In the Valleys of the Noble Beyond

by John Zada

  As we near town, the river accelerates. Rapids, logjams, and eddies appear. Darkness rapidly falls, and the detailed, nuanced world of the rain forest, with its thousand gradations of life and tonality, falls into a shadowy, silhouetted caricature that becomes hard to decipher.

  James is alert, rowing furiously to avoid things I can barely see coming. The river meanders. Our boat begins to spin in circles. At a big bend in the river the boat catches the edge of a logjam in the shadows. James hollers and over a course of milliseconds I see my life flash before me as the back of the boat gets thrust upward by the beastly, runaway currents.

  “Come to my side!” James shouts, as he grapples with the log. I shift toward him, but the boat continues to tilt up and sideways. But before we are upended, the vessel somehow breaks free, and we are drawn again into the dashing flow.

  James rows desperately toward the south bank of the river. Around another bend we see the lights of homes on the street where James and I met a few days earlier. He rows us in that direction, to a section of shore sheltered from the current by an outer sandbank.

  Without saying a word, we climb out of the boat, sodden and jacked up on adrenaline. Together we drag the skiff out of the water and hide it in the trees, before stumbling, almost punch-drunk, onto the road. The long chasm of the Necleetsconnay valley, now to our backs, looks on indifferently, cloaked in an ever-deepening darkness.

  Leonard phones the next day to say he’s had some tour cancellations and wants to make another go at getting to his cabin at Stillwater Lake.

  Later that week we’re rolling up the highway in an early 1980s pickup truck resurrected from Leonard’s fleet of weed-besieged, decommissioned vehicles hidden behind his cabins. It’s an immaculately clear late-summer morning, the cool air redolent of pine and mountain herbs.

  “This is the real thing,” Leonard exclaims, as the wind, blowing through the window, rustles his curls. “Grizzly bears and heavy bushwhacking. You can’t get anywhere more remote.”

  In the back seat are Leonard’s teenage son, Daniel, and their black Labrador retriever, Josie. Leaning on the seat between Leonard and me is a sleek 12-gauge shotgun.

  When I arrived at Leonard’s place earlier, I found Daniel stuffing a backpack with food. With his heavyset build, curly blond hair, and slightly defiant gait, he is a youthful clone of Leonard.

  “I decided to bring the boy,” Leonard said matter-of-factly, pulling me aside. “It’s good to have an extra hand to help carry the grub. And in case we need to get a few things done.”

  “Like what?” I asked, sensing he had something specific in mind.

  “One of Daniel’s friends happened to hike by the cabin a few weeks ago and told him that someone, or something, had broken into it. Made a big mess apparently.”

  As we push up the valley, the mountains become bolder and more imposing. Forested behemoths with trisyllabic names like Nusatsum, Defiance, and Stupendous, topped with crowns of bare rock, stand sentry at the entrances to enigmatic side valleys that flank them. We cross into Tweedsmuir Provincial Park and continue to follow the winding road. Just before the highway ascends to the Chilcotin Plateau, Leonard pulls onto an unimaginably rough dirt road that is pockmarked and littered with rocks. We’re thrown around like an airplane in a patch of bad turbulence. For hours, enduring whiplash, we follow this rocky wagon trail along narrow ledges overlooking the sparkling Atnarko River, alive with spawning salmon. The road drops again to a spot where a few cabins sit by the shore.

  Leonard slows down. “That’s Bill Robson’s cabin over there,” he says, indicating the property of a man he had introduced me to a week earlier, who had said he had heard heavy bipedal footsteps and panting there at three o’clock one morning.

  A little farther down the road, Leonard stops the truck and points out of the passenger window. “And that there is the old outhouse where they found Stanley Edwards dead.”

  We all stare silently at the wooden structure, as if paying our respects. I’m overcome with the image of the white-bearded hermit, the former owner of Leonard’s cabin, dressed in his trademark yellow construction vest and helmet, sitting slumped over in the outhouse—the culmination of a lopsided, maladapted life of solitude. An attempt to become a kind of Sasquatch.

