The Long Stride of Bigfoot from Humboldt County to the World, or…
The Ape-Man Hoaxing the Hoaxers
“There were giants on the earth in those days”. (Genesis 6:4)“In the dark of late night/early morning something came down the hillside up from my cabin. Sitting smoking out on my enclosed porch I thought at first it was just another deer coming to eat my lettuce and chili peppers. I heard what sounded like a tripping sound in the brush, some big thing making a crack and crunch in the underbrush, followed three distinct bipedal "whump, whump, WHUMP" footfalls, very heavy, thunderous things, to the degree that I could feel the concrete under my feet on the porch firmly vibrate 40 yards away. This was followed by a heavy crash of something falling into the brush below. This was no bear, sure wasn’t a deer—I’ve seen and heard these critters up on my road. And if human it would have had to have been an incredibly big or obese man. And why would a big human be out walking around in the dark, dead end, dirt road mountainside, middle-of-nowhere woods at nearly three in the morning? I tried to observe it, but it crept back into the woods a little ways beyond the porch light, and then did not move at all. It did not flee further. My flashlight was inadequate in power and batteries to pursue or see it. I stood there at the edge of the woods for about 15 minutes waiting for any sound or sign. None. I didn't want to pursue and scare it off, or get eaten by whatever it was. Then I decided to duck back into the cabin where I could continue listening and looking without being seen. I knew it was still out there. Once inside for a few moments I heard movement, as the thing went down into the neighboring vacant house’s yard. Through the open window I heard two under-the-breath grunting sounds, something like a bear’s growl crossed with a pig’s snort. Quickly outside I was once again unable to spot anything. The next day I saw a depression in the weeds where the thing had fallen down. There were two further depressions in the plants that looked a lot like big footprints. I could see some metal pipe and wooden construction debris under the herbage where the thing had apparently gotten hung up. Whatever it was I cannot say; and whatever it was it was very big, and incredibly sly. It escaped into the dark of night without another trace, but its impact upon the ground and upon me was undeniable. For what it’s worth, it FELT like a sasquatch.” **
One of the world’s great and last mysteries exists right here, in our Humboldt-area backyard. (The story above occurred on my own hillside on the edge of Willow Creek). With a total county population of less than a small- to medium-sized city elsewhere in California, Humboldt County has a whole lot of open land. Add to this the even more rural surrounding counties to the north and east and you’ve got a veritable lost world, the central heart of which is covered by the Six Rivers National Forest. This land, with its endless convoluted canyons and forests, is habitat for the mystery. Many search the world over for this creature and its hominoid (or hominid?) relatives, but out here in Willow Creek we see Bigfoot every day. It can’t be avoided, with all the statues, a Duane Flatmo mural going up on the new hardware store building, even a “Bigfoot Podiatry” in the phone book.
Is this a myth? A chamber of commerce promotional campaign? A misperception of common animals? Fear of monsters resulting in anthropomorphic projection? A need for mystery or a bogeyman? Does it come from primatologist John Napier’s “Goblin Universe?” Or could it be… real? This is a creature that has never left a skeleton behind that has been found by humans, save perhaps for some fossilized teeth and a few jawbones of a possible Bigfoot antecedent (Gigantopithecus blacki) found over in Asia. And yet reports abound. It is seen, but nearly always fleetingly, often only out of the corner of the eye, or as a blur among blurry trees in a hurried photograph. Most consider it a popular delusion, the product of wild speculation and equally feral expectations. It leaves footprints, and large, unidentifiable scat, complexly constructed nests, and a few stray “unknown primate” hairs. And yet stranger, some believe it is associated with UFOs or comes from ancient Lemuria. Others, perhaps the most sensible (and surely the most informed) of them all, argue that it is simply an unverified apelike or manlike primate species living in North America.
But wait. Everyone knows Bigfoot (“Sasquatch”) is fake, right? Did you hear about the Georgia Gorilla hoax?—a frozen fur suit! And what about that Patterson-Gimlin film? The guy who wore the ape suit confessed, didn’t he? And then there’s those footprints from around Willow Creek, Orleans and Hoopa—the newspapers said “Bigfoot is Dead” when Ray Wallace passed and his family came out to the press with those false wooden strap-on feet, right? And if Bigfoot is some kind of monster, wouldn’t he be dead by now? I mean, there’s just one of them, right? And what about all those captured “Bigfeet” that suddenly disappear, like that one up in Happy Camp?
