Sometimes you're just not meant to have answers, because you're not ready for them.
He started working in the woods of BC's west coast as a boy in the 1940s. He rode log booms down the Fraser, worked tugboats, and came back at eighteen to run heavy equipment, punching roads into country nobody had logged before. By 1955 he was a foreman and bush boss for one of the province's biggest logging companies, and he went on to become a senior forester. Decades later he sat on the provincial Forest Resources Commission. His family describes him as stoic, rational and hard to spook, but he once told his grandkid that sometimes you're just not meant to have answers. He only talked about what follows a handful of times. His son passed the stories down, and his grandchild shared them on Reddit.
In 1951, at a logging camp, he watched from about a hundred metres away as a big, black-haired figure walked the length of the camp on two legs. It stood as tall as the cookhouse eaves, about nine feet, and its stride, measured from the tracks afterward, was close to five feet. On weekends the crew stacked full drums of diesel against the cookhouse doors to keep out thieves. It picked up each drum, several hundred pounds apiece, tossed it aside like an empty box, tore the doors off their hinges in one go, and ducked inside. About twenty minutes later it rushed out and into the bush like it had sensed something. Inside, the meat locker had been ripped open. Tubs of lard, butter, sugar and honey were gone, sausages and bacon mostly eaten, a ham half devoured, and the furniture shoved aside. The company moved the camp ten miles.
In 1954 he was walking a game trail along a ridge with a small crew, laying out a new road with survey stakes, when he spotted what he took for a huge bear at the river's edge below. They'd heard loud whoops earlier and figured it was some kind of bird. Then the animal stood up on two legs, walked ten feet, let out a long 'whooop', and followed it with a deafening sound somewhere between a growl and a scream. Three men dropped their stakes and ran. Another froze, white as a ghost, hugging a cedar. The creature crashed off into the brush.
He grabbed the frozen man by the collar, picked up a dropped axe, and hurried down the trail toward the crew bus. Something kept pace with them through the trees on both sides. Whenever he stopped to listen, it stopped. As they went, the air filled with a musty, rotten stench. He picked up two of the runners on the road back to camp. They and the man he'd dragged out quit that day and left the coast. According to the family story, the third runner was never found, despite two weeks of searching.
In 1962, near Pemberton, he was driving a bulldozer back to its fuel trailer at dusk when a figure at least eight feet tall crossed the new road about a hundred feet ahead, in two strides and about a second. It looked at him, eyes shining orange-red in the headlights. Then it went into the forest, and he watched trees twenty to thirty feet tall sway like grass as it pushed through, with bigger trees shuddering behind it. He parked the machine in an open clearing for the night. He worked that road for two more weeks and never saw it again, but he always believed it was watching.
He died in 2000. The family still has his signature on the old tree farm licence that named him chief forester.