In the Valleys of the Noble Bey - John Zada Page 0,57

stores here. All provisions are ordered in advance and either flown in by plane or delivered by sea barge. Telephone landlines arrived here only in 2000, and service remains temperamental. The Internet is also unreliable, and mobile-phone service is nonexistent. As a result, people still prefer to communicate with one another by way of VHF radio, the simplest and most dependable technology. As no power lines reach Wuikinuxv, electricity for the community has to come from a large diesel generator, droning day and night behind the homes. The village school has nine students, who fall into grade levels ranging from kindergarten to twelfth grade. They all attend class in the same room, share the same teacher, and hang out with one another at recess.

From the perspective of my boisterous city existence, Wuikinuxv is eerily quiet—like a town abandoned. The muffled sound of a child’s laugh or the distant howling of a dog only amplifies the feeling of solitude, as does the area’s signature feature: a blustery wind coming in off the inlet. It blows almost incessantly, effervescently, rattling the chimes hanging on Lena’s porch. There is a wise and knowing quality to the wind, a rhythmic push and pull that make it sound as if it is speaking in tongues. When the wind is paired with the heart-stopping red and orange sunsets that cast the mountains in dark silhouette, the majesty of it all can be overwhelming. I understand why, in spite of the remoteness and the sacrifices needed to keep a community and nation alive, people continue live here.

For days, I pace up and down the road, visiting with Wuikinuxv’s residents. Armed with a casual referral from Lena, overcoming my natural hesitancy, I make impromptu appearances at people’s front doors and in their garages and backyards. I’m more than welcomed. Maybe it’s due in part to the isolation and the novelty of a new face, but people are warm and open in the extreme.

I discover there are few, if any, recent Sasquatch reports from the village itself. There were reports decades back, however, and more than one of them involved a white-haired Sasquatch often seen at the edge of Owikeno Lake. But no one claims to have seen it personally. More recent reports involve incidents at lakeside cabins near the mouths of creeks in the middle of the night. They’re hauntingly similar to the stories I heard in Koeye.

In Wuikinuxv, as well as the territory of the Kwakwaka’wakw people farther south, Sasquatch is known as Dzonoqua (pronounced Joon-ah-kwah)—the wild cannibal woman of the woods. The hairy and unruly giantess, a malevolent being of the highest order, is nearly identical to the Heiltsuk Thla’thla in appearance and behavior. Many old masks and pole carvings of the Dzonoqua depict her with a wide-open mouth, pursed lips, and deep-set eyes.*

Discussions with villagers, who view the creatures in somewhat more folkloric terms than the Heiltsuk do, don’t last long and often taper off into politics. Again I’m assailed with complaints, similar to Lena’s, about the current state of the reserve, its uncertain future, and the indifference of its leaders. I am told the details of an alleged Heiltsuk slave raid and massacre near Wuikinuxv in 1848—an episode that continues to be a thorn in the side of relations between the two nations. The incident, referred to locally as the “slaughter Illahie,” is named after the entrance to ocean narrows near the mouth of Rivers Inlet, where the Wuikinuxv claim the Heiltsuk ambushed them in their canoes after inviting them to a potlatch.

But of all the stories, the one that stands out for me is about an obscure valley that runs into Owikeno Lake. I hear about it for the first time while speaking with Dennis Hanuse, Lena’s next-door neighbor. The topic comes up in a discussion about old Bigfoot reports from local loggers.

“There was another logging camp on the lake that was reporting some really strange stuff,” Hanuse says. “It happened in a place called the Hoodoo Valley.”

“The what valley?” I ask, not sure that I’d heard correctly.

“Hoo-doo. It’s a short valley up the lake, on the north side, several miles out. More than one logging company went in there back in the 1950s and ‘60s. All of them went broke. The last crew that went in left suddenly, scared shitless.”

I ask if he’d seen or met the loggers.

He shakes his head. “I was just a kid. But the older folks said the men got on their boats, tore into the village, and