  We leave the vehicle at the end of the dirt road and navigate a dry, rugged path through a forest that bears little resemblance to the perspiring coastal jungles that I’ve traveled through up until now. The wilderness here, marked by thick-barked, fire-resistant Douglas fir, is rain-deprived, with far less undergrowth. Beneath our feet is a powdery concoction of sand and conifer needles. Leonard says we are walking through the old riverbed of the Atnarko—before its course was diverted by a cataclysmic flood in 2010.

  The mood is unexpectedly tense. Leonard, who is shouldering an uncomfortable-looking external frame backpack from the seventies and carrying his shotgun, has been going on about his plight as a persecuted hunter.

  “People are spreading all kinds of rumors about me, including saying I’m still guiding for bears. They can’t get their minds around the fact that I’ve stopped. I feel I’m being bullied and picked on.”

  The degree of waffling Leonard does in his attempt to come to terms with what happened to him is striking. In one breath he tells me he’s happy that he no longer has to shoulder the stress of his old hunting business and that “bear viewing and ecotourism are the way to go.” But in the next breath he lashes out at the anti-trophy-hunting forces he blames for his downfall. Leonard adds bitterly that another environmental campaign protecting wolves has caused them to explode in number, with the result that they’ve killed off all the deer and mountain goats in the region. “These environmentalists are swinging things all to one side,” he grumbles. “Just eat tofu and don’t do nothin’. That’s all they’re good for.”

  Daniel too is not in the best of moods. He doesn’t speak much to me, and speaks even less to Leonard, with whom he seems almost angry. I get the sense he doesn’t want to be here. He glares at Leonard every time his father stops for a rest break.

  As the trail ascends the mountainside we come across a group of four hikers—two women and two men—the first and only people we see on our trip. Leonard knows them and is drawn into small talk. Their eyes shift surreptitiously between Leonard, his shotgun, and then me. Leonard mentions he is taking me—”a writer from Ontario”—to his cabin. But the comment seems to only deepen their curiosity, shown on their faces.

  “They were behaving strangely,” I say, after they walk off.

  “Probably spooked by the gun,” Leonard grumbles. “They’re the sort of people who only carry bear spray.”

  “Is that a bad thing?” I ask.

  “It’s a bad idea. Bear spray only works at fifteen feet at most. If a pissed-off bear is that close to you, you’re in real trouble.”

  “I can see that carrying a gun is a good idea. But doesn’t that also come at the risk of dropping your guard?”

  “Whaddaya mean?”

  “I imagine with a gun there’s less need to pay attention and be careful. And so you’re more likely to have to use it in the end. And vice versa with bear spray.”

  Daniel is standing with his back to us, looking into the woods, pretending not to listen.

  I go on: “The bear-viewing operations I know of here seem to do fine without firearms.”

  “How any bear operator, or tourist provider, can take guests into bear territory with just spray is beyond me. Anything can happen out here. If I don’t have a gun, I won’t go into the bush.”

  “Maybe those people have learned how to behave around bears without provoking them.”

  Though my comment wasn’t intended as a slight, I can see that Leonard has taken it as one. His tone turns didactic.

  “What you need to know, John, is that those coastal bears are well fed and habituated to people. The guides and the bears know one another personally. The tours even give ‘em names, like Tom, Frank, and Susan—l
ike they’re old chums. But if you run into an Atnarko grizzly, you’ll see how mean and grumpy they can be. I brought a group near here, and an old boar got too close. It was running near a cedar stump. To protect my guests I shot the stump and it exploded. You know what the bear did?”

  “I can guess.”

  “That’s right. The bear decided it had better walk away—and he did.”

  I can see the episode running through Leonard’s mind, and a cool look comes over his face. “Lucky for him.”

  Our hike to the cabin begins smoothly. But after a few hours, a set of worrying omens descends in sequence. The first comes when Leonard takes his fourth rest break in under an hour. He sits on a log by the trail, and lets out a long moan ringing with pain and relief. Daniel looks daggers at his father.

  “What’s the matter?” I say to Leonard. “You’re always stopping.”

  “I’m just outta shape,” he says, staring at his boots. “It’s nothin’.”

  Daniel holds his own stare. “Ask him about his knee,” he says to me coldly.

