Where Bigfoot Walks

by Robert Michael Pyle

  As the day waned, dusky shadows made injury more likely, and I knew my chances of getting out without a bivouac were waning as well. My uneasiness grew out of anticipating cold, hassle, and failure. It wasn’t fear of the place or its creatures, though the Big Lava Bed would make a marvelous set for a cinematic version of the deep, dark woods where sinister things lie in wait. Dark woods have never seemed sinister to me, but my own shortcomings can be truly frightening.

  When you read about lost children or hunters or hikers in the papers, you wonder what they’re going through, at what point they panic, and then what happens. Everyone knows that the disoriented are likely to walk in circles and get more dislocated with every step. Now I knew something of that feeling. The pines looked identical, the rocks were repeats. There was the squirrel midden again, or was it a different one? The squirrels made fun with their piping hoots; the ravens honked discouragement. Panic? No, but a nauseated wave when I realized how a short ramble had become a desperate scramble by the easiest, silliest increments. Though sweaty in my wool, I was cold, and it looked like a bad time coming.

  Then, just as I was thinking about pulling together a rough shelter and gathering a few berries and chanterelles before dark, I stepped between a clump of pines and a lump of lava onto the rough track I’d come in on. I had indeed gone in at least one circle, probably circumscribing the oval on my map. In the end I had arrived very near where I thought I was aiming for. I hadn’t so much misplaced myself as taken leave of my confidence. The Big Lava Bed will do that to you. I stepped lightly onto the flat surface of the track, feeling the way you do coming off a long, awful drive, hitting the pavement, and throttling down.

  Coming out south of my entry point, I found a dozen or more sinkholes. Unlikely to be from meltwater or rainwater at this season, the little lagoons must have artesian sources. Whether the disappeared Lost and Lava creeks tie in to the underground system and reemerge at the south end as Lava and Moss creeks, only the lava bed knows. And perhaps the plants, which know how to find the water wherever it runs. The Big Lava Bed is an ericaceous haven—a heathland full of kinnikinnick, manzanita, their hybrids, two salals, wintergreens, pipsissewa, huckleberries, and others. The odd shrub Garrya, heathlike but in a family by itself, is a specialty of the lava landscape. Its flowers hang in silky tassels. Now old tassels dangled among next year’s firm buds and tough, shiny green leaves. I ate a “little apple,” the fruit of the manzanita. It was sweet and tasty, with little meat and lots of big, hard seeds, but with water in its tissues. A raven alighted in a snag, howled to let Seeahtlks know I was about and stealing his little apples.

  In the dusk I could see that the ponds had drawn some attention. There was an old handmade picnic table, an elaborate fire pit of lava rocks, but no litter. Heaven forbid, I thought, that this should ever become an interpretive site. So far it seems unlikely. According to the forest planners, the Big Lava Bed receives only an estimated two hundred RVDs—recreation visitor days—per year. Or perhaps that’s how many come out after venturing in.

  −−

  Without a doubt this was one of the wildest, most forbidding landscapes I’d ever known. The only place that came close was the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes in Katmai National Monument, Alaska. Marching across the polychrome pumice gulleys of that eruptive plain toward the caldera, I felt as far from anything as I have ever been. But I was never lost there.

  Now, in a land of gaping black holes and razor scarps of lava, I had known the meaning of lost, if only briefly. It means being aloof from your whereabouts, unable to predict, let alone count on, what comes next. It means facing each footstep with a forlorn question, getting no answers from your logic or your heart. To lose yourself is to be cut off from communication with the ground underfoot, the sky overhead. It is almost the worst thing that can happen to a species whose sense of place is often forgotten and never enough. Lost is a peril, a trial, a torture; it is the only kind of certainty that you never wanted. And in the Big Lava Bed, where any false step can mean splintered bone, lost could mean dead.

  No other animal has ever been lost. Disoriented, maybe. Temporarily confused as to location. But unless tossed in a rat’s maze or transported far from home like a bad bear, every creature knows exactly where it is at every waking moment. Each “inferior” animal brain carries its own global positioning device and Geographic Information System as standard operating equipment. At least this is what I believe about the essential nature of wild organisms: by definition they are situated.

