In the Valleys of the Noble Bey - John Zada Page 0,30

spanned generations and continents.

“I hasten to add that this is an extraordinary animal—fearsome and preternaturally intelligent, as far as possible from the cuddly image people in the West sometimes have of bears,” he writes. “These animals are nearly impossible to track, and for all their reality they remain deeply enigmatic. They avoid all contact with humans and are partly bipedal, nocturnal omnivores.”10

American conservationist Daniel C. Taylor, who lived and worked for much of his life in the Himalayas, spent sixty years meticulously researching the Yeti mystery, starting long before Messner and beginning as a wild-man enthusiast himself. After traveling in the region’s most remote valley systems and himself coming across a set of mysterious tracks, he concluded similarly that snow prints purported to be Yeti impressions were made by Asiatic black bears and other local bear species. He demonstrated convincingly that the tracks, including an iconic set of prints photographed by explorer Eric Shipton on the Nepal-Tibet border in 1951 (photos that set off the worldwide Yeti craze), were double impressions of a bear’s forepaws and hind paws. Taylor even managed to find a never-before-published photo of the Shipton tracks that shows claw marks in the snow—which are not seen in the famous photo.11

Since it’s assumed by most people that the Yeti and the Sasquatch are generally the same creature, these bear theories have been taken up and applied wholesale to Bigfoot. Reinhold Messner himself personally led the charge. “Believe me,” the mountain climber declared in an interview with National Geographic Adventure magazine on the eve of his book’s publication in 2000. “Bigfoot is in reality the grizzly. Somebody will prove it like I proved the Yeti story. It’s very logical, the whole thing.”12

Even if Himalayan bear theories are correct, which I suspect they are, the Himalayas are not the Pacific Northwest. The grizzly bear is not the Tibetan bear. And amorphous impressions in the snow are not the same as detailed humanoid tracks in dirt or mud. Time and again in my discussions with eyewitnesses in the Great Bear Rainforest, I am told in no uncertain terms: We live with bears. They are our relatives. We know how they look and act. Believe me: what I saw was no bear.

One of the more frequently brandished and more convincing arguments for the existence of Sasquatch is its apparent presence in North American aboriginal folklore. More than a few indigenous communities, particularly in the Pacific Northwest, allege that Bigfoot-type creatures do exist and can cite names and descriptions for them in their own traditions. For proponents of the Sasquatch, this is almost tantamount to hard proof; if such a species exists, it would have been known to local inhabitants before European colonization.

When early Bigfoot researchers managed to get past walls of secrecy and reticence, they were told by indigenous people that the creatures were greatly feared and respected. Some cast them as cannibal spirits. Others described them as thief-like, preying on women and children. In most depictions, the animals were said to have special powers, including the ability to hypnotize, induce insanity, and cause physical harm. The power to shape-shift or transform into other creatures, many said, is what accounted for their elusiveness. These sorts of cultural beliefs were often of secondary importance to conventional Bigfoot investigators, who were—and still are—more interested in confirming the apelike qualities of the animal, as evinced in some indigenous carvings, masks, and dances.*

There are many permutations of indigenous wild-man beings along the North American west coast. The Sasquatch, of course—its name derived from a Coast Salish word, Sasq’ets, meaning “wild man”—is the most famous. Among the Heiltsuk, as Mary Brown told me, the creatures are known as Thla’thla.† In folklore, the Thla’thla is depicted as a large, hair-covered, forest-dwelling supernatural humanoid. Stories usually cast it as female. Its trademark quality is a penchant for abducting and eating children. It carries a large basket on its back with an inwardly spiked lid in which to stash abductees and transport them back to its lair. Parents often used the stories of the Thla’thla to prod or frighten their children into obedience. Mary’s memory of those childhood tales added to the terror she and the others experienced that day in Roscoe Inlet.

For a long time, like many Sasquatch enthusiasts, I’d taken it for granted that any humanoid or bogeyman-type creature that is part of an indigenous group’s pantheon of supernatural beings must be the same as what people today call Bigfoot, since some, like Thla’thla and Sasq’ets, seem