  Leonard looks up at his son with exhausted annoyance, and turns to me. “I had a little surgery in this knee here back in the spring. It’s just buggin’ me a little.”

  “You should have mentioned that before we left,” I say, feeling a tinge of fear.

  “I didn’t think it’d be an issue.”

  Daniel cracks a patronizing grin. “Who’d have imagined the great Leonard Ellis getting his ass kicked on a hike. Let’s go, Dad.”

  The second omen comes when we arrive at the mouth of Stillwater Lake, a long, narrow body of water hemmed in by steep, forested mountainsides draped with rockslides. Our plan is to borrow canoes at another cabin here and cross to Leonard’s property at the head of the lake. But when we find the boats, we discover they’re cracked and banged up.

  “They’re no good,” Leonard says, with a tired sigh, before standing and looking out toward the lake.

  “Can we get there on foot?” I ask.

  Leonard ruminates. “The west shore of the lake, on the right, is the slightly shorter route, but it’s got too many rockslides. I’ve done it once before. We wouldn’t make it to the cabin before dark.”

  “And the east side?”

  “There’s bits of old trail there. Never hiked it all the way.” Leonard thinks some more before shrugging off a concern he is weighing. “It should be fine. Let’s take it.”

  “This ought to be interesting,” Daniel says, drawing each word out, with a nervous grin.

  The moment we set foot on the lake’s eastern bank, our hike enters the domain of punishment. It takes on shades of Percy Fawcett’s doomed expedition in the Amazon. We’re forced to navigate waves of successive rockslides teeming with sharp-edged, slippery boulders resting precariously one on top of another. Alerted to our presence, every known biting insect—wasps, hornets, black flies, horse flies, deer flies, mosquitos—swarms us. Josie, Leonard’s dog, whimpers and cries, as she too barely manages to avoid falling between the jagged boulders. Small sections of what look like trail appear, mercifully, through the thick brush, only to vanish, Houdini-like, without a trace, into the next clearing teeming with black boulders.

  I’m trailing behind the others when I hear Daniel’s voice up ahead, childlike, imploring, and stripped of cynicism.

  “Holy fucking shit, Dad! Look!”

  I catch up to find the two crouched beside the largest bear track I—and apparently they—have ever seen. It’s in dirt and is bigger than the head of an oversize tennis racket. It could be the footprint of an elephant. And there are more in the distance, heading in the direction where we’re going.

  “Giant old boar,” Leonard says, gravely, stroking his chin. “Ever see anything like that before, Daniel?”

  Daniel shakes his head slowly, fixed on the print. “Uh-uh.”

  Leonard stands and looks around in a pose of alert vigilance. “We need to move. It’ll be dark soon and that cabin’s still a ways away.”

  We push on, constantly looking over our shoulders. Contrary to Leonard’s expectation, the shoreline we’re navigating rises, turning into a steep, rocky cliffside. We’re forced to turn inland, uphill, where Leonard says he’s certain there is a way back down to the lake.

  Hours later, after hiking through heavy, face-scratching brush, we reach the top and are rewarded with a stunning view over the densely forested head of the lake, blooming in several shades of green, in which Leonard’s cabin is concealed. But that moment of sweetness is spoiled by the gut-wrenching realization that there’s no apparent way down. Upon reconnoitering, Leonard says there is only a three-hundred-foot cliff over the water to our side and a steep avalanche chute of dirt and rock up ahead whose bottom he can’t see. We could keep climbing and follow the mountain ridges around the lake, he adds, but we could hike forever and not find a safe way down.

  I’m feeling frustrated, worn out, and exhausted. Daniel is on the cusp of blowing a fuse. Leonard, who is now limping from the raw pain in his knee, is beside himself with confusion, busy doing mental calculations. He tells us he’s going off to investigate on his own and for us to stay put. When Leonard doesn’t return after forty minutes or so—and doesn’t respond to our calls—Daniel and I go looking for him on the bluff above us. We find him there, sitting morosely on a huge rock overlooking the lake, in a pose like Rodin’s Thinker.