  Only people get lost. Captain Jack did not lose his bearings in the lava beds of the Modoc country. Humans and other primates for whom the location of the furniture of the land means comfort, security, nourishment, happiness, and even survival never lose their way on their home ground. They may establish songlines or blaze trees to help, but they know. Only we modern ones do not know our way around. Landlorn, without a compass or a clue, we’re stuck in the ruts to the who knows where.

  Bigfoot doesn’t get lost, not here or anywhere. Maybe it would show us the route, help us spot the path back to the land. If we don’t find our way home soon, we will find ourselves instead out in the sun with Captain Jack, backs against the hot rock wall, hunted out by the howitzers of change. I learned two things here. Whether my compass works or not, I’ll never go in there again without it. And if Bigfoot ever has to make a stand, it ought to be here, in the Big Lava Bed.

  18

  Mermaids, Monsters,

  and Metaphors

  His parting from life

  was no cause for grief

  to any of the men who examined the trail

  of the conquered one

  saw how, despairing he had rushed away

  ruined in the fight

  to the lake of monsters fleeing, doomed

  in bloody footprints.

  —Beowulf

  So what the hell is it?”

  Sheriff Angleford shifted a stubby paw from his hip to his chin, then retrieved the drained Styrofoam cup from the truck’s bumper and pretended to drink the dregs. “Damned if I know.”

  Hank Peterson prodded the duff beside the truck with his boot. “You know what they’re saying, Ed.”

  “I know . . . they’re starting to talk about goldurned Bigfoot again. I thought we got rid of it that last time around, when we pulled that prankster out of the woods and ran him out of town.”

  “Yeah, but this time there’s that dead goat, all chewed up . . .”

  “So? Cougar, bear. Ain’t no goddamn monster.”

  “But there’s more tracks like these over there, Ed. And the doc thinks he saw one, comin’ home from the widow Bates’s Saturday. Said it was bigger ’n Kandoll’s ox stood endwise.”

  “That wasn’t any medical call,” said the sheriff. “And who knows how much schnapps doc and the Bates woman had between ’em?”

  “Folks are worried, Ed. They’re talkin’ posse.”

  “Yeah, like that ‘posse’ they got up when Slade squeezed out of the county coop? That ‘posse’ ended up in the Triangle Tavern, as I recall.” Angleford and Peterson kicked a little more dirt around. They had met at the end of the Cedar Creek road, where a hunter had reported a line of giant footprints.

  The deputy’s cruiser threw up a fog of pumice dust. Deputy Potrillo leapt out. “Hey, Hank, Sheriff, we got it! You need to get over to Jake Kandoll’s place, and quick.”

  “Got what? What’re you yammering about, Potrillo?”

  “That ape-monster! Kandoll and some boys’ve got it pinned down in a canyon behind his place. He’s pissed about that goat.”

  “If he’s got anything in that brush-hole, he’s got a bear. Or more likely a porcupine!”

  “I saw it move, Sheriff. It’s big . . . standing up and . . . and yowling and like that. And does it ever stink. Man, it stinks!”

  “I told you,” said Peterson.
“I’ve believed in it for a long time, most folks around here do, really. Now you’re gonna find out what I’m talking about.”

  Sheriff Angleford, a Montana cop before coming to Washington the year before, had lucked into the sheriff’s job when two local men split the election. When he learned about the county ordinance against killing Bigfoot, he just laughed. “Hairy apes!” he said. “Next they’ll put little green men on the endangered species list.” Now he found himself swept along with a band of locals brandishing rifles at a brushy gully, yelling about something he didn’t even believe in. As the light faded, and howls continued to emanate from the ravine, some of the men wanted to start a fire to smoke the howler out.

  “That’s the only way,” said Kandoll, the owner of the land, hoarse from the general excitement. “We sure as hell ain’t going in there after it. It’s all poison oak anyway.”

  Angleford, for the first time since he’d taken office, found himself supervising crowd control. Crowds didn’t often gather in Skapoose County, but this one was growing fast.

  “Hold on,” he shouted, rolling his bulk in front of the mob. “You can’t start a fire. You know the restriction’s on. You’re liable to burn the whole damn mountain down.”

