Where Bigfoot Walks

by Robert Michael Pyle

  Throughout the reported range of Bigfoot, American Indians who go often into the woods still fear the Sasquatch, and from time to time some of them see it. I have heard stories that appear in no book concerning personal encounters with Bigfoot figures—not only venerable traditions but recent tales as well. For example, an Athabascan teacher I know told me that as recently as the spring of 1992, a fishing village in Alaska was abandoned because the Woods Man had appeared nearby. The teacher was reluctant to say more because her people have such a powerful spiritual regard for their Sasquatch figure, in whom they believe literally and passionately. Martha’s story is dramatic but not unique.

  The hairy-giant theme is hardly limited to Native Americans. Tales of the abominable snowman among the Tibetans and other peoples of the Himalaya are well known. In western China, accounts of a large primate called Yah Ren have become so prevalent that expeditions have been undertaken there recently, with the full blessing of Chinese scientific academies. In the villages of the Caucasus Mountains in southwest Russia, spring festivals include the arrival and slaying of Quidili, a shaggy giant. This has much in common with the winter ceremony of the Kwakiutl, except that instead of the monster appearing in person, the Hamatsa dancer brings forth its spirit. Clearly, forms of Bigfoot appear in widespread cultures.

  Bukwus and Dzonoqua probably haven’t stolen any children lately, but they still steal souls. I have known good men to give up their jobs, families, and reputations to go in search of the big-footed ones. Certainly the tabloid writers who degrade honorable native traditions into idiot-pulp have long ago abandoned their souls, and the “professional” Bigfoot hunters looking for the fortune its skin would bring have severely compromised theirs. Even those who insist that it will be necessary to kill one Bigfoot to save the rest have left a chunk of their souls on the barbed-wire fence of conscience.

  If Sasquatch lives, the concerted efforts at searching for it must soon succeed. Or maybe not. Unlike Indian legends, modern experience and present-day folklore paint Bigfoot as generally harmless and reclusive. The coastal natives had no experience with primates besides humans, who were often warlike. A gigantic hairy “man” would naturally be seen as a threat. But Europeans, aware of gorillas, chimps, orangs, and monkeys, have been able to picture Bigfoot as part of that gentle lineage. Without the fear of a hostile tribe of giants, Bigfoot seekers such as Peter Byrne have been free to abandon the hostile approach.

  Byrne characterizes this other ape as a harmless presence deserving a peaceful overture, whom we would be very wrong to kill. His former coworker, Dede Killeen, in an editorial aimed at scientists who want a specimen, prodded them to consider “the natural rights of Bigfeet.” Yet many seekers of fact and fortune still advocate greeting at least one Bigfoot with high-caliber gunfire. I can well imagine that a sentient animal aware of armed pursuit could become that much more difficult to find.

  −−

  Bigfoot might or might not exist in the sense that we and other known animals exist. Answering the question of its existence is not the purpose of this book. How our hearts are carried off by hairy monsters that may live only in our minds, how we behave when we suspect that stunning discovery and great reward might lie on our own overgrown doorsteps, and how much wildness will survive our rough handling of the land—these are some of the questions I explored in the territory of the Dark Divide.

  Whether heavy on its feet or as light as a ghost that never was, Bigfoot walks the Northwest woods. As we attempt to walk alongside, Bukwus and Dzonoqua are having a hell of a time watching us.

  1

  Not Looking for Bigfoot

  Sometimes the things you believe in become more real to you than all the things you can explain away or understand.

  —Tommy Albright in Lerner and Loewe’s Brigadoon

  It was Halloween night of 1970. I was twenty-three years old, camping near Mount St. Helens. I couldn’t sleep, and then the cries began.

  A little less than half a century before and some five miles away, a pack of miners claimed they had shot at a giant, hairy ape and then been attacked by a group of them. The seven-foot-tall ape-men threw massive rocks onto the cabin roof, the miners said. The next day the men escaped downhill to Kelso and led a posse back in search of the “vicious monsters.” None were seen, but witnesses returned with stories of huge stones on the cabin roof, tracks, a twisted rifle, and other signs of a struggle. The slain Sasquatch supposedly fell into an abyss, which ever since has been known as Ape Canyon. A nearby lava tube, the biggest in the world, became Ape Cave. Since then the region around Mount St. Helens has been the epicenter of Bigfoot lore.