These are the common questions and assumptions one usually hears. They are repeated ad nauseum by the uninformed, whose sole frame of reference is normally determined by sensationalized television and newspaper stories. But look closer, study that 1967 Bluff Creek film until it becomes hypnotic, read 40 books on the subject like this writer has, talk to the endless witnesses and the dedicated and serious Bigfoot hunters, and you’ll begin, perhaps, to see a different story—the full story, the evidence, and not just the crazy media hype.
BIGFOOT AT “FIFTY”
“Bigfoot” was “born,” at least as a cultural phenomenon, in Humboldt County. On October 5th, 1958, the Humboldt Times (precursor to the Times-Standard) ran with a story of giant footprints having been found and cast by a forest road-building crew along the northern border of Humboldt County, up on Bluff Creek. Catskinner Jerry Crew, of Salyer, was a churchgoing “stand-up guy,” according to Willow Creek scion and Bigfoot spokesman, Al Hodgson. Following days of strange events such as fuel barrels being tossed off cliffs and bales of heavy one-inch wire and 700 pound spare tractor tires mysteriously being moved around, Crew cast plaster molds of footprints he found around his tractor as he cut the new course up into virgin timbered mountains. On a trip to Eureka he brought a 16-inch example which was viewed by Andrew Genzoli of the Humboldt Times. The rest is history; but what IS that history? There are so many convolutions, competing theories, and conspiratorial hoaxings that the plot begins to enter spy-versus-spy territory.
This year is the 50th anniversary of that event, but Sasquatch has been around much longer than that. The term, “bigfoot,” has been in folk and journalistic use since the 1920s. In 1929 anthropologist J.W. Burns, working with Northwest and Canadian Native tribes, was the first to put forth the anglicized term, “sasquatch,” derived from the myriad names nearly every tribe from Alaska to California had for the creature. Newspaper stories about wildman creatures, called Whats-Its, Yahoos, Wooly Boogers, Skookums, Jabberwocks, Forest Devils, an infinite folkloric variety, date back to the 1840s, many remarkably consistent with reports of today. The legends go back to the dawn of human presence on the North American continent (or were brought over the land bridge from Asia), and were being recorded by European Americans as early a 986 A.D. story of Leif Erickson coming to New World and being met and attacked by a band of stone-throwing hairy giant man-like beasts.
Jerry Crew just happened to turn up in the Times at the right cultural moment, when the world was ripe for a new mystery, a new noble savage, a relief from the long-dragging wear of the Cold War. As the frontiers closed, and even space was being “conquered,” new symbols of the wild and natural were required. Though rooted in thousands of years of Native American lore (and experience), this Bigfoot business was a new thing to most of America and modern culture. It became the biggest fad since the Abominable Snowman. Few knew before that we had our own version of the ape-man right here in apparently unlikely California. When most think of California they thought of Los Angeles, Hollywood, San Francisco, not a wild, unsettled land.
The AP news wire picked up the story and it ran front page in papers around the world, carrying the moniker “Bigfoot” with it like a cultural virus. Films like Harry and the Hendersons and The Legend of Boggy Creek (or for that matter the wonderfully bad local masterpiece, “Ape Canyon,” by Jon Olsen), endless documentaries narrated by the likes of Leonard Nimoy, a Six-Million Dollar Man episode, “Messing with Sasquatch” beef jerky ads, a certain kind of monster trucks, Chewbacca, countless roadside statues, and a crafty angle on the tourist trade in Willow Creek ensued. So did countless jokes, hoaxes, pranks, scams, monstrous distortions, exaggerations, and delusions. But what is it out in the woods stirring up all this commotion? Can it be explained solely as human lunacy and pranksterism? Talk to the likes of old-timer, 90-year old Joe Ramos of Willow Creek, who was working in those mountains starting in 1955. It was a “hoax all the way through,” he says, and “It’s been a hoax since the Indians decided to pull the wool over the white man’s eyes.”
