In the Valleys of the Noble Beyond

by John Zada

  We hear the door open again. A middle-aged man, short, balding, and wearing glasses, suddenly walks into the room carrying two six-packs of Lucky. “Behold,” he says, “the last dozen beers in all of Ocean Falls till the barge comes in. Do you know you’ve got a crying woman outside?”

  “Ronny!” Darellbear says, smiling. “Forget that and sit your ass down here. We’re having a discussion about the Sasquatch.”

  “The Sas-quatch? Oh boy!”

  “Ronny here moved to Ocean Falls from the illustrious city of Winnipeg,” Darellbear says to me.

  “Yep, I went from the car theft capital of Canada to a place that’s got absolutely no car theft whatsoever,” Ronny says, taking the empty chair next to me.

  “I was just telling John that few people have the right consciousness to see a Sasquatch. You could be the best tracker, the best mountain man, and still not see one. Heck, I’ll bet that even our hunter friend Leonard Ellis hasn’t seen a Sasquatch either.”

  “Leonard?” I say.

  “That’s right.”

  “You know Leonard Ellis?”

  “Do I know Leonard?” Darellbear says, raising his voice, laughing. “Heck, man, we’re only sitting in the guy’s fucking house!”

  “What?”

  “Yeah! He used to live here. In this very house! The person I bought it from took it off Leonard when he moved to Bella Coola. What’s the matter? Your face is pale.”

  I tell Darellbear about the coincidental references to Ellis and the serendipitous meetings over the course of my trip.

  “Well, of course! What did you expect?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Man, you amaze me. Do even you know where you are?” he asks, with his arms outstretched.

  I answer with a puzzled expression.

  “You’re in the Noble Beyond.”

  “The Noble Beyond?” I repeat, in a tone of deliberate incomprehension.

  “That’s right. The Great Bear Rainforest, this whole coast, is the Noble Beyond. This is the land of serendipity, man. The ultimate landscape of myth, magic, and metaphor. The domain that is the unseen universe. Interconnection and deeper meanings lie around every corner here. It’s where your Sasquatch, your coincidences, and a million other possibilities exist. Haven’t you ever read Joseph Campbell, or those Don Juan books by Carlos Castaneda?”

  Ronny nods knowingly, as if I’m being let in on a secret.

  “Heck, let’s just call a spade a spade, man,” Darellbear says. “This whole business of you, or anyone, finding the Sasquatch—that’s bullshit. Exists? Doesn’t exist? You’re never going to know. Besides, that’s not even the point.”

  Lucas wanders back into the room and sits down gloomily.

  “What happened?” Darellbear asks him.

  “It’s her last night here. She said she didn’t wanna spend it with a couple of old dudes.”

  “So take your beers and go to her, man! What are you waiting for?”

  As Lucas reaches for his cans, the rain outside doubles down.

  “Oh yeah!” Darellbear howls, looking out the window next to him and laughing. “Listen to it!”

  The rest of us get up and stare out into the drenched blackness.

  “God damn,” Ronny says, entranced.

  “I’ll bet it can go on like this for days,” Lucas adds, with a touch of concern.

  “Ha! Are you kidding?” Darellbear says to him. “It can go on like this for the rest of the year! That’s why they call it Ocean Falls, man! You should see it when it comes down full tilt. When the rain bounces two feet in the air after it’s hit the ground. Once you’ve experienced that, it’s game over. The rain’s made you its own.”

  “Made you its own?” I ask.

  Darellbear shoots me a serious look. “You become one of us.”

  The old logging road from Ocean Falls to Roscoe Inlet is a pockmarked, rock-strewn gravel track. A couple of miles in, past a cataclysmic rockslide of boulders the size of Great Pyramid blocks, the path begins its gradual disappearing act. From here it continues as a fading avenue of weeds that reach higher and thicker with each step.

  I’m walking with Lucas and his dog, Gnarly—an energetic white retriever who’s constantly ducking into and out of the bush ahead of us. There is an on-and-off pitter-patter of rain. The goal of our micro-journey is to reach Roscoe Inlet. Our plan on the way back is to reconnoiter the two lakes along the road, where Bartender Bob saw the small tracks similar to those I came across at Old Town in Bella Bella.