  “How else we gonna get ’im out?” the truculent Kandoll demanded.

  “Besides,” said the sheriff, “I thought you people had some law around here protecting these so-called Bigfeet. Pretty big fine, isn’t it?”

  A spare man in a checked jacket and shiny tie spoke up, a county commissioner. “Ten thousand dollars. Yeah, statute’s still on the books,” he said.

  “That’s nothing,” Kandoll grunted. “It’s my land; I can shoot what I want. Besides, them durn scientists’d pay me a lot more than that to get a look at this here deal.” Several of his neighbors laughed their agreement.

  “Hell, I’d pay that much just to get a look at this thing,” one of them said.

  A woman from the Department of Fish and Wildlife arrived in a green pickup within minutes of the red Blazer driven by Peter Byrne of the Bigfoot Research Project. She saw the guns and sized it up. “Who’s got a license to hunt at this season?” she asked. “What are you planning on shooting?”

  No one answered. The young woman faced a row of stony faces. She was about to use her handheld radio, when Byrne, stretching his soft British accent to be heard, said, “Listen up, you men.”

  “How’d the guy from Wild Kingdom get here?” asked a logger, and the others laughed. But they listened.

  “If you really have a Bigfoot in there,” he went on, “we’re interested. But it won’t do anyone any good to kill it. We’ve been trying to find one to make contact. This might be our best chance yet.” Once he’d said it, some of the people jeered, but others concurred, including Kandoll’s wife.

  “Why should you shoot it anyway, Jake?” she said. “It just wants to be left alone. One goat doesn’t matter that much.”

  “It’ll be the ox next,” her husband barked. “You’re just being a softy . . . or else them old Indi’n stories are gettin’ to you again. I told you to stop listenin’ to them.”

  “But, Jake, there might be something to the stories . . .”

  “This here ain’t no goddamn spirit, Elma. It’s a durned ape, and it ate my goat.”

  As dark came on, the sheriff and the wildlife agent and the commissioner and the Bigfoot researcher argued over jurisdiction and tactics of peacefully capturing or contacting the creature, while the roars continued from the brush. Suddenly the tone changed. The cry became a sharp whistle. All heads turned toward the head of the box canyon. Another whistle answered from the rim. There, profiled against the dusk skyline of the clear-cut above the ranch, stood a massive black figure.

  A hush like an empty grave fell over the unruly aggregation of the curious and the fearful. Everyone saw the figure. Whistles flew like swallows back and forth between the beast in the brushy grotto and the one on the top. The rim-walker gestured, roared, and whistled again.

  Byrne was the first to speak. “That’s it,” he said quietly. “That’s what we’ve been seeking, all right. It’s bigger than I thought.” He was awed, amazed, moved. Then, the shocked spell broken, a clamor arose. A torch was lit. Men shouted, “Get it!” A rifle shot cracked open the night.

  −−

  Hokey? Of course. But it would be like that. We’ve all seen a hundred movies like it. An unknown or mythical life form arrives stage left—space alien, subterranean, mermaid, whatever—and the reaction of the people on the scene is . . . well, reactionary. The sympathies of the movie audience lie firmly with the interloper, who tragically perishes at the hands of the army, science, or villagers with pitchforks or shotguns. We feel communal moral indignation and pity for a harmless creature misunderstood and feared. And the conclusion, every time, is that it did not have to happen. The lucky ones, such as E.T. or the mermaid in Splash! escape with the help of the protagonist; but only after hair-raising episodes of wrong-headed persecution.

  I know what I’m talking about here. When I was a preteen, my friends and I became completely bewitched by Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, and Lon Chaney, Jr. We began a monster club with ranks: I, as Frankenstein, was president, then came Dracula, the Wolf Man, and Caris the Mummy. I borrowed my father’s boots for monster clogs, and my friends’ mothers made batwing cookies and cherry Kool-Aid vampire punch for our meetings. Our delusions of grandeur ran toward making our own movie with my grandfather’s wind-up Keystone, a primitive sixteen-millimeter motion picture camera. We storyboarded the plot, and of course the monster (played by me) would meet a glorious demise out by the old canal. We never graduated to the slasher genre, two holes in the neck being about as much abstracted gore as we wanted. But for all the fun, some innocence was lost. Those old movies told us all we needed to know about the mean-spirited actions of grown-ups toward whatever they failed to understand.

