Where Bigfoot Walks

by Robert Michael Pyle

  In the opposite shadow of this divide stands Byrne himself, the primary searcher of stature to forswear a violent approach. As Byrne wrote in The Search for Bigfoot, “It seems incredible in this day and age that there are people who would want to shoot something like a Bigfoot . . . [This] is cruel and unjustified thinking, and I would not condone it, not even for so-called scientific reasons.” As for “wanting to shoot one for monetary gain,” Byrne says, “this is mindless cretinism of the lowest form.”

  Most Bigfoot hunters, even if they prefer that the animal not be killed, would not outright condemn doing so. Many others support live capture, study, and release. Byrne’s book, The Search for Bigfoot, included an off-putting list of problems with this approach. Even if the technology was properly guessed and the animal was not killed by an overdose or hurt by half-drugged wandering, Byrne contended, a major problem would remain: Would those in charge be able to resist the pressures to keep it or kill it? He quoted George Hass of Oakland, who asked, “What would happen, if while you have the creature in hand, either drugged or in a cage, healthy and well, some powerful organization like Disney Studios walks up and offers a check for half a million for the body? Are you then going to let the thing go?” Even so, Byrne has recently decided to consider tranquilizing a Bigfoot, should his Bigfoot Research Project succeed in finding one, in order to obtain blood samples for definite proof.

  It is fair to say that the great majority of amateur Bigfoot enthusiasts and members of the interested public want the animal to remain untouched, even if it means never proving its existence. For this reason, Byrne is seen as an exotic “good guy” in the field, while many cast Krantz (with media help) in a black hat. But is it simply a matter of Byrne taking the moral high road and Krantz the pragmatic means-for-the-ends approach? I think it is much more complicated. The two men respect each other’s heartfelt positions, even though they differ. Krantz may be right to believe that only a specimen in hand will guarantee acceptance by the protection authorities, and Byrne’s position may be completely unrealistic. And none of the Bigfoot investigators has had the opportunity to discover what he would actually do in the event. Several hunters have reported having Bigfoot in their sights and feeling unable to pull the trigger because the target struck them as “more human than animal.”

  Our actions and attitudes about killing are a mass of contradictions, confusions, and hypocrisies. We all must kill to eat, to live, to breathe, to walk, and each of us draws the line somewhere. Certain yogis wear masks, it is said, so as not to inhale and kill microorganisms. Vegetarians will not kill animals for their own nutrition (for a variety of reasons) but are content to kill plants, which are living things. I used to collect butterflies for the thrill of it, then for the trophies, then for discovery, eventually for college tuition money, and finally for research purposes. I have known all these motives and acted on them, and I still feel their contradictory tugs. Yet I am no more confused than three friends who have expressed abhorrence at my taking the lives of butterflies: one a fly fisherman, one a moose hunter, the third a fur broker.

  Since I have found it possible to justify the killing of moths and butterflies, I have tried hard to sympathize with Grover Krantz’s position. I find I cannot come around to it. When I sought out the vultures’ find in the Big Lava Bed, I would have been as excited as anyone to find a Bigfoot corpse that had died of an accident or disease. But when I peered through the lodgepoles, sighting along the handle of my net at a lava pinnacle about the size, shape, and color of a Sasquatch, I knew that even if Marsha had been a buffalo gun instead of a butterfly net I could never shoot. I draw my own personal line somewhere between butterflies and Bigfoot.

  As I wrote in my piece for Washington, “Should we kill one Bigfoot, there will be a blood-rush for specimens: museums, zoos, roadside attractions, labs—all will want their own. And like the great auk, Sasquatch might not survive this flood of lethal attention.” Both Byrne and Krantz have pointed out the naive flaw in this reasoning: even if one Bigfoot was found, the rest would not be any easier to find than they have been these hundred years and more. And Krantz is probably correct that one killed Bigfoot would lead to statutory protection for the rest.

  So why do I continue to resist gigantocide? And that raises other questions: Why worry about the fate of an animal that is not at all certain to exist in flesh and blood? What ethical standards apply—what scruples should we display—toward premeditated killing, when the victim might be an ancestor, a cousin, or a pipe dream?

