In the Valleys of the Noble Bey - John Zada Page 0,106

of his rant, as though he’d just remembered, he screamed, “Look!” and pointed to the top of the cabin. I looked up and thought, “What the heck is that?” There’s two windows at the Deer Pass cabin and it was right above one of the windows: an enormous handprint! It looked like whatever had made it rubbed its hand in the soot of an earlier fire.

He said that something had come during the night and was banging on the side of the cabin. The attack, he said, started early in the night, while he was inside. It began with rocks and branches being thrown at the walls. He said he was absolutely terrified and as the night progressed, more things started happening. Banging. Shaking.

He said, “I swear it was a Thla’thla! I swear it was because what could put a handprint up there?”

I looked at it again. It was huge, and you could still see it because the dirt or soot was still on the walls. It wasn’t a perfect handprint by any means, but you could see it was a handprint and there was more than one along the walls of the building. And there was no way that this young man could have gotten up there. The Deer Pass cabin is high. It sits on stilts. The space beneath the cabin is used for wood storage. There’s no ladder at the cabin and it was just too high. The print was just too big.

He then went on to say that the creature was mocking him. It was terrorizing or scaring him. It could have gotten into the cabin at any time if it wanted to through the windows and door.

He said the creature finally went away after he screamed at the top of his lungs: “Leave me alone! Please just leave me alone! I’m not going to hurt you! Just leave me alone!” And I guess when it heard the fear in his voice, it disappeared.

Addendum 2

Hoodoo Valley Postscript

A year after my trip, I visited the Great Bear Lodge, a remote bear-viewing camp at the southern edge of the Great Bear Rainforest. I traveled on the invitation of one of the owners, Marg Lehane, an Australian I’d met in Winnipeg a few months before.

One evening, after an unforgettable but completely drenching day viewing grizzlies in the field, Marg and I found ourselves chatting over a glass of wine beside a huge wall map of the region. As we compared notes about the beautiful places we had both visited in the Great Bear, I related the stories I’d heard in Wuikinuxv about the Hoodoo Valley—which I pointed to on the map. When I told her that logging companies had reported strange incidents there over half a century ago, I could see the gears turning in her head. She admitted to knowing nothing about the place, but said that a colleague of hers might have been in the area at the time. She promised to ask him whether he knew anything, and she would put us in touch if he did.

Weeks passed and our conversation slipped my mind. But then one day I received an email from her:

When you were at the lodge, we talked about a valley in the Rivers Inlet area with some unusual happenings. My business partner knows the exact valley you were referring to. He went into the valley after the two logging operations there went broke to retrieve some of the machinery, and said that it was a creepy experience. He would be more than happy to chat with you about what he knows.

Later that day I began a correspondence with seventy-two-year-old Lance McGill, who lives on Vancouver Island. This is his statement concerning his knowledge of the Hoodoo Valley:

That valley, the Sowick valley on Owikeno Lake, is a really beautiful place. It’s chock-full of fir, cedar, and hemlock. My family was in the construction business. And I’d first heard about it when my dad bought a Caterpillar D7 off the first logging company to go broke in there in the late 1950s. I can’t recall the company’s name, but they apparently had a hell of a time in there. All sorts of mishaps. Nothing went right.

Between 1965 and 1967 I was working for a logging company called Kerr and Dumaresque, which was pulling timber in various parts of Owikeno Lake. While it was there, another logging show, run by Carlson Logging out of Port Alice, got the rights to go into Sowick—that problem valley.