Bigfoot, Yeti, and the Last Neanderthal, page 24
Though I had packed my bear spray I still felt vulnerable, so bought a fearsome hunting knife at the gas station. I am sure it would not have been much protection, but it made me feel better. I thought I had better report in to the local Ranger's Office and get permission to put up hair traps. This involved a drive back down the Skagit Valley to the National Forest Service HQ at Sedro-Woolley. Fortunately the lady at the reception desk had read The Seven Daughters of Eve, which made my eccentric request for a permit rather easier than it might otherwise have been. In no time, the relevant higher authority promised to produce a letter of permission and fax it through the following day. I would then have the authority to set hair traps for a sasquatch. Was this the first official endorsement of such a request, I wondered.
Back at Marblemount, Lori and Adam had returned from their first visit to the Big Guy. He was still there, which was a great relief to me, and was knocking from his lair under the tree as usual. Over lunch Lori explained that she had just told the Big Guy that she and Adam were soon to be married. He had taken the news well and not worked himself into a frenzy. When we arrived back at the tree he was thumping away, louder and more often than on my last visit in March. Lori had laid out the usual offering of green apples and also some Hershey bars, which were another of the Big Guy's favourites. Meanwhile I set up about a dozen hair traps consisting of Gorilla Tape mounted sticky side out on foam pipe-insulation tubes, with the whole construction threaded onto garden stakes and secured with some moss. I had invented this version of a hair-sampling kit at Ashland, having failed to find a manufactured alternative. All I could find on the Internet was an account by researchers in Canada who had strung up barbed wire around a carcass to catch grizzly hairs. This sounded far too brutal for the Big Guy.
I also set up a camcorder and microphone to catch any sight or sound of the Big Guy while we were away. Lastly, using gloves, I put some apples in glass jars which I had wiped with an alcohol swab to remove my own fingerprints. The idea was that if the Big Guy picked any of these up he would leave prints which I could take back to Ashland and have professionally developed and analysed. Only primates have finger ridges, I was told. The thumping was getting louder and Lori was getting nervous so we called it a day and returned to Marblemount.
The following day began quietly enough as we drove to the site. I inspected the hair traps and, sure enough, several of them had short dark hairs stuck to the extremely tenacious Gorilla Tape. I removed the traps and replaced them with fresh ones. The apples and the chocolate had gone so Lori laid out a new selection. Both Adam and Lori pointed out that there were no signs that the apples had been gnawed before they disappeared. The implication was that the apples had been picked up and eaten whole, something a bear was apparently unable to do. I didn't say that I had seen big ‘Grizz’ do exactly that at Wildlife Images a couple of days before. The Big Guy was rather restrained that morning, despite Lori's attempts at starting a conversation. It was another beautiful day and we headed back to Marblemount for lunch in the sunshine. We would meet back at the tree after I had collected my permission letter from Sedro-Woolley. It was all going very well. I had some recordings of the Big Guy's thumpings and some hairs to analyse. But the relaxed atmosphere was not to last long.
When I drove back towards Marble Creek and the Big Guy's lair, Lori and Adam were waiting for me on the roadside. Lori looked terrified and Adam explained that the Big Guy had gone berserk. The thumping had grown in intensity and he was roaring and sounding extremely angry. Lori was genuinely in fear of her life and was expecting the Big Guy to come out from his lair and kill her. The reason was obvious, she said. Lori had just explained to the Big Guy that she would be moving to England and would not be back for quite a while. This fresh news enraged the Big Guy and precipitated his terrifying tantrum. Lori could not be persuaded to return to the tree, so we all retreated to Marblemount. After we had settled Lori, Adam and I headed back to the Big Guy. If this was to be the last visit then I wanted to retrieve my hair traps and recording equipment. The roaring had stopped when we arrived, and I collected the traps, camcorder and microphone as quickly as I could. Adam had said that the Big Guy only knocked when Lori was present, but that was no longer the case as we heard a number of knocks. Not loud ones, but he was still at it.
