In the Valleys of the Noble Bey - John Zada Page 0,1
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.
“Nickle-Sqwanny,” 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 Canada’s 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 Coola—a Nuxalk Nation community situated just a short distance from where we’re standing. A series of serendipitous encounters led me to Clark, who, people told me, had once seen a Sasquatch—a 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, don’t 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 exist—and 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.
“All day I never seen a bird, I never seen a duck, I never heard nothing,” he said, recounting the story before taking me up the bluff. “It was just silence all day. And I couldn’t make no sense of it.”
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 he’d 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 couldn’t 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.
“I never seen any person that big before in my life,” Clark said. “It was massive. It just stopped on the mountain and stared at me. And I stood there frozen.”
Clark thinks the encounter lasted one whole minute. But at the time, he said, it felt infinitely longer. Though he couldn’t 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 Clark’s body. His legs became wobbly. And for a moment he felt as though he might pass