Where Bigfoot Walks

by Robert Michael Pyle

  The rain diminished as I rolled northward along the eastern verge of the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument. At ten I crossed Elk Pass where Boundary Trail No. 1 intersects the road. I pulled into the trail parking lot to get out and stretch. This was becoming a long night. To wake up, I walked a way in the black rain and fog. Realizing where I was, I crossed the Dark Divide for the last time, hailing it with a Pyramid Pale Ale. Later it would become important to note that this was the only beer I drank that night.

  Striding back toward the car, I heard an eerie whistle; in the fog it chilled my spine just a degree or two. I stopped, it stopped; I resumed, and it resumed. Then I realized the sound was the whistle of the wind in the neck of my ale bottle. I recalled the sound of air escaping my car seat up at Bluff Creek and how that had momentarily caught my attention, and again I laughed at myself and shook my head. “Ha,” I snorted. “Dummy.”

  But back at the trailhead, as I make notes in the comfortable glow of the overhead lamp, I hear another sound, definitely from outside. “Wheeeouh,” it shrills, descending the north hillside ahead of me. Sharp, loud, it is no bird I know, no owl I’ve heard. What bird would it be in the cold fog and rain and dark? And it is real—a real, sharp whistle—repeated at intervals. It pauses, and I drive back onto the road.

  Coasting down the road past a creek, I stop and hear the whistle again. The sound is quite close to my left on the hillside—loud, piercing, and not always shrill. It has a hoarse or grating or metallic undertone, not so different from what I heard by the shore of Cultus Lake late at night.

  The rain has become a mere drizzle. The night is entirely black, the full moon masked by sopping clouds. All is silent; then the whistles begin again. They are fairly rhythmic, as bird calls are, and sometimes have a nasal, reedy (birdy) quality. But the sounds vary and move about the hillside. I whistle back, “Wheeeough.” The whistler answers, now shriller, more urgent. It seems almost enraged, or at least irritated, as the Cultus caller did. I am tingling. I have often talked with owls, sometimes, indeed, even by blowing across a bottle, but this is different.

  The whistles seem to come from no more than a hundred feet away. The maker moves back toward the creek, a little behind me, over my left shoulder. Then it fails to respond to my whistle. I’ve turned off the engine to hear better and not intimidate whatever it is. My lights are doused as well, except the brake lights. I listen through my open window, carefully, quietly . . . I am about to pull over, get out, and shine my flashlight up into the brush of the hillside. Then, with the suddenness of a gunshot, something strikes the roof of the car like a slap.

  Involuntarily I yell, punch the clutch, key, and throttle at the same instant, and, if an old Honda can be said to burn rubber on a wet mountain road, it does. I don’t stop until my heart slows down, a quarter mile later. Shaken, I get out. There is nothing on top of the car, no dent or mark, and I feel foolish for having panicked. But it was not my decision. Like the autonomous nervous system, like smooth muscles, the action occurred on its own. I didn’t pee my pants, but I got the hell out.

  I went back to the site where the car was slapped. There was nothing to be seen on the road, and no more calls to be heard. I kicked myself again for not remaining to have a look. Something had been up there at the Dark Divide. Something that whistled loud and clear, something that struck my roof. I checked again to confirm that there were no trees overhanging the car or anywhere near, only the low alders on the hillside. Nor had there been any wind. Whatever struck the car had been propelled.

  There was nothing for it but to continue north. I would have loved to look the area over in daylight, but I had to be in Olympia by nine in the morning. As my blood pressure and heart rate dropped back to their normal lows, I reluctantly left the scene.

  The road followed Iron Creek past Ferrous Point to the Cispus and thence down to the Cowlitz at Randle. I stopped for coffee at a tavern, where rude spotted-owl T-shirts were a big item. I kept my mouth shut. On the seemingly endless downramp of State Route 12 from the foot of Mount Rainier to the interstate, I had hours to run the tape of the whistles through my mind. I’d heard way too many people say “It had to be Bigfoot” about this or that event to do the same myself. I hadn’t a clue. After midnight the full harvest moon picked out the rain-dampened flower fields of Mossyrock, and a barn owl crossed the highway in my headlights.

