‘I’ve reached the supposed ground zero of Bigfoot’
Canadian author John Zada’s hunt for the Sasquatch takes him to Bella Coola, B.C. Although ‘Bigfoots are said to appear occasionally in neighbouring communities, they are omnipresent here … they’ll walk through your front yard if need be,’ he writes in his new book
Canadian writer John Zada had an obsession with Bigfoot stories as a child. As an adult, he travelled to the Great Bear Rainforest in British Columbia, site of many sightings and legends over the years, in an effort to separate myth from reality. The next day, I leave my cheap riverside motel in Bella Coola proper and ride up the empty highway on a rented bicycle to the Four Mile reserve — a Nuxalk residential community located that distance up the valley from the main town site. It’s an idyllic day, one of those perfect, temperate end-of-summer afternoons, with swirling tendrils of high cloud and a cool breeze blowing in from the ocean filtered through evergreens.
I turn onto a side road and enter the reserve, riding leisurely past homes situated on spacious, unfenced lots separated by swaths of bushy overgrowth. The placid neighbourhood is alive with groups of romping children. From Four Mile, the view looking up the Bella Coola valley is crystal clear. An adjacent side valley, the Thorsen, beckons with the mist-obscured, sugar-icing-coated glacier at its head.
I’ve reached the supposed ground zero of Bigfoot — the waking version of the lofty wilderness of my daydreams as a kid. It’s hard to downplay the links and associations with Sasquatch here. Because of that, the idea of looking for the physical animal is tough to resist. For, in a real sense, Bella Coola is Bigfoot.
For Sasquatch enthusiasts, the town’s very name, its contours of sound, evokes the creature’s spirit. Whereas Bigfoots are said to appear occasionally in neighbouring communities, they are omnipresent here, constantly flitting between hidden recesses and blind spots. Residents allege the animals are bolder here than anywhere else on the coast — so much so that they’ll walk through your front yard if need be.
Reports span the length of the Bella Coola valley and all adjoining creek and river systems. Ask around and you’ll hear incidents of every variety, involving howls, whoops, screams, loud crashing in the bush, and road crossings; figures standing or crouching in the open at night, peeping into windows, banging on houses, rock throwing, stick throwing and wood knocking; and putrid lingering odours and tracks in the mud or snow. Some reports are just weeks old. Others have been circulating for more than half a century.
The majority of encounter sites cluster in and around the Bella Coola town site and Four Mile reserve, as well as on the highway and adjacent river running between the two communities. Drivers, cyclists and people walking the two-lane road have reported seeing Sasquatches
crossing it in both directions. Fishermen on the river have seen the animals on its shores.
Nothing strikes me as particularly significant about this — at first. The area around and between the two communities is the busy, more populated stretch of the valley. Residents here are mostly Nuxalk, and Sasquatch awareness runs high (whereas up the road in the nonnative community of Hagensborg, as in Ocean Falls and Denny Island, there is far less belief in the creatures — and significantly fewer reports). Whether or not Sasquatches exist, it makes sense that there would be more reports in this thoroughfare zone than in the rest of the valley. But when I look at Google Earth to get a better handle on the terrain, I notice something interesting: the entrances to four side valleys are located in the hot zone of reports.
Three of those valleys are on the south side of the Bella Coola River, between Four Mile and the ocean. The fourth, the Necleetsconnay valley, faces them all on the north side. Each of these valleys is home to glacier-fed, salmon-bearing creeks and is a world unto itself. Their confluence at the lower reaches of the Bella Coola River is a nutrient-rich crossroads.
Could the cluster of alleged Sasquatch activity in this area be indicative not just of human demographics — a cluster of belief — but also of the proximity of those valleys to one another? In other words, could the higher number of reports be the result of real Bigfoots constantly moving among the valleys, crisscrossing back and forth between habitats and food sources?
The Necleetsconnay, a narrow valley hemmed in by steep mountainsides and canyons running ten miles north from Bella Coola, strikes me as the most promising of the bunch.
I bushwhacked its lower reaches on my previous visit alongside Clark Hans, who, decades earlier, had seen a Sasquatch on a ridge while duck hunting with his cousins. The Necleetsconnay merges with the Bella Coola River delta as it enters the inlet, about a mile northwest of town, where the remains of old Nuxalk village sites are found. It is an area of numerous reports.
I share my ideas later that day in Four Mile with Nuxalk Sasquatch investigator Loren Mack. He concurs with my observations, adding that there are “known routes between the valleys” on which the creatures travel. He shares with me his own treasure trove of plaster casts and stories outside his trailer.
“Keep in mind,” he says afterward, “that we have at least two different creatures here according to our traditions. You have the Sninik. It’s tall and palelooking, with clammy skin and thin patches of fur. It crouches in the bush with its knees coming up as high as its head. It makes whooping noises.
“Then you have the Boqs, which are darker and much smaller. Child-size. They’re more tricky and dangerous. They’re the screamers.”
It’s another reference to the Little People of the Wuikinuxv and the Bukwus, the little woodsman, of the Heiltsuk tradition.
“But neither of those,” I say, “accurately describes the classic Sasquatch: the big, tall, often dark, hairy animal most often described.”
“Those are the hybrids,” he says. “There are other beings in our traditions, too.”
Discussions of this sort continue as I get to know the locals, culminating in a growing feeling, again, that the creatures, whatever their size, colour, or shape — whatever their nomenclature — likely exist.
