Kim Bannerman's Blog, page 10

Respect for the Big Man

I despise wading into the Bigfoot discussion, I really do. On the internet, people are very passionate on this issue.

Normally, I’m all about the science. The burden of proof should be on the person making the claim, right? ��But who am I to tell someone that what they saw or experienced was a trick of their mind, a mistake, or a fallacy? I’ve had too��many intelligent, university-educated, trustworthy friends that have seen, heard, or experienced something strange in these woods to fully dismiss the idea of the sasquatch.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, don’t expect me to be unbiased when I’m talking about bigfoot. I’m not even remotely skeptical. I’ve lived on the West Coast for forty years, and last year was the first time I ever saw a mink, and in all the years previous, I never once questioned whether or not minks existed. The forests here are dark and deep. Unseen creatures hide amongst the trees. Some of them are accepted as fact, while others stick to the shadows.

Honestly, it would easier if I didn’t think bigfoot existed. Camping trips would certainly be far more enjoyable.

Tonight, during my nightly internet surfing, I came across a copy of a painting made by Robert Bateman, who is one of the pre-eminent wildlife artists in the world, and much respected for his work in art, conservation, and environmental education. The painting was this:

‘Sasquatch’, by Robert Bateman, 2009

And I immediately fell madly in love with it. When I was small, I used to spend hours looking at a book in my parent’s collection, The Art of Robert Bateman, and when I discovered that Shawn had a whole library of Bateman books, I knew that he was the��perfect match��for me… that’s how influential��Bateman’s artwork has been��in my life. (Thank you, sir!)��His artwork provides a glimpse into the natural world that travels��far beyond photographs – looking at Bateman’s work is akin to looking at the paintings of John Audubon. It provides the viewer with a window to a scene that is free of influence by human proximity.

So to find Bateman’s ‘Sasquatch’ filled me with joy, almost as much as finding a real sasquatch (but with much with less terror, so bonus!) I’m not sure if a cryptozoological��painting done in a realistic style by a respected artist adds credibility to witness accounts or validity to a notion that many dismiss as hokum, but it certainly sparked a certain regional pride in my heart. Here, along the fog-shrouded coasts and secretive, primeval forests, one does not openly dismiss the existence of sasquatch; the��person you’re speaking with may have had��more first-hand experience with the weird, the wild, and the wonderful than you.

Aztec Theatrics

One of the perks of freelance work is that the strangest requests come through our household. For example, a couple of years back, Shawn��was hired to write Aztec-style music for a video game. Suddenly, he was researching��the sounds of ancient Mexico, which meant our house was filled with the sounds of flutes and drums and rattles.

One instrument that he did NOT try was the Death Whistle, and for that, I am profoundly grateful. ��The Death Whistle was used��to strike fear into the enemies heart as warriors charged into battle, much like bagpipes*. ��They may also have been used honour Ehecatl, the wind, and to signal the removal of a slave’s hair just before they were��sacrificed at a banquet – man, those Aztecs knew how to throw a memorable dinner party!

There are no words in the English language that can adequately describe the sound, so I’m not even going to bother. ��Instead, here’s a video clip. I’d say ‘enjoy’ but it’s hard to do that��when your innards are quavering like lime jello and the vision of a thousand screeching, blood-thirsty, cannibal��jaguar-men fills your imagination.

*unlike bagpipes, there are no Death Whistle bands that march in parades playing ‘Scotland the Brave’. Again, I feel profound gratitude.

Funny Little Ogopogo

“I’m looking for the Ogo-pogo, the funny little Ogo-pogo.

His mother was an earwig and his father was a whale.

I’m going to put a little bit of salt on his tail.”

In the course of researching turn-of-the-century music for Bucket of Blood, I stumbled across the lyrics to a British Music Hall hit��called ‘The Ogo-Pogo: The Funny Fox Trot”, written in 1924 by Cumberland Clark and Mark Strong, and made famous by the entertainer Davy Burnaby.