  We push along the path and reach a washout thick with deadfall. We spend what seems like forever crawling both under and over the debris. From that point forward the path is barely visible, continuing through thick second growth choked with blueberry and huckleberry bushes. We plod through the dark, claustrophobic corridor, having to crawl at times, coming across bear prints and what we think are cougar tracks.

  “If I saw a Sasquatch and got evidence of it, I’m not sure I’d tell the world,” Lucas says, voicing a sentiment I’ve felt more than a few times. “It would probably put them in danger. That’s probably why they hide from people.”

  Some Sasqualogists take for granted that proving the existence of Bigfoots would result in eventual protection for the species—and the forests they inhabit. But what if the discovery were to have the opposite effect? It’s hard to imagine the chain saws and mining machines going silent for the sake of a few remaining wild men. The announcement would be earth-shattering from a scientific point of view and would probably also result in a thousandfold more attention being heaped on the creatures and their habitat from hordes of tourists, government officials, newsmongers, scientists, and hunters.

  After much effort, bruised and scuffed, we emerge into a clearing. In front of us is a creek coursing through a dark, spacious, and mossy old-growth forest. To our left, immediately downstream, lies a pulverized wooden bridge—presumably part of the old road we tried to follow and lost. Lying on top of it is an enormous Sitka spruce, one of the largest trees I’ve ever seen. The tree had somehow fallen over, splitting the bridge in half as if with a karate chop. The trunk is so wide that a small car could drive along it. The almost deliberate precision of the impact is eerie.

  Just beyond the bridge, several miles from where we started, there is no sign of the road—not even the faintest whiff or vestige of a track. Lucas, heroically, wants to push on. But we have no maps or navigational equipment—nor sufficient provisions. I make the decision to turn tail rather than risk getting lost in an unfamiliar landscape whose depth, after one wrong turn, could become nothing short of infinite.

  On the hike back, we arrive at Ikt Lake—the second body of water along the logging road out of Ocean Falls. We saunter along the sandy shoreline scanning the ground. This is where Bartender Bob claims he saw the unusual, small humanoid tracks. But there is nothing here save loads of goose shit, deer and wolf tracks, and a plague of baby frogs on the move. The rain ended hours ago. Except for the intermittent breaks made on the surface by cutthroats catching bugs, the lake is as still as glass. The sky is in the throes of post-rainfall tumult. Thick foggy vapors rising from the drenched rain forest churn in cottony swirls. This captivating scene, mountains and all, is reflected in the lake.

  Lucas and Gnarly, lost in their own investigations, wander farther down the shore, appearing to grow punier in the surrounding gigantism. I quickly tire of searching the ground for tracks and decide there’s far greater reward in just sitting and watching the Rorschach-blot reflection of the mountain scene in the water.

  And then something strikes me. When I tilt my head, turning the mountainside and its reflection in the lake sideways or vertical, the scene takes on the contours of a head and torso. I keep looking and discern facial features, which materialize in the lighter patches of alders and shrubs beside the lake, where the “head” is. There I see eyes, a fat nose, and lips. The bushiness creates the impression of matted hair. The head rests on no neck. The darker conife
rs on the higher mountain slope (and their mirror images in the lake) form wide shoulders that jut out from behind the head. Higher yet, the rising slope of the mountain curves to a level ridge, creating the impression of hanging arms. The image is of a humanoid being, bulky, hairy, and muscular. It’s somewhat abstract but has an unnerving presence and edge—and a stolid personality. Its power is equal to that I perceived in the ghostly faces I saw in the shoreline reflections while traveling up the Koeye, which I likened to beings on a totem pole.

  I’m jolted to the core when I realize that I’m staring into the eyes of what looks to be a Sasquatch—one of my mind’s rendering—hewn from the mountain and forest and radiant with the presence of the surrounding wilderness. I’m transfixed and stare at the creature as the mist around it roils.

  I’m mindful that I’m seeing what I’m seeing because I want to, that our minds are adept at generating images from our surroundings, especially images that consciously occupy us. But even though I know that this creature is just a mountain and its reflection in the lake, something about the image feels real to me. The image is expressive, its detail convincing. It’s saying something, speaking to me. It may as well be real. It doesn’t matter that it’s literally not.

