The Complete Guide To Mysterious Beings - Galaksija

NINE
BIG FEET AND LITTLE BRAINS
Vancouver Island, British Columbia, lies just across the Canadian border, north of Seattle,
Washington. Unidentified hairy beings live there. The Indians have always insisted that the heavily
forested sections of the island were inhabited by ”Wild Men of the Woods.” A lumberman named
Mike King reported stumbling across one of the creatures there in 1901. He said that he saw it
squatting by a creek, carefully washing off some roots and stacking them in two neat piles. He
started to raise his rifle but felt that he was looking at something human – too human to be shot at,
even though it was large and covered with reddish brown fur. It finally jumped up and ran off like a
man.
”His arms were peculiarly long and used freely in climbing and bush-burning,” Mr. King observed.
After the thing had departed, King went down to the creek and looked at its tracks. He saw evidence
of a ”human foot but with phenomenally long and spreading toes.”
British Columbia has produced many ABSM reports (up in Canada the thing is called by the old
Indian name, ”Sasquatch”). Even Theodore Roosevelt, the great outdoorsman who later became
President, recorded a hairy monster story in a book he published in 1893, Wilderness Hunter.
Roosevelt repeated a tale told to him by a trapped named Bauman. Essentially, Bauman and another
man had been camping at the head of Wisdom River when something tall, walking on two legs, had
invaded their camp and smashed their gear. At night they could hear ”a harsh, grating, long-drawn
moan, a peculiarly sinister sound.” Bauman left the camp one day and when he returned he found
his friend dead.
”The body was still warm,” Roosevelt wrote, ”but the neck was broken, while there were four great
fang marks in the throat. The footprints of the unknown beast-creature, printed deep in the soft soil,
told the whole story... It had not eaten the body, but apparently had romped and gambolled round it
in uncouth, ferocious glee, occasionally rolling over and over it; and had then fled back into the
soundless depths of the woods.”
Fortunately there aren't too many stories of witnesses suffering physical harm from their meetings
with the hairy people. But there are too many to ignore. In the next chapter we will summarize a
large number of North American sightings, including incidents involving attacks and injuries.
In 1965 John W. Green, editor of the Agassiz, British Columbia Advance, compiled a list of 120
Sasquatch incidents ranging from sightings and attacks to the discovery of tracks and various
strange occurrences. In 1942, according to Green, a man in Katz, British Columbia, had his arm
broken by a hairy giant while picking berries. Going further back, there was a story that two
mountain hunters in British Columbia had been killed by something that ”walked on two legs” in
the early 1800s. Back in 1907 Indians at Bishop's Cove, British Columbia, were reportedly terrified
by a monkey-like wild man that dug clams at night and ”howled.” In 1945 a hairy giant chased one
Henry Charlie for nearly a mile near Harrison Mills, British Columbia.
Another member of our monster hunting brigade, Lee Trippett, an electronics engineer in Eugene,
Oregon, has collected forty-one ABSM incidents from the states of Washington, Oregon and
California, alone. In California the creature has been dubbed ”Big Foot” for obvious reasons.
So right there we have 161 events. Obviously we cannot list them all. A columnist for the San
Francisco Chronicle, George Draper, has written many articles about ”Big Foot,” and he, too, has
come up with more items for our grotesque glossary. Still another researcher, Roger Patterson of
Yakima, Washington, has built up an enormous file of little-known sightings and has acquired a
collection of plaster casts of ”Big Foot” footprints and other kinds of tangible evidence, including
photographs. An anthropologist in Illinois, Loren Coleman, has yet another collection of reports.
This mass of evidence contains all kinds of oddities, such as the following letter written in Katz,
British Columbia, on April 23, 1957, by someone who signed the name ”Mary Joe.” The letter was
mailed to the village clerk at Harrison Hot Springs in the heart of Sasquatch country. It was written