This made me laugh, because it wasn’t exactly the Ogopogo with which I’m familiar… we used to camp on the shores of Lake Okanagan in British Columbia, and everyone was well-acquainted with the tales of the lake monster that lives in the lake and in caves under Rattlesnake Island. Images of Ogopogo were everywhere: tourist souvenirs, statues, t-shirts, etc etc. But the last place I’d expect to see it was in a vaudeville piece.

Long ago, the monster was originally called��n’ha-a-itk, which is Salish for “lake demon”, or the naitaka, which was the name given it by the Okanakane��people. Perfect��– that’s much more frightening! ��Witnesses describe it as a long, dark serpent with a head like a sheep and a fondness for fresh meat; ��when crossing the lake by canoe, travellers��would sacrifice a dog to the monster, to keep it fed and content until they reached the other side.

But at a luncheon held in August 1926 in Vernon, at the north end of Okanagan Lake, the gloriously-named W.H. Brimblecombe sang a parody of the song, changing the Ogo-pogo’s parentage to a ewe and whale. The lunch guests were members of the Vancouver Board of Trade, the Vernon Board of Trade, and the Vernon Rotary Club – they thought the performance to be perfectly delightful, and the next day, a reporter in the Province newspaper wrote about the event.

It’s quite a silly, jaunty��little song, but��as a child, I was utterly terrified by Ogopogo, the monster who lurked in the depths of the lake. ��I wonder if I would’ve been half as scared if I’d envisioned an earwig/whale hybrid with a horrible aversion to salt?

Ringdocus

In my last post, I mentioned the shunka warakin, a canine-like animal��described by the Ioway people of Iowa and Minnesota. While this may be��an oral history reference to long-ago memories of the dire wolf, which went extinct in North America around 10,000 years ago,��a man claimed to have shot a shunka warakin, only 100 years ago. Now, this could easily be dismissed as a tall tale, told and retold and embellished as all good hunting stories are… except that he had the creature stuffed, and tourists can still see it today.

Curious? Me, too!

The Madison Valley of Montana��was a frightening place for white settlers, who were quite unaccustomed to the carnivores��that prowled its dark haunts. Screams and howls terrified the farmers, and livestock became a favoured target of the beast. ��One man, a Mormon by the name of��Israel Ammon Hutchins, was tired of losing his animals to the ravenous creature, and when it visited his farm a second time, he shot it dead. ��Because he was an enterprising man, Hutchins saw the value of the freakish, hyena-like carcass, and traded it to taxidermist Joseph Sherwood for a cow.

Sherwood stuffed the creature and set it on display in his store in Henry Lake, Idaho. He named it ‘Ringdocus’ but, after his death, no one knew quite what happened to the mount.��The only evidence of its��existence was a grainy, black-and-white photo, causing lots of speculation about the animal’s true identity.

But in 2007, the grandson of Hutchins, Jack��Kirby, tracked down the stuffed creature: it was being kept in storage at��the Idaho Museum of Natural History. ��Upon retrieving the mount, the first thing Kirby did was take the stuffed animal to the grave of Hutchins, to show the old man that Ringdocus had returned to Madison Valley. When the��Madison Valley History Museum opened in 2008, Ringdocus was placed on display.

So what was it? You can find a photo of it here, and it’s pretty clear, it doesn’t look much like a wolf… narrow snout, sloping back, skinny haunches. I don’t know much about taxidermy, but could there have been a bit of creative license taken by Mr. Sherwood? ��Or did an ancient monster prowl the valleys of Montana, and has – at last – come home?

The Geography of Beasts

Perhaps you have already picked up on the subtle clues that I am a fan of werewolf mythology? If not, let me admit that yes, I do have a fondness for fuzzy beasts that howl when the moon is full. My attention is highly attuned to any whisper of such creature in popular myth and legends, so when I first heard about The Beast of Bray Road, I was intrigued. I went straight for Wikipedia, typed it in, and gave a shrill shriek of surprise to read,

“… the Bray Road Beast is a creature first reported in 1936 on a rural road outside of Elkhorn, Wisconsin. The same label has been applied well beyond the initial location, to any unknown creature from southern Wisconsin or northern Illinois and all the way to Vancouver Island, Canada, that is described as having similar characteristics to those reported in the initial set of sightings.”