  Intrigued by the stories, I had decided to take a look for myself. My wife, JoAnne, and I set out for St. Helens in a red Volkswagen Beetle, driving south from Seattle a hundred miles on the freeway and U.S. 99, then up the Spirit Lake Road east from Toledo. A swarm of big autumn alderflies glittered in the afternoon sun as we drove up the Toutle River, which would become a hot mud toddy when Mount St. Helens later erupted. Autumn regalia of yellows and reds draped the black cottonwoods, bigleaf maples, and dogwoods of the Cascade foothills. Vine maples burned candy-apple red, and the cascaras were hung with lemon drops.

  When the day went cold, we stopped for coffee at Spirit Lake Lodge, a three-story beauty of huge fir beams and basalt blocks built in 1940 by Gus Gustafson. Gus had lived by the lake since 1917, a neighbor of the Harry Truman who would become briefly and posthumously famous for his sit-down strike in the face of the 1980 eruption. Over a hot mug I asked Gus about Bigfoot. Gus claimed that his grandfather had helped to promulgate what he called the Sasquatch hoax. As he told it, a church group on a picnic was accosted by miners in bearskins, who wanted to scare people away from their unpatented mine. Grandpa Gustafson spread the tale of the “apes,” thus (according to Gus) starting the local Sasquatch legends. Of course, I knew that the other miners’ story had preceded this one and that numerous Indian traditions were earlier yet, but I just listened.

  I found it strange that a man living near St. Helens for fifty-three years wouldn’t have encountered so much as a track if something was there. But I’d heard that no one sees Bigfoot except by accident, and I knew that locals are often the least inquisitive about their backyards. At this point I was strongly inclined to believe in the possibility of Bigfoot, so I tucked away Gus’s version of the creature as hoax without setting too much store by it.

  JoAnne and I were tempted to check into the warm old lodge, but even seven dollars for a double was more than we could manage on our graduate students’ ragged excuse for a budget. So as dusk came on, we drove up the road to the Timberline viewpoint and beheld the youngest and least glaciated of the Cascade volcanoes. Its sides lay under deep, creamy snow, as did the trail we hoped to take the next day across the Plains of Abraham to Ape Canyon. On the broad, flat surface of that old ash flow might there not be tracks?

  A purple sheen fell over the silky slopes. Loo Wit, as the Indians called the mountain, became a cold blue snow cone against the subtle pallor of the winter sunset. We couldn’t go far in the gathering dark and the deep snow, so we merely stretched our legs before returning to Spirit Lake to set up camp. After a little wine and some wursts cooked over a reluctant fire of damp wood and old-man’s beard, we crawled into our down bags. I felt just a mote of unease in the quiet, closed campground.

  It felt great to get away from the city into the solitude of the high country. But the solitude and silence vanished abruptly. This was deer season, and suddenly hunters appeared with headlights and racing engines. A jeep buzzed the campground again and again. Someone hauled a snowmobile up to Timberline and ran it over those snowy mantles for hours. After their ruckus subsided, my back, tight from the drive and from too much time spent hunched over my desk at the university, took on a spasm. In the cold it throbbed like a broken bone badly healed, preventing me from getting any kind of sleep.

 
And then the cries began. From the southwest, up toward the Plains of Abraham, they boiled out of the night like bats from a deep and silent cave, each one an invisible note on the staff of the black sky. At first the calls resembled shrill barks, but not canine in the least. Then they accelerated in tempo, grew in volume, and rose in pitch until they sounded more like whistles.

  I’d been studying ornithology and mammalogy with Professor Frank Richardson, a great naturalist, and we had gone over the known vocabularies of Washington’s birds and mammals. I’d heard many in the field and had listened to recordings of most of the others. I ran again through the species that might have produced that tortured concert: elk, coyote, red fox, bobcat, puma, the winter owls. The calls I was hearing were not in the repertory of any of these, as far as I knew.

