Where Bigfoot Walks

by Robert Michael Pyle

  What was it like before fire and flashlights, on a moonless night? I love the dark and revere the night. Yet a night with no light at all is like eyes with no lids: too much of a good thing. I tried to let the stories of marauding hairy devils get me spooked to see what that might feel like, but the fire and logic kept the fears at bay.

  In spite of Teddy Roosevelt’s gruesome account of a trapper raked away from his campfire, Beowulf’s eerie tale of Grendel slaughtering thanes in the mead hall, John Gardner’s bloodier version from Grendel’s point of view, the many Indian tales of abductions, I can’t manage to see Sasquatch as threatening. Of course some individuals could be, just as some people are. Monsters scare us whether they exist or not. Yet if it walks, Bigfoot is no monster, merely an animal. Animals can represent either allegorical, atavistic fear, like Dorothy and the Scarecrow’s lions and tigers and bears, or actual physical threat, like grizzlies for hikers in Montana or Alaska. Bigfoot, like a big bear, could play both roles. But there is no recent reason to believe that it represents a serious threat to humans. In virtually every contemporary account, it only wants to get away.

  And yet we are not the masters of our hearts in darkness. When my whistled “Clair de Lune” to the moon echoed across the lake, something didn’t like it. A cry arose near the shore, like a cross between a heron disturbed at night and a crow’s caw with massive amps. But as it receded to the northwest and repeated—it would call each time I whistled a phrase—it became a weird and harsh one-note call, like a scream or a roar or a metal sheet being whipped. And though I knew this must be an animal, one I couldn’t place in the field guide of my mind, it managed to get me a little spooked after all. I left the fire well banked and crackling as I retreated into my tent.

  −−

  My wild idyll ended in the morning. The previous night’s phantom arrivals were just the vanguard. At the other end of the lake people were loudly comparing the merits and prices of real estate in the San Juan Islands and Ocean Shores. So why didn’t they go there? I remembered why I whisper in the wilds.

  As I packed, my colorful array of stuff on the tent’s fly sheet made a truly appalling mass. Any Yakama of old would have doubled up with laughter at the sight of it. Of course I didn’t need the books, the Therma-Rest pad, the changes of clothes, the air pillow, the candle lantern, camera, binoculars, butterfly net, maps, charts, journals, and so on. But I wanted them and was willing to be my own beast of burden. Apart from a lot less food and the transmogrification of my plaster from package to cast, the burden was the same I’d arrived with. I jerked my foot out of my boot at the feel of something foreign—my neglected watch. A friend fresh back from the Amazon had told me of shaking out his boot for no reason, only to dislodge a huge bird-eating spider. We react automatically to lumps in our shoes, just as we do to bumps in the night and whistles in the woods.

  The watch said it was time to depart my tidy if slightly more used campsite. I left behind my impression, more clinkers in the fire pit, and a sliced Boletus: benedictions. Clark’s nutcrackers whistled in a fir, and a sharp-shinned hawk, smaller than my resident Cooper’s, skimmed three feet over my head. If there was anything cultus here, I hadn’t seen it. I surrendered the lake to the party of eight that had captured the far shore.

  The retreat went faster than the entry, thanks to gravity’s assist. On the way out I mused on the nature of being alone in the wild, and in evolutionary time. In Indian Heaven I had known a hundred hours of solitude. On my way to Deep Lake for water early that morning I had met up with Alan Cossitt, the photographer I’d first met at Quartz Creek. Having spoken to no one but the jays, myself, and passing voices in the night for so long, I wanted to stretch out my solitude. Just entering his own, he understood. Now, wading the stream of weekend hikers, there was no escape from company.

  When you encounter no other person for days on end, you begin to forget what you look like. In time you might forget who you are. This forgetting was part of the power quest during which Northwest Indians hoped to encounter, and survive, Dzonoqua and other power-guarders. Today, drowning in people, we too forget where we came from. But unlike the vision questers, we meet no guides.

