In the Valleys of the Noble Beyond

by John Zada

  In 2008, British professor Ian Robbins, head of trauma psychology at Saint George’s Hospital in London, conducted a similar experiment in conjunction with the BBC program Horizon. Six people were left in a bomb shelter for forty-eight hours under very similar conditions. All subjects experienced pronounced visual and auditory phenomena.

  From these sorts of experiments researchers have determined that when humans experience prolonged social isolation they are susceptible to hallucinating. If there’s a dearth of sensory information reaching the brain—an organ that normally processes a huge amount of data to construct our reality—it tries to make up for those scant signals, and the patterns they evoke, by concocting extra ones of its own.

  Charging an eyewitness, who is certain to have experienced something, with having had a “hallucination” can be tantamount to an insult. The word is heavily loaded and wrongly implies a flawed capacity. Yet, I wonder whether some of the more dramatic Bigfoot encounters might be related to the effects of prolonged isolation in the wilderness.

  The story of Albert Ostman, the Swedish Canadian prospector who claimed he had been kidnapped and held captive by a family of Sasquatches near Toba Inlet in 1924, stands out. He had been wandering in the woods alone for three whole weeks before he was allegedly abducted in his sleeping bag.

  Mary Brown of Bella Bella, who was part of the group sighting at the cabin in Roscoe Inlet, related another secondhand Sasquatch report concerning a different forest cabin that, to my mind, also fits the isolation hypothesis. This one involved a troubled Heiltsuk youth who spent weeks in rehabilitative isolation at the cabin and claimed the building had been attacked by a Bigfoot.* Yet, interestingly, over the course of my researches, I hear of other incidents from campers involving a Sasquatch assailing that very same cabin.

  When Lena asks how my Hoodoo Valley research is going, I tell her, resignedly, that the trail has gone cold.

  “Have you spoken with Frank Hanuse yet?” she asks.

  I had spoken with Frank—a Wuikinuxv elder and elected councillor—several days back about Sasquatches and the Rivers Inlet sockeye collapse. But that had been before I’d heard about the Hoodoo Valley from his brother Dennis.

  “Talk to him again,” Lena urges. “Frank’s full of stories, and he knows everything happening around here.” Lena dials his number and hands me the phone. After several rings, the lively, good-humored man answers in his trademark cowboy-like drawl. After a bit of small talk, I tell Frank that I’m trying to find out more about the loggers who fled the Hoodoo Valley and ask whether he knows anything about that episode.

  “Know anything? Of course I do!” he says, laughing at the seeming silliness of my question. “I was alive back then. I heard the whole story, which goes back generations, from the old chiefs at the time.”

  Frank says the elders told him that sometime in the 1800s, the villages dotting the lake experienced a period of what he terms “bad luck.” It was a combination, he says, of bad weather, poor fish runs, and freak accidents. Malevolent spirits were blamed for the misfortunes. So the heads of all the villages organized an emergency meeting and performed a ceremony to cleanse the village sites of the evil.

  “So, what’s the connection to Hoodoo?” I ask, wondering whether I had missed something.

  “Well, you can’t just get rid of bad energy. It doesn’t just disappear. You have to move it somewhere. See where I’m coming from?”

  It takes me a few seconds to realize what Frank is saying: the evil spirits were cast away by the village chiefs—into the Hoodoo Valley.

  “Bingo, kid.”

  “But why there?” I ask.

  “Because it’s a good-for-nothing valley. Not too deep. Water barely runs there. And so the elders thought it was a perfect place. No one would have any reason to go in there in the future—except for those poor loggers who all ended up being plagued by mishaps. That’s why they fled the place. All those companies went bankrupt in the end.”

  “And the name ‘Hoodoo’—is that the name of the creek?”

  “No. The white guys just called it that.”

  “Why?”

  “Why this and why that! Because it’s bad ‘hoodoo,’ man—that’s why! Maybe ‘hoodoo’ sounds like ‘voodoo’—so they called it that. How should I know?”

  “That’s crazy,” I say.

  “If you don’t believe me, go and spend the night up there yourself.”