Tempering those stories is my discussion with Peter Mattson, known affectionately to his friends and acquaintances as “the Swede.” Mattson is an eccentric émigré, a ski bum from Europe, who runs the Tweedsmuir Park Lodge and its heli-skiing operation at the head of the valley.
“In all the years I’ve been here, we’ve never seen a trace of them,” he says in his cut-and-dried Scandinavian accent. “And with all the flying that we do, especially taking our backcountry skiers and snowboarders over the mountains in the winter, you’d think we’d have seen tracks in the snow by now. But we haven’t.” “Ever?” “Never.” “Not one track?” He shakes his head. “Not a track, not a toe-print, not even a hair.”
I’ve slipped back into the dualistic mind-set involving Sasquatch — “exists” versus “doesn’t exist” — both out of habit and desperate hope. At the same time, the metaphorical image of the Sasquatch in the outline of the mountains near Ocean Falls remains alive in me.
In quieter moments I allow myself to think about Bigfoots in a more symbolic and philosophical way. And though I’ve considered psychology, in the hope that it would help illuminate either proof or disproof of the creature, I still feel there’s an aspect of our behaviour that’s unexamined, having to do with our need to plumb the depths of the unknown.
What is the deepest intent of Bigfoot hunters and investigators? What is my own?
Life is full of unknowns that preoccupy us. We constantly grapple with things we don’t know or can’t see — the blank spots on our conceptual and literal maps: What, if anything, lies around the next corner? Past the edge of the visible universe? Beyond tomorrow? After death?
For the literal questions, we often do our best to actually, directly or indirectly, see for ourselves. Explorers fling themselves into little-known regions. Scientists conduct experiments. Companies and governments employ analysts, consultants, spies. Individually, we might take our question to a private investigator — or a psychic.
When an answer is particularly elusive, we make do with guesses: we use our imagination, we concoct hypotheses and stories that jibe with our world view. We create placeholders until we know for sure. In answering more existential questions, philosophical systems, including religious and cultural cosmologies, fulfil a similar function. They’re connectors, bridges to little-understood or unknowable aspects of life.
In answer to certain mysteries, all cultures have employed pantheons of deities, demigods and preternatural beings. Christian culture has angels — celestial beings that act as intermediaries between heaven and earth. In Islamic and pre-Islamic Middle Eastern lore, the djinn are intelligent, shape-shifting and meddlesome essences that harbour a capacity for either good or evil. Elfinand fairy-type beings (which, like the Thla’thla or Dzonoqua, are given to kidnapping children) are still revered in Celtic cultures.
In the countries of Scandinavia, races of little people called Tomte and Nisse are said to roam the countryside. One Norse being, the Hulder or Skogsra, is a female forest spirit that can lure a man into her subterranean cave, from which he will never emerge.
Move in any direction on the world map, and the beliefs, the stories, the lore accrue. At one level these beings represent a direct link — and a kind of proof within the circular logic of belief — that there is a deeper, unexplained mystery and origin to life and the universe. And that as humans we aren’t alone in this painfully empty cosmos.
Within these precincts of cultural expression, the Sasquatch may find its deepest function and appeal. In First Nations cultures, the creatures associated with Bigfoot, even if they are also flesh-and-blood animals, are imbued with religious and supernatural significance. Like prophets, holy people or saints, these creatures, auspicious in the extreme, appear to deliver messages, herald events, impart lessons or dole out justice — in the cause of cosmic equilibrium. They are the subtle, secretive and cunning emissaries from some other reality, which all humans, not just people in traditional cultures, seem to yearn for.
Though Sasquatches on one level embody a kind of primitivism — the “backward” and “uncivilized” qualities that make them characters in bad horror films and goofy commercials — the creatures are gifted with a slate of talents that place them on a level above humans:
Profound physical strength and endurance; Unfathomable stealth and speed; Ability to appear and disappear at will; Hypnotic and fear-inducing projections of gaze and voice;
A hyper-symbiotic relationship with nature.
Their highly evolved and even magical sleights of hand give them the appearance of superheroes or demigods. In a manner consistent with higher beings, Sasquatches set themselves apart from humankind. They dwell in out-of-theway places difficult for us to get to and where we don’t belong.
Like Greek gods huddling on Olympus, they remain aloof and want little to do with our lot. Like our very own shadows, they move away from us when we pursue them. But they can also appear randomly in our midst. And when they do, as with any deity, the appearance is auspicious in a life-changing way. Ask any eyewitness.
“The basic urge toward mysticism,” the late Anglo-Afghan storyteller and experiential philosopher Idries Shah once wrote, “is never, in the unaltered man, clear enough to be recognized for what it is.”
The Sasquatch enthusiast, hunter, or scientist will give any number of logical motives as his or her excuse for pursuing the animal. And those may be true. But anyone hooked on Bigfoot is almost surely drawn as well to the phenomenology and magical mystery surrounding the alleged creatures. We could even call this impulse religious — not in the conventional meaning of the word, but more in the pure sense of having a reverential relationship and attitude to something sacred, set apart, forbidden. When I honestly plumb my own motivations, I can see that my fascination stems from the seemingly superhuman implications of the Sasquatch. And because that part of me that likes to believe — and wants to believe — still clings to the idea, I feel driven to physically go out and look.