bear standing on its hind legs, as a few skeptics in the community had alleged—but a Sasquatch. The Koeye valley, they added, was one area Sasquatches inhabited.
At first I thought I’d come across an isolated incident—a spooky bump-in-the-night episode gone sideways. But from that moment forward, without my having made so much as a suggestion or query, Sasquatch stories jumped out at me—both in Bella Bella and in neighboring towns. My arrival on the coast, it seemed, was coinciding with a cyclical rash of creature sightings in every nearby community. And contrary to what I expected, people itched to talk about it.
In the Kitasoo/Xai’xais First Nation community of Klemtu, thirty miles north of Bella Bella, residents claimed that someone, or something, was banging on and shaking their homes in the middle of the night. Bloodcurdling, high-pitched screams emanating from the forest above the town were reported on a weekly basis. Two construction workers from southern British Columbia, newly arrived and ignorant of the experiences of the local residents, told me that they often heard a hollering and stomping on the mountainside above their trailer. Both claimed to be lifelong woodsmen and said it sounded like no animal they knew.
Meanwhile, in the Bella Coola valley, people traveling along the two-lane highway reported large humanlike forms crossing the road in their headlights at night. The gargantuan, lumbering figures were said to be of such enormous stature that they stepped across the highway in just three strides before melting into the blackness. Large, humanlike tracks, some measuring up to eighteen inches in length and pressed deep into the earth, appeared along the bushy byways between unfenced homes in two indigenous neighborhoods. These were only a few of the stories.
By the time I met Clark, I was awash in these tales. I had done little of the outdoor adventuring planned for my travel story and was instead obsessively following a trail of yarns, strangely synchronized as if they’d been deliberately laid out for me.
As a child I had been obsessed by stories about Bigfoot. I grew up in the 1970s and early ‘80s, a time when Sasquatch had become a pop-culture icon after a string of movies and television shows exploited the public’s apparent fascination with the creature. I became literate by reading some of the first books published on the subject. For years the creatures, which I had come to believe in wholeheartedly, even appeared to me in my dreams at night. They were otherworldly, existing far beyond the pale, yet fit perfectly into the fabric of my mental universe.
I mostly grew out of this obsession, but part of it remained with me. Now, through no will or decision of my own, my old interest had resurfaced—like an amnesiac’s memory returning. But now, the faded old yarns printed in dusty library books were turning into real-life experiences shared trustingly with me—a writer and journalist—by the people who lived and breathed them. I felt compelled to investigate and make sense of this mystery, which, to me, had languished in inexplicability for far too long. Maybe I could discover something that others had not found. When Clark told me his story and offered to take me to the very spot he’d been fearfully avoiding for three decades, I couldn’t say no.
While I stand on the banks of the Bella Coola, the rain lets up before beating down again, this time with the feel and ferocity of sleet. Clark wades waist-deep into the river to fetch our aluminum rowboat, which has been picked up by the rising tide and dragged downstream. When he returns, we climb in and push off, hitching a ride on the swift current. Clark rows as I bail out rainwater from the bottom using an empty laundry detergent container with its top sawed off. A young bald eagle cuts a path directly over us, its wing flaps reverberating in the air. The bird lands atop a rotting tree stump sticking out of the inundated estuary. I turn my gaze to take in the valley and the mountains that line it. I have not left yet, but the desire to return to the Great Bear begins to take hold of me.
The river current slows as fresh water and salt water collide. Clark leans over the side of the boat, reaches down into the water, and pulls out a large eagle feather. He holds it close, admiring it, before handing it to me with a satisfied grin.
As we drift into the head of the