  −−

  Two or three days later, Peter Byrne came to Swede Park, our home in the Willapa Hills. “Shame on you,” he chided good-naturedly when I told him about my hasty departure from the whistle-spot.

  “I know, I know,” I said, laughing. “Even if it were you-know-who, I fully agree with you that it doesn’t represent a threat. In fact, nothing up there does. So why did I turn tail?”

  “Things that go bump in the night,” Peter suggested, tipping his glass toward mine. “I’ve had that feeling when tracking the pugmarks of a large black leopard in the Indian dusk.” That seemed to me an altogether better reason for getting spooked. There are panthers on the Dark Divide, but they don’t whistle, they scream; and though it’s unnerving, you know they are unlikely to attack. Leopards are another matter. Anyway, Peter hadn’t cut out; he’d merely felt like it. Maybe that’s the difference between tiger guides and butterfly hunters.

  We had been considering the basic humanity of Bigfoot, something Peter is more and more convinced of. And if it pops from our head, like the children of Zeus? All the more human. Whether or not we ever get a chance to run gene-sequencing tests on a bit of tissue to determine our genetic propinquity, we are plumbing what it means to be human. One thing it means, Peter and I agreed, is to skedaddle smartly when the affrighted imagination overcomes curiosity and common sense.

  But I couldn’t leave the puzzle alone. Five days after I’d left the hills, Thea and I headed up the Lewis River bound for Elk Pass on a bright, colorful autumn afternoon. We arrived at the Boundary Trail as the day began to cool.

  The place of the sounds was a low, wooded slope beside the two-lane paved highway. There were, I again confirmed, no trees overhead to drop cones or debris onto the car top. Between the pass and the site I had fled, a small rough track diverges westerly into an old quarry or borrow pit. Above its rim bracken and fir were outlined against a rapidly moving cloud in a cold blue October sky. The odd dump truck and RV passed on the road; then it was quiet until a fighter blasted overhead at a few hundred feet. Lots of rain had fallen since that night. Everlastings nodded with the burden of it; the pumice looked like grainy March snow against the earth.

  Crossing the Dark Divide at midnight, I heard an eerie whistling and stopped to listen, but when something struck the roof of my car, I sped away. Returning later, I found a long line of huge tracks crossing the pumice slope near where I had stopped. Though eroded by rain, they were deeply impressed in the steep slope.

  While I poked around the borrow pit, Thea explored a patch of nearby old-growth noble fir and found a Hemphillea (an uncommon, vestigially shelled species of slug), the first we’d ever come across. Being a gut-level Cartesian like me, and not having been present the night of the cries, she lacked my sense of the significance of this place—the westernmost edge of the landscape on which I’d focused my being for many days. So she was surprised when I hollered with some urgency to come see.

  I had climbed a slope to a small shoulder that ran from the road up to a higher ridge and formed one side of the quarry. Immediately I saw a line of large impressions ascending the slope on the other side. Careful not to disturb the marks, I worked my way down the loose bank to a spot where I could see them clearly. My mouth dropped. These were tracks—big tracks.

  Each of the prints from the Dark Divide was sixteen inches long and six and a half inches wide. No hunter, elk, or bear made these tracks, and no hoaxer could have known I would be there.

  The spoor came from a rocky-floored stand of firs uphill from the highway.
The first fairly distinct impression lay in mossy sand at the edge of the woods. From there the tracks came a little way down a pumice slope to a rotting stump above alder scrub, where they were indistinct and scuffled. This was precisely the area from which the whistles seemed to have come. Next the tracks moved across the slope (as had the whistler when I whistled back) before striking uphill. The prints crossed a line of eroded elk tracks, then merged into a well-trodden game trail that headed up the shoulder to the rocky ridge above.

