Where to Find Bigfoot

I was standing around at the downtown cafe where amateur poets gather each week to recount their lives in verse last night when I was approached by someone who'd been told I could show him Bigfoot. Naturally I told him I could, but that it wouldn't be easy, nor would success be guaranteed on a first attempt. But I did assure him that I could take him to places where his chances of spotting a gargantuan primate were greater than in downtown Sacramento.

Skeptics remind us that, without specific forensic evidence, in the form of bones, scat, hair, or something else that could be touched, measured and assayed in terms of DNA structure, there is little (beyond plaster casts of otherwise inexplicable tracks) that could be called proof of Bigfoot's existence. Using this standard, however, the real question is not whether such animals have ever existed, but whether they have managed to survive this deep into the industrial age. Paleontologists have long known of just such a primate, dubbed australopithecus giganticus. The fossils recovered so far provide adequate scientific evidence that massive primates have existed-all that remains is to find bones of more contemporary origin.

While our own branch of the primate line has shown itself to be a champion in terms of reproduction, we have yet to prove that the strategy of infinite multiplication is either wise or sustainable. In fact, all evidence of late has shown us that adjustments to the strategy are in order and the sooner the better. The idea that a large, reclusive primate might have wandered in another evolutionary direction, based on small families and wide dispersal (common enough among large predators and scavengers), is hardly revolutionary. In fact, the 2004 discovery of homo floriensis, the diminutive primate whose existence, firmly established in folklore, had lacked scientific foundation despite a century of intensive archaeological and anthropological study, shows us, if nothing else, how incomplete our knowledge is.

The rainy, forested coast, I explained, is where you will find bigfoot if you care to. From roughly the Gualala river north to British Columbia, in the Coast Range and the Cascades, anywhere remote enough to provide insulating cover is a likely place. This is where the tracks have been found and the folklore insists strange wild mannish creatures roam, doing all they can to remain hidden, for reasons any mammal can deduce instantly. Before the invasion by ranchers, loggers and road-builders, the misty coastal woods were a rich source of protein with legendary salmon runs in literally every stream, along with natural foodstuffs abundant enough to sustain human populations for at least 10,000 years. Acorns, roots, bulbs, berries, and greens could be found on every slope and level place; a larder that could scarcely be exhausted except by decades of determined effort.

Even now, a resourceful naturalist can eke out an existence without resort to commercial sources, but it's a much more difficult proposition now than it was a century ago.

Bigfoot, if he is still around, is fighting for survival much as the California condor is. In past centuries the condor lived off the carcasses of deceased ungulates, which may have never been especially plentiful given the competition offered by wolves, bears, eagles and other large, obstinate creatures dependent on the offal and detritus of grazing herds. Only when the fences went up and the carcasses began to be poisoned by lead, or situated alongside dangerous highways, or deliberately loaded with poisons meant for wolves, coyotes, etc., did the condor go into serious decline, a situation which has left the giant scavengers on the brink of extinction.

Bigfoot, hiding out, is obviously under the same sort of threat. Our spreading civilization has either purposefully or incidentally destroyed animals thought to be impervious to such depredations, from the passenger pigeon to the American bison. That we could threaten a species given to making itself scarce in the first place is hardly speculative; in fact it is the way we do things.

All that aside, and despite the obvious hoaxes perpetrated in recent decades, those of us disposed toward rooting for the underdog position remain steadfast in our hope, (the word belief here carries a religious connotation entirely out of place in this discussion), that Bigfoot is still out there somewhere, wisely avoiding contact by retreating to ever-diminishing areas of wild land.

Thus I confidently promise anyone who asks that, given time, I can show them where Bigfoot lives and, with patience and luck, can actually find one. Having never seen the animal myself is a deficiency I attribute to the fact that, when I am in the woods I am generally occupied with other matters. Finding Bigfoot requires a level of attention to detail we rarely have time or the opportunity to exercise.

When Ishi finally succumbed to the sheer loneliness of being the last "wild" Indian in California and was installed as a living museum exhibit in Berkeley, he generously shared his hunting tactics and procedures with the anthropologists. They were struck by his intimate knowledge of the Yuba river country, first of all. None of it was strange to him, who had spent a lifetime not only getting to know every acorn tree and patch of nutritious bulbs on his home range. Moreover, his way of hunting was sympathetic rather than hostile. He moved slowly, sniffed the air, listened and watched with a level of attentiveness that the scientists could hardly believe. His hunting tools were drawn directly from the landscape, and fashioned with an eye toward their harmonious function: the bowstring silent as an owl's wing, the arrows of hazelwood, fletched with local feathers, everything directed toward achieving an ever-increasing level of intimacy with the environment, in contrast with the warlike stance of white hunters who depended upon ambush, hounds, and superior firepower as they worked to eliminated the wolf and grizzly from California and all but extinguished elk from the west coast. More resilient animals like deer and black beer were hunted with a passionate determination, both for private use and for the market. Ducks and geese were decimated, salmon were harvested like beets in a field, with little thought given to the next generation.

For Ishi, the matter was different. He was a confirmed eater of meat, but on a different scale; a scale which had proven over long centuries to be both sensible and sustainable, and required not just acute attention to every detail, but the understanding that whatever he took he would eventually be obliged to return.

Lacking Ishi's training, the best a modern white man can do under the circumstances is try to be quiet, keep foreign odors under control, and not soil the campsite with plastic wrappers and beer cans. To really see what's out there it becomes necessary to translate oneself from a barely-conscious suburbanite into an animal aware of its own surroundings, a trick any dog can perform without much practice, but which obviously requires a great deal of effort for someone trained from infancy to ignore all signs of life while obsessively working to accumulate consumer goods.

Two weeks in the woods, with minimally invasive trappings, ought to be a good beginning for this type of hunt, but success at such an enterprise could easily require two or more years of diligent effort, a luxury open to few of us.

The fact that all manner of cranks and charlatans persist in doomed efforts, sometimes under the aegis of a psuedo-scholarly discipline called cryptozoology, to prove to the uninterested masses that Bigfoot exists should hardly be accepted as proof that he doesn't. And there's good reason to believe that we don't deserve this proof even if it is out there.

But if a small class of people can develop a more sympathetic approach to wilderness exploration, perhaps discovering in the process certain things about themselves that lead to broadly benign patterns of behavior, it can only help the situation.

In the final analysis, it is indeed doubtful that anyone alive will ever be able to definitively prove that Bigfoot actually is out there. But I don't blame the wild creature for this, though he might go to great lengths to prevent this discovery. Rather, as Ishi might explain if he were around to, we probably don't deserve the privilege of making this discovery. At least not until we can learn what he so vainly tried to share with us.