trying to get as far away as he could, until he reached a nearby creek bed. Before he could get any farther, he heard the heavy panting of the sow. Soon she was in view again, growling, gnashing her teeth, and frothing at the mouth. She charged at full speed.
“The last thing I remember was kicking up my feet and catapulting her with my legs,” he says. “But the strain was so great that I blacked out.”
When Johnny regained consciousness, it was dark. He was covered with a pile of tree branches a foot high. The bear had buried him until she could return later to feed on him. His final memory before waking up in the Royal Jubilee Hospital in Victoria ten days later was clambering to his feet and stumbling down the road into town in the pitch black of night. Although he has no recollection of it now, Johnny made it a mile to a neighbor’s place and used his first-aid training, which he learned as a logger, to instruct the gathering crowd of villagers on how to keep him alive until the air ambulance arrived.