In the Valleys of the Noble Bey - John Zada Page 0,10
the world became. Every branch of every tree along the trail was loaded to capacity with snow, a thousand miniature avalanches in waiting.
Over an hour in, we stopped to rest. It was midafternoon. A premonition of dusk hung in the air. The woods were uncomfortably still. We had seen no other people on the trail that day.
“How much farther should we go?” I asked.
Before my friend could answer, something caught our attention. Above and behind us, in the distance, we could hear movement. It was a diffuse rustle at first but grew louder and more methodical. Something, or someone—it had to be someone!—was walking, almost marching, through the snow toward us, and was covering ground fast.
Crunch-crunch …
Crunch-crunch …
Crunch-crunch …
Soon the sound was almost directly upon us. It had an excruciatingly heavy presence. Deep panting accompanied every thundering step, which resonated surreally, as if in surround sound. It was so close—whatever it was—it seemed as if we could reach out and touch it. Yet we couldn’t see a thing. Not a single moving tree, or a cloud of snow thrown off branches. Just a heavy plodding, like a locomotive chugging past us. The jolt of intense, heart-stopping fear didn’t kick in until after the sound had started to recede around the mountainside. My friend and I turned to each other, wide-eyed.
We spent the next few moments in terror-fueled speculation, trying to determine what had walked past us. We had just ruled out woolly mammoths when the presence began plodding back toward us—this time from the other direction—as if it had forgotten something.
Crunch-crunch …
Crunch-crunch …
With it came that same deep, seething panting.
It sounded agitated, almost as if it were deliberately announcing itself with stomps and anxious pacing. The floodgates of dread blew wide open. It was too much to handle.
In perfect synchrony, the two of us broke into a panicked sprint. Like ultra-athletes, we ran nonstop all the way back to Nelson.
I may have fled the forest with lightning speed, but I was nowhere near fast enough to outrun my latent beliefs, which were waiting for me at the head of the trail. By the time I stepped back onto the concrete, I was convinced I’d rubbed shoulders with a Sasquatch. My friend, although also sure we’d skirmished with something rare and untoward, eventually got tired of talking about it and lost interest.
But I couldn’t let it go. I started to make inquiries around Nelson. After a bit of sleuthing I found myself at an artisanal coffee shop sitting across from the local Sasqualogist, a man in his early fifties named Robert Milner. He was the first Bigfoot researcher I’d ever met, and, contrary to expectations, he had no weird quirks. He was a normal guy who spoke openly and matter-of-factly about Bigfoots as if he were talking about his vegetable garden. He’d never seen a Sasquatch, he said, but had concluded from years of in-depth research that the animals lived in a dense cluster within a fifteen-mile radius of the nearby Kokanee Glacier.* Sasquatches, he added, had been seen a few times on the edges of town, but he insisted—for no particular reason—that what my friend and I had heard was most likely an elk passing above the trail.
I casually brushed off his dismissal as envy and, eager to confirm my bias, asked him how many people in town had seen the animal.
“More than are willing to admit,” he replied, with an air of mystery. Forest rangers, loggers, a former policeman, and the owners of a local hot springs resort were among the eyewitnesses who had confided in him.
“One hunter I know,” he said, “had a distant Sasquatch in his rifle sights but chose to lower his gun rather than shoot.”
“Why?” I asked.
“For the same reason that all hunters in the same situation do: he couldn’t pull the trigger.”
“Because he was paralyzed by fear?”
“No, because it was too human-looking. At one point the thing casually turned its head and stared straight at the guy through the crosshairs of his scope for a full minute.”
My mind took in that eerie moment. Then a disturbing thought came to me. “How far away was the Sasquatch?” I asked.
A look of affirmation came over Rob’s face. “Several hundred yards,” he said, pausing before delivering his denouement. “The Sasquatch knew he was there.”
In the years after Nelson, several people I met, or knew, came out of the woodwork with personal tales of their own. The first was a Toronto acquaintance with Pakistani roots who told me