What We Missed on Nootka

by Danielle Clarke (Canada)

I didn't expect to find Canada

“Yeah, but did you see . . . anything else?” “What . . . like . . . sasquatches?” I could feel my skin raise, my cheeks flush. I was on the bus from town to the city, talking with a stranger about a trip I’d hiked a few years back, a few years removed from writing it now: you don’t tend to forget those trips that hit hard, leave you black and blue, but looking forward to the next time. It had been my first multi-day hiking/camping trip, and I was excited to talk about how days before the trip our group got together and hunted bullfrogs by headlamp and pocketknife near Parksville, B.C. We stripped the legs, and brought them down hours of concrete and dirt road to get to the west coast. Sizzling legs over the campfire until the toes curled over the edges of the skillet, we shared our last night in Tahsis, on Vancouver Island, AKA The Hawaii of Canada, AKA Ape Island. The next morning our hired boat took us and our gear away from the long-gone ruins of the old cannery, past otters and endless trees, to the north end of Nootka Island, much smaller than the one we called home. I told the bus rider about us walking through the rusted remains of an old beached ship in the sand, over sharp coastal rock face, machete bush whacking (not the lollygaggers like me, but the ones that actually knew the route). How we trudged through swamp, and more bush, across tidal flats, and sloping pebbled beaches. I told him about how the dog we brought had been raised in a dump on the prairies and ran after the first black bear we encountered on the beach, until an eagle distracted him, and he became an on-leash dog for the rest of the trip. We passed more eagles, and cached our bags in the trees just tall enough to be above bear height, and saw orcas near the shore at sunset from our campsite one night. We passed worn signs warning about cougars, but were lucky enough to not see any. I told him about how the ones that had done this trip before had woken to wolf tracks one morning, and about how much I struggled and was barely strong enough to climb the ropes up a steep section, but that somehow, years before, my cousin and his wife had done this trip with their small children. I thought I could shock him with talk about how we passed a spot that used to house a shrine containing human remains. At the end of the hike, in the church at Friendly Cove, a newspaper clipping spoke of the Yuquot Whalers’ Shrine, which now sits in the basement of a New York Museum (American Museum of Natural History), occasionally displayed, and in indefinite limbo to be returned and the bones to be laid to rest (Mowachaht/Muchalaht First Nations). The small church, few carved poles facing the sea, and handful of people felt like culture shock, distant from the mere days we spent with only each other, and the odd sound of a chainsaw, somewhere deep in the trees. By the time we were back on the boat, I was aching, blistered, and had shins black and blue from always taking the low-road: when in doubt, crouch and crawl over things that you don’t want to fall onto with your body weight plus the weight of your tent, sleeping bag, sleeping mat, food, clothes, raingear and anything else you were foolish enough to over-pack. But I got chills when this stranger alluded to there being something, more, something that I clearly missed, and hadn’t known to be looking for. “Sasquatches? Well yeah, but no. I mean . . . I heard there’s a . . . witch, up at the north end of the island. “Oh. Yeah, no, we didn’t see a witch.” As sad as I was to miss a cryptid, I already lived near Victoria, an internationally-known witch and occult hotbed, so I didn’t feel that I’d missed too much. Or maybe she didn’t miss us.