Bella Coola really is a wild place. WILD. Only last week the rumour circulated that a couple had been surrounded by wolves while walking their dogs on the Lost Lake Trail. And every now and again a dog goes missing, victim to another Cougar (Mountain Lion). In fact at the end of our street is 'Cougar Hill'. And it isn't unknown to have Grizzlies wandering down our road in the early hours of the morning. (I'm just going to check on the dog outside to make sure she hasn't been snatched...)
(The dog's still there). The wildest talk here is of the Sasquatch, known also by the native name which is the 'Boq' (boc), relative of the Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas and first cousin of the Bigfoot of California. If someone here hasn't had a personal encounter someone they know has. Sometimes it's a sighting, other times it could be a large unidentified foot print seen while hiking (I can claim to have seen such), in some cases people have seen nests and unidentified scratch marks high on trees and the rest of the stories involve rocks being thrown from the forest. Unidentified sounds can also be heard deep in the forests and in one case there was even a story of a man being kidnapped by a family of Sasquatch!
I mean really. Seriously? Sasquatch. Really? Well, I wouldn't believe it but these stories are coming from upstanding pillars of the community. The other day I went for a dog walk with a good friend. She has a 7 month old baby and seemed a bit on edge...I would describe my friend to be pretty solid but anytime a twig snapped she spun on her heels. It was a windy day. Cougars maybe? Bears? The dogs would bark, run into the bush and...nothing. Then we started sharing bear stories. We would walk past a creek and a story of a bear the size of a truck would be discussed. I started to get a bit twitchy. It's that not being top of the food chain thing.
And then I turned and asked her if she believed in Sasquatch. She looked at me with a cold stare as if to say, 'Oh yeah, are you kidding me, of course I do!' Then she explained to me that she had seen a 'shape shifter' (Sisiutl). Under the porch late at night she had seen two glowing red eyes. She turned to her husband and he too had seen the eyes...they backed off into the house. Several native representations of the creature depict a long, serpentine animal with small forelimbs and a dog like or crocodilian head. Pacific Northwest tribes were convinced of the animal's existence. It seem my friends share their belief.
Meanwhile I have learnt that local legend has it that the Sasquatch hang around in the Bella Coola estuary. The estuary is a beautiful place to walk the dog but I never see anyone else on any of the trails. Now I know why.
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