  “I can’t! No one will take me there.”

  “You know why, kid? Because no one here in their right mind goes up there. And come to think of it, neither should you!”

  The next day, the engines of the Guardian Watchmen patrol boat sputter to life as the sun lifts itself above the Coast Mountains. It hovers like a beacon directly in line with the long axis of the lake, turning the water a dazzling gold.

  Alex unties the boat and sits in the pilot’s chair, and we roar eastward into the blinding morning. Seated beside Alex is his Guardian Watchman colleague and copilot, Archie—a ginger-haired thirty-something from Vancouver Island who is married to a woman in the village.

  Alex inserts his iPhone into a yellow waterproof boom box beside him, and we are bathed in the deep bass rhythms of a rap song. Alex and Archie light up smokes, and their dialogue and laughter are drowned out by the deafening music and growling engines. We’re thrown up and down in wind-whipped swells in rhythm with the thumping baritone poetry and the occasional sound of gunshots. Water drenches the windshield, obscuring the view of mountains ahead, silhouetted in the glaring light.

  We are heading east, hugging the lake’s south shore, but my gaze is glued to the distant north shore. I’m wondering which of the valleys we’re passing is the Hoodoo. Surrendering to my momentary obsession, I ask Alex, yelling above the music, where the valley is, but he shrugs his shoulders and says he can’t tell from here.

  Our plan is to circumnavigate the lake, looking for bear hunters. Though the trophy hunting of bears in British Columbia remains legal and is backed by an influential hunting lobby, some First Nations in the province have come out strongly against the practice. They say killing grizzlies for trophies is an antiquated, unethical, and inhumane practice that erodes their ecosystems. In 2012, Coastal First Nations, an alliance of nine indigenous nations on British Columbia’s central and northern coast, and including the Wuikinuxv, banned the hunt in their territories, all situated in or near the Great Bear Rainforest.*

  When I asked Alex earlier what authority and means he has to enforce the ban, he curtly answered, “Tribal law.”

  “What do you do when you find hunters?”

  “We politely ask them to leave. And offer to escort them out.”

  “But what if they won’t go?” I asked. “You can’t just arrest them.”

  “We’ll follow them around. Make a lot of noise. Mess up their hunt. Scare the bears away so they can’t get a shot.”

  “And hope,” I add, “that a group of alpha males carrying guns in the woods won’t get pissed off enough to turn them on you.”

  A disconcerted look comes over Alex’s face. “Something like that.”

  The lighthearted sense of adventure with which we’ve embarked evaporates after we pass the first and second narrows at the far end of the lake. Here Alex cuts the engines and we bob in silence near an abandoned logging camp at the mouth of the Sheemahant River. The mood turns militaristic. Alex and Archie pull out a pair of binoculars. They pass it back and forth and murmur to each other quietly like tense army generals at the front line. Straight ahead, onshore, are a few white trailer-like buildings. The lake is still.

  I crouch down next to Alex. “Why the cloak-and-dagger?” I ask.

  “It’s hard to tell from here, but that’s a really big camp,” he says, handing me the binoculars. “Lots of buildings. Old vehicle trails. Even an airstrip in the back. They logged the shit out of this area in the seventies. So, it’s like a small town. A group of hunters could easily hide in there.”

  I
look through the binoculars and see no movement among the trailers and trees. “Who would know about a place this hidden and remote?” I ask.

  “Anyone,” Alex says. “It’s easy to find on marine charts or Google Earth. All you need is a floatplane, or chopper, and you can get anywhere in this country.”

  “We have a few hunters around here who might be tempted,” Archie says, taking the binoculars from me. “One of them, a guy named Leonard Ellis, lives in Bella Coola.” It’s the same man Captain Brian Falconer had mentioned in Koeye, whom I’d met the previous year.

  “You mean the former grizzly hunter who now does bear tours?” I ask.

  “Yeah, you should go and write about that guy. Forget the Sasquatch.”

  This second reference to Ellis piques my interest. I’d had no idea he was so well known. I make a mental note to seek him out when I get back to Bella Coola.

