by John Zada
I do a double take. Hunt for bears? Since when do environmentalists hunt bears? I look around but no one else reacts to the strange comment until a moment later, when Nate turns to Brian with a clownish expression.
“I hear your aim sucks,” he says. Everyone bursts out laughing.
The inside jokes go straight over my head. I ask Brian what he meant by the comment about hunting.
He explains that it’s still legal to hunt grizzly bears in British Columbia, and that in an attempt to stop the hunt in this area, Raincoast had bought the local bear-hunt guiding license—a permit—usually held by an outfitter. By owning the license, Raincoast prevents outfitters from guiding hunters, thereby bringing partial protection to the bears.
“But here’s the catch,” he says. “Under regulations, the holder of the license is obligated to offer hunting in the area every year—or give up the license. So we do the hunting that’s required. We bring people in to hunt. They buy grizzly tags from us, and our own guide outfitter comes down. We just, well … we haven’t been successful,” he concludes, with a guileful smile.
“Who used to own these licenses before?” I ask.
“A man in Bella Coola named Leonard Ellis,” Brian says. “He bought up the licenses for a bunch of adjacent guide territories in an attempt to create a kind of hunting empire. At the time we started lobbying the government to end the hunt, Leonard experienced financial trouble with his business. So we bought his guide territories from him. He’s now making a living by running bear-viewing tours.”
It’s another serendipitous reference: I had come across Ellis while on my first trip to the area. I had rented one of his cabins in Bella Coola for a few nights, during which he’d mentioned the controversial nature of the bear hunt on the coast.
“Look! Over there!” Nate yells, pointing toward the trees. “Mama bear and cubs!”
We all reflexively reach for our cameras. On the edge of the water is a sow trailed by two of her young. We begin snapping photos. Nick steers the Zodiac closer. The bears weave through the thick brush at the water’s edge—headed toward camp.
Brian pulls out his radio receiver and informs the lodge of the bears’ movements. A flurry of VHF activity follows between people at camp as word spreads. We trail the bears slowly, until the animals, probably sensing us, vanish into the woods.
Everyone is elated, looking at camera display screens. Nate looks like someone who’s just won the lottery.
“The whole week I’ve been trying to see a bear,” he says, amazed. “And now, close to the last minute of the very last day, just as I’d given up, a bear suddenly appears.”
Brian radiates a knowing smile and places a hand on Nate’s shoulder. “That’s how it happens.”
Later that evening, I head to the ocean down a short path that leads from the edge of the lodge. The barnacle-covered rocks of the intertidal zone are exposed in a vivid display of textures and colors. In the distance, the western sky is bathed in a fiery, post-sunset light, silhouetting the adjacent islands of Fitz Hugh Sound.
It has been an intense week. It feels as though a month has elapsed since I arrived at Koeye—and many more months since the start of this journey.
The one thing that has caught me off guard, more than anything else, is the unbridled power of nature in this area—and its ability to wreak havoc upon the senses and emotions. It’s an exceedingly charged place. Exposure to these most beautiful and pristine faces of the Great Bear means allowing oneself to be bombarded by awe-generating stimuli. And like any positive stimulus, these can act in the manner of a drug whose pleasures generate cravings, culminating in a kind of addiction. During my day up the Koeye, and even now, amid this brilliant miracle of the intertidal zone with its pools of red sea urchins and colonies of painted starfish, I can feel my emotions well up. But excessive emotion can also lead to self-certainty and absolutism. I can see why those who are at the front lines of protecting these incredible places are invariably so vehement in their mission, so focused and unyielding—and also so successful.
Where the Sasquatch is concerned, things remain less clear. Weighing the Bigfoot data seems to produce the same trap as a pros-and-cons list. Often the information just accumulates on both sides without being really convincing one way or the other.