  I am certain that some of the would-be giant killers see themselves as exactly that—some Jack, some David, some Saint George or Saint Michael or Muhammad Ali—out to dance like a butterfly and sting like a broadsword. Such Uzi-toting dragon-slayers would rejoice in the act of righteously blowing away Bigfoot, which they vaguely imagine as an archetype of evil like that embodied in giants, dragons, monsters, and the Other. They are the kind of men who would take satisfaction in gunning down the last wolf. That way lies the pogrom, the bounty, and all manner of final solutions.

  But these gun-happy Jacks (and Krantz is not remotely among them) have got it backward. We have here, if we have anything, the greatest gift of evolution in our time, just as Mount St. Helens is an immense gift of geology, and in the same place. If Sasquatches exist, we should cherish them. By so doing, we might reinforce how to treat one another better. At this juncture in our brutal history—after Rwanda, after Bosnia, after Tiananmen Square—would we not be well advised to take the humane approach at every opportunity, toward the broadest possible concept of the Family of Man?

  Or shall we begin this new relationship through the sights of a high-powered rifle, like any despicable sniper; or the jaws of a great steel trap, as we did for wolves and grizzlies throughout their former empires? If Krantz is right, and Bigfoot is Gigantopithecus, it is hominoid; if Byrne is right, it is hominid. If Myra Shackley is right, and Bigfoot equates with Neandertal, it is human. If the Kwakiutl and Klickitat are right, it is both human . . . and spirit. And if the doubters are right and Bigfoot is nothing but thin air, then it still exists within the lineage of our hearts. If we condone the killing of our evolutionary companions—our friends, our brothers and sisters, our ancestors, our dreams—how far can we be from the brink?

  We know that Bigfoot is one big metaphor—a model for wildness, the unknown, tumid and hirsute desires with no names, the godforsaken exile. But metaphors can get up and walk. How sadly ironic it would be if something amazing had to be executed in order to prove that it wasn’t a stand-in for something else. Or as Blackfeet singer-songwriter Jack Gladstone put it: “What is the proper way to express what can’t be seen? For our senses grasp only a glimpse of the mystery between. Therefore I’m resigned to weave my way through the forest of word-lore, dyin’ for a metaphor.” Will that be Bigfoot—dyin’ for a metaphor? As if in reply, in “The Man in the Mirror,” John Sparrow wrote, “Wouldn’t it be nice to think that there was something left that the human could encounter without bringing death.”

  Surely we can agree to leave the question of Bigfoot’s existence open until unimpeachable photographic or first-person testimony proves it for all but the most cynical skeptics, or until a roadkill or subfossil shuts the case tight. Krantz, Perez, and others will reply that photos can always be faked and that there have been plenty of solid testaments already; if doubters won’t believe Patterson, then what? It has also been pointed out that no fine nature photographer has ever photographed a Sasquatch, and no professional biologist has ever reported a sighting. This is no proof against; it’s just a circumstance. But I suggest that when an Art Wolfe brings in a picture, or a George Schaller presents a sighting, acceptance will surely follow. And if it doesn’t? Then sweet mystery will survive another day.

  In Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid, when the unfortunate hybrid first sees children, she asks her sisters if the children will be her friends. No, the sisters say; when they see y
our tail, they will be terrified and run away screaming. Eventually she gives up her tongue and her tail for love and legs—and loses it all. The mermaid in Splash! would have made out no better if the scientists had had their way. These are fairy tales. But who can doubt that, faced with the real thing, we would behave any better than we do toward our myths . . . or toward ourselves?

  For ourselves, as much as for the beast, I want us to be able to think of Bigfoot as an animal or an idea worthy of our best behavior. Bigfoot, I presume, has no desire to be our friend, but we need friends wherever we can find them. How much better poised we might be to approach the times to come with equanimity toward all nature if we could agree to forswear the acts most clearly destined for remorse.

  Let’s rewrite the end of this movie. Grover Krantz is no murderer but a dedicated and visionary scientist with the best interests of his subject ultimately in mind. Even so, I hope he and the others who want a Bigfoot in hand will reconsider. Bigfoot belongs in the bush.

  19

  Carson on the Columbia

  Once you have been to his land

  you may enter and leave at will

  though few return from that journey

  unchanged.