  Some ten tracks were individually discriminable, three of them marginally clear. They were impressed about an inch into steep, loose, granular pumice that had sustained rain for days, and they lacked the structure to take a mold even if I’d had my plaster with me. The battery on the flash attachment was dead, and it was too dark to photograph the mossy, shady print without it. But the others, in the open, exposed fairly well. I measured the best track by cutting marks of its dimensions on a dry alder twig, then compared it against the second-best. They were identical: 15-7/8 inches long, 6-3/8 inches across the instep, and 3-3/8 inches across the heel. By comparison, my size-ten EEE feet measure 10-1/2 by 4-1/2 by 3 inches.

  No print showed distinct toes, except a fairly distinct big toe on the inside, a primate trait according to master-tracker Jim Halfpenny; other mammals, such as bears and weasels, that exhibit a “big toe” have it on the outside. A heel was still visible in two tracks. I had the definite impression of bare, humanlike feet. If these prints had been left by a hunter, his huge boots were more footlike and smooth-soled than most, certainly not waffle-stompers. There were no shoe marks of any kind in any of the prints. The stride varied because of the slope, but the longest step (two steps equal a stride) was about four feet, going uphill at about forty-five degrees.

  Thea was less impressed by my tracks than I was by her slug. Spotting the elk trail, she reckoned the big tracks were just elk prints eroded together. But it was chilly, and she didn’t linger. Up the slope, where this line of tracks crossed a line of equally eroded elk tracks, I could clearly see the difference between the two. Even if they were hoof prints that had run together into larger impressions, it seemed unlikely that two such composites would have the same dimensions. I photographed my own hooves in their big Frankenstein boots next to the two best impressions, and they looked petite by comparison.

  Okay, so something or someone had walked across the slope not long before or after the time I’d heard the whistles. Supposing these tracks had been made by the whistler, what about the thump on my car?

  Beside the spot where I had parked when I traded whistles, I found a ten-inch-long twisted-off twig of cherry. I asked Thea to fling it at me as I replayed the scene. She tossed the stick at the car several times, and it made the appropriate sound and impact.

  Does this prove anything? Of course not. I remember a short story having to do with a teller of tall tales who, when pressed, would produce a physical object reputed to come from the scene described. A matchbox from a certain tavern, for example, was supposed to provide proof positive that the story had occurred as told. This is just the sort of logic often employed by reporters of paranormal or extranormal phenomena, and I am not about to fall prey to its seduction. A stick is a stick. The fact that it appears twisted rather than broken, and Sasquatch is often said to twist branches rather than snapping them, and that it makes a satisfying “thump!” about like the one that sent me skittering, demonstrates nothing.

  But there was the other stick, the alder twig on which I carved notches showing the precise distance from the rim of the heel to the tip of the toe, identical on the two best tracks. This alder switch is a little more difficult for me to dismiss than a cherry twig that looks twisted off and that thumps nicely.

  −−

  In the failing light we dashed off to see the violent scene of St. Helens’s Windy Ridge up close for the first time, caught the pewter sunset glow over the ashen eruptive landscape, then left for home. I had a roll of film, a couple of sticks, some notes and drawings in my yellow “Rite in the Rain” field notebook, and a hell of a lot of questions. Thea brought the slug home for identification. We would keep it alive in a terrarium for a long time. At least it could be said that one strange creature roams the Dark Divide at Elk Pass, sliding along the ancient forest floor on its one big slimy foot.

  I did not announce my “find.” I considered it scarcely dramatic enough for anyone else’s attention. The last thing in the world I wanted as I began writing this book was notoriety. I had dodged attention ever since receiving a well-publicized grant for the purpose of looking into the Bigfoot myths. For one thing, I am not enamored of the sort of quick-brush, sensational publicity usually given the topic by newspapers and television. For another, as Peter Byrne pointed out to me, if my movements were known I could easily become the target of hoaxing, either to throw me off whatever track I might be on or to entertain the hoaxer.

  When I went into the hills, almost no one knew where or when. I have no reason to think that anyone followed me at any time or attempted to delude me with false findings. As for the whistles and tracks, no one could have known that I would change my mind at the last minute and travel over the Divide and stop at Elk Pass that dark and rainy midnight; I hadn’t known it myself. It defies belief that what I saw and heard could have been the objects of a hoax aimed at me.

