Where Bigfoot Walks

by Robert Michael Pyle

  The centerfold featured photos of and comments by eight local business people and elected officials who were asked, “Do you believe in Big Foot?” Sheriff Ray Blaisdell and Prosecuting Attorney Bob Leick both gave replies suitable to their positions. “I don’t believe in it, but I do believe people have been seeing something,” said the sheriff. “I’m willingly suspending my disbelief,” replied his colleague. “I don’t know whether it exists or doesn’t exist.”

  Only Arlene Johnson, executive director of the chamber of commerce, took a hard line: “I have a hard time believing in anything I can’t see or have not seen proof of.” Jim Joseph, a sporting goods shopkeeper, told the Pioneer, “I think there’s more to it than we even begin to understand.” Bill Yee, the manager of the public utility district, gave a hearty “Yes, I believe Big Foot exists,” then qualified it, “just as sure as the Lock [sic] Ness monster exists. I have never seen Big Foot myself, but I have never seen the Lock Ness monster either.”

  Perhaps the most surprising responses came from the three elected county commissioners. All three looked on the phenomenon positively. “I’m not a disbeliever,” said Ed McLarney, “but I’m not a total believer yet either. People have to be seeing something.” Commissioner Ed Callahan went a little further, saying, “I do believe there’s something out there we can’t explain.” And Kaye Masco left no question: “From the information that I have gathered and the reading I’ve done, I absolutely believe Big Foot exists and has a watchful eye over all of the people in Skamania County.” That is a remarkable degree of open-mindedness about a topic that causes discreet people elsewhere to smirk or swallow their thoughts.

  But it was not just the local attitude that drew me to conclude my ramble in Carson, nor the fact that a line drawn from my starting point through the middle of the Dark Divide leads to Carson Hot Springs, with its promise of a cheap bed and a fantastic tub and massage. It was the Skamania County Bigfoot law of 1969: Ordinance No. 69-01 Prohibiting Wanton Slaying of Ape-Creature and Imposing Penalties. The ordinance reads:

  BE IT HEREBY ORDAINED BY THE BOARD OF COUNTY COMMISSIONERS OF SKAMANIA COUNTY: WHEREAS, there is evidence to indicate the possible existence in Skamania County of a nocturnal primate mammal variously described as an ape-like creature or a sub-species of Homo Sapian [sic]; and WHEREAS, both legend and purported recent sightings and spoor support this possibility, and WHEREAS, this creature is generally and commonly known as a “Sasquatch,” “Yeti,” “Bigfoot,” or “Giant Hairy Ape,” and WHEREAS, publicity attendant upon such real or imagined sightings has resulted in an influx of scientific investigators as well as casual hunters, many armed with lethal weapons, and WHEREAS, the absence of specific laws covering the taking of specimens encourages laxity in the use of firearms and other deadly devices and poses a clear and present threat to the safety and well-being of persons living or traveling within the boundaries of Skamania County as well as to the creatures themselves, THEREFORE BE IT 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 ($10,000.00) and/or imprisonment in the county jail for a period not to exceed Five (5) years. BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the situation existing constitutes an emergency and as such this ordinance is effective immediately.

  The ordinance was signed by Commission Chair Conrad Lundy, Jr., and Prosecuting Attorney Robert K. Leick. The fact that it was adopted on April 1 did not escape notice. However, the commissioners insisted they were completely serious. “Although this ordinance was adopted on April 1, this is not an April Fool’s Day joke,” Commissioner Lundy told the Pioneer at the time. “There is reason to believe such an animal exists.”

  Likewise, as longtime commissioner Ed Callahan told the paper, he and his comrades were very serious when they amended the ordinance in 1984. At that time Prosecutor Leick realized that “the county had exceeded its jurisdictional authority by making the crime a felony,” according to the supplement.

  The new version declared that a person found “guilty with malice” would be guilty of a gross misdemeanor. If the killing were premeditated but without malice, it would be a misdemeanor. The penalties were reduced to a maximum of one year in jail and/or a one-thousand-dollar fine. Perhaps mindful of the wacky faction of Bigfooters, the revised law prohibited any defense based on “insane delusions, diminished capacity, or . . . a diseased mind.” If the county coroner determines “any victim/creature to have been humanoid,” the crime would be considered homicide.