Do we discount the mundane and everyday reports coming from reliable people? Or do we disregard those Natives who still profess knowledge of the creatures? As sightings and reports occur on nearly every continent, surely not all could be done by jokers—a global hoaxing conspiracy? What about the ancient Indian rock paintings depicting huge hairy, man-like beings? And what of totem poles in Washington bearing sasquatches among other well known creatures? What of old Native taboos barring entrance to certain regions known to be the turf of the Giant Hairy Man (Bluff Creek being one of them)? Old miner’s reporting attacks by packs of gorillas? Likewise, what about the Bigfoot creatures associated with sightings UFOs along the Klamath and Trinity Rivers in 1975-76? What about the Hupa’s Little People? Kamoss? Is this all just an hallucinatory Jungian mass projection of the collective unconscious, a desire for a wild and mysterious revivification? And if so, what is this archetype? Can a myth leave footprints?
THE HOAXERS
One might scoff of late, in the wake of the hyperbolic media attention paid to the Georgia Gorilla hoax. Promoted by profit-seeking good old boys apparently led by Northern California’s notorious Tom Biscardi, this “bigfoot corpse” image spread over the internet and was trumpeted in a press conference covered by all the major networks. It turned out to be a Halloween costume with a hollow head, rubber feet, and some opossum guts tossed on its belly for gore appeal. The flap lasted all of a couple of weeks, but generated countless millions of web hits and, presumably, dollars.
Biscardi, with his Great American Bigfoot Research Organization--based north of San Francisco with a fleet of a Corvette, glitzy Hummer (that looks like it’s never been off-road), and other techno-gear—is always ready jump on the investigation when the reports come in. He aspires to be the go-to guy on Bigfoot, and P. T. Barnum-like, is always in the press barking out the freak show. His roots go way back to a close association with legendary hoaxer Ivan Marx in the early 1970s. Marx, maker of “The Legend of Bigfoot,” claimed to have filmed 700-pound sasquatches. These, it turned out, depicted Marx’s diminutive wife wearing an ape suit and absurdly prancing, awkwardly frolicking about in a mountain meadow.
In 1995 Biscardi rolled in to Happy Camp, up at the extreme north of the state, and set up “findingbigfoot.com,” a pay-for-view live cam site. He claimed that he knew exactly which cave Bigfoot was living in, and had the local witnesses to back him up. With a large camera on a pole, now the whole paying world could see the creature captured live on the internet! Unfortunately, there was no Bigfoot, no home cave, either. Word around Willow Creek had it that the “witnesses” were just jokers trying to drum up attention and tourism for their tiny, remote town. Biscardi pulled a classic bait-and switch, suddenly claiming that someone had captured a live Bigfoot in a nearby county, and he would reveal it to the world. Of course, the creature had been moved by the time he got there, and then disappeared altogether. One of those reporting the captured creature was a Marx family member. The paying web membership was left seriously wanting, and Biscardi was excoriated live on the Coast-to-Coast AM radio show; but no refunds were forthcoming.
Bluff Creek road project head contractor, Ray Wallace, was another man who tried to make a living from Bigfootology. Most first-hand accounts of the 1958 road project show that Wallace began his hoaxing after Jerry Crew and the road crew had already seen many instances of footprints. Strange sounds in the woods, and even some sightings of extra-large hairy humanoids occurred, and culverts, 700-pound spare tractor wheels, and heavy 1-inch wire coils were picked up and tossed into ravines. If one compares the “feet” revealed after his 2002 death by Wallace’s family it is easy to see their ungainly and amateurish hackings as fake. Working with a whittler named Rant Mullens, Wallace apparently laid claim to the hoaxing in order to keep his frightened crew from fleeing the job to escape the strange “guardian of the mountains.” Though he did not know Wallace or Crew, Joe Ramos was working in the Red Mountain and Blue Creek area just north of Bluff Creek. He claims similar mysterious and unexplainable vandalism, but also similar pastime fun had with print-making.
Though it is undeniable that some of the well known footprints found in famous Bigfoot books were made by Mr. Wallace, it is equally clear that he did not fake all of them, everywhere. And many of the footprints of his time display qualities of a much higher realism than found in the absurd, cartoonish Wallace and Mullens prints. Jeff Meldrum, an Idaho State University anthropological anatomist, observes fine skin detail and working physical features that vary over differing terrains and steps. Observable here are the signs of a working foot, or else an incredibly complex model with moving parts and adaptive anatomical structures. Jerry Crew observed the track line coming down steep hillsides, varying its mode of planting and stride on the ground, pressing so deeply into the soil that one scientist observer estimated the maker’s weight at around 800 pounds. Later attempts by a Wallace family member to replicate the “hoax” by trailing behind a pickup truck failed miserably.
