Skookum
“You’ve really done it now, dumbass,” I said to myself as I lay broken and bloodied on a desolate riverbank near Mount Rainier, Washington. “You killed yourself.”
All those years of pursuing that damn beast, chronically infected with tunnel vision as I focused solely on that one passion and said to hell with everything else, friends and family included. I guess it might be hard to rein in a passion stemming from childhood, but God, how could I let it get so out of control?
Karma really is a bitch, ain’t it?
Before I begin my story, you should know that I am descended from the Chinook peoples of the Pacific Northwest (specifically the Wasco-Wishram tribe on my mother’s side), and there is a certain word historically used by those peoples that you should know about. That word is Skookum. It has various meanings, but it is most often used as a verb meaning to be able or an adjective meaning able, strong, big, genuine, reliable, or monstrous. Thus we have English phrases like “He’s a Skookum guy,” as in solid and trustworthy, or “We need somebody who’s Skookum” as in big and strong.
But among some parts of this culture, there is another meaning for “Skookum” that has attached itself to a particular animal in this country that is in many ways larger than life. It is a legendary beast that has persisted in the various legends of the many different tribes and races of people who have lived around the North American woodlands for thousands of years, even though it, by all rights, should not exist. The names for it are many: ts’emekwes, stiyaha, kwikwiyai, nuk-luk, sesquac. But of course, most people today know this creature as Bigfoot.
My obsession began in my eighth year, during a family camping trip on the banks of the Columbia River. I had gone off to relieve myself in the bushes when a dark form suddenly emerged between a pair of hemlocks about a hundred feet away. If you’ve ever seen the infamous Frame 352 from the Patterson-Gimlin film, then you’ve seen pretty much exactly what I saw that day. This creature was six and a half feet tall, with black hair, a slightly conical cranium, and, most interesting of all, it had rather prominent breasts, just like Patterson and Gimlin’s subject. And she wasn’t alone either. The animal’s baby, itself only about a third the height of its mother, came toddling after her.
I wasn’t sure what to do. I didn’t want to attract attention because I didn’t know if the mother would see me as a threat and go all “mama bear” on my ass. Fortunately, when our beagle caught sight of our visitors and started a barking fit, the mother picked the kid up, plopped him on her shoulders, and faded back into the trees from where she came.
When I told my parents about what I had just seen, they didn’t immediately dismiss my story as just one of those imaginative flights of fancy that children are often susceptible to. They didn’t say they didn’t believe me, but the look in their eyes betrayed them. A few years later, when I brought up the subject again to my dad while on a hunting trip, he said that all the scientific evidence did not support the existence of a population of great apes roaming undiscovered in any region of North America and that I had probably just seen a black bear and her cub.
“Oh, yeah?” I retorted. “If that was just a bear, then why didn’t she attack me just for being too close to her cub?”
“That’s only grizzly bear moms, son,” he responded. “Black bears are small enough that they can climb trees. That’s how they prefer to protect their young.”
Even though I was positive that was no black bear I saw, I knew I wasn’t going to do myself any favors by continuing to argue my case, so I kept quiet about it. Ten years passed. I got through high school and most of my tenure at the University of Washington without thinking much of the hairy beast.
But then, during my third year at college, it happened again. I was studying for a degree in forestry then and attending a field trip to Olympic National Park. We had camped out on Hurricane Ridge Road, and my best friend Kyle and I were surveying the pines on a peak opposite from where I was standing when we caught a glimpse of another such creature traversing a clearing. I wasn’t able to see it as clearly as the last time, but it was clear that the legendary Bigfoot had shambled into my life again.
From then on, things were never the same. I had Bigfoot fever. I was able to keep it under control for a few more years, enough to complete my degree and start a family. But Kyle and I kept track of where the sightings happened. Kyle, too, had believed in the legend even before the Hurricane Ridge sighting, and he encouraged me to join him on his hunts. It was fun for a little while. But I always had a stubborn streak, and my wife and parents telling me that these hunts were silly wastes of time only fueled my desire to prove them wrong. My obsession soon grew to the point that even Kyle started telling me I was overdoing it. My furious pursuit led to me getting fired from three jobs and arrested twice for trespassing.
