No. 12

Winter, the Wild Man and Wapiti

As a child in the mid-eighties my father began to institute a Winter Camp, whereby we would be acclimated to the cold temperatures and spirits of the dark winter forests, the trip usually happened in October. Mostly it would rain as we set up camp, somewhere between Hood and the sparse spokes of Mount Jefferson or down in the lower Santiam wilderness. Some years it would snow, deep mounds and drifts laying against the tent. The quiet mornings of cold listening to the creaky limbs of naked trees I always imagined some wild haired man of the woods creeping through the dense brush and I would get up and scurry into the trees to pee keeping an eye out for the wild man or the samsquatch, this word we’d use instead of ‘Sasquatch’ as we thought that if you said the real name out loud you would conjure the beast. Years later I began to read about the wild man of the woods used in ancient European fertility rites to personify the dark chaos of winter, the wild man would be hunted and caught, kept for several days as the people would feast, then he would be killed and buried and for the three days that the sun seems to stay static where it rises at the horizon he would travel to the underworld and then rise again to usher in the lengthening of days for spring. This same wild man over centuries morphed into our own Mr. Claus, in my head this obvious connection between Sasquatch, patron deity of the PNW, and Santa fills me with glee.

Two years ago, I built a small meditation deck that looks out into the forest behind my house. It’s a dark deep hollow that cuts down from my back patio, filled with evergreen and understory. I started sitting out there after dark every night, not only hearing and feeling the night sounds and critters rustling but also watching the sky and finding I could palpably sense the seasons gradually changing in a more real and concrete way than I’ve ever done in my life of modern-western-staying inside where it’s safe and warm all the time kind of living. Night after night feeling the weather, watching the trees, hearing the animals and feeling the temp slowly drop, the fog rolls in, the wind actively stripping the deciduous trees as I sit out there in fall, the clear freezing nights when I can only stay out for a quarter hour, I begin to get a faint glimpse of what our ancestors saw, understood and believed. Often, I let my dog run loose while I’m out there, her small shadow lightning quick. Sometimes she’ll scare up deer or racoons, but every now and then she’ll stand stock still at the edge of the woods, peering into the darkness. I go stand with her trying to reach out with my senses to find what she’s detecting. Something strange, bigger than a deer, weirder than a cougar or possibly she senses the mystery, the undeniable connection between our deepest fears and the thick chaotic tangle of the forest at night.

Within the most ancient buddhist sutras is contained a story out of the Samyutta Nikaya wherein Gotama is sitting by the city gates near the local dump wherein two yakkhas (a certain type of nature demon) are hanging out talking. One of them is named Shaggy-hair, the other is Spikey-hair, with long hair all over their bodies. Spikey says ‘Betcha I can scare this fake ascetic, he seems like a chump.’ His buddy says, ‘I don’t know bro, that’s Gotama. I’ve heard a few things about him.’ Spikey sneaks up on Gotama and grabs his arm. Gotama recoils. ‘Did I scare you?’, says Spikey. ‘No, it’s just that your touch is kind of well, evil…’ ‘What? Evil?’ says Spikey, ‘Not cool, I’m going to split your head and drive you insane!’ Gotama replies, ‘Right, you can’t actually do any of that. But I’ll answer a question for you.’ The demon says, ‘Okay, tell me, where do lust and hate come from, discontent, delight and terror…’ ‘From yourself silly, your own mind as it clings with white knuckles to pleasures, pain, objects, ideas, views, self, fears… you get the idea. Until you let go, you’ll be miserable.’ Immediately the yakkha’s hair all falls out and he sits silent, still, spacious. And so, the wild man is tamed through the taming of his mind. Historically, as the buddhist monks began to enter Tibet they used these same tactics to subdue the local mountain deities, yetis and demons in order to make way for the teachings.

One of the last winter bow hunts I went on many years ago was up on Hood, off the south side near NF-46. We’d wound our way up off Ripplebrook on logging roads and then hiked into the bush. We camped on snow and cut up a fallen red cedar for fuel. Second day we were stalking deer in deep snow off a service road when we came upon a track, a single track. Wide, with toe indents and claw. Large as a bear pad but like a dog. Wolf track, rare and special. But spooky too up there in the silence of the trees. I’d never seen one before and its size gave me the heebie-jeebies. We mulled over the single track, wondering how only one print, like the creature touched down for only a moment, like it were ephemeral, mythical in nature. Next morning my boots were frozen. That afternoon we hiked up on a high ridge. Flying solo, I posted up on a giant nurse log for a few hours. Seeing nothing I climbed down and walked to the edge of the canyon to look down on a sea of evergreen. Hearing a whisper behind me I turned. A fat black-eyed female wapiti stood not three feet from me in the brush. It was motionless and stared at me with no apparent expression. Late in the season and on the mountain, it was closed to elk cow harvesting so I only stood quiet, watching, its breath thick on the cold air. I exhaled and turned to see a bird drop from a branch and the animal was gone, without a sound. Indigenous folk believed that to encounter wapiti up close was auspicious and one should ask for insight from this encounter. Not long after this trip, my buddy who I’d hunted with for several years fell off the wagon and ended up on a dark path wherein he lost everything. He’d been headed there for some time, but I couldn’t see it, my lack of awareness during this period being of epic proportion. At times I wonder if this creature showed up to tell me something, a flicker of insight in the cold woods, to try and get me to open my eyes to my friend’s troubles and my own lack of compassion, staring me in the face.