In the Valleys of the Noble Bey - John Zada Page 0,6

brain. It didn’t matter that it was a pruned pseudo-forest existing in a choke hold of suburban sprawl. The ravine was a self-contained extension of all wilderness areas—a spark from the fire of grander wilds. Because of that, my early bush experience seeded a growing desire in the years ahead to find a vaster woodland, the quintessential forest—one that retained some vestige of its original bounty and power. Nature as it once was, unknown to any memory.

That inner impulse didn’t fully crystallize until later. It was to be a long and circuitous road that led to that forest, one made more mysterious and poignant by tales of savage giants.

Wild, bedraggled humanoids have been reported in hinterland regions around the world for centuries. In remote and mountainous corners of the Caucasus, central Asia, China, and Siberia, traditions abound describing unruly bipeds living on the tattered edges of civilization. The Abominable Snowman, or Yeti, of the Himalayas is the best known of these manifold Asian humanoids.*

North America too has its far-flung, otherworldly realms, and from them come stories of similar creatures, supersize and even more bestial than many of their Asian counterparts. Travelers and explorers, pushing west along the frontier in the 1800s, reported encounters with rogue beings they described as “wild men.” As settlers began populating the ever more rugged regions of the far west, incidents involving “skookums,” “evil genies,” “hairy men,” “bush Indians,” “apes,” and “forest devils” proliferated by word of mouth and in the early North American press. Indigenous residents, when confronted with these accounts, generally laughed or shrugged their shoulders. Nothing new, they informed the settlers. Not only were these wild people known to them and their ancestors, there was even a time before the arrival of the white man when they had had dealings with them.

Had the reports petered out, all might have been attributed to a mix of colorful storytelling and sensational journalism. But the reports kept coming in. By the early twentieth century, a basic profile of these creatures had taken shape among those who believed in their existence: they were apelike, often of gigantic stature, and covered in hair, and on occasion left behind large, deep footprints. Even US president Theodore Roosevelt mentioned the creatures in his 1892 book The Wilderness Hunter. He described a story he’d heard about a woodsman who, reputedly, had been killed by one of the animals. Stories like these introduced more and more people to the creatures.

One big tale appeared in the press in 1929. That year, John Burns, a teacher living on the Chehalis Indian Reserve near Harrison Hot Springs, British Columbia, wrote an article for Maclean’s magazine about a race of forest giants called “Sasquatch” that had been terrorizing people in the area. “Sasquatch” was a mispronunciation of the word Sasq’ets, meaning “wild man” in a local dialect of Halkomelem, a Coast Salish language. Burns had been tipped off about the creatures by a British-born teacher and anthropologist also living in the vicinity. No sooner had he started looking into the sightings than he became hooked. Burns began to document reports obsessively, becoming the world’s first known Sasquatch researcher.

“I was startled to see what I took at first to be a huge bear crouched upon a boulder twenty or thirty feet away,” said one eyewitness Burns quoted in the Maclean’s article. “I raised my rifle to shoot it, but, as I did, the creature stood up and let out a piercing yell. It was a man—a giant no less than six and one-half feet in height, and covered with hair. He was in a rage and jumped from the boulder to the ground. I fled, but not before I felt his breath upon my cheek.”

For the next few decades, Burns would churn out dozens more articles about the creatures, which he wholeheartedly believed in and whose protection he later advocated for—but which he never once saw. His dispatches alerted readers far and wide to the alleged animals and gave them a name that would stick.

But not until almost thirty years later, in 1958, would the subject blow wide open. Inspired by the sensationalized reports of the Abominable Snowman in Nepal a few years earlier, the growing media machine of postwar America jumped on a series of similar stories coming out of a small town in northern California. A bulldozer operator named Jerry Crew came forward with plaster-of-Paris casts of gigantic footprints found on a logging-road construction site near the town of Bluff Creek. Someone—or something—had been leaving