In the Valleys of the Noble Bey - John Zada Page 0,35

I pass what look like children’s footprints in a wide muddy bank. Rocks, large tree roots, and high banks force me to climb up into the muskeg to skirt those obstacles, and I soon find myself on the other side of the tiny bay. It becomes a feverish wild-goose chase, and again I start to feel silly. There are no Bigfoot tracks here. I turn around.

I tell the visitors from Klemtu I found nothing corresponding with giant tracks. One of them suggests that maybe the small footprints I saw belong to a juvenile Sasquatch—a comment I dismiss. But I ask, before leaving, if they remember the name of the person who posted the Facebook photos, and I’m told it’s a young woman with the first name Beth.

Back at Alvina’s, I pull up the woman’s Facebook page. The privacy settings are lax, and I start to shuffle through the deck of selfies and food shots on her wall. I finally come to some photos of human-looking footprints in the mud, and the woman’s caption above them: “Bigfoot lil’ feet.”

In response to a question in the comments section, she says the tracks were found at Old Town’s lake. I realize the tracks may have been the small ones that I attributed to kids playing in the mud.

When I ask Alvina if she knows Beth and where to find her, she scrunches her face into a look of annoyance.

“Why do you keep asking me if I know people around here?” she says. “I know everyone in this town.”

I tell Alvina about the tracks, and she remarks that finding human footprints there is odd. Not many people go up the trail, she says, and it’s almost unheard of for people to walk around in the mud—or wade in the water. “No one ever goes swimming in that lake,” she adds. “A lot of people are afraid of that place. It’s an old village site.”

Alvina picks up the phone and dials Beth’s number for me. There’s no answer. She leaves a message on my behalf.

I decide in the meantime to head back to the lake to take another look with camera in hand. When I get there, I find a flurry of small, bare footprints, about eight or nine inches long, that meander along the muddy shoreline. The area looks completely undisturbed, except for a few sets of shoe prints nearby, including my own from when I’d walked by earlier. One of the shoe prints belongs to a child and is smaller than the barefoot tracks in question.

My first reaction again is to regard the bare prints as made by human children. But as I look closer at them, I begin to wonder.

I discern two distinct sets of footprints. They originate from separate areas on the edges of the mud and come together before going forward into the shallow water. They reappear together in the mud again to the left, moving toward firmer ground and the bush.

One set of tracks is wider, and looks almost like a Birkenstock sandal with toes attached to it. The other is unusually long and narrow. The big toe is a smidgen apart from the four others.

I also notice a green apple sitting on a log behind me onshore.

I take a few photos of the tracks before heading back to try to piece together the story.

Days later, I catch up with Beth and her boyfriend, Carl, a young couple in their mid-twenties. Beth is a stay-at-home mom, and Carl works as a gas-station attendant at the government dock.

I speak to both of them separately about the day they and their young nephew went up to McLoughlin Lake to go fishing for cutthroat trout. They had cast their lines at the end of the trail (where I stood with the people from Klemtu) but got no bites. So they decided to try a different spot, and walked into the bushes farther along the shore until they came to the muddy banks and the collection of small barefoot tracks. They had seen no other footprints, tracks, or disturbances in the area indicating that other people had been there. (It was their shoe prints I’d seen in the mud.)

They had been astonished by the small prints. Echoing Alvina, they say that not many people go to the lake—and even fewer wander into the bushes there. In all their time in Bella they’d never heard of anyone wading or swimming in the water.

And when they looked closer, as I had, the tracks had appeared