  After generations of movies with the same basic script, we should not be surprised if our baser motivations prevailed and we extended pitchforks instead of open arms to any outrageous beast that had the misfortune to walk off the set and into our midst. I suppose the theme survives because it never ceases to jerk tears and sell tickets; but does anyone doubt that we would react this way, given the opportunity? Or that we would feel anything but remorse about it afterward? The issue has been one for scriptwriters and dreamers so far, since few outlandish species have dared to show up. But if Bigfoot walked out of the woods tomorrow, how would we behave?

  −−

  Several years ago Sally Hughes, John Hinchliff, and I found a species of butterfly that was new for the Washington list at the foot of the Big Lava Bed. We had been seeking the golden hairstreak in the state for a decade, reasoning that where its host plant grew, the insect flew. Its larvae feed strictly on the foliage of golden chinquapin, a western type of wild chestnut. The shrubby tree and the butterfly are widespread in California and not uncommon in Oregon all the way north to the Columbia River. I had a feeling that if we could find the few golden chinquapins rumored to occur across the river on the Washington side, we would find the butterfly as well.

  The Army Corps of Engineers’ Environmental Atlas of Washington State, the same document that helped legitimize the search for Sasquatch, showed the chinquapin in parts of Clark County. We scoured the region but found none. A few years later a paper by professor of botany Arthur Kruckeberg, one of my longtime mentors at the University of Washington, detailed the whereabouts and ecology of the chinquapin in two Washington locations. At last we were able to visit them, and within seconds we confirmed the state record of Habrodais grunus as well.

  Kruckeberg had been concerned about the effects of logging on the chinquapins. They are considered weed trees by many foresters in California and Oregon, and the few scraggly ones in Skamania County were certainly not being given any special protection from spraying and log-slash. By
finding the butterfly and subsequently having it listed as a “Priority One Special Animal” by the Washington Natural Heritage Program, we doubled the reason for the USFS to attend to the dispersed chinquapins. Together the butterfly and plant people lobbied the Gifford Pinchot and gained the interest of USFS biologists. All this resulted in a few lines in the Forest Plan about both organisms and a degree of attention to their well-being. I have since heard from colleagues that at least some chinquapins have been flagged with ribbons meaning “do not harm,” and the hairstreaks are thriving. The long-term health of these species locally is still in question, but if they are lost it won’t be from ignorance. Unlike certain other novel creatures reputed to occur in the area but never “proven” with a specimen, at least they have been recognized.

  One evening during my exploration of the Big Lava Bed, following a day’s walking, I visited the site of our discovery to see if I could find the golden hairstreaks again. They appear in the late summer and fall and are reported to fly at dawn and dusk as well as in full sunshine. But perhaps this was too late in the season or the day even for them. I did not find them, nor any eggs. There were fewer chinquapins, and they were very dusty from a long season of logging-truck traffic.

  In that autumnal haze, with the scrubby growth black on the black, scabby-toe lava, the idea that golden-leaved trees and golden-winged butterflies occurred here together seemed outlandish. Yet we know these life forms exist, not by faith or belief, but by Cartesian means: Professor Kruckeberg’s paper, based on herbarium sheets, and our discovery, backed up by a small series of specimens in the state museum. In other words, the evidence is concrete. It depends neither on hearsay nor on the leaky memory of some field observer but on actual specimens. And there’s the rub when it comes to Bigfoot: there is no body.

  Nonconsumptive wildlife enthusiasts and weekend naturalists often fail to appreciate the need for collecting specimens. If we can see the creature or the plant in the field, they ask, why is there any need to kill it? Often their point is well taken. Christmas bird counts and Fourth of July butterfly counts have shown that sight records can be just as meaningful as specimens in many instances. After all, we have come a long way from the days when every bird had to be shot to credit its occurrence. Picking wildflowers is considered antisocial.