Lori and Adam left the next morning. Lori was still pale from terror and vowed she would never return. She had carried on her father's research for many years, but now felt very threatened by the Big Guy. Not wanting to go back to an enraged sasquatch alone, I followed them down the valley to the Interstate and carried on to stay with Rhett at his home on nearby Whidbey Island while Lori and Adam headed south towards Seattle.
I spent the following day with Rhett on a ferry trip round the San Juan Islands looking for orcas, something I had wanted to do for a long time, though we didn't see any. I set off the next day on the long drive back to San Francisco and home. When I reached the junction with the Interstate that would take me south, I suddenly thought: this is ridiculous. Here I am within an hour's drive of a sasquatch, with all the equipment I needed for a positive identification. I know the creature is there. I may never have the opportunity again. Even if I do return one day, the Big Guy will probably have gone. I just have to go back to Marble Creek. So that is what I did.
The change of plan meant I was going to miss my college's Governing Body meeting. My emailed apologies to the College President, the distinguished biographer Hermione Lee, caught my feeling of apprehension:
Dear Hermione,
I am writing from the small township of Marblemount in the North Cascade mountains of Washington State where I am pursuing my Bigfoot research programme. For the last few days my colleagues and I have heard a large creature who appears to live under a big fir tree. He, or she, thumps and growls, sometimes very aggressively. I have no idea what it might be. I am going to investigate further.
The upshot is that I am unable to attend the GB meeting tomorrow and present my apologies. If things here go badly wrong, I hope you will accept my posthumous apologies for future meetings.
With kind regards
Bryan
Walking down the track to the Big Guy's tree on my own was far more scary than in company. At Burlington I had bought a ‘Go-Pro’ video camera, which I mounted on a head-strap. It recorded my progress down the track and would film any creature that appeared. I was certainly frightened and really thought this might be the end of me. At least my final moments would be on film, so long as the ‘Go-Pro’ survived the Big Guy's lethal attack. All these things went through my mind. I had my hunting knife in my belt and the bear spray in a holster. I test-fired the spray and a jet of foul-smelling yellow liquid shot twenty yards in front of me. Would it stop the Big Guy if he decided to attack, or make him even madder? I really didn't know.
When I reached the tree, there was no knocking to be heard. Maybe the Big Guy has left his lair, I thought. Or maybe he's on his way back. Adrenalin pumping, looking over my shoulder after every step, I did my round of the hair traps. Yesterday's apples and chocolate had all gone, and there were more hairs on the traps. On one of them, round the back of the tree, I could see three long, shiny, golden-brown hairs stuck to the Gorilla Tape. This is it, I thought. After decades of effort by cryptozoologists, here at last is a genuine sasquatch hair sample. I re-set the traps, opened a new file on the voice recorder and assembled the camcorder. As I drove back to Marblemount, I felt the warm glow of success. I had made the discovery of the century. I had three sasquatch hairs in my pocket and tomorrow, after the Big Guy comes out for the apples, maybe there will be a movie too.
Back in Marblemount, I began to think it would be a good idea to get another witness to the Big Guy's knocking. Not a Bigfoot enthusiast but a neutral opinion. Three old-timers were drinking beer outside the general store, so I went over to speak to them. ‘Sure,’ they said. ‘We know all about the sasquatch in the valley.’ They had also known Lori's dad when he was living in the forest. But none of these three seemed particularly good witness material and I left them with their beers. I then thought of the National Park station up the road. I could get a park ranger to witness the Big Guy's thumping; I couldn't do better than that. I drove to the station and launched into my strange request. Very fortunately the ranger on duty, Sage Bohme, had studied human evolution at college so was not as surprised as he might otherwise have been when I explained the scientific purpose of searching for sasquatch. Fortunately, it was nearing the end of his shift. He didn't feel he ought to use company time for this expedition, but in his own he was happy to come with me.