  And this is what changes my entire perspective. For although this symbol is an object lesson in the psychology I’ve considered, it also reframes that knowledge: rather than thinking of perception as just our senses distorting reality and thereby somehow separating us from nature (implying a kind of error or falsehood), I see now that our creation and interpretation of symbols is also part of our nature—an aspect of nature itself. There’s something normal, even essential about this process. Our minds work this way not just because they evolved to do so over time but because these functions help us fulfill a very human need.

  I think of all the Bigfoot sightings. Whether they’re real, pattern mismatches, or phantasms deriving from an altered state, they must, I realize, all resonate equally in the observer—evoking sentiments that deepen life and make it and more enriching. Take the relationship indigenous peoples have to Sasquatches. The attitude of some First Nations peoples yields far more because these people see the animals as a combination of physical being, spirit, story figure, symbol, and teacher. There is a definite takeaway, with manifold social and psychological benefits for both the individual and the community. All that many of the rest of us can seem to muster is the possibility of a physical ape-man and the impoverished, binary either/or debate about its existence.

  And perhaps this is what Darellbear, in his idiosyncratic way, was trying to convey the other night: that beyond the obsession with the rational question of whether the Sasquatch physically exists, there is a whole other field of inquiry that is being neglected, an ether of subtler possibilities—his Noble Beyond. What can the Sasquatch and our pursuit of it tell us about ourselves, about our motives, individually and as a culture, about what we deeply and truly yearn for?

  Perhaps I’d find out in Bella Coola.

  * Or perhaps it just seemed that way, given that rainfall wasn’t being measured across most of the uninhabited coast.

  * In 1986 a counterterrorism unit of the Toronto Police came to Ocean Falls to test its weapons and pyrotechnics on the derelict buildings, temporarily making the town look like a smoldering action film set.

  * When I hiked with eyewitness Clark Hans on my previous trip to Bella Coola, I could scarcely believe the details he picked up in the forest that were initially invisible to me. Once he pointed them out, deer rubs on the bark of trees, faint animal impressions in the moss, and banana slugs partly concealed by foliage were all revealed in an instant.

  8

  BELLA COOLA

  (Q’UMK’UTS‘)

  Long, long ago, there lived a lad who was so poor that all he had for clothing was a rough goat-skin blanket. He was so miserable and friendless that he made up his mind to commit suicide. The ice was breaking in the Bella Coola River at the time, and large cakes were floating down to the sea. The lad leaped out upon one block, then sprang to another, and finally into a clear patch of water. Associates seeking to dissuade him had followed him from one cake of ice to another, but they drew back when he plunged into the cold water.

  The youth was not drowned. He found a road under the water which led him to the land of the herring; then, still following the path, he passed in succession the countries of the olachen, the steel-head salmon, the spring salmon, the sockeye salmon, the hump-back salmon, the dog salmon, and lastly the cohoe. Each kind offish dwelt in its own country, the cohoe salmon, being the last to reach the Bella Coola River, living at the greatest distance from it. Not long after his arrival in the land of the fish, the salmon boat, Noäkxnim, left for Bella Coola and on it the youth returned home. Owing to this experience he became in time both wealthy and famous.

  —Traditional Nuxalk tale recounted in T. F. McIlwraith’s

  The Bella Coola Indians

  A thick patch of vapors chokes the high forests of South Bentinck Arm. Snippets of tree-lined mountainside appear teasingly through the clouds.

  “The sun’s about to punch through,” our captain, a tall, heavyset man with curly hair and glasses, says to me. “We’ll stop in Green Bay now. Those Dutch ladies are dying to see some bears.”

  The engines of the forty-two-foot Nekhani rumble to life, sending us on a northeasterly course. The water becomes siltier as we approach a bay at the mouth of the Nooseseck River valley on the mainland. When we arrive at the estuary, much of the morning cloud cover has dissipated. The valley glows in hues of gold and green beneath the thinnest swirls of mist.

  Four women—two from Vancouver and a pair of older travelers from the Netherlands—and I gather our packs for a hike along the river. The captain, who has put on waders over his jeans, reaches into a nook just above the deck of the boat and pulls out a 12-gauge Defender shotgun—the same weapon I fired with the Guardian Watchmen along Owikeno Lake. As he loads the weapon, his manner becomes militaristic and dramatic, suitable for a Hollywood action film.