  —Margaret Atwood,

  “Oratorio for Sasquatch, Man, and Two Androids”

  When I left the lavalands, I paralleled the route of the old Broughton Flume, which still carried fir cants from Willard down to the mill at Underwood. I saw the yellow trains of the Union Pacific, the green trains of the Burlington Northern, and the red truck train of I-84. There was Mount Hood’s sleek eminence. There was the big river itself. I had come all the way, Cowlitz to Columbia. To celebrate, I crossed over to the Whitecap Brew Pub in Hood River.

  The Columbia Gorge marked the end of the trip, but I wanted to make it last. Besides, I was hours early to check into my room at Carson Hot Springs. So I crossed the Bridge of the Gods back to the Washington side and struck north and west into country with the names of the wild: Panther Creek, Bear Creek, Cougar Rock, Trout Creek, Wind River, Trapper Creek Wilderness. I wanted to feel just a little more of this swatch of the West where giants are said to walk.

  At a curve in the narrow forest road, a flock of waxwings and other birds erupted from a blue elderberry they’d been busy dismantling. Stepping out among them I heard their seeps, cee-dees, and about half of the bird calls of the past month afield. It was one of those great autumn feeding flocks where species mingle in common pursuit of food before migrating or wintering in the north. As my presence became known, they all vanished into the mist and the drop-laden conifers.

  As I nosed up the Wind River, the wind off the gorge was cool, moist, and fragrant. Beyond the Wind River Experimental Forest (how many ways can you skin a cat?) I crossed a gentle divide into the Trout River watershed, where a road crew was fixing a muddy slide just in time for me, and came up under the eaves of the tiny but vital Trapper Creek Wilderness. On the ridges far to the north, plantations gave way to the gnarly tops of old growth, which came and went with the blowing fog-wraiths, making me uncertain if they were really there or not.

  The Cat-skinners (Ray Wallace’s skilled guild) had cut roads close to all the edges of the wilderness area. Bare Mountain, on the western border, richly deserved its name. I knew that the Siouxon drainage, off to the northwest, flowed yet unlogged and unroaded and that its future was an ongoing battle between those who liked it that way and those who wanted the spaghetti of roads to spill over the entire plate of the Gifford Pinchot map.

  Outside of the national forest such options no longer remain. I rolled as far down the mountain as Chelatchie Prairie, headquarters of the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument. Tumtum Mountain, a perfect isolated cinder cone, had been licked clean of trees from the bottom up. The Weyerhaeuser St. Helens Tree Farm appeared to be logged off right down to Canyon Creek. Where Fly Creek came in, a dramatic spot of mossy rock walls and merging white waters, a half dozen or so trees had been left on the scenic cliff point. This was a land of vine maples strung with tight red leaves and a tinsel of heavy, long lichens, and replacement conifers that were about Christmas tree–sized, where they had taken.

  I was working hard to appreciate Jim Hewkin’s idea that Bigfoot is an opportunistic beast, happy in the logged-off hills. But these hills had been pretty efficiently logged off, and it stretched my powers of imagination to envision how a giant might use them. I escaped back into the national forest, where some of the streams had buffers, and a few patches of old growth survived, but where fragmentation was well advanced. Puny Creek was, but it would have seemed a torrent a month before, when I had gone thirsty in search of a slake.

  As the day waned, I wandered easterly up Panther Creek, where panthers surely hunt yet. The road circled around onto the humped shoulders of Bear Creek. A land of lions and bears. Dropping through oaks into bigleaf maples slung with long locks of Usnea, I realized that I was really on the cusp between the dry side and the damp side of the Cascades, yet another divide. Travel much farther west and you’re in the temperate rain forest; to the east you’re in the sage desert. I was reminded of John Green’s quip about the majority of Bigfoot sightings occurring on the wet side. Isn’t it interesting, he asks, how people’s need to invent monsters dries up where less than sixteen inches of rain falls?

  Through rags of mist and ragged forest I saw a silver sliver in the distance and a black lump beside it that seemed to have tumbled down from the dark heights of the Divide to the north. The sliver was the Columbia; the lump, Beacon Rock. Golden god-beams fell across the distant river, and a patch of pale peach sky shone beneath a silver ceiling—a more fitting arrival. But the glory was brief. The day, never a bright one, was duller still for the melancholy of any ending. As I descended toward Carson, the dishrag sky mopped up the last of the light in the west, and the drear became complete. I thought I heard a donkey, but it was a last futile elk call of a bow-hunter about to give up and go home.