When he clocked off, we set off for the Big Guy's tree, which Sage immediately identified as a Douglas fir. As is common with Douglas firs, the trunk was divided from just above ground level and two trunks thrust upward to the sky. Before long the Big Guy started knocking again, which was a great relief to me. Sage listened intently. We had both clearly heard the same sound. Three dull knocks coming from beneath the tree. Sage was intrigued, though he said nothing. He started looking around, then climbed down the bluff on the downhill side and made a circuit of the entire tree looking for an entrance to an underground lair. He didn't find one, nor any sign of trampling. When I had pointed out this absence of tracks to Lori and Adam they explained that the lair was reached through a series of tunnels running all through this part of the forest with its entrance probably down by the creek about a hundred yards distant. Sage carried on with his inspection of the site, looking all round the tree and up to the top branches, while I attended to the hair traps. After about five minutes he came over and said in a quiet voice, ‘I have an alternative hypothesis,’ and directed my gaze up the two parallel trunks.
Fifty feet above the base, but still nowhere near the top, a large side branch from the left trunk had grown over to the other so that they were touching. He got out his binoculars and showed me how the branch was embedded in the trunk so thoroughly that they were in close contact. The ingrowing branch had worn a channel in the trunk, which I could see through binoculars had been polished smooth. Sage's alternative hypothesis was that when the trunks moved in the wind they slid or rather jerked across this tight junction, making the knocking sound. This was relayed down the tree and amplified by the hollow trunk near the base. The sounds appeared to be coming from under the tree, but they actually originated fifty feet higher up.
Sage thought his hypothesis could also explain the changes as the day progressed. At that latitude and in otherwise calm periods, the desert to the east of the Cascades heats up as the day wears on. As it does so it draws air from the ocean inland across the mountains. In the mornings there is very little wind. This was Sage's explanation for the lack of knocking early in the day, which Lori put down to the Big Guy being asleep. She had noticed that the knocking grew louder and louder throughout the late morning and into the early afternoon. Sage's explanation was that as the wind increased through the day, though barely noticeable at ground level, it moved the tops of the Douglas fir and drew the branch across the trunk lower down. The more wind, the more frequent and the louder the Big Guy's knocking became. When it reached a certain speed the embedded branch slid continuously against the opposite trunk and the growling began.
Sage's hypothesis was testable. If the branch were sawn off, the knocking should stop. I am sure we could have arranged that, but as with many aspects of the project, I needed to avoid going off at a tangent. If Lori wants to silence the Big Guy once and for all, she knows what she has to do.
As I drove away down to Oregon, after thanking Sage for his brilliant analysis, I reflected on my own reaction to the Big Guy. From the moment I heard the first knocking in March, I had become more and more convinced that there was a large animal under the tree. Lori's explanation for the quiet mornings and noisy afternoons seemed entirely reasonable. I even began to believe that the Big Guy was jealous of Adam and wanted Lori for himself. I was rapidly losing the scientific detachment I thought I had and was well on the way to becoming a true believer myself. Thank goodness I asked Sage for a second opinion.
Back in Ashland, when I looked at the short hairs caught on the traps set near the apples and the Hershey bars, they were clearly from deer, with their characteristically frothy medullas. And what of the three glossy sasquatch hairs which would at last identify the sasquatch and set me on the road for the Nobel Prize? As I unwrapped the covering from the Gorilla Tape, the three short hairs became a single long one, dark blond and shiny. Just like Lori's, in fact.
26
The Russians
As we've seen earlier in the book, when it comes to yetis, the Russians do things differently. There is structure to their investigations. Ever since the Snowman Commission was established in 1958, ‘hominology’, the Russian term for anomalous primate research, has been a recognised scientific discipline. Although the Commission enjoyed only a very brief life before being dismantled by the Soviet government, its enduring legacy is that hominology has never had to struggle for intellectual acceptance as it has done in the West. Astonishingly, three of the original investigators are still active, meeting once a month in Moscow's Darwin Museum just as they have for the past forty years. It was my good fortune that these eminent gentlemen had responded to the press announcement of the Oxford-Lausanne project and were among the first to send me hair samples for DNA analysis. I travelled to Moscow to meet them and hear more about their research in general and the samples in particular. Fortunately, all three speak good English, though I did arrange to have a translator present just in case.