If the animals do exist and are indeed intelligent, nocturnal, elusive, fast-moving, sensitive, and adaptive to their environments—as well as wary of humans—we have the starting point for an explanation as to why they remain unclassified. This explanation makes even more sense when we add the impact of our own biases—especially those of us in a largely urban-minded world that is unaware of the extent of reports, unappreciative of the vast and remote habitat, and unfamiliar with what might pass as evidence, such as tracks. Add to that a closed-minded scientific establishment and the derisory media, and you might have a situation in which the truth remains deeply hidden. The creature’s rarity, due in part to its natural elusiveness, is increased exponentially by our own false assumptions.
It all sounds good and possible—alluring even. But in the end, it’s just a hypothesis.
As I walk along the rocks, taking care to avoid the anemones and mussels, a quote I’d once read and committed to memory pops into mind: Learn to be as analytical about things of which you are credulous as you are of those which you criticize.
What if there really, truly, is no Sasquatch? What other explanations can we offer?
Throughout this trip, and even before it, a series of questions has increasingly nagged at me: What is the role of belief and perception in all of this? What about our eyes and our brains? Aren’t our experiences the culmination of sensory inputs, filtered and then interpreted? We make loads of cognitive mistakes in other mundane areas of life—isn’t that reason to explore the mechanics of perception here? What can psychology tell us, if anything? Hardened skeptics and debunkers pay these types of arguments lip service but never really fully, or properly, unfurl them.
Even if the Sasquatch does exist, and there’s enough to suggest that it might, some understanding of how we perceive—and misperceive—reality may shed light on some, or even many, eyewitness accounts.
As I climb the trail back up toward the lodge, I have a commanding view of the sound and the sunset. Far off in the distance, on the water, something catches my eye. It looks like a sailboat—sometimes one, at other times more than one. It appears just on the surface of the water before disappearing, like some phantom ship. I squint my eyes a little, focus, and keep watching. A little farther down the sound, I see it again: a form that I can only conclude is a sailboat. It takes me a moment, but then I finally realize what I’m looking at: plumes of whale exhaust appearing and disappearing in the distance!
It’s a beautiful and deeply moving sight—and a fitting end to my stay at Koeye. But when the sentimentality settles, I find another message in that magical spectacle:
Things are often not what they seem.
* Qqs (pronounced Kucks) means “eyes” in the Heiltsuk language, evoking the idea of watchfulness and stewardship over the land—as well as the opening of the eyes that comes with learning.
* The plane (or its wreckage) still has not been found, despite all the technology on board and on land.
* Biologists remind us that Sasquatches would require a minimum population in any given area in order to procreate and survive. The infrequency of reported encounters and of trace evidence, and the fact that not one of these animals has been produced after decades, suggests to them that the creatures don’t exist. Sasqualogists disagree, saying that Bigfoot populations in many areas are sufficient to ensure their continued survival. Most Sasquatch encounters with humans, they add, go unreported, indicating there are many more of the creatures than is believed.
* There is only one DFO official in all of British Columbia, based in Vancouver, who is authorized to disentangle whales.
PART III
6
WUIKINUXV
A fat
her said to his double-seeing son: “Son, you see two instead of one.” “How can that be?” the boy replied. “If I did, there would be four moons up there in the place of two.”
—Hakim Sanai of Ghazni, in Idries Shah’s Caravan of Dreams
“That is a very dangerous lake, Mulla,” said a local fisherman, “and people who swim in it are always found at the bottom.” “That’s all right, friend,” said Mulla Nasrudin, “I’ll keep well away from the bottom.”
—Idries Shah, Learning How to Learn
I travel by floatplane to the village of Wuikinuxv (Wee-kin-no)—a First Nation community of roughly forty people located at the head of Rivers Inlet on the mainland coast, sixty miles southeast of Bella Bella. It’s no more than a row of homes situated along a rough gravel road that runs beside the two-and-a-half-mile-long Wanukv River, which empties into the Pacific. From the air, the village appears so diminutive it makes Bella seem like a sprawling metropolis.
