In the Valleys of the Noble Bey - John Zada Page 0,18

a cement truck. My friend said it was as tall as the roof of the truck. The creature then looked at him and gave him a dirty look before making a beeline into the bush.”

I watch Bindernagel with fascination as he reacts to this serendipitous, though secondhand, report. He’s nearly beside himself with euphoria and breaks into a flurry of questions that are met by an equal number of shrugged shoulders and shaking heads.

“Dunno,” Carl says, over and over again. “All he said was that he never believed in Bigfoot before, but now he was convinced.”

Before driving off, Carl bids adieu to Bindernagel with a friendly smile, saying, “Well, I hope you find it.”

When I look at Bindernagel moments later, I see his mood has soured. His face shows a mixture of expired elation, irony, and annoyance—all melded into one unsettling look that I can’t decipher.

“What’s the matter?” I ask.

“Well, I hope you find it,“ Bindernagel says mockingly, enunciating each word as if he’d been slighted. “See what I mean? People have no idea.”

“I don’t follow.”

“The Sasquatch—it’s already been found!” he says, with a resentful, drawn-out sigh. “One day the vindication will come.”

Bindernagel fixes his gaze on the road, shakes his head, and changes the subject, pointing out another promising location for a camera trap.

* Krantz showed his dermal-ridged tracks to fingerprint experts around the world—including those in law enforcement, who were much intrigued by them. One renowned fingerprint guru, John Berry, who was also the editor of the fingerprint community’s journal, Fingerprint Whorld, told Krantz that Scotland Yard had concluded the prints were “probably real.” See Regal, Brian, Searching for Sasquatch: Crackpots, Eggheads, and Cryptozoology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 138.

* Bindernagel mailed copies of the book to the heads of all state and provincial wildlife units in North America, only to receive just one lackluster letter of thanks.

PART II

4

BELLA BELLA

(WAGLISLA)

They believe in a race of giants, which inhabit a certain mountain off to the west of us. This mountain is covered with perpetual snow. They inhabit the snow peaks. They hunt and do all their work at night. They are men stealers. They come to the people’s lodges at night when the people are asleep and take them and put them under their skins and to their place of abode without even waking. Their track is a foot and a half long. They steal salmon from Indian nets and eat them raw as the bears do. If the people are awake, they always know when they are coming very near by their strong smell that is most intolerable. It is not uncommon for them to come in the night and give three whistles and then the stones will begin to hit their houses.

—Diary of Elkanah Walker, a missionary among the

Spokane people of the Pacific Northwest, 1840

The flight from Port Hardy, near the northern tip of Vancouver Island, to Bella Bella is short, taking just over forty minutes. But the distance covered feels immeasurable. Within moments we soar over the blue abyss of the Pacific, crossing some invisible boundary separating humanity’s neat grids from the sprawling folds and rising humps of a free-flowing hinterland. We skip over Labouchere Channel, banking north across the thickly carpeted mainland coast and the islands that huddle around it like pottery shards. Our small twin-engine turboprop flies low, revealing the landscape in the clearest detail. Long stretches of yellow sandy beach, clusters of rocks foaming with breakers, and stands of old growth—all breathtakingly intact—roll past in succession. Occasionally, fjords—cliff-lined coastal inlets of the sea—appear, snaking eastward, before vanishing into distant scrums of mountains.

This wilderness in my sights is a powerful spectacle, amplified, I suspect, by my own predispositions and experiences. I’ve spent much time living and working in the Middle East, with its austere, bone-dry deserts, which I’ve not only become accustomed to but also accepted—as a child of Arab parents—as part of my genetic makeup. The Great Bear Rainforest is the antithesis of that barren topography. Placing images of the two regions side by side, you would be hard-pressed to find a more stark contrast. Because it is so wonderfully different from everything I’m used to, the Edenic lushness below resonates deeply with me.

We dip bumpily into fingers of low-lying cloud, emerging high above gnarled, tangled treetops in miniature. Soon a road appears, then a cluster of homes. A water reservoir and a marina finally hurtle by as the plane sinks into an outlying, tinder-dry bog jungle, meeting its shadow on a