After I gave a short seminar on my project to their monthly meeting, I was excited to sit down with the trio: Igor Burtsev, Dmitri Bayanov and Michael Trachtengerts, who between them have amassed well over hundred years of cryptozoological research. Each has written books on hominology, copies of which they kindly presented to me to take home. I have had to edit the interviews a little. Despite their good command of English, which I had no trouble following as the spoken word, the language difference makes a verbatim account too disjointed. I began by asking Michael Trachtengerts about how he first became interested in yetis. He was quick to correct me, with twinkling eyes and a broad smile that never left his face.
‘Not yetis, almastys. That is what we call these creatures in Russia. I liked to read about nature and about wild people but what really started me off was when the Patterson-Gimlin film was shown in Moscow in 1975. I lived then near the Polytechnical Museum and saw a notice about this film, so I bought a ticket. When I saw the film, I had at once the sense it was not fake. That is when I wondered if the tales and stories about similar creatures from all over the USSR might have a real foundation. I liked to spend much of my spare time travelling, usually by canoe going for a month or so to the remote rivers of Siberia or in the eastern part of Europe. I heard very interesting stories that seemed to be incredible at first. I started to write up these stories and collect them to publish as books, but after a while I began to try to look for more evidence. I bought a large camera with a 500mm telephoto lens and taught myself how to make footprint casts. I wasn't very lucky. Once I joined an expedition to the Pamir Mountains. We looked around, and I was carrying my heavy camera, but we saw nothing and made camp. An hour later another group came back and said they had seen an almasty not far away, and it was jumping from one rock to another.’
I asked Michael whether he had ever seen an almasty during his almost forty years of research.
‘No, I am unhappy to say. No, I see only footsteps. I see almastys only in the tales people tell me, that they saw such creatures and even held them in their own hands. I have spoken to at least a hundred people who have seen almasty, mostly in the Caucasus or the Pamirs, but sometimes in other regions. Almastys live everywhere, but they are rare. But maybe I am just unlucky. I spent a lot of time in the woods but I have never even seen a bear, even though once my friends saw one just behind me. I saw a lot of footsteps of bears in my village, where I have a summer house, and a lot of footsteps of bears every time I go to forest for mushrooms, for berries and so on. But I have never seen one. But it means that just because I have not seen an almasty that they do not exist. I know bears exist of course, but I have never seen one.’
I asked Michael to tell me more about the four hair samples he had kindly donated to the project. The first thing I found out was that he had not collected them himself, which always extends what forensics experts call ‘the chain of custody’. Michael was aware of this shortcoming, but did know all about the samples and where they had come from.
‘Two of the samples I sent you came from the expeditions to the Caucasus by Marie-Jeanne Koffman in the 1970s. They were caught in bushes close to almasty footprints. The third sample also came from the Caucasus, but was collected later, in 1994.
‘The final sample came from a very distant place, from Kargapol in the Archangel district in the far northwest of Russia and it has a very interesting history. It was in January in a severe winter. There were military barracks there and some creatures were spotted around this place by a hunter. He saw footsteps of such creatures in the snow and was quite afraid to go into the woods. He followed the tracks until they ended by the wall of the soldiers’ barracks. So he thought that the almastys might have gone onto the roof and even into the loft to escape the severe frost.
‘This was true because later that night two of the creatures, an adult and a child, went inside the barracks, perhaps for the warmth, perhaps to drink from the soldiers’ drinking vessels. It was midnight. The older creature just was sitting, waving his hands in front of him to make the soldiers keep quiet. And one of the soldiers, the strongest perhaps, tried to take him out but when he went up to the creature he fainted through fright or something else, maybe the smell, who knows. Then the creature with the child went out of barracks and crossed the parade ground and disappeared. There were about thirty soldiers who saw the creatures and they describe them in quite a lot of detail. The larger one was about eight feet tall and the child was about three feet. They were a brown-greyish colour, and they were not afraid at all. I suppose that they had been to the soldiers' camp several times before because they were familiar with what was inside. The soldiers were very afraid because they never saw such creatures before. But they were from Central Asia and they knew about similar creatures in their native land, so they understand what it was they saw. The soldiers found a bunch of hair on the chair where the grown-up almasty had been sitting, and this is what I sent to you.’