  My back was crawling as well as yowling itself, so I lay still and listened. The sound of the chorus changed again to suggest the crying of babies. The snowmobilers had long since left; there was no one up there. The cries persisted for many minutes, subsided, resumed, then played on into the predawn. They might have been a dream, they were so strange and unworldly—or, rather, deeply visceral, but different from anything I knew in the world. Yet this was no dream. Nor was it the wine, little and long gone.

  JoAnne never woke up during the racket. Finally I dropped off to sleep, and when I awoke it was dawn and the world was silent. I listened, crawled deep into my down cocoon, and slept again.

  The next thing I knew, weird cries were in my ear again, very close. A gray jay was perched on my shoulder, calling for breakfast. I rose, chilled and a little shaken. JoAnne was already up. Over our breakfast of instant oatmeal and coffee I chatted with the insistent camp robbers. Ill content with bits of wurst and flakes of oatmeal, they cocked their gray masks and asked for more. But the voices: JoAnne had heard nothing. Should I just consider them an anomaly of an odd night, maybe an artifact of the wind in concert with owls or virtuosic coyotes? No. They were still as real and fresh in my mind as if the eerie, whistle-cry chorus had just ended.

  Spirit Lake was lustrous in the clear morning, and St. Helens an almost clichéd image of mountain glory, its glacial shadows outlined and emphasized by the oblique rays. Snowy ash fields rolled below the cone. Out on the snow an ancient language of runes had been inscribed by the small-track makers: juncos, jays, deer mice, varying hares. A great horned owl chasing a hare made a snow angel, but the hare got away. It was interesting to decipher the night’s script with the aid of my Rosetta Stone, Olaus Murie’s Peterson Field Guide to Animal Tracks. But the book didn’t contain the tracks I was especially seeking.

  Well, what did I expect? If it were that easy everyone with an ounce of curiosity would be up here looking. We stomped over to the edge of the Plains of Abraham but couldn’t get farther without snowshoes.

  Later, heading back down the Toutle, we attuned ourselves to the very real wonders of the Cascade autumn. Bigleaf maple leaves floated down like great yellow bats in glide. A saffron tortoiseshell butterfly seeking a hibernaculum flashed above the stream. Below, the water ran deep magenta with the spawning of chum salmon. In the concrete reality of the salmon’s flash, Sasquatch seemed somehow unnecessary.

  At home in our small apartment on Brooklyn Avenue, we looked through the mail. In the October–November issue of National Wildlife, my eyes were drawn immediately to an article entitled “On the Trail of Bigfoot,” by the magazine’s managing editor, George H. Harrison. The National Wildlife Federation had cosponsored the American Yeti Expedition 1970, led by Robert W. Morgan, and Harrison had gone along. Just five months earlier the expedition had made camp very near where we had just spent the night. The crew had found several sets of sixteen-inch tracks, including fresh ones made in the night after Morgan set up a sound device he hoped would attract his quarry. So we might have found tracks there—unless the expedition was the target of a hoax.

  But for me the most striking thing about the article was Harrison’s description of “eerie and frightening sounds of the night” when he camped on the slope of the volcano. When I read his words, I might as well have been reading my own night notes.

  −−

  Five years later fieldwork took me back to the Northwest. JoAnne had gone on to another life in Alaska, and I had remarried. Sally and I were sharing an overstuffed Volkswagen Beetle with my brother, Bud, field assistant David Shaw, all our camping gear, and a summer’s worth of provisions. We were traveling Washington’s back roads in search of data on butterfly ranges for my dissertation. When we got to Mount St. Helens, the subject of Sasquatch came up. David and Bud were enthusiastic; Sally, an English botanist, was tolerantly amused. We combed the mountain’s forest fringes looking for intact butterfly habitats.

  But the roads we used were there to serve the logging trucks; the land was largely clear-cut, and incessant rain kept the butterflies under cover. David observed that Bigfoot must like mud if it lived around there. Bud added that there seemed to be about as many butterflies as Bigfeet, and they were both proving boring. That night, near Harry Truman’s lodge, we had a brief thrill as a large, dark figure lumbered down the road toward our headlights. This was how most of the sightings occurred, according to the Bigfoot books. But the figure turned out to be a substantial drunk. We stayed at the same campground where I had heard the calls, but we heard only a great horned owl. I slept well.

