The grandfather in this story started in the woods of the BC coast as a boy in the 1940s, worked the tugs and log booms, ran heavy equipment building logging roads, and by 1955 was a foreman and bush boss. Much later he served on a provincial forest resources commission. He was stoic and practical, his family says, and told almost no one what he had seen. His son passed the stories on to the grandchild who shared them.
The first was in 1951. From about 100 metres he watched a huge, black-haired figure walk across a logging camp to the cookhouse, its head level with the roof at nearly nine feet, its stride about five feet judging by the tracks later. The crews used to stack full diesel barrels against the cookhouse doors over weekends. It tossed them aside one by one, tore the doors off their hinges, ducked inside and stayed about twenty minutes before rushing out into the bush. Inside, the lard, butter, sugar and honey were gone, the meat locker had been ripped open, and a ham was half eaten. The camp was moved ten miles.
In 1954 he and a small crew were staking out a road along a ridge above a river when what he took for a big bear at the water's edge stood up on two legs, walked about ten feet and gave a loud whoop and then a deafening holler, somewhere between a growl and a scream. Three of the men dropped their stakes and ran. He grabbed a colleague frozen against a cedar, picked up a dropped axe and headed for the crew bus, and all the way something heavy moved through the trees on either side, stopping whenever he stopped, with a musty, rotten smell that grew sickening. Two of the runners were picked up on the road. According to the family story, the third was never found, and the men he rescued quit the coast for good.
The last time was near Pemberton in 1962. Walking his bulldozer back to the fuel trailer at dusk, he saw one at least eight feet tall cross the road 100 feet ahead in two strides. It looked at him, eyes glowing orange-red in the machine's lights, and crashed off into the forest, making trees 25 to 30 feet tall sway like grass. He knew what it was by then, finished the road over the next two weeks, and never saw it again. He died in 2000.