  Leick credited the idea for the original ordinance to the late Roy Craft, then editor and publisher of the Skamania County Pioneer. “You never knew whether Roy was being mischievous or whether he really felt it was something that needed to be done,” Leick told the newspaper. But whether the originator had giants, a joke, or a civic promotion in mind, Skamania officials treated it seriously. The amended law also declared the animal “an endangered species” and created a “Sasquatch Refuge” coterminous with the million-acre county. Presumably the intent was not to protect habitat from logging. Nevertheless, Prosecutor Bob Leick summed up the business this way: “I think Sasquatches are at least as important as the spotted owl.”

  In spite of their elected officials’ openness, most people who encounter hairy apes still keep their sightings quiet, according to the newspaper, for fear of being thought crazy. Such a concern has never bothered Datus Perry. He doesn’t give a hang. You can take his stuff at face value or you can stuff yourself; it’s all the same to him. “I don’t just believe in Bigfoot,” he says, “I know it’s out there, so I’m beyond the need for belief.”

  If this oddly echoes Grover Krantz’s words about belief versus knowledge, the resemblance doesn’t end there. Both men have white beards clipped close under their chins, though Datus lets his throat-mane and hair go long and silky. Both are tall, slender, lank. Both wear spectacles and gesture emphatically. Beyond that, two Bigfoot hunters could scarcely differ more than Krantz and Perry. Krantz comes across as vaguely astonished at everyone else, tolerant under protest, suffering no fool gladly, sarcastic, and world-weary. Perry is a gnome, ever surprised at himself, both naive and sly, grateful. The first is a university professor, the second a mountain man. They share a fascination but few opinions. Their languages do not have many words in common beyond “Bigfoot.”

  In an interview by Carrie Robertson for the Gorge Current of Hood River, Oregon, Perry estimated the number of Bigfeet in North America at a mere fifty. He said that they migrate great distances and hang about civilization as well as in the deep woods. There have been many hoaxes, he believes, but insists that his own sightings are real. “You see,” he told Robertson, “I tell it like it is. I have a photographic memory.” That recall gives him a picture of a rather iconoclastic model; in his statues and drawings, Perry’s Bigfoot is eight to eleven feet tall, narrowly built but with broad shoulders and a tiny, almost neckless, and strikingly pointed head. The point, he believes, is a sharp ridge with a punkish tuft of hair, which can wear off, running its length.

  Another one of Perry’s apostate views concerns the beast’s putative putridness. “The common thread among all the [reports] to give them credibility was the strong, strong sulfur smell,” Sheriff Ray Blaisdell said to the Pioneer. Yet Perry believes that Bigfoot is odorless and that the reported strong smell might come from the skins of deer and other animals it wears as shawls or necklaces. The Bigfeet bury their dead, eat them, or flush them down glacial rivers, he says. “They live in mountain alder and in willow, where there’s good cover overhead, and where the sun doesn’t come in too much. They keep hiding better, going farther away.” They may resort to cannibalism since we are taking all the fish. “You wouldn’t eat your own kind—but you might eat somebody else’s. Sasquatch is not above [eating other Sasquatch].” They also eat fruit, rodents, big mountain angleworms, and dogs.

  Unlike many enthusiasts, Perry actually lives in t
he forest, and going into the wilderness has been his chief pleasure. “Anthropologists need to come out in the bush with me and get a full account of my findings,” he told me; “that way they can see how the real thing fits their bones and teeth.” So far Grover Krantz has not obliged him.

  When I came off the Dark Divide, Datus was not to be found. I later learned he’d been up in the hills working on his main project, enlarging, by hand, a cave that he believes will connect with a big lava tube. I finally met him at Carson’s Bigfoot Daze the next autumn. Around the first night’s campfire, the confab running to wild tales, Datus told a few of his own, like that of his friend who was raped by a “big, snaggle-toothed, breath-reeking female.” The friend had a mineral springs that tasted like beer, made friends with another Bigfoot he named Nancy, and taught her a few words. Other stories concerned a diesel tank whose valves were mysteriously opened, a Bigfoot who stopped a Caterpillar tractor, and a bulldozer left running, high-centered on a stump. “He’d love to stop the logging,” said Datus. I thought of dozer-driver Ray Wallace, who reported Bigfoot doing just that by intimidating his road crew; and of how Ray, like Datus, democratically tells stories that raise interest as well as those that merely raise eyebrows.