Just behind the town lies Owikeno Lake—a thirty-mile-long body of fresh water ringed by high mountains and fed by dozens of rivers and creeks. Epic in size, the lake was once the site of numerous indigenous settlements before the twin blows of disease and population amalgamation under colonial rule cleared its shores of inhabitants starting in the late nineteenth century. The area is noted for its Sasquatch lore, which people attribute, in part, to the lake’s acting as a kind of travel corridor between neighboring regions within the Great Bear Rainforest.
Wuikinuxv is difficult to get to. Located far to the side of the Inside Passage route, it is completely bypassed by the ferry. The only way to get here is by boat or by chartering a floatplane from Vancouver Island. I made inquiries prior to my trip to Koeye about catching a boat ride from Heiltsuk territory to Wuikinuxv. The feedback from the Heiltsuk, usually friendly and helpful, ranged from shrugged shoulders to flat-out refusal. It became apparent that there is no regular traffic between the two communities. Similarly, when I reached out to contacts in Wuikinuxv to hire a boat pickup from nearby Koeye, no one responded.
At first I made little of this awkwardness. But then I started hearing murmurs of a falling-out between the two nations.
“You should be careful when you go there,” warned one Bella teenager at Koeye who learned I was leaving for Rivers Inlet in a few days.
“Be careful of what?” I asked, unable to imagine what would constitute a danger there.
“The Wuikinuxv. They’re still angry,” she said.
“Angry about what?” I pressed.
“Being conquered.”
I’m staying at Grizzly’s Den, a bed-and-breakfast located on the eastern end of the Wuikinuxv strip. It’s a comfortable two-story home. A flag showing the profile of an indigenous warrior on top of a Canadian maple leaf stands in the front yard. My host is Lena Collins, a petite, middle-aged woman of mixed Wuikinuxv and Heiltsuk ancestry. There is a youthful vigor about Lena, who loves to dialogue. From the moment she picks me up at the floatplane dock, I am flooded with information and trivia about the town: the lack of cell-phone service, the absence of a proper grocery store, the packs of rowdy street dogs that patrol the gravel road. When we reach her home, I finally manage to squeeze in a question, asking if she does anything else apart from running the seasonal B and B.
“Ha!” she snickers, unpacking a crate full of food that arrived on the plane. “You’ve obviously never been to a place this small before. Everybody’s got a million jobs here. You should be asking me: What don’t you do? Let’s see,” she says, before counting on her fingers. “I work at the band office. I’m a language and culture teacher at the school. I’m also the custodian there—that translates to glorified janitor. I pick up people and goods that come in on the plane. They call that position the ‘band van driver.’ And I happen to be the volunteer fire chief. That was a job I was tricked into doing. Oh, and I’m also a mom.”
Then our chat turns to politics. Lena complains that the people in power in the village aren’t doing enough to better the community. That segues into a long digression about the conflict I’d heard about earlier. The Wuikinuxv and the Heiltsuk, she tells me, are locked in a complicated dispute, part of it territorial, involving, among other places, Koeye, which was once populated by villages from both nations.
“I hope that’s resolved soon,” I say, deciding to steer the conversation away from the thorny subject of tribal politics. “Do you know why I’m here?”
Lena looks at me in shock. “Oh, I’m sorry! I haven’t even asked about you yet. When you called you mentioned you were working on a book, right?”
I explain that I’m collecting stories related to Sasquatch and ask if she has seen or heard anything.
“No, not me,” she says. “I think it’s been quiet around here lately with regard to that. But I know people you could talk to.”
She fires off several names, which I scribble into my notebook.
“I’m really sorry for going off on that tirade just now,” she says. “I’m a bit worn down by everything. In spite of the difficulties, we really are a great nation. We just keep getting the short end of the stick. And not just politically.”
Like other parts of British Columbia, Rivers Inlet and Owikeno Lake used to be blessed with bountiful salmon runs. In years gone by, every salmon species returned in droves in the autumn to spawn in the area’s many connecting rivers, streams, and lakes. Foremost among them was the sockeye, in numbers up to three million strong. The homecoming of this keystone species, a grand gesture of nature’s benefaction, made the region’s waters crimson with hurtling bodies. The Rivers Inlet salmon run was once among the largest and most dramatic in the province.
