Bf Cameos In Literature

[JDL]

Though it was about Neanderthals rather than bigfoot, I immensely enjoyed both Michael Crichton's interpretation of Beowulf, Eater's of the Dead, and the movie based on it, The 13th Warrior.

[Nipissing]

New member here! Very happy to see this thread becaue I've been sitting on this little nugget for a while and couldn't figure out where to post it. This comes from William Least Heat Moon's autobiographical Blue HIghways: A Journey Into America. At one point he decides to look around Franklinville NC in Randolph County for the grave of one of his ancestors, William Trogden. Does anyone else think this sounds...familar?

 

The smell in the pines was sweet, the spring peepers sang, and the trail over the first hill was easy. Whippoorwills ceaselessly cut sharp calls against the early dark, and a screech owl shivered the night. Then the trail disappeared in wiry brush. I began imagining flared nostrils and eyed, coiled things. Trying to step over whatever lay waiting, I took longer strides. Suddenly the woods went silent as if something had muffled it. I kept thinking about turning back, but the sense that the grave was just over the next hill drew me in deeper. Springs trickled to the lake and turned bosky coves to mud and filled the air with a rank, pungent odor. I had to walk around the water, then around the mud - three hundred yards to cross a twenty-foot inlet. Something heavy and running from me mashed off through the brush.

 

The sudden silence, pungent smell, and "something heavy and running from me" seem a bit evocative of our big friend, no? Perhaps I'm reading too much into it, I don't know. It's in section 2, East by Southeast, start of chapter 3. If you go to this page http://littourati.squarespace.com/storage/moon-files/moon_map.htm and click on Franklinville NC, you can see the pin on the map and read more. The BFRO has two reports from Randolph County.

[LeafTalker]

Yes, yes! It sounds very familiar!  

 

And personally, I think you are absolutely NOT "reading too much into it". But no worries about what anyone thinks. Again, the point of this thread was not to see if any particular passage could pass someone else's "sniff test" for authenticity, but to create a home for odd, stray observations that cause your intuition to sit up and take notice. 

 

Thanks! I love all the other references we have here so far, too, but yours was exactly the type I was thinking of when I started the thread.

 

So thanks again, Nipissing, and welcome to the BFF!!!!  

[Gotta Know]

Plussed, Nipissing--and welcome! While the unseen creature could have been a large deer or bear, the sudden silence of the woods and your own foreboding certainly is telling.

 

I remember a time about 12 years ago when I was exploring a small tributory of the uppler Blackfoot river near Ovando, MT. I had fished a couple hunded yards from the road without too much luck, and eyed the next promising bend of the river in a darkened canyon another 200 yards upstream. Even with my lab along for company, there was just something ominous about that canyon and I could not force my feet in that direction. I'm sure I was thinking "bear" at the time, but as I look back there's a sense I had of being watched, and just way too vulnerable overall. I think my trepidation was amplified by the fact no one had any idea where I was should something happen. Heading back to the truck simply felt a whole lot better than the other direction. 

[Guest]

Fetching this thread out again, after nearly two months -- something come upon recently, of which it is hard to resist telling. I encountered by chance, a recent novel by Dan Simmons, The Abominable (incidentally, the first time I had ever heard of this very prolific -- in various genres -- author: I'm not in the US, and suspect that he may be less well-known in the rest of the world, than in his own country). What with the title; and the cover picture, of climbing activity among huge, threatening mountains -- no prizes for guessing who-or-what, I hoped would feature in the story...

 

In which, disappointment was what I got. The novel is indeed about Himalayan climbing; but, coupled with espionage- and covert-war-type "dirty work" with "Westerners" pitted against the growing German Nazi movement (the action is set in the mid-1920s). The "Abominable" of the title, turns out to be an inanimate item of "political dynamite". Our hairy friends are not encountered first-hand for certain, or even as a substantial "possible" -- are just mentioned in passing from time to time as a feature of local belief; or, with said belief made use of by various "bad-ass" humans to mask their own acts of violence, as being of the sort popularly attributed to yetis.

 

"Snowman" presence or not, I was not greatly impressed with the novel. IMO the author 's writing style is OK; but he's extremely wordy, and engages repeatedly in largely-unnecessary voluminous info-dumps about various subjects (especially here, the minuitiae of mountain-climbing, in which I have personally little interest) -- and there is reason for doubt as to whether said "info" on his part, is always accurate. Frequent desire inspired, to yell "Drop this stuff and get on with the story !"  Feel that this book is not likely to make me into a Dan Simmons convert.

[Oonjerah]

^ Either he was getting paid by the word, or he's the type who just CanNot Shut Up. 

   A very slow reader, I would probably not have made it to page 3. 

Also boring the reader prevents Best Sellers. 