  The next morning, when Datus took the podium again, he said, “I’ve been screamed, chattered, whistled, yodeled, and knocked at by Sasquatch. Seems like they hang around to protect you from other animals. One man alone with a couple of poodles has the best chance. You can whistle three times and they might answer . . . Say, ‘Bigfoot, come on in.’ Hold your hand up with a limp wrist, that means non-aggression. Hold up a flower or a bough as an offering; that’s the best defense, better than a forty-five Magnum.” Datus was getting warmed up. “Worst thing you can do is carry a gun. Or have a rough dog on a chain. I guarantee one thing—first time you meet one the skin on your back will wrinkle up and your hair will stand up. You’ll be so darned scared you won’t know what to do. Just walk away like nothing was wrong.”

  He had a big tablet of drawings, notes, and findings, and he flipped the pages as he went. “One time I was scared by something on the trail—hey, I got the right of way!—it was evidently a Bigfoot, I never saw it. It screamed, I answered. This went on until I felt like Tarzan of the woods.

  “I have fallen into a lot of experiences with Bigfoot. I think maybe it was meant to be that way, so I could tell you about it.” He told about sightings up above Government Springs, by Trapper Creek, and elsewhere. “I sat and chewed licorice fern and waited, looking at a rock ledge with tore-up moss. I found a track and was trying to figure out how to get a cast, and while I was pondering, ol’ Sasquatch appeared.”

  Someone asked if Bigfoot ever said anything. “I’ve heard them talk five times,” he replied, “but it sure ain’t my language; more like Asiatics or something.” Does Perry carry a gun? “Never! Just a machete.” He told of having a heart attack and of regaining his strength by building a switchback trail up the nearby mountain, where he knew he could find his friends from time to time. Then, just as a new tale seemed imminent, he said, “I don’t know what to say . . . I think I’ll turn this microphone over to Rory . . . no, Ray, that’s his name.” And Datus Perry sat down.

  After the screenings of videos (Harry and the Hendersons for the kids, Patterson and an episode of Unsolved Mysteries for the adults); after reports of rows of trees mowed down by Bigfoot on Cinnamon Mountain near Ape Cave; and after a hunter’s tale of an apple-picking Bigfoot, backlit in the moonlight, near Seaside, Oregon, that “smelled like an outhouse” and of one in the Coast Range that looked “like a big black biker,” Datus weighed in again. By then what he said didn’t seem so bizarre, but one got the impression that he was always ready to see Bigfoot—not an unusual trait among the faithful. For example, he took as “signs” an apple in an orchard with a single tooth impression (a starling?) and a cherry tree completely stripped that had been full a week before (a bunch of starlings?). He spoke of a far-off dark pattern that he admitted “could be shadows” and of stones that he took for knives and scrapers, reminding me of Ray Wallace’s concretions that he took to be missiles for killing deer.

  “I’ve been hoping I could make a breakthrough and talk at them,” he said. “Maybe build a fire and whittle on something to put them at their ease, and they’d say something . . . But what the heck, I might get friendly with them and then I’d have to tell people about it. They’d think I was really crazy then.”

  −−

  When I visited Datus another autumn he was living in a trailer at the Bigfoot Park with his former wife, Lillian Dillingham. They had recently sold their ranch of many years across the road. Perry was born in 1912. “I was conceived in Home Valley,” he said, by a fussy schoolteacher and a trapper, and brought up in Washougal by his grandparents. When he came to Carson to explore the caves in the sixties, he met Lillian. Later he was a machinist in the Vancouver shipyards and an engine man on troop ships and diesel barges on the Columbia. “We got froze off the river in ’48,” he said. He got pneumonia then and later; the month before I visited him, he almost died from it. Exposed to asbestos and fiberglass in the shipyards and gases from burning wool when he worked for Pendleton Woolen Mills, he has very little breath left.

