In the Valleys of the Noble Bey - John Zada Page 0,94

we climb out of the boat, sodden and jacked up on adrenaline. Together we drag the skiff out of the water and hide it in the trees, before stumbling, almost punch-drunk, onto the road. The long chasm of the Necleetsconnay valley, now to our backs, looks on indifferently, cloaked in an ever-deepening darkness.

Leonard phones the next day to say he’s had some tour cancellations and wants to make another go at getting to his cabin at Stillwater Lake.

Later that week we’re rolling up the highway in an early 1980s pickup truck resurrected from Leonard’s fleet of weed-besieged, decommissioned vehicles hidden behind his cabins. It’s an immaculately clear late-summer morning, the cool air redolent of pine and mountain herbs.

“This is the real thing,” Leonard exclaims, as the wind, blowing through the window, rustles his curls. “Grizzly bears and heavy bushwhacking. You can’t get anywhere more remote.”

In the back seat are Leonard’s teenage son, Daniel, and their black Labrador retriever, Josie. Leaning on the seat between Leonard and me is a sleek 12-gauge shotgun.

When I arrived at Leonard’s place earlier, I found Daniel stuffing a backpack with food. With his heavyset build, curly blond hair, and slightly defiant gait, he is a youthful clone of Leonard.

“I decided to bring the boy,” Leonard said matter-of-factly, pulling me aside. “It’s good to have an extra hand to help carry the grub. And in case we need to get a few things done.”

“Like what?” I asked, sensing he had something specific in mind.

“One of Daniel’s friends happened to hike by the cabin a few weeks ago and told him that someone, or something, had broken into it. Made a big mess apparently.”

As we push up the valley, the mountains become bolder and more imposing. Forested behemoths with trisyllabic names like Nusatsum, Defiance, and Stupendous, topped with crowns of bare rock, stand sentry at the entrances to enigmatic side valleys that flank them. We cross into Tweedsmuir Provincial Park and continue to follow the winding road. Just before the highway ascends to the Chilcotin Plateau, Leonard pulls onto an unimaginably rough dirt road that is pockmarked and littered with rocks. We’re thrown around like an airplane in a patch of bad turbulence. For hours, enduring whiplash, we follow this rocky wagon trail along narrow ledges overlooking the sparkling Atnarko River, alive with spawning salmon. The road drops again to a spot where a few cabins sit by the shore.

Leonard slows down. “That’s Bill Robson’s cabin over there,” he says, indicating the property of a man he had introduced me to a week earlier, who had said he had heard heavy bipedal footsteps and panting there at three o’clock one morning.

A little farther down the road, Leonard stops the truck and points out of the passenger window. “And that there is the old outhouse where they found Stanley Edwards dead.”

We all stare silently at the wooden structure, as if paying our respects. I’m overcome with the image of the white-bearded hermit, the former owner of Leonard’s cabin, dressed in his trademark yellow construction vest and helmet, sitting slumped over in the outhouse—the culmination of a lopsided, maladapted life of solitude. An attempt to become a kind of Sasquatch.

We leave the vehicle at the end of the dirt road and navigate a dry, rugged path through a forest that bears little resemblance to the perspiring coastal jungles that I’ve traveled through up until now. The wilderness here, marked by thick-barked, fire-resistant Douglas fir, is rain-deprived, with far less undergrowth. Beneath our feet is a powdery concoction of sand and conifer needles. Leonard says we are walking through the old riverbed of the Atnarko—before its course was diverted by a cataclysmic flood in 2010.

The mood is unexpectedly tense. Leonard, who is shouldering an uncomfortable-looking external frame backpack from the seventies and carrying his shotgun, has been going on about his plight as a persecuted hunter.

“People are spreading all kinds of rumors about me, including saying I’m still guiding for bears. They can’t get their minds around the fact that I’ve stopped. I feel I’m being bullied and picked on.”

The degree of waffling Leonard does in his attempt to come to terms with what happened to him is striking. In one breath he tells me he’s happy that he no longer has to shoulder the stress of his old hunting business and that “bear viewing and ecotourism are the way to go.” But in the next breath he lashes out at the anti-trophy-hunting forces he blames for his downfall. Leonard