  And what about a hoax perpetrated by me? What can I say, other than to parrot Dave Barry: “I am not making this up.” Thea, already doubtful of the tracks, pointed out how hokey it would seem that I heard the whistles on my last night out—“a convenient climax,” I believe she called it. Then to go back and find tracks in the same spot? It’s too much. But I can’t help the way it happened.

  I did show the photographs to Peter Byrne and, much later, to Grover Krantz. Peter showed polite interest but felt he could say little without having seen the tracks himself. Indeed, I wish I could have returned to the site with him at the time. Grover was more positive. After examining the slides, he said, “I’d say you’ve got a darned good case.” He said he had seen people become believers over much less. “If this was all I had,” he went on, “I’d be very interested. I wouldn’t posit an animal on it. But when you have a thousand of these . . .”

  Well, I had ten. What kind of case did I want? None, really. I never set out to find Bigfoot or evidence of the same. I have no interest in joining the ranks of the seekers, the true believers, the obsessives with something to prove. As a biologist, I would be as interested as anyone in the field if a new primate turned up. As a naturalist and a prowler of the deepwood, I would not be as surprised as some. As a conservationist, I would be highly intrigued to see how the discovery played out. But as a writer I have no wish to use my pale “evidence” to convince anyone of anything. Least of all myself.

  I took some pains to explain my accidental findings by known phenomena. Could the whistles I heard have been made by some species of owl whose repertory I didn’t fully know? I narrowed down the possibilities to saw-whet, spotted, and barred owls, of which saw-whet seemed the least likely. This past spring, Thea and I went afield with Bob Pearson, a dedicated northern spotted owl researcher who works on his own time. We joined him at a café in Randle, where the breakfast clubbers swapped round damnations of the creatures we were seeking and of those whom they see as caring more for owls than people.

  “They’ll do just what they want,” said an obese man in overalls. “See, they’ve got the numbers. And they’ve got the laws—all they’ve gotta do is find a species.” His breakfast partner, a trim older man with a clear-cut flattop, told of seeing two Forest Service Suburbans full of college students surveying wildlife up on Elk Pass; this he saw as a bad sign. I wished that their bitterness and my enthusiasm—and vice versa—did not have to flow from the same source. There was no point talking it over.

  From there we drove to several spots in the hills that I will not name. As we drove, Bob told
us about the first time he’d heard a spotted owl call. He’d been plotting known locations in a computer mapping system for the Forest Service for some time. “I knew the owls in the abstract through pixels and paper, as dots within estimated circles of home range, and as numbers.” Then he went out on his first survey with an experienced caller. “We called, asking, ‘Is anybody out there?’ And when the first owl called back—it might have been saying ‘Go to hell,’ for all we knew—it came as a revelation: we had talked to an owl.”

  At the first stop Bob struck down the slope into the old growth, and we followed. Varied thrushes, golden-crowned kinglets, and western tanagers called through the dense vegetation. Bunchberry and anemones bloomed at our feet. Vanilla leaf and sword fern glittered in the sun filtering through the crowns of immense Douglas firs.

  We descended five hundred feet over a quarter mile before Bob paused and called. Unlike many owl-census workers, he calls with his own voice instead of using tape recordings. Soon an owl barked back and Bob replied. Before long it swooped down to a branch ten feet from our faces. I was surprised to learn that the birds could be called up during the day. Pearson placed one of several white mice he had with him on a branch, and the female owl swooped down, grabbed it, and swooped up again. Watching and following, we were able to locate her pair of young, fledged but still near the nest. We tried the same with three pairs of owls and found two. At one nest site both parents and both young were perched within yards of us at the same time.

  I looked into the black black eyes set in the taupe face, with heavy black brows, a pale “H” of fluff around the chartreuse yellow bill, and a rich brown widow’s peak flecked with opal. Such a bird! “About as big as a football,” said Bob, and a political football it certainly has been. I doubt that anyone, face-to-face with this stunning creature, could say the violent things that are said on the T-shirts and in the cafés at Randle. But I wouldn’t want to risk it. The young, almost as big as the adults, were fluff-balls. Thea said they looked to be made out of hummingbird nests.