  Seeing nothing with which our kind recognizes kinship, no one to mar our sublime ancestral solitude, we come to believe we are unique on the planet. The next step is that well-known psychosis of solitaries: declaring ourselves God. Judging from our behavior so far, we’re well on the way to doing just that. I believe the hubris of Homo comes at least partly from our assumption of uniqueness. The recognition of others in our midst who are not so very different might inspire a little humility. Perhaps the Indians are right when they speak of presences that only those with Indian eyes can see. Perhaps we are not alone after all.

  14

  Natural History of the

  Bigfoot Hunters

  This may very well be the destiny of the lonely Sasquatch, to be perpetually obscured by those who try hardest to discover it.

  —Michael M. Ames, Manlike Monsters on Trial

  Two plaster casts stand on my work table. One, bought from the Western Bigfoot Society, was taken from a mold made in 1967 at the site of the Patterson-Gimlin film at Bluff Creek in northern California. Pressed in gray Mount St. Helens ash, this copy is gray, fourteen inches long, six across, and obviously hominoid: a big footprint or a fake. The other cast is the one I made at Deep Lake. It is about an inch shorter and narrower than the Bluff Creek cast, and it lacks obvious toes, but the possible heel, big toe, and ball of the foot aren’t bad. To me it suggests the press of a primate foot: a big footprint or a feature of erosion.

  So I was prepared to leave the matter until I saw in an issue of Smithsonian an article by Richard Wolkomir on recent anthropological finds in the Americas. A photograph said to represent a child’s footprint preserved in Chilean sandstone looked strikingly like the negative of my Deep Lake artifact. Recently I showed my cast to Grover Krantz, author of Big Footprints: A Scientific Inquiry into the Reality of Sasquatch. Krantz regards the 1967 Patterson-Gimlin film and the prints that came from the area as probably authentic. But he was not impressed with my Indian Heaven plaster; it seemed to him too flat-bottomed for a human footprint. When I compared it with the Chilean print, he said he didn’t regard that as a real footprint either.

  At Bigfoot Daze in Carson, Washington, I acquired a copy of a plaster cast taken from a mold impressed in Mount St. Helens ash; the original cast was made at Bluff Creek soon after Patterson’s adventure. (Photograph courtesy of T. L. Pyle)

  These bits of “evidence”—chunks of plaster, photographs, the dents in earth or rocks—demonstrate one thing for certain: we have no common sense of what constitutes proof of existence, of what evidence really is. This is one of the major reasons for the lack of consensus among those interested in Sasquatch phenomena. But it is only one. Perhaps even more important is the sheer variety of method, motive, and mentality among those who go forth in search of hairy giants. As I began looking into Bigfoot, I found the natural history of the Bigfoot hunters at least as compelling as the animal itself. I soon realized, however, that the personalities and territories of the investigators would become the most time-consuming and trying aspect of the undertaking. None of them reveals his findings or theories unless he trusts that the inquisitor won’t rip him off. (The male pronoun is appropriate throughout this discussion, since virtually all of the serious Sasquatch pursuers I’ve met are males.) All are ego-involved and proprietary when it comes to the fabled object of their pursuit, and each one is an individual, full of foibles and crotchets and more or less obsessed—probably as it should be for seekers of grails. I was fully familiar with all these traits among the many butterfly enthusiasts I have known.

  I have also found the Bigfoot hunters to be generous, kind, and helpful, though not usually to one another. Make no mistake: there is a competition going on here, a contest perceived by the participants as the most
important possible, with the biggest stakes; the competitors intend to win if at all possible. Some show a spirit of collegiality and a desire to expand our knowledge. Individuality looms large in this enterprise, however, and friendships forged over Bigfoot may be short-lived or carry a tinge of shared suspicion. Except for their tendency to believe in advance of proof, this strange company resembles another idiosyncratic troop, the scientists.

  Actually, they don’t believe without proof, they simply accept a standard of proof that academic investigators are usually unwilling to allow. This brings us back to plaster casts and to Grover Krantz. A full professor at Washington State University’s Department of Anthropology in Pullman, Dr. Krantz is the exception to the amateur status of most of the hunters. He is also much harder-headed than most when it comes to evidence. Even so, he is convinced that unnamed anthropoids walk the woods. Or, rather, one named anthropoid: he thinks Bigfoot is probably a species of Gigantopithecus, the enormous apes of the Pliocene and Pleistocene known from tooth and jaw fossils found in Asia.