A recent editorial in the Times-Standard (James Faulk, August 19 2008) again claims that the whole Bigfoot flap based on Genzoli’s story of 1958 was rooted in a hoax, despite much evidence to the contrary. In an email, Dr. Meldrum told me, “The problem is with those pesky facts: 1) Genzoli was quite convinced in the veracity of Crew's story as indicated by his surviving widow [researcher Daniel Perez interviewed her in 1995], and 2) there are those inconvenient tracks--not Ray Wallace's later and quite transparent carvings, but the very animated tracks. Many casts of those tracks are on display at the Willow Creek-China Flat Museum and have been examined by track experts such as myself." Recently, Meldrum was in Willow Creek doing high-resolution 3-D computer scans of the large collection at the museum. These prints display details that just could not have been created with uniform, flat, wooden stompers, what Meldrum calls the “transparent fakes” done by hoaxers. Obviously, hoaxing this complex was way beyond the capacity of Wallace, who ended his career operating out of a roadside trailer selling knick-knacks to gullible tourists, promulgating stories of UFOs and captured bigfoot creatures and films he could never produce for scrutiny in the real world.
Certainly the myth of Bigfoot lives. The obsessive cable news coverage of the Georgia event by CNN and their ilk proves this. But out in the hills, among those who have lived their lives in the remote mountains of inland Humboldt, Trinity, Del Norte and Siskiyou counties--even in my own backyard--there is regular evidence of something much more tangible and alive. If one looks past the craze, actually looks into the detailed reports, the mystery deepens. Despite all the hype and urban legend furor, Bigfoot is seen in the most mundane scenarios by ordinary people. In these reports the creature behaves like a perfectly normal biological creature, its lifestyle perfectly adapted to its environment—IF one can get over the misconceptions. It is a strange phenomenon, but one that fascinates the more one looks past the myth and considers the consistency and potency of the evidence and experience. Bigfoot hunters scour the forests with high-tech modern gadgetry, wood knocking, and howling in the night. Everyday folks and old-timers regularly come in to my Willow Creek bookstore to report sightings and weird occurrences. It’s a mixed bag. The Hairy One also attracts a lot of nuts.
IT’S WEIRDER OUT THERE THAN YOU THINK
It’s weird out there, he was telling me, this fellow (I’ll keep him anonymous) in my bookstore who’d been living up the hill from my location, in a treehouse, endeavoring to live, look, and smell like a Bigfoot. All the better to find one, he’d say. He’d come up to Willow Creek to seek the cryptid, leaving San Francisco and selling his possessions in order to obtain gear and photographic equipment. Just a few days earlier he had seen two “mermaid-creatures” and a variant form of the river-dwelling serpent the Hupa call Kamoss. This creature came downstream on Willow Creek at night towards his camp, its single eye glowing from within, without reflection, like a headlight. Could this have been a car coming down the nearby highway? He never did find Bigfoot, despite wintering in a tree, and left the area for more fertile Bigfoot fields up in Washington.
Yes, it is strange out there in the night when imaginations run wild. But there are other, much more sensible reports. We’ll keep these anonymous, too. A sane and sober father of two is out fishing at a local lake when he looks up to see an upright ape-like creature stalking the opposite shore. A family is driving home up Hwy. 96 when a large, hairy biped stands up along the side of the road and paces down into the forest. Another fellow sees one outside the Hupa-area dump. While out camping in the Trinity Alps area a fellow’s tent is pelted periodically for hours with small rocks hailing down from the forested hillside, and strange wood knocks ring out in the night. Unknown chatter and howls are heard off in the dark mountain distance. Where is the oddness here?
A local business owner’s father had the following experience. Early in the morning, arriving to open his shop, the life-long Willow Creeker heard something he had never heard in all his years out in the woods and hills. A loud howling, beastly yell, clearly not human but from no known animal, echoing off the canyon walls up from the river across Hwy. 299. This was strange, but he had a business to run. A short time later a government worker, either Forest Service or Fish and Game, came into his shop with an air of panic and wild-eyed excitement. Camping down on that same area of the river bar he had been awakened by the same ominous howl. Looking out his tent flap he saw a big hairy “creature,” walking along the bank. Walking? Yes, upright, walking, bigger than a man, and taller. at about seven feet. This was NO bear!