  It’s now early evening. Seeing Leonard, my guide, at a complete loss sends a shudder running through me. I realize we likely won’t make it to the cabin before dark.

  “We need to decide whether to find a place to camp for the night—or whether we should head back,” I say, feeling something approaching panic well up in my chest.

  “There’s no going back,” Leonard snaps. “We won’t make it in time. And there’s no way I’m camping out here for the night with that big boar wandering around—and while my cabin is just down there.“

  “So what do you propose?”

  “We go down that avalanche chute,” he says, pointing to a precipice just ahead of us.

  A look of wild disbelief comes over Daniel’s face. “Dad, you’re crazy! There’s no way we’ll be able to get down there! It’s way too steep!”

  “Going down’s not the problem,” Leonard says, more calmly now, trying to downplay things. “The issue is coming back up. We just gotta make sure we can climb the chute again when it’s time to leave.”

  “How? How do we make sure?” Daniel says, with desperate, mocking sarcasm.

  “The first rule I learned while goat huntin’ is that if you can climb down without killing yourself, you should be OK to get back up. So, there’s only one way to find out.”

  I concur with Daniel that it’s a bad idea and decide to challenge Leonard. “What if we make it down without killing ourselves, but we still can’t climb back up?” I ask. “What happens then?”

  Leonard shrugs. “Maybe there’s a boat at the cabin? That’s the only other way out of here. That west shore is even nastier than this. And the way things are going with my knee …”

  Daniel fumes and shakes his head again, glaring down at his father as Leonard strains to get up from the rock he’s sitting on. Leonard grabs his pack and shotgun and starts hobbling toward the chute. Josie follows him, but when they reach the top of the grade, she stops in her tracks and turns around feebly.

  “I’ll check it out and let you know,” Leonard hollers. Using his shotgun like a cane, he disappears down the slope, past a few small trees.

  Daniel and I sit silently, staring at the ground, for what feels like ages.

  “What’s with your dad?” I say, finally giving in to the temptation to ask.

  The teenager makes a slightly dour face before glancing at me embarrassingly. “He likes to push himself sometimes.”

  I’m stranded atop a rocky bluff in a remote and rugged wilderness. My frazzled and injured guide wants to fling us down a steep mountainside in a desperate bid to reach shelter. Our sense of vulnerab
ility has long ago turned into fear. But running parallel with it, like an undercurrent, is a sort of excitement.

  I’ve given little serious thought to Sasquatches in the last few days. But in this moment, perched atop an avalanche chute, with the weight of adversity bearing down, I get a flash of insight, however irrelevant and unhelpful: this visceral fear I’m experiencing, the thrilling kind, which bursts our reservoirs of adrenaline, is what Bigfoot enthusiasts seek. It is an excitement born of adventure, glory, and self-sacrifice.

  Somewhere in that mist-laden landscape between Koeye and the Hoodoo Valley, when the surrealism became almost intolerable, I was struck by a notion that has remained with me ever since: there is a process of personal mythmaking in play here. What began as a research trip, albeit an adventuresome one, to solve a puzzle, has morphed into an all-consuming journey, an epic, whose hero is none other than me. And whether I admit it or not, that was probably the intention all along.

  All of us yearn to be heroes in narratives of our own making, if only to live lives brimming with purpose. Most of us take up that call, at one time or another, to a greater or lesser extent. Others make it a recurring part of life. It’s the underlying motive, almost a default setting, that pushes rational people to sometimes do seemingly irrational things. Anywhere there is an opponent, or obstacle, standing between the hero and his or her goal—where difficulty and adversity lie—there is a mythical quest with its attendant moments of high drama.

  Journalist Will Storr says that a “compulsion for emotional narrative” underlies this deep desire to fling ourselves into the push and pull of human circumstance. He describes the mind as a kind of “Hero-Maker,” seeing the world in terms of stories in which we are cast into the virtuous leading role. Our minds, Storr says, are addicted to story templates because that is how we experience life. “The mind reorders the world,” he writes, “turning the events of our days into a narrative of crisis, struggle, resolution, and casts us in the leading role. In this way our lives gain motivation… . We are coaxed into hope, into heroic acts, into braving impossible odds.”22