As I mentioned earlier, my mother was a member of one of the Chinook tribes, and it was from her that I learned of Skookum. She dropped this word on me during one of her lectures, lambasting me for not being there for my son, who was five years old at that time.
“When a man is considered reliable and trustworthy, people say ‘He’s a Skookum guy,’” she told me, “and you have most certainly proved yourself to be anything but.”
“God damn it, ma,” I shouted at her over the phone, “I know these things exist. You just wait. One of these days, I’ll show you all.”
It was three days later, about a week before Thanksgiving, that karma finally caught up to me. Kyle and I had driven out to Mount Rainier National Park to investigate a recent sighting, which a couple of park rangers reported while they were helping to prepare the park for its closure over the winter. I had decided to recon the area near the sighting location alone while Kyle took a nap back at the motel room, despite the weatherman’s warnings of a snowstorm descending upon the region. He had tried to convince me to go home the previous evening, that my family needed me more than he did. But I was having none of it.
The sighting occurred at the park’s famous Christine Falls, a two-tiered sixty-nine-foot waterfall on Van Trump Creek, running southwest of the mountain. Around four o’clock, as the sun was setting, I was traversing the stone bridge that runs over the falls when I saw a black form emerging from the forest above the upper tier. Excited, I crept toward the location, hoping to sneak up on what I thought was the Bigfoot specimen. Unfortunately, by the time I was able to see the animal clearly, I realized that, this time, it was a black bear.
The bear roared at me, and I was practically frozen with terror. I tried to remember the procedure for dealing with a bear standing no more than three yards away. I figured that maybe I could raise my arms and yell at it to scare it away. But then I heard a small bleating sound behind me. I didn’t need to turn around to realize that I was standing directly between a mother and her cubs.
A mother bear couldn’t very well protect her cubs if a possible threat was directly between them, so I guess the attack was inevitable. She slashed me across the torso, leaving deep, diagonal wounds across my stomach and chest. I fell backward and drew my legs up to my chest to protect my vital organs. She tore up my back as I reached for what I thought was the only thing that could save me: my flare gun. I whipped it around and sent a flash of red light sailing over her head. Startled, she jumped back, leaving me time to make a break for it. I could have easily shot her with the flare, but I didn’t want to punish her for acting on her motherly instincts. Luckily for me, the creek was only a few yards away. I raced back to the bridge, jumped, and landed in the creek about ten feet below.
I landed rather awkwardly on my left leg and heard a sickening crack as it broke. Unfortunately, I was right above the waterfall’s second-tier overhang when I landed in the creek. I couldn’t focus on anything but the pain, so I went over the edge and plunged 37 feet into the erosion pool below. I banged my other leg on the rocks on the way down, which also broke. I swam over to the pool’s edge opposite where I fell in and pulled myself ashore. In addition to the broken legs, I was bleeding from a dozen wounds inflicted by the bear’s claws and soaking wet from the watery misadventure I had just suffered.
I wasn’t sure if any of the wounds were fatal, but that didn’t matter. It was November in the area that held the Guinness World Record for the snowiest place on Earth. On average, the temperatures around Mount Rainier in November are usually zero degrees Fahrenheit and can get as low as minus twenty. The night was bound to get cold, and I was bound to freeze to death if I couldn’t get to someplace warm. But I couldn’t very well use my legs to find such a place, and I’d lost the flare gun as I fell over the waterfall. I was still cursing myself for letting my ambitions get out of control, cursing Bigfoot for leading me on this path of destruction, and begging God to save me when I finally blacked out from the pain.
