In the Valleys of the Noble Bey - John Zada Page 0,12

if you spent several days camped alone anywhere in that wide radius around the glacier and played the harmonica or broadcast recordings of children playing in a schoolyard, those sounds would draw Sasquatches near and virtually guarantee an encounter. It was an idea he had recently come up with, but had not yet tested.

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SASQUALOGY

In the half century since big, upright creatures, leaving hundreds of tracks, were seen in the high snowfield on the north side of Mount Everest by a band of British mountaineers, the ye-teh, or yeti, has met with a storm of disapproval from upset scientists around the world. But as with the sasquatch of the vast rain forests of the Pacific Northwest, the case against the existence of the yeti—entirely speculative, and necessarily based on assumptions of foolishness or mendacity in many observers of good reputation—is even less “scientific” than the evidence that it exists.

—Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard

In 1963, John Bindernagel, a third-year wildlife biology undergrad at the University of Guelph in southern Ontario, visited his local barbershop. Before taking a seat in the chair, he rummaged through a stack of magazines on a nearby table and pulled out a copy of Argosy—an American men’s magazine that featured “true” adventure stories.

As the barber went to work, Bindernagel flipped through the magazine. Halfway in, something grabbed him: it was a story about a race of undiscovered ape-men that people were claiming to see in the British Columbia wilderness. The author was Ivan T. Sanderson, an eccentric Scottish American biologist, who was making a name for himself investigating mysterious creatures and paranormal subjects. The story, brimming with eyewitness accounts and colorful illustrations of the shaggy creatures, fired Bindernagel’s imagination. New species were being discovered all the time—but an anomalous, unclassified primate in North America promised to be the discovery of the century.

Bindernagel was so taken with the mystery that he decided to bring it up in his wildlife management class a few days later. Raising his hand, he asked his professor what the strange ape-men, seen by people across the Pacific Northwest, could possibly be. He had barely spoken his last words when the lecture hall erupted in peals of laughter. Bindernagel looked on as his fellow students keeled over in convulsions of cackling. The answer, the professor said, stepping in to adjudicate, was simple: Bigfoot was a hoax. With a reproachful glance, he added that the subject wasn’t fit for serious discussion in class, and that it shouldn’t be brought up again.

Rejected by his peers, the angry and embarrassed undergrad resolved to pursue the topic quietly on the side for as long as it took to yield answers. The subject would eventually consume him, becoming his life’s obsession.

In 1998, more than three decades later, Bindernagel, a career wildlife biologist, published a book entitled North America’s Great Ape: The Sasquatch. In it, he argued that the reported physical and behavioral attributes of Bigfoot are so similar to those of known primates that the creatures are almost certainly an undiscovered species of great ape. It was a deliberate act of demystification reflected in the book’s subtitle: A Wildlife Biologist Looks at the Continent’s Most Misunderstood Large Mammal.

I reached out to Bindernagel, now living in British Columbia, before leaving on my trip. He was thrilled by my interest and invited me to stop in at Courtenay, the laid-back community on the east coast of Vancouver Island, to spend the day with him. Not only would I gain insight into the Sasquatch from the perspective of a scientist working on the subject—there are only a handful of such scientists in the world—but it would also provide access to the mind of a man who, for most of his life, has known the relentless pursuit of a creature that the wider world, including his own colleagues, insists does not exist.

When I pull up to Bindernagel’s home—a small, aging bungalow in a leafy subdivision on the edge of town—both he and his wife are waiting on the front lawn. Bindernagel, who brandishes a toddler’s smile and keeps his hands glued inside his pockets, looks very much the academic, with his wiry gray beard, beige slacks, and denim shirt. Joan, his wife, a petite and innocent-looking blonde, stands by his side, also smiling shyly.

The image and demeanor of the wildlife biologist couldn’t be any further from the monster-hunter stereotype: the outspoken and abrasive alpha male decked out in commando-style bushwhacking gear and battlefield accoutrements. I’d always known that Bindernagel embodied a different archetype. Even