her teeth, and frothing at the mouth. She charged at full speed.
“The last thing I remember was kicking up my feet and catapulting her with my legs,” he says. “But the strain was so great that I blacked out.”
When Johnny regained consciousness, it was dark. He was covered with a pile of tree branches a foot high. The bear had buried him until she could return later to feed on him. His final memory before waking up in the Royal Jubilee Hospital in Victoria ten days later was clambering to his feet and stumbling down the road into town in the pitch black of night. Although he has no recollection of it now, Johnny made it a mile to a neighbor’s place and used his first-aid training, which he learned as a logger, to instruct the gathering crowd of villagers on how to keep him alive until the air ambulance arrived.
Johnny spent two months in the hospital. He’d suffered serious bite and claw injuries on his head, neck, back, torso, and thighs. The doctors told him one of the claw marks had missed his spinal cord by just a millimeter.
I ask Johnny what happened to the bear.
“The game wardens got her,” he says. “But it was a year later. And after she chased a kid in the village—and also me.”
“What?”
He nods.
“She ran after me by the band office. I escaped by climbing into one of the trucks parked there. She knew who I was, too. I could see it in her eyes. She remembered me from my smell.”
Johnny tilts his neck to one side and winces, then massages it with his hand.
“I felt relieved when they got her. I didn’t have to look over my shoulder anymore. But when they shot her I felt physically sick. I felt bad. I don’t hate her for what she did. Bears are just animals. They don’t have the rational thoughts we do.”
Johnny tells me he has to leave to go fishing with a friend visiting from out of town. I quickly ask him what he knows about Sasquatches—and the so-called Hoodoo Valley.
“I don’t know much about the place,” he says, gathering his gear. “Only that loggers got spooked in there—and left. It was a long time ago. People here stay away from that place.”
“And Bigfoots?”
“One story,” he says. “I was staying a few nights at a cabin on the lake, at a place called Kwap. It’s an old village site. About five miles down, on the north side. Near Hoodoo. We were doing work at the lake. This was about twenty years ago. We were sleeping one night, and then all of a sudden we heard this deafening banging on the walls: Boom! Boom! Boom! It went all the way around the cabin. It felt like the cabin was gonna fall apart. It kept pounding on and off for about ten minutes. We had a couple of bear dogs with us, sleeping outside. They were 120 pounds each. When we finally opened the door to find out what was going on, the dogs bolted into the cabin. They didn’t bark once. It was definitely not a bear.”
“What happened next?”
“Nothing. The banging just stopped.”
“So you didn’t actually see the culprit. But you’re assuming it was a Sasquatch?”
“Bears don’t walk around cabins banging on walls. Besides, my dad and uncle had seen a Sasquatch around the same time, bathing in the creek behind that same cabin.”
“And the cabin’s still there?”
“It is. But nobody’s been there for ten years now. People are afraid of the place. Some students didn’t believe my story until they went on a camping trip there. The next morning they were back here with their tails between their legs. But they weren’t as lucky as we were. They lost one of their dogs.”
“Lost?”
“Their dog chased after whatever was bothering them. It never came back.”
There’s a long pause. Johnny throws me a serious yet commiserating look that seems to say: Have you got your fill of stories yet? He cuts the silence by saying he has to leave.
“Wait,” I say, getting up. “Is there any way I can get to these places?”
“Where?” he says, exasperated.
“Hoodoo. The cabin.”
He chuckles sarcastically. “If you can find anyone here willing to go with you to Hoodoo, or that cabin, I’ll give you everything I own.”
“What about you? Could you take me?”
Johnny makes a cringing face and shakes his head. “I’m not going out there. I’ve been through enough.”
“Can you suggest anyone?”
Johnny thinks a moment. “Do you know