One customer told me that he had seen a family of Bigfoot (two large males, a female, and a juvenile) when he was a child back in the 1950s, at a Willow Creek area rural country dance. The several other kids at the dance, playing on the perimeter of the property, saw them, too. The creatures watched from the edge of the forest for a while, with obvious interest in what the playing human kids were doing. Nothing else happened. They just retreated slowly back into the woods. This fellow, a former logger seemed an utterly sensible and down to earth chap. It took much coaxing to get him to tell his story.
Quite more frequently someone tells of having seen a Bigfoot in their yard, perhaps eating from the blackberry bushes, seeing one crossing the road or a creek, or digging in a trash can. A woman working one of the forest fire lookout stations in the area is said to have seen a big hairy biped moving through some underbrush off Friday Ridge Road. This was after some footprints and a peculiar semi-woven nest made of bay tree leaves was found in the area. Sean Fries, and investigator out of Weaverville, was with his girlfriend up on Aikins Creek when they heard a noise in the brush. Not seeing anything, she took a photo, and upon getting the image on their laptop they noticed a strange brown form behind some trees. When enhanced digitally this form showed features that looked surprisingly like the head and upper torso of a humanoid creature. They returned to the spot and found that, when viewed from the same location and angle, the brown form was no longer there.
A recent book, “The Hoopa Project,” written by ex-cop, David Paulides, recounts dozens of encounters out on the reservation, the strangest of which has a woman meeting a Bigfoot out in her yard, talking to him (he only grunted back), and then leaving him a loaf of bread. These stories are so down to earth and every-day that one wonders, why would someone make them up? These are not exactly exaggerated “fish tales” nor folk legends. Sightings are occurring all the time out there. The Hoopa Project participants even signed quasi-legal affidavits declaring their veracity. A forensic artist was hired to do “crime scene” reconstructions of the creatures. They looked surprisingly… human, and generally quiet consistent.
Then there is the Patterson-Gimlin film, shot up on Bluff Creek in 1967. It has never been proven to be a hoax, and never convincingly replicated, though many doubt it. The supposed ape suit has never been produced for the public to see. Bob Heironimus, who claims to have been the man in the suit, could not even describe the route to the film site (he was more than 25 miles off course, about an hour’s drive on those roads) in Greg Long’s book, “The Making of Bigfoot.” If studied frame-by-frame, rather than the one famous image which coincidentally looks the most suit-like, fascinating details emerge. Muscles ripple and flex, the huge, hunched back, ape-like face, the flexing feet and hands--all are very convincing if looked at with an attentive and open mind.
Al Hodgson, the middle-man for so much of Bigfoot history in Willow Creek, tells me that he didn’t fully and really believe in the creature until one day in his church’s Bible study group. A woman he’d known and completely trusted for decades, one whose sanity and sincerity he put in the highest regard, told him, “You know, Al, I saw one of those.” She wouldn’t lie or exaggerate. “My family has already given me enough trouble about it,” she said. I asked Al why, with all that evidence piling up right before his eyes for all those years, he was never convinced. “The evidence piled up for me in just one woman,” he said. Though he’s never seen one, sometimes this kind of proof is enough.
THE RESEARCHERS: BIGFOOT LIVES!
“These guys don't want to find Bigfoot--they want to be Bigfoot.”
Many a Bigfoot forest researcher visits with reports of strange encounters or sightings, observations through thermal imaging gear, blobs captured on a digital camera. If anything, Bigfoot is more active now, and certainly more widely seen and reported, than at any time in its long history. Thousands of sightings have been logged since the days of John Green’s 1970 “Sasquatch File, and from upstate New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida, New Mexico, not just the Pacific Northwest. Just look at the website of the Bigfoot Field Research Organization (BFRO.net), the most skeptical, professional and scientifically-minded investigative group out there and you’ll see the extent of this activity. As our ability to document and communicate about the encounters grows, so do the reports, a far cry from the day when witnesses were afraid to be assumed insane for seeing such a thing. Surely not every one of these thousands is a hoax or hallucination.
