PART I 1
THE BECKONING
In any field, find the strangest thing and then explore it.
âJohn Archibald Wheeler, physicist
A froth of dark, roiling clouds churns above the swaying canopy. The rain begins, but as a gentle caress.
I am trudging through ground moss and rotting blowdown to the symphonic pitter-patter of reconstituted sea. Shouldering a flimsy daypack and holding a single-barreled shotgun, Clark Hans, my hiking partner, leads me along a high, forested bluff overlooking an expansive valley. We reach a lookout on the edge of the bluff with a commanding view across the floodplain, where limestone mountains dressed in a patchwork of cedar, spruce, and hemlock vanish under strangleholds of mist. To our right, the river meets the ocean, a sullen, blotted-out void.
Clark stares into the distance.
âHere is right where it stood,â he says. âWhere it looked down at me.â
I say nothing, bearing witness to a reverie I can barely understand.
A cool gust of wind washes over us. The rain increases.
âLetâs go,â Clark says, coming out of his trance. âWeâll follow the creek back.â
âThe creek?â I say. âBut you said thereâs bears there. Why donât we go back down the rock face?â
âToo slippery now from the rain.â
Clark heads back into the forest and marches in the opposite direction from which we came. I follow behind him, barely able to keep up. We come to the edge of a steep ravine, the slopes of which are filled with colonies of devilâs club, a spiky shrub as tall as a man. We skirt around the sharp-spined, broad-leaved plant, grasping at smaller trees and shrubs to avoid slipping down the hill in the ever-intensifying downpour.
We reach the bottom of the ravine, a narrow gully between the moss-encrusted walls of two mountains. Weâre completely drenched. All around us, a nightmarish tangle of salal and salmonberry bushes rises above our heads, partly concealing enormous conifers reaching for the narrow opening of sky above the gorge. We can hear the nearby creek running, but it is nowhere to be seen.
Clark, exhaling plumes of foggy breath, scours the surroundings. Suddenly his eyes dart left. There is a rustling in the bushes up the gulch. Itâs followed by the sound of something heavy moving.
Da-thump. Da-thump. Da-thump.
Fear clenches my chest. Clark remains frozen, his head cocked in the direction of the sound.
Da-thump.
There is something near us, waiting, watching, listening. I pick up what I think is a gamy animal smell mingling with the aroma of drenched evergreen. Clark takes hold of his gun with both hands. In almost zero visibility, the weapon offers little, if any, protection. Clark turns to me with an expression of muted alarm, trying to gauge my reaction.
Then: Da-thump! Da-thump! Da-thump!
âGo!â Clark yells, dashing through the berry bushes to a faint game trail. As I run behind him into the thicket sharp branches tear at my face and rain gear. All I can see is Clarkâs backside a few feet in front of me.
A heaving, growling bark explodes around us.
WOOF-WOOF-WOOAHHF!
WOOF-WOOF-WOOAHHFFF!
I break into a sprint with my arms held up to my head to protect myself from whatever beast is nearly upon us. The barking resumesâlouder nowâand the terror spikes. Then I realize itâs Clark making the noises. He stops and cups his hands to his mouth.
âHey, bear! Hey, grizzly-grizzly-grizzly!â he hollers at the top of his voice, a ploy to ward off any bears nearby.
Clark drops his arms and ducks into a waist-high tunnel-like trail in the brush. Weâre forced to crawl on our hands and knees, past sprawling blooms of wet, rotting skunk cabbage, making loud noises, and occasionally having to untangle ourselves from the branches that snag our packs. I realize that at any moment we might be ambushed and mauled by a startled grizzly. Iâm awash in regret for what feels like a foolish undertakingârevisiting the perch of a legendary creature that also happens to be in the heart of bear country.
We come into a relatively dry enclosure of gargantuan Sitka spruces. Beneath a few of the trees, the forest floor is packed down. Clark wanders over to one of the impressions and moves his open palm over it.
âDay bed,â he says. âA mother and cub were just here.â
Clark gets up and heads into the younger brushy alder forest at the edge of the spruces, barking and yelping like a man possessed. I follow into yet another gauntlet of thorns. The novelty of exploring one of the last intact wilderness regions on the planet gives way to silent cursing.
And then reprieve. We emerge, bleary-eyed, from the darkness onto a bright, open estuary dotted with driftwood, mature berry bushes, and half-eaten salmon carcasses. Several bear trails interweave through the tall sedge grass. The invisible creek we were following appears, emptying into a wide, fast-moving river running gray with glacial silt into a fjord-like Pacific channel to our west. Clark stops, rests the butt of his gun on the ground, and turns to me with the smiling satisfaction of a man grateful to have come through.