[Boris Khan]

John Darnton's Neanderthal deals with references to yeti.

Piers Anthony mentions skunk ape in Firefly.

[coffee2go]

Someone mentioned previously in this thread about authors making references to their own experiences in their writings.  I do believe this is true.  I took a creative writing course a number of years back and one of the things we were required to do was to keep a notebook or journal and jot something down every day.  It was to be an incident or encounter we had, a description of something we saw, or pretty much anything we chose to write about that day.  The purpose was to use these excerpts in our future writings.  I do believe this technique is and was used by many fiction and non-fiction writers.

[Guest gerrykleier]

Robert E Howard and CONAN of course. THAK from "Rogues in the House" might as well be a Bigfoot. Primitive "Ape Men" types and reference to evolution, precursor species, Cave Men etc abound in Howard's fiction. Similar types appeared in lots of other pulp fiction, (especially 'killer' gorillas), so he was probably just working that angle. He lived in Cross Plains Texas, so he was kind of far away from the areas where most of the Texas sightings are, but I wonder if he heard stories... GK

[Gotta Know]

Took me awhile to find this thread, but I just came across a squatchy passage in, "The Boys in the Boat; Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics," by Daniel James Brown. The main character is Joe Rantz, who leads a hard-scrabble existence prior to gaining fame through rowing for the University of Washington. "Thula", (below) is his stepmom who does not care for him, and forces his father to abandon him a number of times, leaving him to his own cunning to survive.

 

It's 1925 in the small Washington logging/farming town of Sequim Washington--at the top of the Olympic Peninsula so famous for BF sightings. Joe's father has moved his family into a "half-finished" home that he has built on a 160 "stump farm," as the property has just been logged of its old growth cedar trees. The handy father has illegally diverted water from the nearby Dungeness River to create a canal by which to power a small sawmill for cutting wood to finish the house. Here's the passage:

 

"To Joe the condition of the house made little difference. Once again he had the semblance of a home and a new world to explore. Behind the house there was a meadow of nearly an acre, carpeted in summer with sweet  wild strawberries. During the spring, water flowed over his father's waterwheel with such force that it excavated a pool nearly teen feet deep and twenty-five feet long. Soon salmon and steelhead and trout from the Dungeness made their way up the irrigation ditch and gathered in pools in the pond. Joe rigged up a net on a long pole, and whenever he wanted a fish for dinner he simply the net out behind the house, picked out a fish, and hauled it in. The woods just beyond the property were full of bears and cougars. That troubled Thula and made her understandably nervous about her flock of small children, but Joe thrilled at night when he heard the bears splashing as they fished in the pond or the cougars screeching as they met their mates in the dark."

 

See what I mean? Considering that we know how squatchy this area is now, imagine how it must have been before we cut down their forests and all but over fished their streams. But I digress. What struck me about this bolded passage are obvious hints to BF's existence. "The screeching cougars" implies to me that there were many nightime calls that could have been mistaken for the big cats. But cougars actually tend to be fairly quiet. Certainly they're not typically calling back and forth to their mates.

 

And yes, the "splashing bears" might easily have been just that. But there's just something about this passage that suggests that the actual animals involved were once again misidentified. We know BF is there now. And likely for eons before that. Thus, it's not a stretch to think that these nighttime visitors were neither bear nor cougar. It just makes me wonder how often BF is simply not accurately identified from a historical basis?

 

 

It's a great book, by the way. Living in Seattle, it gives a unique historical perspective that for me is a page-turner.

[LeafTalker]

Good catch. I didn't know that about cougars (that they were pretty quiet, for the most part); but I think you're right, that people often mistake sounds made by the BF for other kinds of noises.  

 

My favorite story about these kind of "mistaken identity" things is the Mike Wooley story about watching a BF whistle to his friend. Wooley said something like, "I'd spent all my life in the woods, and I'd heard that noise hundreds of times, but I thought it was a bird." 

[Incorrigible1]

.....but Joe thrilled at night when he heard the bears splashing as they fished in the pond or the cougars screeching as they met their mates in the dark."

 

It's all good speculation, but I would consider that pretty thin stuff. Not every splash nor sound is bf related.

[Gotta Know]

^^No doubt--"thin" is an apt description. No, not a sighting or even a footprint. But to me, it goes in the "could be!" file.

 

Just interesting, is all.

 

And yeah, LT, that's exactly what I'm talking about. How much "evidence" do we simply miss because it's misinterpreted?

[MIB]

Not every splash nor sound is bf related.

 

That is true, but then again, it is unreasonable to imply that no BF-related sound is ever wrongly dismissed.   What we accept vs what we reject is as much a matter of our prior beliefs as it is about the thing being experienced.

 

MIB

[Incorrigible1]

Default conclusion should be most anything other than "bigfoot."

 

Just sayin'.