What what?! I live on Vancouver Island, I’ve never heard of such a creature. And what possible cryptozoological connection could there be between this island in the Pacific and that far-away magical land called Wisconsin?

Well, I figured the best person to ask would be my friend Michael, who comes from Wisconsin. But he’d never heard of the Beast of Bray Road either. Also, seeing one of my eyebrows slowly raise in quizzical curiosity, he also assured me that he is NOT the Beast of Bray Road in human form.*

Here’s the story: Bray Road is a quiet country lane near the community of Elkhorn in southern Wisconsin. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, a series of witnesses claimed to have had a run-in with a frightening creature around this area, mirroring a series of earlier sightings in 1936, 1964, and 1972.

On Oct. 31, 1999, a young woman named Doris Gipson was driving along Bray Road when, after leaning down to change the radio station, she felt a thump and feared she’d hit something. Stopping to check her car, she saw a massive, hairy animal surge towards her out of the darkness. Terrified, she leapt back into her vehicle and raced away, but not before the creature pounced onto her trunk, then slipped and fell off. Thinking it might’ve been a bear, she came back later that evening and saw a large form on the side of the road; when she saw the creature move, she fled the scene again. The next day, she told a neighbour what had happened and showed her the scratches on the car.

And, as in every small town, word quickly spread.

But instead of laughing or dismissing the story, people began to share their own creepy experiences, some of which dated back ten years. Descriptions of the beast followed a similar pattern, bringing to mind the traditional images of werewolves. The creature was fast, muscular, and frightening. One witness said, “His face was … long and snouty, like a wolf”, while another claimed that she’d seen an animal which she’d assumed was a large dog… until it stood up. A group of children were chased by the monster, yet another man had his chickens taken, and a dairy farmer saw a powerfully-built, bear-like animal wandering through his field, only to disappear behind a pile of stones.

To add to the story, rumours of satanic rituals, stolen dogs, and sacrificed, dismembered livestock began to surface. Occult graffiti was reportedly found in an abandoned house and at the local cemetery, close to Bray Road, which sparked the possibility of a connection between the werewolf and dark magic.

The sightings continued right up to 2006, but no one has yet figured out what the Beast might have been. The descriptions given by eyewitnesses match neither coyotes nor dogs, nor the red wolf native to the area. The animal didn’t quite fit the description of a bear, either. Some have suggested that the beast was the last of the shunka warakin, a hyena-like animal from Ioway cosmology that may have been the (supposedly extinct) dire wolf.

Personally, I’m intrigued by the connection to Vancouver Island — there’s a lot of miles between here and rural Wisconsin, and I’m curious why the Beast of Bray Road has made an appearance in this neck of the woods. You can look at it two ways:

(a) if such a creature exists, then how would one travel so far? (Of course, if it is a werewolf and not a shunka warakin, then taking the Greyhound is not impossible.)

(b) if such a creature does not exist, then how does the concept of the Beast of Bray Road migrate across a continent? Did a lone traveller from Wisconsin, vacationing on Vancouver Island, see something unexplainable and immediately grab the first word in their vocabulary for a large, hairy dog man? That seems unlikely to me, not only that they’d jump to such a conclusion, but that people who live here would so readily accept the claim.  To flip it around, would I immediately scream ‘SASQUATCH!’ if ran into a monster while walking the streets of, say, Bristol? And would someone then make a note in Wikipedia that sasquatches are frequently seen in the Pacific Northwest and South West England?  No, of course not. If I yelled ‘SASQUATCH’ **, I’m sure a kindly old woman would pat my arm and tell me, “No, dear. We don’t have sasquatches here. That must’ve been a Alien Big Cat.”