When I came to, it was a sight that I will never forget. The first thing I noticed was an orange glow. It filled me with warmth, and I thought some park rangers had probably stumbled upon me and lit a fire. But then the light moved away to reveal a face resembling a mix between a human and a great ape.
My breath caught in my throat. I stared directly into the face of the creature that had been my sole obsession since that camping trip twenty-two years ago. There, standing right over my prone body, was Bigfoot.
And he wasn’t alone. Through the thick snowfall, I saw four more standing behind him. From the looks of them, they were a mating pair with two youngsters, and the one standing over me seemed to be like a grandfather, with greyer hair and a more grizzled appearance.
But the most miraculous thing about these creatures was that the grandfather spoke something vaguely resembling human speech. The youngsters started acting restless, and the grandfather scolded them. His voice was very deep and guttural, and the language was like nothing I’d ever heard before or since.
But the strangest thing about all this is that the orange glow I woke up to emanated from the top of some rudimentary staff fashioned from a birch sapling. It seemed as if the grandfather was performing some sort of magic healing ritual on me, for I realized that my pain had dulled considerably.
I tried to speak to the grandfather, to ask him why he was helping me. But he held up a hand to silence me, then waved two fingers in front of my face. All at once a deep exhaustion came over me. As I drifted off to sleep, I heard the grandfather speaking in his guttural tone. Despite the rugged nature, his voice had a calming tone that seemed as if he was telling me, “Go to sleep now. Things will be alright in the morning.”
And they were. The anxiety over me being out so late finally got to Kyle around one in the morning. He found me and placed a frantic call to the park management. When I woke up the next morning, I was surrounded by rescue workers. All of a sudden, Kyle shot into view.
“Oh, thank God,” he said, “you’re all right.”
“Kyle, I’m lying on a riverbank with half my bones broken.”
“Yeah, but you’re alive. Dude, I’ve been worried sick about you. You didn’t come back last night, and I was worried you were out there freezing to death. The paramedics say you were lucky to survive this long.”
“Yeah,” I said, remembering the miraculous helping hand I’d received last night, “I guess I was.”
Kyle suddenly got up as if to leave. “Dude, the chopper’s coming. Guess I’d better get out of the way.”
“Kyle, wait,” I said. “No more ‘Squatching for me, alright?”
Kyle smiled at me and raised his hands in a facetious defensive pose. “Whatever you say, buddy.”
My road to recovery was rocky, but once I’d completed rehab, I settled down, got my marriage back on track, and mended my relationship with my parents and son. I finally put my forestry degree to good use, and now I work as a park ranger in Olympic.
Although my Bigfoot hunting days are behind me, I still often ponder the nature of the family that saved my life on that cold November day. What especially baffles me is the magic that “Gandalf,” as I call him, used to bring me back from the brink. How was he able to use it? Was he some holdover from the distant past of Native American shaman rituals? Is the entire species a legion of forest spirits tasked with the preservation of life? Probably the more important question is; why did they save my life? To this day, I cannot think of any good reason other than that the very human trait known as empathy is not exclusive to my species.
I have never told anyone about what really happened that night. It’s probably best that way. They would probably think I was going off the deep end again. And you know what? I’m okay with that. I finally got what I wanted, even if I don’t feel like I did anything to deserve that reward. Anyway, let me give some advice to all you Bigfoot hunters out there: if searching for these creatures and exploring the woods of this great country to find them is your hobby, then by all means, go out there and have an adventure. Just don’t let your inner Ahab get a hold of you.
Author’s Commentary
This is another story I composed for the same writing class that produced "The Course of Empires." This one is much more small scale, however, focusing on a man whose obsessions nearly get him killed but is ultimately redeemed in the end.
The story was written in response to a "magical realism" prompt, although I feel that I missed the point a little. Magical realism is about using magical elements to accentuate aspects of reality and are treated mundanely, whereas here the magical elements are very much treated in a fantastic manner. Either way, I still think it turned out pretty good. Let me know what you think!
