In the Valleys of the Noble Bey - John Zada Page 0,101

find ourselves just standing there, emotions largely discharged, wondering what to do next.

The sow is uncertain. She wears a look of shy embarrassment and lowers her head to the ground, pivoting it from side to side, fluttering her lips. After a few pendular swings she resignedly lumbers into the trees.

My heart is galloping uncontrollably. I try to speak but can’t.

“Jeezus,” Leonard says.

We stand there watching her, a shadow drifting between trees, as she is joined by her offspring. The pair vanish deeper into the woods before reappearing again, farther off, in the adjacent creek, crossing to the other bank. The three of us huddle, dazed and fired up on adrenaline. Josie picks up a rusty old food can, brings it to Leonard’s feet, and starts to play with it as if nothing has happened.

“Boy, that was close,” Leonard mumbles, looking both agitated and euphoric and trying to regain his composure.

“What took you so long to shoot?” Daniel asks, his relief tinged with annoyance.

“The gun jammed. We’d have been dead meat if I hadn’t let off that warning shot,” Leonard says, before turning to me with a look as admonishing as it is sarcastic.

“So, Sasquatch Man. Seen enough yet? Ready to go back?”

* Grease trails were indigenous trade routes running between the northwest coast and the interior, along which fermented oil (i.e., grease) of the sacred oolichan (eulachon) fish was traded for other goods.

* In 2001, the provincial New Democratic Party government imposed a moratorium on bear trophy hunting across all of British Columbia until better scientific data about its impact on populations could be collected. Several months later the party was defeated in a snap election. The first act of parliament of the victorious Liberal Party was to rescind the moratorium.

* Bella Coola earned its wider reputation as a Sasquatch hub when journalist John Green and field investigator Bob Titmus, both pioneering Bigfoot researchers, started documenting the numerous reports here in the 1960s. The town’s Bigfoot profile was further raised when the memoirs of a colorful twentieth-century Nuxalk bear-hunting guide named Clayton Mack were published in the 1990s. Mack’s two books, Grizzlies and White Guys and Bella Coola Man, contain the transcribed oral accounts of his own early adventures. Mack, a respected wilderness hand who spent most of his life in the bush guiding hunters (including Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl), claimed to have seen and heard the creatures on a number of occasions.

* Edwards taught himself advanced mathematics and aeronautical engineering, getting his pilot’s license after only twenty-eight hours of instruction at age sixty-two—the oldest person in Canada ever to qualify at the time. But he never got his homemade plane to fly.

9

THE RECKONING

The search is not for a wild man but for how wildness has left men, then to bring that wildness back.

—Daniel C. Taylor, Yeti: The Ecology of a Mystery

We’re crammed into an old wooden rowboat, with Leonard in the back, paddling against the wind with two-by-fours cut by Stanley Edwards himself. Only Leonard speaks, periodically directing our strokes through the thick blooms of aquatic weeds. He’s irked about the way the trip has gone and returns to his laments about his plight and life. My mind is overloaded, and I block out most of what he’s saying. But one sentence penetrates:

“Without meaning, a man’s life falls apart,” he says.

Our run-in with the sow and cub the previous day marked the end of our expedition—and my trip. It was as if some denouement, or climax, had been reached. It felt like a powerful, unspoken truth: that there was nothing more to do. My travel companions, I think, sensed that too.

At first I can’t help feeling that I’m returning empty-handed—that the Sasquatch has run circles around me.

But it really hit home more than once during this side trip with Leonard that it doesn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things whether the Sasquatch actually exists or not. The possibility of a physical Bigfoot may be important for people like John Bindernagel and other scientists, who are working within a certain materialist worldview involving mammals, natural histories, and primate lineages. But to me the implications of the Sasquatch have amounted to a different significance: what it tells us about ourselves.

When I think of everything I’ve considered related to the Sasquatch—belief and skepticism, scientific pursuits, traditional tales, personal mythmaking, pseudo-religious awe, pattern-matching, and the attempt to explain the unexplained—I realize these are all expressions of meaning. And that our pursuit of the Sasquatch, our various interpretations of it, are a