  The six of us pile into an inflatable rubber dinghy, and the captain paddles us to shore. The Vancouver women and I, wearing gum boots, climb out and wade through the waterlogged edge of the estuary to the high bank. One by one the Dutch women, dressed in hiking shoes, are hoisted piggyback-style by the captain over the shallows. They coo and giggle, like teenagers as the man strains under their weight.

  We tie the raft and wander single file, quietly, through an estuary bank thick with high grasses and sedges, following a web of animal trails. Our guide—the captain—surveys the ground ahead of us. He stops and points the muzzle of his gun toward exposed dirt in the grass.

  “That’s another fresh grizzly dig,” he murmurs in a slight drawl, pushing up his glasses and looking around. “They’re here all right. They could be anywhere hidden in the grass.”

  We enter the forest, walking parallel with the river, and push through thorny berry bushes and devil’s club. Large bear tracks appear in the soil, leading out of the woods toward the riverbank. We continue bushwhacking and finally emerge onto the wide, rocky bank of the Nooseseck River, which is flowing swiftly down from the upper valley.

  “We’ll park on these logs and wait,” the captain says, leading us to a pile of driftwood on the river’s edge. The shallow Nooseseck splashes with salmon battling the current to swim upriver. A few half-eaten fish carcasses lie on the rocks in front of us, evidence of bear activity.

  We’re interrupted by a rustling in the bushes slightly upstream. We freeze into a perfect tableau, breaths and heartbeats stilled as we look toward the forest edge. But the sounds fade away.

  As the afternoon wears on, restlessness takes hold. Our guide urges us not to speak and scare off the bears he’s convinced are all around us, just waiting for the right moment to step out. His periodic sighs and grumbles are the only interruptions in what feels like an eternal stretch of present. When the first intimations of dusk appear, our
guide stands up and declares that we’re throwing in the towel. The Dutch women look crestfallen, but we are all relieved. It has been a long day, and everyone is looking forward to getting back, to a shower, food, and some rest.

  As we push back through the bush toward the estuary, I can see that our guide is disappointed. He carries himself languidly, almost spitefully, in protest to the world.

  “You saw all those tracks and diggings,” he says to me. “They were there. They were right there. I just don’t get it.”

  I turn to the man, who’s resting his shotgun casually over his shoulder. “They must have heard you were coming, Leonard.”

  Days earlier, I had arrived in Bella Coola and gone to see Leonard Ellis, the erstwhile bear hunter turned wildlife guide. His guide operation and beautiful cabin complex, called Bella Coola Grizzly Tours, is run from his home and property at the foot of the Coast Mountains, partway up the valley in the community of Hagensborg. I don’t know any bear hunters, and before I revisited Leonard, I had expected him to look surly, like a person tinged with madness from his remote wilderness existence. His detractors depict him as difficult and unrelenting, but I found Leonard soft-spoken, polite, and even charming. He was obviously hardened and rough, as a serious woodsman would be, but with a seemingly more malleable interior, a cowboy’s drawl, and a cherub’s smile.

  I’m still not sure what the overriding reason was that led me to Leonard’s door again, beyond my attraction to the reputation attached to him. The fact that other people on the coast seemed obsessed with Leonard made him seem larger and more interesting in my eyes. And after spending time with many indigenous residents and environmentalists, becoming familiar with their ideas and values, I was admittedly curious to learn more about people of a different ilk living on this same stretch of coast.

  As Leonard led me into his home, I found myself paying close attention to his hunting achievements—which were hard to avoid. All over his house, which felt like a big, disheveled backcountry cabin, were the mounted heads of various prey animals he had culled over the years, mostly ungulates like mountain goats and deer. In his back shed Leonard had stashed away his most prized possessions: two stuffed bears, a grizzly and a black bear, standing side by side on their hind legs, front paws extended, their teeth gnashing. The grizzly was massive, standing around nine feet high; the black bear beside it was shorter, reaching up to the grizzly’s shoulders. As I gaped at them in morbid fascination, Leonard told me that he had taken the animals on a road show years earlier.