A wolverine is eating my leg

by Tim Cahill

  provided the native American population, the Eskimos and the Indians." The theory, of course, is that nomadic tribes migrated across the frozen Bering Strait. "A case, I think, can be made for Gigantopithecus as an ancestor to Omah," Byrne says.

  Currently living in a trailer in The Dalles, Byrne is still deeply involved in the hunt. If he should come on one of the animals, he plans to dart it and keep it subdued for several days. A team of scientists have agreed to fly in at any time at his expense. They would land in Portland and take a helicopter to the site. There they would take photos, measurements, urine, stool, and blood samples. The Omah would then be set free.

  I asked if a tranquilizer capable of bringing down a beast that could conceivably weigh up to 1,000 pounds wouldn't kill a man hoaxed up in a gorilla suit.

  "No," Byrne says, and adds wryly: "Unfortunately, the safety margin is quite high. The drug has been tested on volunteer prisoners. It simply puts a man under for quite a long period without harming him. You can, however, quote me as saying I would be delighted to put a dart in the ass of any jerk wearing a fur suit for my benefit."

  I am indebted to Sergeant Jack Robertson of The Dalles's sheriff's department for a bit of woodsy Omah lore. "If you should be out in the woods without a weapon," he said, "and you see Bigfoot, just throw some crap in his face and he'll run away. They hate that."

  "What am I going to do if there isn't any crap around?"

  "Listen," Robertson said, "if you're out in the woods alone and you see him, there'll be plenty of crap around."

  Flora Thompson is seventy-four years old, a Wy-am Indian who lives at Celilo Falls, the prime salmon netting spot on the Columbia River, which her tribe calls Wauna. Flora studied and learned the legends of the Wy-am from her late husband, the great chief Tommy Thompson, who died at 108 in 1951. She can tell about the time before men when all the animals were people and were giants. Coyote was the Changer. He dug a trench from the great eastern lake to the ocean so the salmon could swim upstream. In this way Coyote made the earth fit for man.

  In the Changing Time, just after there were men, there was another beast. As Flora Thompson describes it, it is very much like the Omah in the Patterson film. It was a female and its name was Tlat-ta-chee-ah.

  "We use Tlat-ta-chee-ah as a scarecrow," Flora says. "We tell the bad children that she will come to eat them if they don't behave."

  The Wy-am are not the only tribe that have legends about giant, apelike creatures. Many tribes call him Sasquatch.

  In British Columbia, the Salish call him Stwanitie. The Quamault of the Olympic Peninsula call him Seeakwa. In Alberta he is called Tsonqua and Ghaga, and in Northern California, the Hoopa call him Kadonkwa. In the Central Pacific Northwest many tribes call him Omah.

  Peter Byrne in his investigation has talked to many of the tribes in the general sighting areas. Two elderly Indians on the Colville reservation located in Northeastern Washington told him that their grandfathers spoke of seeing up to twenty Omah catching salmon during a run on the Columbia River. In the 1850s, they said, the Omah caught the white man's disease and died.

  Another legend prevalent in the Northwest is that there were once many Omah and they lived not only in the forests, but also far to the south and in the plains of the east. The Indians warred with them, and by the time the white man came, they were all gone.

  Item: At twilight in a small mountain town in Northern California, a clerk in the general store thought she saw a large, hair-covered animal she took to be Bigfoot. Within an hour a large armored crowd had gathered in front of the store, ready to hunt the beast. Investigation

  showed that the beast was actually a prankster, a high school boy who had thrown fur over his head.

  From a letter to Deputy Carlson, dated November twenty-fifth, 1972: "I believe from reading the article about the Bigfoot search that it is a man dressed in a gorilla suit so people do not kill him, he is probably getting a big kick out of doing his thing, scaring people. The article said it looked like a man. That's what it was—a man—in costume. If you attend a Halloween dance in Los Angeles you would see plenty of Yeti, dancing with the girls. I've seen plenty of these outfits, so do not shoot him, he's having fun."

  The letter was signed "Miss Los Angeles."