  We restart the engines and crawl slowly up to a long pier at the edge of the abandoned camp. We moor and get off the boat. Alex has put on a Guardian Watchman jacket and cap, both emblazoned with native insignia. He’s holding a 12-gauge shotgun, which has materialized out of nowhere, and has a big knife strapped to his waist. Archie hands me a Velcro belt holding a container of bear spray.

  “Just in case,” he says.

  We enter the abandoned camp, cautious but determined, like narcotics officers on a raid. No one speaks. We weave around the sides of several large, decaying Alcan trailers set in a wide clearing with sprawling weeds and berry bushes.

  Inside the musty-smelling trailers everything seems to have been left just as it was when the loggers were in residence: old teak furniture, a small, bulbous black-and-white turn-dial TV with its antennae up (how did they get any signal out here?), faded fashion magazines featuring Farrah Fawcett–haired women in bell-bottoms, and a beautiful retro silk-screen print of an alpine scene.

  I break off from the others and enter the largest trailer—the living quarters. It’s no more than a long hallway lined with bedrooms. Each is a hollow shell containing broken bed frames, filthy mattresses, and collapsing wardrobe closets. Scrawled on each room’s door in colored marker is the name or nickname of its former occupant:

  Pin Ball Jason

  Davey and the Grinders

  Crazy Ray’s Palace: No fags, fruits, or fat chicks

  Boom-Boom Man

  And on the very last door, to room number 34, scrawled in big, bold caps:

  BIGFOOT

  Finding no intruders at the camp, we push up the Sheemahant valley. With even greater trepidation we follow an old track out. It’s lined with tall alders concealing a thick, dark forest. At first our hike is easy going. The path, an old dirt road, is covered in moss, short grass, and fallen leaves. But the farther we go the more overgrown it becomes, the weeds reaching up to our knees and even our thighs at times. Our legs become so drenched in morning dew it’s as if we’d waded waist-deep into a lake.

  Alex is holding his shotgun nervously across his chest with both hands. The added worry now is bears. And after we see two huge grizzly tracks, the anxiety becomes infectious. Archie walks ahead issuing a rebel yell to ward off any bears. Between howls, no one speaks. The only sound is from our footfalls—and from our breathing, which dispenses small clouds of vapor in the shaded morning cold. Although the area we’re in has been heavily altered by humans, it feels deeper in the bush than anywhere else I’ve been on this trip.

  “It’s kinda like walking those city blocks, back home, eh?” Alex says, trying to lighten the mood. I make an effort to imagine Toronto and its sobering blue-gray concrete grid, but I’m unable to. It feels farther away than any real place possibly could.

  “I can’t imagine going home,” I tell him.

  “You know what it is about the city that’s the real buzzkill?” Alex asks.

  I laugh. “Take your pick,” I say.

  Alex stops in his tracks and looks at me seriously. His eyes widen. “It’s the noise.“

  We reach the overgrown airstrip, no more than a long, rectangular clearing in the forest. There is a fork in the trail. Archie and Alex argue about which branch to take.

  But suddenly they’re interrupted by the droning of a small plane in the distance. We all stop and cock our ears. Alex and Archie listen intently, meticulously, trying to discern clues in the sound. They glance at each other, volleying questions back and forth with their eyes: What kind of plane? How far? Is it coming or going? Is it headed for the lake?

  But just as the droning gets loud enough to arouse real suspicion, the sound crests and trails away in the soft rustling of alder leaves.

  By midafternoon we’re sitting on the pier at the abandoned logging camp eating our lunches and preparing to leave. The weather has become stiflingly hot. Alex and Archie take off their wet shoes and socks and lay them on the pier to dry while they stuff themselves with sandwiches.

  I strip down to a T-shirt and marvel at the fact that in my several weeks of rain-forest travel, it hasn’t rained once. Drier, warmer weather has become the norm on the coast in summertime. But this is something different—more like a drought.

  Alex finishes eating and begins to unload his shotgun. He places several slugs and shells on the pier, in a line next to him. I stare at them in morbid fascination. I tell him that I know nothing about guns or hunting, having lived all of my life in one city or another.