It was hard not to believe in Bigfoot, despite my innate skeptical reserve, after a three-hour interview with James “Bobo” Fay, Humboldt County’s top Bigfoot investigator. You may have seen him recently on the History Channel show, “Monster Quest.” Anyone who has heard his call blast will attest to the living presence—not only could he be Bigfoot with his large stature, but he seems to understand the inherent nature of the Big Hairy One. He has encountered many strange things out in the woods, and has seen the creatures a half a dozen times. His conviction goes beyond belief: he KNOWS it is real. Having worked extensively in the woods as a logger and at other jobs, Bobo has been all over Humboldt County, collecting countless reports and stories of Sasquatch encounters. He has worked with the Natives who tell him that this is no mere legend.
Drawn to Humboldt in the mid-1980s, following Bigfoot’s allure, he eventually met Eurekan, Irwin Supple, then in old age. Back in the 1940s, after serving in the war, Supple was one of the first few to blaze in his jeep the old mule and wagon road up to Fish Lake, above Bluff Creek. While hunting for deer up there he encountered eight foot tall “gorillas,” heard (and later recorded) their strange chatter, whistles and knocks in the night, and eventually was able to leave food for them. They would leave gifts in return, usually small things like piles of pine cones or a fish. Though Supple continued in the Bigfoot field until the early 1990s, his main significance is how early he started. He was looking for Bigfoot in the field long before it was widely known as such, and while Ray Wallace was just a lad. Who could have been hoaxing Supple?
Old logger Joe Ramos, when asked if he thought Bigfoot was all a practical joke, said it was surely 99% a hoax. This, I asked, despite the oil drums picked up and thrown about, heavy equipment tampered with? What about that 1%, then, I asked. Shaking his head, “Believe what you want to believe,” he said. “Who can say what is real?” Perhaps it is in that one percent that the mystery lies? Perhaps that is all the room it, and Bigfoot, need to live?
Meanwhile Bobo and his “California Crew” associates are still out looking every chance they have to get away from jobs and families, their techniques increasingly refined, the sense of closing in on the mystery palpable. He feels it is only a matter of time before certain proof is found or filmed. I asked Bobo about the public’s indifference to the evidence and their inability to get past the crazy label placed on bigfooters. “They’re shaking their heads at me, and I’m shakin’ my head at them,” he says. “It’s REAL, end of story.”
END
"He's a monster, he'll eat anything, alive, dead, fresh, rotten.... He's a survivor... mobile, quick, fast, and strong.... Anybody who sees a slow Sasquatch is not in the ball park.... He's got no limits, climbs any mountain, swims any river. He's got no barriers.... Not an endangered species, that’s us.... He can pull down big game on the run or by stealth, like a cougar.... He can lay down a light track or spring like a deer.... Has a lot of humor, yet restraint.... Rocks cars and cabins, but lets folks go.... We agonize, he couldn't care less.... An opportunist at the top of the food chain, in great shape--he's got it made! Adapted to cutover lands, lives a good rugged existence.... He's got no need for wages, lives off the fat of the land, and pays no taxes!"
-Jim Hewkin, retired fish and game professional from Oregon, quoted in:
Pyle, Robert Michael. Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide
Steven Streufert is the proprietor of Willow Creek’s Bigfoot Books used book store, as well as one of the founding acolytes of the Church of Bigfoot, Scientist.
http://users.gotsky.com/s_streufert/bigfoot.html
http://users.gotsky.com/s_streufert
(Oh yeah, Bobo says to say that Mike Wilson is going to look "really stupid" when the truth finally comes out).
** The account at the beginning of this article is my own story. I can't explain it at all, save with a sasquatch hypothesis. I live at the top of Panther Road, in a cabin at the dead end of the road, near the top of the ridge which is just across from Brush Mountain Lookout's ridge and Friday Ridge Road to the South. There have been numerous recent Bigfoot incidents reported out there lately. (Below, the burn pile behind which the creature stalked, the dense forest beyond, from which it came.)
“If we found the Klamath giants, we would grasp some essence of the titanic knot of rocks, waters, and trees, as Beowulf and Gilgamesh grasped their ancient lands by defeating Grendel and Enkidu. But the Klamath giants also have become more than shaggy, beetle-browed projections of human desire. We begin to see in them the possibility of a consciousness quite different from our own, of a being that may be very close to us in hominid origins, but that may have evolved in mysterious ways. We imagine an animal that somehow has understood the world more deeply than we have, and that thus inhabits it more comfortably and freely, while eluding our self-involved attempts to capture it.”
--David Rains Wallace, The Klamath Knot