I want to know more about the distribution of sightings of the Bray Road Beast, but I can’t find a single reference to any Vancouver Island encounter, except for that lone sentence on Wikipedia (which, I might add, has been cut’n’paste’d to a ton of websites… come on, people! Can’t you even edit the sentence to remove the phrase ‘all the way’?) Who claims to have seen it? When? Why here?  All the references to Vancouver Island link back to the Wikipedia article, but it offers no clue where it came from, or who left it. How frustrating! I may just have to take the Greyhound to Wisconsin, and start asking questions….

Run, dire wolf skeleton, run!

*but of course, that’s precisely what a werewolf in hiding would say, right?

Werewolf Bathtub

Way back in 2004, I did an interview with the Dragon Page Radio Talk Show to promote my novel ‘The Tattooed Wolf’, which had just been released as an ebook. Because it’s Lycanthrovember over at Hic Dragones, I figured I’d look up the interview with Evo Terra & Mike Mennenga and share it with you, but sadly, the page only had a written synopsis of the interview I did (along with Alan Dean Foster ohmygod!!!! *)

I wish I could share the actual interview with you, for which the Dragon Page hosts bestowed upon me the title of ‘Coolest Interviewee Ever‘. Why, you may ask? Because it was a phone interview, and as such, I could do it naked, in a bubble bath, with a glass of rum in hand. ROCK STAR.

Earlier this year, I hunted down Evo Terra to ask him some questions, and I hadn’t corresponded with him in a decade.  When I mentioned my name, he said ‘Oh! The bathtub girl!’, and never was I more proud and pleased to have been so unprincipled in my youth.  Lesson of the Day: if a task can be performed in a bathtub, then do so there. A bubble bath makes everything memorable.

Is this your illustration? I love it but can’t find anyone to credit. If it’s yours, please let me know!

*Yeah, I’m totally name dropping now.  I hang my head in shame.

Mossy Monday

I’m feeling very weary today, low energy, fighting off a bit of a cold, but the sun is shining out there and even though it’s November, the forest is a bright emerald green, thanks to the millions of varieties of moss that you can find EVERYWHERE. Up, down, left, right. Between making a video last week for the Cumberland Community Forest Society and taking pictures for their instagram feed (come and follow at @cumbyforest to get your recommended daily dose of nature!), I’ve had a bit of an epiphany: there’s a LOT of variation in mosses.

Go on, get down on your hands and knees, take a peek at those mosses. From a distance, it just looks like endless green, but when you look closely, they display an almost infinite variety of shapes, shades and growth patterns. So beautiful! For good measure, take a moment to admire the liverworts and lichens, too; they’re often confused with mosses and can grow in close proximity, so to be fair, they’re adding to the green-ness, too.

Want to hear a fascinating mossy fact? It’s possible that ancient moss caused the Ordovician ice ages. What what?!?! Yes, that innocent, harmless moss may, in fact, have been powerful enough to cause glaciation and altered global temperatures; as mosses spread across the landscape over 470 million years ago, they absorbed CO2 from the atmosphere and extracted minerals from the rocks, starting a chain reaction that ended with algae blooms, mass extinction of marine life, and a global drop in CO2 levels. all of which added up to the formation of ice caps at the poles.  We need to give moss a bit more respect!

If you aren’t outside and can’t get your nose close to the ground to admire the wee plants, then here’s the video for you to watch, enjoy, share with your naturalist friends. And if you have a favourite moss of your own, I’d love to hear about it!

Five Years On.

Yesterday was the fifth anniversary of my dad’s death.  Our family went out for dinner but never once mentioned why – that’s okay, it was a strange and sad day to mark, no one needed to be blunt about the occasion. But there have been births and marriages in those last five years, and I marvelled at how families evolve and change. Some people at the table had never met my father, and yet here we are, celebrating this life lived and the ripples that his personality left in our own futures.