âNickle-Sqwanny,â he says.
Before us is the confluence of the Necleetsconnay River and the Bella Coola River, which drains an epic, fifty-mile-long valley of the same name. We are in the Great Bear Rainforest, a wilderness region the size of Ireland located along Canadaâs rugged British Columbia coast. The partially protected area, touted as the largest expanse of unspoiled temperate rain forest left in the world, extends some 250 miles between Vancouver Island and the Alaska Panhandle.
Days earlier, I had arrived in the town of Bella Coolaâa Nuxalk Nation community situated just a short distance from where weâre standing. A series of serendipitous encounters led me to Clark, who, people told me, had once seen a Sasquatchâa member of the alleged race of half-man, half-ape giants believed by some to inhabit the wilds of North America. The reputed hair-covered bipeds, known more colloquially as Bigfoots, donât officially exist. No physical specimen, living or dead, has ever been produced. Because of that, mainstream science scoffs at the idea of such creatures, which are also considered by most people to be no more real than fairies or gnomes.
But like other residents of the Great Bear Rainforest, Clark Hans, a soft-spoken, fifty-one-year-old father of four, and erstwhile hunting guide turned artist, is convinced that the animals existâand that he saw one. He agreed to take me to the location of his sighting; a spot he had been too afraid to revisit since the incident thirty years prior.
On that day in the spring of 1983, Clark had been on a duck-hunting trip in the Bella Coola estuary with two of his cousins. Upon arrival there, the group decided to split up. Clark would remain at the mouth of the Bella Coola River, and the others would head up the Necleetsconnay River. They agreed to meet later back at their boat.
Clark remembers that day as being eerily quiet. Nothing moved.
âAll day I never seen a bird, I never seen a duck, I never heard nothing,â he said, recounting the story before taking me up the bluff. âIt was just silence all day. And I couldnât make no sense of it.â
The experience was made stranger by a memory from the week before, when Clark had ventured up the creek alone to check his animal traps. While there he had felt an unusual presence. Someone, or something, he felt, was watching him. He then discovered a cluster of young alders whose tops had been snapped back at the nine-foot level. It was something heâd never seen before, nor could he explain it.
The day he was hunting with his cousins, Clark continued to scour the estuary but found no birds. As he decided what to do next, his eye caught a distant movement on a moss-covered bluff on the mountain facing him. He saw what looked like a person moving into and out of the trees. Clark thought it might be one of his cousins, but he couldnât tell for sure. Whoever it was kept weaving amid the foliage. After disappearing again, this time for much longer, the figure reemerged along the bluff closer to Clark. He estimates it was no more than two hundred feet away when it stepped into the open.
But what he saw caused him to shake his head and blink in disbelief. Directly ahead was not a person but a large, muscular humanoid, covered in jet-black hair, with wide shoulders and long arms, standing on two legs. Though it looked human, it had a menacing, bestial appearance.
âI never seen any person that big before in my life,â Clark said. âIt was massive. It just stopped on the mountain and stared at me. And I stood there frozen.â
Clark thinks the encounter lasted one whole minute. But at the time, he said, it felt infinitely longer. Though he couldnât make out the eyes in the general blackness of its face, the creature seemed to impale him with its gaze. A deep chill ran through Clarkâs body. His legs became wobbly. And for a moment he felt as though he might pass out. Then the animal released Clark from its visual grip and casually shuffled off.
âIt walked into the bush in just a few strides,â he said. âIt didnât run. It just calmly walked away like it couldnât care less. They tell you not to be scared, but I was afraid.â
Clark had known about these creatures his whole life. Nuxalk traditional tales, passed down through the generations, speak of a pair of supernatural beings known as Boqs and Sninik, humanoids that are analogous to Sasquatches. Some in the community considered the animals to be a bad omen. Others claimed the creatureâs very gaze could trigger a comaâor even death. As Clark stood stunned in the aftermath of his sighting, his mind flooded with scenario after terrifying scenario. Was the monster still watching him? Was it planning an ambush? Had it already cursed him? Heâd heard that some people who had looked into the creaturesâ eyes had gone mad. Maybe his spiraling fear was evidence that he too was now losing his mind.