  Excerpt from a conversation with a deputy sheriff in The Dalles, Oregon: "Now I'm not saying that a critter like that actually exists. I've been hunting this part of the country for almost twenty years, and I've never seen hide nor hair of one. But if I did see one, you damn betcha it's a dead one. It'd be worth more to you alive, but even a dead one would bring you a million for a squeeze of the trigger. And how would you capture one? You couldn't, is all. Shoot it, is the best way. You'd have a million. I wouldn't even come to work tomorrow if I shot one tonight. I'd just sit back and start counting my money."

  Sections of County Ordinance 69-01 Skamania County, Washington (located just across the river from The Dalles): "Prohibiting wanton slaying of ape-creatures and imposing penalties.

  "WHEREAS, there is evidence to indicate the possible existence in Skamania County of a nocturnal primate mammal variously described as an apelike creature or a subspecies of homo sapiens, and

  "WHEREAS, both legend and purported recent sightings and spoor support the possibility, and

  "WHEREAS, this creature is generally and commonly known as 'Sasquatch,' or 'Yeti,' or 'Giant Hairy Ape,' and

  "WHEREAS, publicity attendant on such real or imagined sightings has resulted in an influx of scientific investigators as well as casual hunters, many armed with lethal weapons,

  "THEREFORE, let it be resolved that any premeditated, willful and wanton slaying of any such creature shall be deemed a felony punishable by a fine not to exceed ten thousand dollars and/or imprisonment in the county jail for a period not to exceed five years."

  This ordinance was adopted in the spring of 1969. On the first day of April to be exact.

  Excerpt from a conversation with The Dallas deputy Rich Carlson: "There are always fellows who go out to shoot it. There are people who said they would shoot it if they saw it. In the beginning, one sighting we had, the townspeople found out about it, and by jimmy, they went up there with rifles, ready to hunt it down. . . ."

  Undoubtedly there have been many hoaxes in the Bigfoot saga. In 1968 a Mr. Ray Pickens of Colville, Washington, strapped a pair of sixteen-inch, footlike plywood boards to his feet and tromped over the nearby woods. A small crowd gathered and a photo was sent to Peter Byrne, who dismissed the tracks as obvious fakes. Pickens later admitted the hoax. John Napier states in his book: "I have in my files photographs of a further set of tracks which were clearly made by a hinged wooden contraption which wouldn't fool the village idiot."

  Another citizen of Colville, the Bigfoot hunter Ivan Marx, made a series of phone calls one night in October 1970. He was in a state of high excitement. A wounded Bigfoot had been sighted near Colville, and in the morning he was going

  to go out after it with his camera. As might be expected, a crowd gathered, and Marx stayed in radio contact with them. At one point he claimed to have sighted the beast and some minutes later said he was actually filming it.

  Peter Byrne said Marx offered to sell the film to Byrne's organization for twenty-five thousand dollars. He agreed to buy on the condition that the film could be studied first for signs of a hoax. Byrne says his study showed that the film had been shot about a month previous to the date Marx claimed and that it had been shot in an entirely different area than that claimed by Marx. Armed with this information, Byrne, the sheriff, and some concerned citizens made a visit to Marx's Colville home. Marx was gone, and there was no forwarding address.

  He resurfaced a few weeks ago on the television show "You Asked for It." He had shot a film, he said, of a large Bigfoot in a snowstorm and had come to "You Asked for It" because he was impressed by the show's reputation. To my layman's eyes, the film seems an incredibly clumsy fake. Peter Byrne said it was "ridiculous." In it, the
creature is seen white in a heavy snowfall. It walks manlike, toward the camera, jumps around aimlessly, and gives us a view of his front and back sides. The white gorilla suit bags and wrinkles in the ass.

  Most of the known hoaxers seem to be motivated by money, by a desire for notoriety, and by the desire to put one over on everybody, especially the bright boys, the scientists. Journalists, as everyone knows, are beyond these considerations. Through perseverance and knowledge of human nature, I personally obtained an exclusive interview with Bigfoot.