I thought about how every single person in the restaurant, even the baby in the high chair over there, will be dead and gone in 150 years*, and this group will be replaced by a new group, all eating and chatting and enjoying each others company in pretty much precisely the same ways as we are. I found this both sad and remarkably hopeful, all at the same time. I don’t think there’s a word in English for the emotion. Our language is terribly light on words for complex, multi-layered psychological states.

Sometimes I hate how time peels everything away, how it all changes, how we can’t hold on tightly to anything, because no matter what we do, we essentially have no control over our place in a vast universe. We have limited choices, and we do what we can with the tools we’ve been given, but the relentless assault of time wins every single damn game.

But at the same time, that bittersweet sense of chaos paired with the agony of loss and the giddy joy of gain can create a pure euphoric state, especially when the sun is shining and the world is beautiful. Transience makes us cherish the single imperfect moment far far far more than if we existed in perfection forever.

I don’t know what happens to us after death, and I’m not afraid to embrace the inability to know, or to ever know. That’s okay.  But I find comfort in accepting that, even after death, life still keeps plodding on through the years, growing and changing and yet still containing the essential core concepts that make it worthwhile: family, friends, some laughs over good food, and even the quiet weeping afterwards as we mourn those who are no longer with us.

*I first thought ‘a century’, but I’m inflating the number to account for advances in healthcare and also for sheer optimism.

Mish-Mash Bubble-and-Squeak Awoooooooo!

1. Lycanthrovember

If you’re a fan of werewolf-themed literature, may I be so bold as to direct you towards Hic Dragones, where they are currently celebrating Lycanthrovember (which I’m sure is an official holiday somewhere) by offering a pretty sweet two-for-one sort of deal: buy a copy of ‘The Tattooed Wolf’ and get a copy of ‘Wolf-Girls’ absolutely free. YEEEEEAH!

“[K. Bannerman] displays unusual and sometimes uncomfortable characters, and I care about them all, the significant players and the extras. If you like reading stories about intriguing people, this story doesn’t disappoint. If you like short, satisfying reads between your ‘Harry Potter’ or ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ ten pound seat-raisers, then buy this book.”

– Joe Murphy, The Dragon Page

“[Wolf-Girls is] a refreshing contribution… well worth reading… It’s always nice to read stories with a strong female focus, especially in genres and thematic areas that are traditionally male-dominated where women are sidekicks or something to look at. The she-wolves in this anthology truly are themselves and feel strangely natural.”

– The Future Fire

2. Reading Out Loud

On Saturday, Nov. 8 at 4 pm, I’ll be joining author Matt Rader at the Village Muse Bookstore in bustling downtown Cumberland, BC to read from my newest novel, Mark of the Magpie. Wait a second, I think that requires clarification… I’m reading from my book, and Matt’s reading from his. Or we could swap, I guess. Either way, it’s going to be fun. I’ve heard a rumour that there will be the consumption of beer afterwards.  Hurray!

3. Trees

A week ago, we were partying to save the trees in the Cumberland Forest. What a shin-dig! How many places would hold a lively circus-themed festival with hundreds of joyful people to save the wilderness next door? I love this town. Take a peek at a the party, which Shawn captured in his moving light box and shared with the world on the cyber-you-space-tubes. Isn’t living in the future amazing?

‘Mark of the Magpie’ Flies Free

The book launch was last night!

Despite a torrential rainstorm of biblical proportions, it was (to use a suitably Victorian phrase) bang up to the elephant. I was simply mad as hops to be reading to such a lovely clutch of chuckaboos, and I was left with a right gigglemug for the whole night.

And now the book is OUT! Copies of ‘Mark of the Magpie’ can be found at the following locations:

Blue Heron Books
Courtenay Museum
Cumberland Museum
Laughing Oyster Books
Village Muse Books

As well as online through Lulu (for now). I’ll let you know when it’s passed through all the appropriate channels and available through other online distributors.

Many thanks to those intrepid adventurers who braved the elements to listen to me read in a darkened theatre, and who asked such wonderful questions, and who ate and drank and made much merriment afterward! Yes, murder mystery fans are a most fun bunch!