  I found Datus recumbent on the bed in his trailer, his drawing pad on his narrow knees. Though thin and pale and sucking oxygen, he was as feisty as I remembered. His beard was short, his hair still long and silky. He showed me his drawing, a cone-headed female with a monkeylike face and round breasts (he has never found them either “pendulous” or “perky,” as others have reported). The caption said, “I don’t need a chin or beard. My eyes reflect red at night. Imagine me in total black or brown. 1200 #. 10’ to forehead, 10’ 8” to top.” On a fresh sheet he sketched a leg and a hand, showing fingers that stopped eight inches above the knees rather than hanging below, apelike. Next to it he drew a hairy, clawed bear paw.

  “Deal is,” he said, “their hair’s short and breaks off. If you see a picture showing long fur around the hands like a bear, you got a bearskin.” He said Patterson’s Bigfoot, for example, was bearskins. “And he had a tall son-in-law,” he added.

  He gave me this drawing, and I asked him to sign it. “If I do you’ll prob’ly just go,” he wheezed, then laughed and signed it.

  I wasn’t nearly ready to go as long as he was talking. I told Datus he seemed to know a lot of natural history. He said, “I keep my eyes open.” Then he reeled off some of it. “These creatures? Fastest thing but a cheetah. Outrun pretty near anything in the forest. Deer? No problem. Are they throwers? Oh, shit, are they ever—and accurate! Hones a true course at a deer or a horse. I’ve never seen any sign of a sharp tooth . . . but then I’ve never had one mad at me. No lips, either. Face is black velvet. Roman nose”—like his, I noted. “Mouth might be like a black slit, but how do you see a black slit in black velvet? Like to eat pine beetle grubs, dig ’em out of rotten wood with their nails. Also grasshoppers, which are a different outfit from flying ants.”

  After hearing him describe behavior and features that might belong to any woodland creature, it was a mild shock when Datus told me about the arenas where big male Bigfeet fight. One of these he had found up behind Augspurger Mountain as a young man. Tracking a buck deer with a rifle, he came to a solid wall of thorn apple (hawthorn), which the animals had planted foursquare to make an impenetrable enclosure. He went up on a knob, which he later figured as the bleachers, to look down inside, and saw a Bigfoot sleeping. “The females sit up there to watch the big ol’ guys fight,” Datus said. “Rocks, clubs, ever’ damn thing—survival of the fittest. That’s why you see such big ones.” From an Indian he heard about another square arena on the south side of Mount Adams. An Indian woman saw four Bigfeet at once headed that way, and a Portland Bigfoot hunter is supposed to have seen four going, one at a time, toward there from the north.

  I didn’t want to make Datus talk too mu
ch, and I thought Lillian might be protective. But she and Thea were having a good time talking and playing with two small dogs at the other end of the hot little trailer. Datus told me a long, detailed story about when he was working in California on a surveying team and “ran a Bigfoot right out of bed” in a huckleberry thicket, where it had a neat den. He didn’t see the animal, but his boss did and ran like hell. The boss was scared to death but wouldn’t admit to seeing anything. When Datus pressed him, he said, “Bullshit! Can’t a guy run if he wants to?” But with a transit? Datus asked. “If you want to keep your job,” said the boss, “you’ll say nothing about this.” Datus laughed over the incident. “Then I found a surveyor’s pipe pulled right out of the ground.” Many years later Datus found a similar Sasquatch bed in a swamp north of Carson, up near Pete’s Gulch.

  He says lots of people have his boss’s attitude. The forest and game people agree there’s something out there but won’t admit it’s Bigfoot. They get out into the field too late in the day and leave too early, so they never see it. Two of his friends, a forester and a chemist, had experiences of their own but later denied them, refusing to talk about it further. The forester then cruised the hill where Datus’s trail was for the Forest Service: “Shit, they logged the hell out of it.” His sister’s husband was “quite a nature man. But he was scared shitless when he saw his first Bigfoot.”