  I had put notes up in the local supermarkets and laundromats asking anyone with Bigfoot information to call me at the Oregon Motel in The Dalles. About one in the morning on a dark and stormy night, I received a call. A hoarse voice with a heavy accent I couldn't identify asked me if I

  was the writer who wanted to talk to Bigfoot. I said I was. The voice said, "I am Omah." He stretched it out "Ohhhh-mahhhh." He said he would meet me in twenty minutes at the local Denny's twenty-four-hour coffee shop. He said I would recognize him because he would wear an ankle-length trench coat and a slouch hat, and because he would be nine feet tall. I suggested he carry a basketball so as not to attract attention.

  I dressed quickly and doused my face with cold water. The restaurant was one of those bits of roadside Formica with zippy Muzak and menopausal waitresses on Mother Goose shoes. Two truck drivers discussed Peterbilt rigs near the door. Omah sat in the rear, hunched over a cup of coffee, the hat pulled over his forehead.

  He looked up quickly, almost angrily, as I approached the table.

  "Cahill?"

  "Yeah," I said. "You Omah?"

  "That's me."

  "So why did you call me?" I asked.

  He smiled strangely. "I need ink."

  He wanted to know if I had done any interviews and what my approach to the story was going to be. I said that I saw him as a survivor, a self-reliant primitive in the midst of vast technocracy: a pleasant reminder that we haven't yet swallowed up all our wilderness. I said that I saw him as man's closest brother on the earth and that by knowing him, we could certainly learn to know ourselves the better.

  Omah nodded absent-mindedly while I spoke. He called the waitress over and ordered five Lumberjack Breakfasts. "A stack of delicious buckwheat cakes with rich creamery butter and Vermont maple syrup, mounds of hash browns, a giant slab of Canadian bacon, golden brown toast, and an assortment of the finest jams: a breakfast fit for a lumberjack."

  While he ate, I pumped him with questions. He had been coming down to The Dalles from Fort Hood every spring for years to raid the apple orchard that is now The Pine-wood Mobile Manor. One fateful June, five years ago, he

  found the orchard gone. In his confusion, he had come to The Dalles Drive-in, which at the time was playing Planet of the Apes. He watched the film three times every night for two weeks. He learned to speak English. And an unshakable idea grew in his mind. Through the long, snowy winters on Mount Hood he considered. Every spring when he came down to The Dalles, there was a new ape sequel film. This year he was ready to act.

  Suddenly he pulled the hat back from his forehead and turned his profile to me. The features were humanoid, but the nose was flattened and the eyes were flat black coals.

  "What do you think?" he blurted.

  "About what?"

  "About me, Omah. . . . Do you think I could get a part in the next ape film."

  He must have seen the look on my face because he stopped talking and stared moodily at his Lumberjack Specials. Mentally I scrapped my survivor story. A great, inexplicable wave of sadness washed over me. We sat in silence for several minutes.

  "Been swell talking to you," I said and faked an expansive yawn. "Well, I better get back to the motel."

  He looked up, and for the first time his humanoid face showed emotion. It seemed twisted into an expression of hopeless pleading.

  "I need the ink," he began, then changed his tack. "Hollywood must know . . ."

  I stood up, ready to leave.

  His lower lip quivered, and for a terrible moment I thought he might begin to cry. We paid the bill and he followed me out the door where we stood for several minutes in the black and windswept Oregon night. He continued to jabber about ape films in his strange accent.

  "Look," I said finally, "I gotta go."

  "OK, sure," he said. There was a distant bitterness in his voice. "Ciao."

  ten inches long, painted white with dabs of red in front to resemble an injured minnow. There were three sharp treble hooks spaced along the bottom of the plug.

  I was casting out to a weedy hole about fifteen feet from the pier, hitting it dead center every second or third try, when something big hit the plug and took the line halfway out with the star drag singing. I set the hook and started horsing the monster in. He never broke water, and when I had him next to the pier, I yanked him up onto the boards, like the perch I was accustomed to hooking.

  He was a huge, enormous, gigantic, mountainous, monolithic fish of about fifteen pounds, and I screamed. My father came tearing out of the house, down the hill, and out onto the pier. He clubbed the fish, got a leather glove and tried to work the plug out of the fish's mouth. Finally he just cut the line and tossed it back, plug and all.