  Ass or archer, that bleak bray seemed absurdly out of place in the gathering dark, but no more so than the apparition I encountered a few miles beyond. Driving directly into the cloud-glow of the fullish moon, I beheld scores of pale faces looming and crowding all around me. It was a big herd of sheep, or mountain maggots, as John Muir called them. But here they had a progressive function, employed to suppress brush on replanted clearcuts, in place of herbicides recently banned on public lands. They reminded me of hiking the Pennine Way to the Dark Peak near the English–Scots border, where I was seldom out of eye- or earshot of sheep. Masked by the wan moon, these faces were even dumber than those of the Derbyshire breed. Their fleece, certainly not golden, was full of burs, tangles, and shit. Now there’s easy food for Bigfoot, I thought, if it likes mutton. As I pulled through the bleating flock, a ruffed grouse pummeled the roadway before me. The night has no shortage of visions. If we don’t see them it is only our own blindness.

  −−

  One person who has no lack of visions is Datus Perry, the resident Bigfoot guru of Carson. A skinny Santa in olive drab and flannel, Perry hangs out in the canyons above the Columbia, where he spots Sasquatch almost at will. In 1937, he claims, he saw one in full view at two hundred feet on the Observation Peak Trail. In 1963 a Bigfoot followed him down from the saddle south of Gifford Peak, and he saw it well from twenty feet. Since then he has seen them from Panther Creek to the Quesnel River in British Columbia, in every aspect from sunning to soliciting his favors.

  Anywhere else Datus Perry might be considered merely an eccentric or worse. Around Carson he is certainly seen that way, yet he is also revered as something of a Bigfoot expert. Situated at the confluence of the Wind River and the Columbia, Carson lies in the very heart of Bigfoot country. The town team is the Carson Bigfoots. One of several annual Bigfoot revels around the Northwest takes place in Carson’s Bigfoot Trailer Park. And the locals have blessed both the proceedings and the beast that
inspires them.

  Back in 1969, “at the peak of Big Foot sightings in the county” as they later put it, the Skamania County Pioneer of nearby Stevenson published its first “Big Foot Edition.” A second came out on April 1, 1992. “Our hope,” wrote editor Stacy Smith, “was to compile a comprehensive edition that would include past sightings for a historical perspective and more recent sightings for a timelier edge.”

  The original 1969 Bigfoot paper was stimulated by a spate of sightings at Beacon Rock, Bear Creek, and near the Big Lava Bed. The front page included drawings by artist Linda Ford, who worked with Washougal sportsman Don Cox to recreate the creature he saw cross the fogbound road at Beacon Rock. The encounter, the paper said, had the stone-sober Cox all shook up. Inside was a photo of Sheriff Bill Closner and Deputy Jack Wright making a cast of a twenty-two-inch track in the snow, with members of the Bigfoot Research Association (a group of former lawmen) kneeling over the sulfur cast. “I guess I’ll have to stop laughing,” said the sheriff.

  The attitude of the Big Foot Edition was nonviolent. As editor Roy Craft wrote, “To be honest, I think there is such a creature, and I think that more than one was forced down out of the high mountain lava cave area by the most severe winter in the history of the Cascades.” He went on, “Let us hope that when the day for irrefutable evidence by way of perfect photographs comes, the ape-creature will be left alone to the wilderness home he has chosen.” A reader commented, “The monster (and what right have we to call it that?) . . . is self-supporting, owes no debts to anyone, and asks for naught but its God-given right to pursue its own life with malice toward none.”

  A portrait of Datus Perry, white-maned and pointing with a stick, graced the front page of the 1992 Big Foot Edition. Within was a 1969 photograph of Robert Morgan and a young female assistant, her long hair swept back in the style of the times, displaying casts of tracks purportedly found on his American Yeti Expedition. A map indicated the Ape Cave area, Babyshoe Pass at the eastern end of the Dark Divide, and the southern part of the Big Lava Bed as “the most probable places to find Big Foot.” The paper included drawings of Bigfoot by Stevenson Elementary School students and a table of “Big Foot Facts.”