The mortifying possibilities swirled into a vortex of dread. Clark had to flee. He tore off all his clothes and in an adrenaline-fueled feat of endurance crossed an ice-choked Bella Coola River delta, while holding his shotgun and clothes aloft to keep them dry.
Back in town, Clarkâs uncle and grandfather found him slumped at the doorway, frazzled, wide-eyed, and teetering on the brink of hypothermic collapse. When they asked Clark what had happened, he tried to relate his story. But his speech was garbled and nonsensical. What little they did understand of his chattering gibberish was enough to alert them to what had happened.
The men did all they could to warm Clark up and calm him down. Later they burned sage and sang traditional chants to purify him of any negative emanations absorbed from the creature.
âI was naked during the ceremony,â Clark said. âThey took my clothes and smoked those tooâso the creature wouldnât bother me. So it wouldnât haunt me. But it still did.â
Clarkâs fear and anguish deepened, and he was hospitalized for anxiety. After being discharged, days later, he underwent a complete transformation. Clark quit both smoking and drinking. He started going to church, and he took up drawing and painting. For a year he refused to go anywhere near the forest. Until he led me on the hike that afternoon, Clark had not once returned to the spot where heâd seen the creature three decades earlier. Neither had he climbed the nearby bluff where the animal, looking down on him, had so deeply altered the course of his life.
âIâd heard lots of Sasquatch stories before,â Clark said. âI used to tell people: âIâll believe it when I see it.â I never disbelieved it. I just said: âIâll believe it when I see it.â And when I did see it, I said: âWhy me?ââ
Ten days before meeting Clark, I had traveled from Toronto to British Columbia to work on a magazine story about the Great Bear Rainforest. After gaining a small amount of environmental protection in 2006, this lofty stretch of rugged coastline (best known for the white Kermode bear, or âspirit bearâ) had been insinuating itself into the mind of the outside world. I had come to write about the area as an up-and-coming travel destination for those interested in seeing grizzly bears, going on hikes in primeval forests, and learning about the first peoples, who have inhabited this coast for at least fourteen thousand years.
But as is often the case with plans, little went as intended.
In the town of Bella Bella, on Campbell Island, the seat of the Heiltsuk First Nation, I found myself more interested in the peopleâand local goings-onâthan in taking part in any touristy adventures on offer at the nonindigenous-owned local fishing lodge. While engaging with residents, I heard about a frightening incident. Months earlier, a monstrous humanoid had been seen on the edge of the communityâs youth camp, located nearby at the mouth of the beautiful Koeye River on the mainland coast. It wasnât the first such incident at the camp, I was told.
Deeply intrigued, I talked to two of the key eyewitnesses, a brother and sister in their teens, and implored them to tell me their stories. The mere mention of the incident caused them to stiffen and etched onto their faces something of the visceral fear they had experienced. They were hesitant to speak at first, but then they agreed. What stood before them that night, they insisted, was not a bear standing on its hind legs, as a few skeptics in the community had allegedâbut a Sasquatch. The Koeye valley, they added, was one area Sasquatches inhabited.
At first I thought Iâd come across an isolated incidentâa spooky bump-in-the-night episode gone sideways. But from that moment forward, without my having made so much as a suggestion or query, Sasquatch stories jumped out at meâboth in Bella Bella and in neighboring towns. My arrival on the coast, it seemed, was coinciding with a cyclical rash of creature sightings in every nearby community. And contrary to what I expected, people itched to talk about it.
In the Kitasoo/Xaiâxais First Nation community of Klemtu, thirty miles north of Bella Bella, residents claimed that someone, or something, was banging on and shaking their homes in the middle of the night. Bloodcurdling, high-pitched screams emanating from the forest above the town were reported on a weekly basis. Two construction workers from southern British Columbia, newly arrived and ignorant of the experiences of the local residents, told me that they often heard a hollering and stomping on the mountainside above their trailer. Both claimed to be lifelong woodsmen and said it sounded like no animal they knew.
Meanwhile, in the Bella Coola valley, people traveling along the two-lane highway reported large humanlike forms crossing the road in their headlights at night. The gargantuan, lumbering figures were said to be of such enormous stature that they stepped across the highway in just three strides before melting into the blackness. Large, humanlike tracks, some measuring up to eighteen inches in length and pressed deep into the earth, appeared along the bushy byways between unfenced homes in two indigenous neighborhoods. These were only a few of the stories.
By the time I met Clark, I was awash in these tales. I had done little of the outdoor adventuring planned for my travel story and was instead obsessively following a trail of yarns, strang...