But by the 1970s, after decades of unchecked commercial exploitation, the numbers of these fish, so crucial to the well-being of the ecosystem, began a dramatic decline. It was a trend seen across the Pacific Northwest coast. Overharvesting by commercial and sport fisheries, combined with damage to habitat caused by the introduction of clear-cut logging, was thought to have had a negative impact on the salmon runs. By the 1990s, sockeye salmon were returning to the area in just the tens of thousands. It was barely enough fish to provide Wuikinuxv’s residents with their main winter sustenance. Those foreboding signs were mitigated only by the knowledge that salmon runs had declined and rebounded naturally in the past.
But in 1999, something inconceivable happened: the legendary Rivers Inlet salmon run collapsed. For the first time in the town’s memory, sockeye salmon, a mainstay of the diet and culture of the local people, stopped turning up in fishing nets. Roughly thirty-six hundred salmon, about 0.1 percent of historic levels, returned to the Rivers Inlet ecosystem that year.
“It was devastating to walk by the river knowing there was no fish,” Lena tells me. “Because that’s part of who we are—and what we look forward to. But that was only part of the problem. We knew that if we weren’t going to get any fish—neither would the bears.”
Local grizzly and black bears congregate at rivers and streams in the late summer and early fall to gorge themselves on spawning salmon. During the several-week feeding frenzy, an adult bear will consume many dozens of fish, to get the fat reserves it needs to survive the winter hibernation. Because of the historically bountiful salmon runs, and the huge size of some of the fish, Owikeno’s grizzlies had a reputation as some of the largest on the coast. To say that bears once thrived here is an understatement.
Every year, the animals passed through the village to access feeding spots along the Wanukv River. But in the autumn of 1999, when the salmon didn’t return, hungry grizzlies invaded the town. In a last-ditch effort to find food, around two dozen weak and disoriented bears, some with cubs, took up residence in and around Wuikinuxv. Some foraged for scraps at the town’s garbage dump. Others ventured close to homes, digging through people’s front yards. At first, residents tolerated the invasion. But as the weeks went on, the bears became bolder and more unpredictable, sleeping on people’s porches and trying to break thro
ugh doors and windows.
Lena, living in another home in Wuikinuxv at the time, had one starving grizzly sow with cubs in her yard. “One day,” she recalls, “one of the cubs came right up to my window—and I looked into its eyes. It was a powerful moment. I felt I was looking into the face of a family member, and not being able to do anything to help. We had nothing to give them.”
When the bears started breaking into trailers and threatening people, the decision was made to put them down. By early winter, sixteen grizzlies had been shot dead. One black bear, among the many that had wandered through town on the heels of grizzlies, was also put down, bringing the total to seventeen bears. Locals say they’re certain many more bears starved in the forests during the winter months.
The ecological chain of events resulting from the salmon die-off—a symptom, in part, of a rapidly changing habitat—ran deeper than even the residents of Wuikinuxv initially suspected. Only in retrospect did a few locals realize that the bald eagles had gone missing that autumn. Like the bears, they had always been plentiful around Wuikinuxv during salmon season, perched on conifers by the dozen, their white heads gleaming like ornaments on a Christmas tree.
Take any street in small-town North America and transplant it into an impossibly rugged terrain that smacks of some northwest coast version of Jurassic Park and you’ll have Wuikinuxv. The physical village—a collection of homes set on spacious plots of unfenced, overgrown land along a gravel road—nestles in the shores of the Wanukv River, with the slopes of craggy mountains towering over it. The nation’s school, government building, and cultural big house cluster at its center. The main road continues past the town in both directions through thick, brushy rain forest before dead-ending at Wuikinuxv’s two points of arrival and departure: the government dock at the head of Rivers Inlet at one end and the airstrip and an abandoned logging depot on Owikeno Lake at the other.