  I visited Krantz on a June Sunday when the campus was bare of students and my steps were the only echoes in the halls of the handsome old anthropology building. My visit was not a guaranteed success since, in an essay on the ethics of the Bigfoot hunt in Washington magazine, I had written:

  Professor Krantz may resent the professional opprobrium he receives as a Bigfoot believer, fallout that simply demonstrates the pre-Copernican attitudes of many scientists. He doesn’t deserve their close-minded contempt. But if Krantz dislikes the appellation of crank, he would appreciate even less that of murderer. For if he kills, or causes to be killed, a hominid, then a murderer he will surely be in the minds of many people.

  Nonetheless he greeted me civilly in his laboratory, which was lined with shelves supporting plaster casts of footprints as well as more conventional human and pre-human fossils. A lanky man, Krantz wore blue jeans and a gray work shirt with lots of pens. His hair and beard were the color of his shirt, the hair a thick, trimmed tassel, the beard short on the chin, long on the neck. He flopped in his chair and lit a cigarette ventilated by a device of his own making. Behind specs his eyes warned that he was weary of mindless and repetitive Bigfoot interviews.

  In his book Krantz analyzes the available physical and other evidence for Sasquatch and speculates from an informed position on the ecology, biological traits, and evolutionary affinities of this and related putative animals. Respect for this rogue anthropologist, who dares to speak seriously of such matters, has generally increased since the book appeared. He believes that his career and reputation have suffered to some extent because of his warmth for the subject of Bigfoot, but his recent promotion and his colleagues’ newfound interest suggest to him that they may be coming around—if not to acceptance, at least to a desirable open-mindedness.

  But then, Grover doesn’t want people to believe in Bigfoot, at least not the way they once believed in unicorns. He says that believing is something you do because it makes you feel good. At one time he did believe, which he equates with hope. Later he came to know, which is something quite different. “I don’t believe in Bigfoot,” he told me. “I have certain knowledge that causes me to conclude.” What is this knowledge? Chiefly the tracks, as he explains in his book, and the Patterson film. I asked to see one of the tracks on which dermal ridges and pores clearly appear, authenticated by forensic pathologists. The print was impressive, yet, he lamented, it did not satisfy the scientific establishment, which is why he insists on the need for a Bigfoot specimen.

  Just before I left, he showed me his reconstruction of the skull of Gigantopithecus. Known and respected for his work on Homo erectus, Krantz has received both praise and derision for the model. In their 1990 book Other Origins: The Search for the Giant Ape in Human Prehistory, Russell Ciochon, John Olsen, and Jamie James engagingly describe their search for fossils in Vietnam and their belief that Giganto (as they call it) cohabited with early man. But they give both Krantz and Bigfoot short shrift. Ignoring his Gigantopithecus model, they call his theory that Bigfoot and the extinct ape are identical “threadbare” and dismiss him as “a fervent believer” who “has stepped outside the bounds of science.”

  As a self-described intuitive iconoclast, Krantz is used to it. He is happy to see minds opening, and one senses that he anticipates the victory being all the sweeter when it comes because of the mockery that has gone before. By his own confession he is no woodsman, and his ultralight helicopter sits grounded in his garage, so Krantz is unlikely to make the discovery himself. But as far as he is concerned, he already has the evidence, and it is up to the others to catch up. Even so, no one will be happier than he when the type specimen is safely lodged in a museum. It is Krantz’s insistence on a specimen that makes him controversial and that brought about my earlier indictment of him.