  Alex and Archie exchange grins before Alex turns to me. “Wanna try shooting it?” he says.

  I’m gripped by an involuntary fear and hesitation. His invitation has the tinge of something taboo. “No. It’s all right,” I find myself saying, in spite of an intense desire to say yes.

  The two throw me looks bordering on disbelief, as if to say: Who would turn down the chance to fire a shotgun for the first time?

  “It’s easy,” Alex says. “Plus, if you’re going to be wandering around these parts, it’s something you need to learn.”

  The decision has been made to initiate me. Alex picks up a shell and grabs the gun before standing up. Both he and Archie have a look of impatient relish on their faces, as if they’re about to play a joke on me. I stand up without protest.

  “This is bird shot, but it’ll still have a kick,” Alex says, inserting the shell, loading it, and then handing the gun to me. I take it awkwardly, adjusting my grip to its heavy weight.

  “The safety’s off,” Alex says, backing up. “Go ahead.”

  “Where should I point it?” I ask, thinking aloud.

  “Away from us,” Archie says.

  Alex gestures toward the water. “Shoot into the lake.”

  I see an old tree stump sticking out of the water, about eighty feet from the side of the pier, and take aim.

  “That’s good,” Alex says, approaching and readjusting my grip. “Now hold it like this.”

  All skittishness evaporates as my attention is directed outward, focused on the target. I adjust my aim and pull the trigger.

  After what feels like not much more than a microsecond, there’s a peal of thunder and an incredible shock wave …

  The late Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges wrote a fantastically surreal story called The Aleph. It’s about a tiny orb, the Aleph, which when gazed at allows the observer to see the entire universe from every conceivable angle. The main character describes the moment he peers into it: time stops and in a split second he bears witness to everything that ever existed—and would ever exist—from all visual perspectives, all at once.

  No metaphor is exact. But the experience of firing the shotgun feels like Borges’s description of looking into the Aleph. In that instant, a universe of impressions washes over me. Every shooting I’ve ever seen in a film or TV show or read about in a book, from handguns to artillery, is reexperienced, from the perspective of both the shooter and the shot. It’s a profound and debilitating shock. In that moment I understand what it’s like to be on the giving and receiving ends of a deadly projectile weapon. I feel a mishmash of contradictor
y emotions: the ego-amplifying elation of power merging with disgust. And all of this unfolds within a split second.

  The top of the stump and the water around it explode. A gruesome, diabolical thunder runs amok across the lake and mountains, reverberating, repeatedly, back and forth.

  “I think you hit it,” Alex says, taking the shotgun out of my hands and patting me on my shoulder. “You all right?”

  “I feel a bit jolted.”

  “That’s how it always is the first time,” he says. “And that was just bird shot. The slug’s got a lot more kick.”

  “What’s the difference between the two?” I ask.

  “We carry the slugs to use against bears—in worst-case scenarios. It’s really rare, but if a grizzly is coming at you, and it’s going to kill you, the slug will usually stop it in its tracks.”

  That hypothetical scene plays out in my mind. An all-consuming chill runs down my spine, and I quickly shake the thought.

  The ride home along the lake’s north shore is a blur. I’m tired. I barely notice the two cabins, sites of alleged Sasquatch attacks, that we pass at different creek mouths.

  We barrel again toward the sun, now hanging over the western end of the lake, and pass high precipices of dark, shiny granite with small trees growing in their clefts.

  We approach a narrow valley whose entrance is elevated above the water. Alex and Archie slow the boat down and in unison crane their necks and look up at the slope leading to it from the water. Contorted trees, deciduous and coniferous, tangle at its entrance. The men, skittish, speak into each other’s ears, look at me, and then throttle the boat’s engines.

  Acting on a hunch, I tap Alex on the shoulder. He turns and looks at me as if caught in a secret act. I jerk my thumb backward, from where we just came.

  “Hoo-doo?“ I yell, over the sound of the engines.

  He stares at me for a moment and then nods, conceding. I see he wants to say more, but the engines are deafening. It has been a long day. His eyes implore me to leave it alone, to let it go.