  "It was a garfish," he tells me now, two decades later. A garfish is a particularly repellent trash fish with a nauseous oily taste. I do not believe that it was a garfish because I have a very clear mental image of the fish, and the fish's mouth, and my father's gloved hand in the fish's mouth. What I see clearly are the teeth, like no teeth I had ever seen. They were staggered in rough rows across the roof of the mouth, and each of them curved toward the throat, so that any living thing caught there would be impaled and driven back to the gullet.

  The fish, I know now, must have been a northern pike. These are found in the lakes and rivers of the northern part of the northern hemisphere. They are long, lethal-looking specimens, and the Anglo-Saxons called them pike because of their resemblance to a medieval weapon. A twenty-pound pike will go over four feet in length, and the world's record pike weighed forty-six pounds and two ounces. There are bigger fish in the northern lakes—sturgeon and muskie—but I am fascinated by pike. They are among the meanest freshwater fish extant, a streamlined killing machine and the most satanic predator of the lakes. They take small muskie, cannibalize their own kind, hit crayfish, frogs, mice, small muskrats, ducklings, and any other birds

  small enough to swallow. There are eyewitness accounts of pike killing and ingesting small swans.

  I was out on the ice, alone on Nagawicka, because I wanted to catch a northern pike. It would be my first through the ice, and I imagined that, in that place, I could confront those fears of twenty years ago, turning them to my own advantage—to fun. Besides, I think it's

  silly to be afraid of a fish.

  The first order of business was to drill a couple of holes. If you're after northern, you'll want to drill over about eight feet of water near the edge of a substantial bed of weeds. Pike skirt these beds and feed on the smaller fish that take refuge there. (If you don't know the lake, it is sometimes possible to obtain a hydrographic map of the bottom.)

  Kids and muscleheads use a spud to chop the hole. This is a long metal pole with a chisel on the end, and it takes up to half an hour to drill a hole through three feet of ice with one. An ice auger, especially the thirty-dollar Swedish brand that I prefer, will drill a hole in two minutes flat, provided you keep the blades sharp. Some Winnebago-camper types—cretins and moral paraplegics—buy augers outfitted with gasoline-driven motors.

  After the holes were drilled, I set up my tip-ups. These are wooden cross-shaped devices with a line and reel located near the end of one long arm. They cost about five dollars apiece. The crossbar is balanced across the hole, and the business end, spool and all, goes into the water. This way, the spool won't freeze over. When a fish hits the bait, a knob on the reel releases a long springy metal tip with a small red flag at the top. The tip and fla
g spring up, and the angler rushes over to deal with the catch.

  If you're after northern, as I was, you'd probably be using live bait, like four- to ten-inch suckers. I hook them just behind the dorsal fin, let them drop until they hit bottom, then pull them up a foot or two. When a northern takes a sucker, it will usually hit it from the side—this is the con-

  ventional wisdom—break its back and run with it. This is where you must be especially careful. The smallest tug on the line will alert the fish that something is terribly wrong, and he'll spit the bait out. If you let the fish run, it will stop, turn the disabled bait around, and swallow it head first. Always head first.

  Having swallowed the bait, the pike will make a second run. Watch the line: one run, a pause, the start of the second run. Here you yank back on the line—the proper amount of force is a matter of practice—set the hook and start pulling him in, hand over hand on the line itself.

  Because much of the work must be done with bare hands—baiting the hook, pulling the fish in—you're advised to have two pairs of gloves or mittens. One pair always gets wet. Which was my problem that day out on Nagawicka. My right hand was numb. No feeling to it at all.

  I decided to leave my three tip-ups in place and walk up to the old cottage to get out of the wind. The front door was open, hanging askew on the bottom hinge. Snow had drifted in through the broken windows and the floorboards were warped and cracked. It was smaller than I remembered it, and I wondered who my parents had sold it to, and why the new owners had let it fall into ruin. It was spooky and sad and colder than hell in the old place.

  I had stuffed my right hand into my pants, under the belt, under the thermal underwear, and was holding it to the warmth of my groin. When a frost-nipped hand warms under these conditions, the first jolt of feeling is an intense, prickly sort of pain. It is a good pain because you know it will be over soon and because it means your hand will be all right. It was at this point—while I was feeling sad and spooked and hurt and happy—that I heard running steps on the porch outside.