  Grover Krantz may be unusual in being an academic on the track of Sasquatch, but he is not the only scientist to treat the subject seriously. Myra Shackley, lecturer in archaeological science at the University of Leicester, stated in her book Still Living? that Mongolia’s Almas might be a surviving Neandertal and that Yeti and Bigfoot probably exist. Geoffrey Bourne, the former director of the Yerkes Primate Center, wrote in his Gentle Giants (1975) that “Gigantopithecus may indeed have survived to the present day in very isolated areas” and “might be the animal that is responsible for the Yeti and Bigfoot sightings.” And John Napier, the late former director of the Primate Biology Program at the Smithsonian Institution, concluded that a hoax sufficient to explain the facts was even more unlikely than the animal itself.

  The symposium “Sasquatch and Related Phenomena,” at the University of British Columbia in May 1978, brought together twenty professors in various fields along with several serious laymen to consider the mythology, ethnology, ethology, ecology, biogeography, physiology, psychology, history, and sociology of the subject. All took it seriously, and while few if any accepted the existence of Sasquatch outright, they jointly concluded “that there are not reasonable grounds to dismiss all the evidence as misperception or hoax.”

  −−

  So while it is not true, as often asserted, that science has willfully ignored the phenomenon, far and away the greatest number of Bigfoot buffs have been nonacademics, if not antiacademics. It is common at Sasquatch gatherings to hear vicious derogations of the academy for “repressing” information or for blindly ignoring the obvious and thereby pulling the rug out from under the worthy ranks of the dedicated amateurs. These charges, however naive and lacking in empathy for the scientific method, are not without basis. Many tenured or tenure-hopeful scientists have pooh-poohed the topic without any critical attention to its substance. Grover Krantz and the BC Twenty can thus be seen as courageously bucking the tide, sometimes to their detriment.

  The amateurs (true lovers of the search) have no such tethers on their enthusiasm. Nor do they labor under the restraints of experimental protocol. This results in a vibrant output of opinions, publications, and theories that run the gamut from brilliant to disturbed, from cleverly intuitive to sloppy and gullible, and from helpful to hopeless.

  Most of the Bigfooters begin by gathering all the information they can find, then rejecting those reports or references they deem groundless or unsupportive of their biases. A few of the major players apply certain standards to weed out the more vacuous or obviously fatuous data. Others build great middens of material, like Grendel’s bone pile in the mere, where chaff and kernel compost together. Ray Crowe, the big, voluble, white-mustached director of the Western Bigfoot Society, is the model for this catholic approach. His periodical, the Track Record, is a repository of all things Bigfootish, from obvious dross to genuinely intriguing gems. Ray says of his all-embracing approach, “Always read with your skepticals on.”

  Of the many cataloguers, one of the most thorough and opinionated is Danny Perez of the Center for Bigfoot Studies in Norwalk, California. He
has published an odd, detailed critique of the Patterson-Gimlin film in his BigfooTimes, as well as a very useful bibliography of ape-man publications entitled Big Footnotes. Perez is also one of the most outspoken advocates of gunning down a Sasquatch and is known for attempting to do the same to his friends and colleagues in verbal exchanges. In action he is like an impatient terrier, yipping and nipping.

  Crowe and Perez typify two morphs of the Bigfoot searcher, in fact two poles occupied by obsessives of all sorts. Sticking with the corvid theme of Ray’s name, you might say that they are both jackdaws, gatherers of all kinds of glittering objects. But while Ray is more the lumbering, deliberate raven, issuing occasional barks or good-natured hoots, Danny apes the jay, forever squawking in a high-pitched and aggressive manner around the eyes and heels of all the other creatures in the wood. Most of the other giant-hunters more resemble magpies—also acquisitive and endlessly curious, but querulous rather than declamatory in their statements and retiring by nature. These several seekers after Sasquatch tend to be very serious, and I began to wonder whether any were in it simply for the fun. When I met Ray Wallace, I found one who was.

  Along with the footprint casts on my desk squats a round stone about the size of a high school shot but weighing some four pounds instead of the twelve we hefted when we put that steel ball. The stone was a gift from Ray Wallace, who presented it as an example of a missile that Bigfoot routinely throws to kill deer. To him the existence of round concretions (common formations in sediments) provides perfectly adequate evidence for the presence of hairy monsters that hunt deer. Or else he was having me on.