  The next day we headed up the Columbia Gorge to find sun on the east side of the damp Cascades. We were joking about Bigfoot, its capacity for alcohol, and our imaginations, when we came to The Dalles, a town on the Oregon bank of the river. As we uncoiled ourselves from the confines of our old gray bug at a gas station, I noticed a prefab building across the street with a clear sign on the front: bigfoot information center. Of course we went in, prepared to guffaw quietly at a roadside attraction of the Tom Robbins variety. But we didn’t laugh. Far from tacky, the exhibits were impressive, the tone discreet, and the printed interpretation intelligent.

  I introduced myself to the director of the center, an Irishman with a British colonial background named Peter Byrne. With the understated manner of an Oxford don disturbed in his rooms at Balliol or Magdalen, he explained the objectives of his project. His khaki dress and educated accent placed him somewhere between that don and a white hunter on safari. A Bigfoot expedition in northern California funded by Texan Tom Slick had brought him from Nepal. Later Byrne decided to take his mission into Washington and Oregon.

  Although his search for the so-called abominable snowman had not been conclusive, Byrne felt the chances of finding Sasquatch were better. Toward that end he had begun gathering all of the reports he could find, interviewing the principals, and then retaining in his database only those reports that satisfied the rigorous dictum “When in doubt, throw it out.” He had rejected hundreds of bears, drunks in the night, shadows, hoaxes, hallucinations, and who-knows-what. That left him with a few dozen “encounters” that were extremely difficult to dismiss out of hand. I’d heard of some such: a doctor who watched a Bigfoot for twenty minutes at close range in clear light; five policemen and a parson who swore to the authenticity of an array of tracks found in the winter of 1953; a long string of perfect tracks in remote wilderness; and so on. While maintaining a degree of clearheaded skepticism toward the majority of the “sightings,” Byrne and his partner Dede Killeen had become convinced that Bigfoot exists.

  −−

  That autumn, back at Yale, I was appointed to the seminar committee of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. It occurred to me to invite Peter Byrne to speak. The venerated school did not routinely give audience to speculative subjects. Topics might include “New Methods of Increasing Pulp Production in Tropical Cut-over Stands” or “Biomass Studies in Relation to Biological Diversity in a Connecticut Woodland.” They did not address monsters. Yet the novelty of the topic and my enthusiasm for Byrne finally won Dean Francois Mergen’s approval, and
Vice President Henry Chauncey, Jr., signed off on it—a formality deemed judicious in this case.

  Byrne spoke at Yale with charm, confident yet self-effacing good humor, and gentle authority. He showed the famous 1967 Patterson-Gimlin filmstrip from Bluff Creek, recounted the most substantive reports from his files, shared photographs and casts of tracks, and adroitly fielded all the usual objections to the existence of such an animal. Afterward a barrelful of Yale’s best biologists, primatologists, and anthropologists filed out of Sage Hall’s gothic auditorium scratching their heads. They might have come to ridicule the subject and the speaker, but when they left, not one would tell the press that they thought the phenomenon certainly a hoax or a misguided obsession. Of course they had not become convinced, but many minds had been opened that afternoon. Mine had opened wider.

  Over the years I had formed something of an emotional attachment to a creature that I did not necessarily believe in. I suspect that many people harbor similar feelings. Bigfoot represents many motives in our society, from blind faith to curiosity, from superstition to wild hope. As for me, the keen interest in this outlandish subject shown by people I respect has been a pleasant tickle. Something in the mix of myth and tradition tells me that this thing warrants my attention.

  I think of Bigfoot as an emblem of the Pacific Northwest, standing for the residents’ earnest and whimsical frontier curiosity, for their eagerness to grasp the essence of the land and its life. It reflects our fascination with the bizarre, the monstrous, and the mysterious—the more like us, the better. As a fuzzy sort of grail, Bigfoot positively shines with the hopes, both noble and pathetic, of the outsider, the searcher, the latter-day Linnaeus, the wannabe Darwin, or maybe Barnum. It mirrors our schizoid approach to the universe, now crying out to be gulled, now hard as bones against belief.