A young fisheries officer from Ahousaht thinks so. And so do First Nations legends from the West Coast.
Two years ago, Luke Swan Jr. said he was patrolling the waters around Ahousaht, northwest of Tofino, when he saw a figure he didn’t recognize crouching on the shore. “Something really big stood up, probably between eight or nine feet,” he told CTV News in 2014.
He said he had seen enough bears in his life to know it wasn’t a bear. He and his father went back to the shore and found some footprints. According to the Ha-Shilth-Sa newspaper, the men saw 10 bare footprints in approximately a 30-foot area. The man who witnessed the footprints said they were 16 inches long, about seven to nine inches wide and about three feet apart.
The men felt their findings pointed to a sasquatch having been in the area, but they couldn’t confirm it.
In Nuu-chah-nulth lore, buc miis (pronounced book-mees), or bigfoot, is a symbol of good luck and spiritual strength. He is known to have lived for thousands of years in the Clayoquot Sound watersheds.
Ahousaht is located on Flores Island, 20 kilometers northwest of Tofino on the west coast of Vancouver Island. The main settlement on Flores, Ahousaht is only accessible by boat or float plane. Its inhabitants are primarily members of the Nuu-chah-nulth First Nation. Although Flores is surrounded by water, there are recorded reports of sasquatches swimming, says renowned cryptozoologist
John Bindernagel.
The Courtenay biologist last year investigated sasquatch vocalizations in Alert Bay on Cormorant Island (northern Vancouver Island). The idea that sasquatch could swim from island to island isn’t farfetched, he said at the time.
“We need to tone down our arrogance that says ‘this cannot happen.’ Healthy skepticism is perfectly in order and it’s a really good question, where did it come from?”
Bindernagel would like to see more scientific exploration of these kinds of sightings. And he says communities and individuals just aren’t getting that.
“It’s like. how could it possibly be there, rather than let’s review the evidence and see if it is. We should all pay attention to these reports.”