Bigfoot: Childhood memories from Morris Mountain, BC

Dear Bigfootencounters,

I am partially blind now, but my husband of nearly 57 years is helping me tell you about my childhood.

I am 79 years old and I was born in the Morris Valley in the heartland of Little Mystery Mountain, BC in 1930, one of seven children most older than me. We lived in a 3 room wood shack with an outhouse out in the backyard.

As a child my mother was always finding ways to feed us all, I was mostly cared for by my older brothers & sisters while mother fished or hunted rabbit with a shotgun. Rarely did any of us younger children have much to wear besides a diaper or a hand-me-down t-shirt. We slept 3 girls to a bed, played anywhere we wanted too and stayed outside most of the time except in winter. My feet never had shoes on them until I was 7 years-old and then only for school hours because somebody older needed them. My prize possession at the time was a sock-doll a lady in the city made each of us girls and my bigger brothers got dodge balls, which we all played kick-ball in the summer months.

My earliest memories was playing in the woods, we had what we called "wood-friends" that my youngest sister & I played with. My "wood-friend" was a dirty kid, hairy mostly and he never brushed his hair. He played tag and jump rope with us and went swimming in the lake with us. He was small like me but he out ran my older brothers at kickball which made them mad.

My parents knew who he was and allowed him along on fishing trips. He was just always around except when my older brothers came to fetch me for supper. Then he would disappear until play time the next day. My wood-friend had a family that lived in an underground well, but I think it was a cavern of some kind. I never went in it but he did in winter, sometimes he smelled like smoke from a fire when he came out to play. Then in the summer months, my "wood-friend's" family lived in one of the rocky cliff outcropings up on the Mystery Mountain where it was too far for me to go in my bare feet. He had barefeet too, but was much more adapted to the berry stickers, thorns and such on the ground than me and my sister. I spent many an hour picking out thorns and stickers from the bottoms of my feet and my legs.

Our hairy friend's name was "on-sag" and he called me B-trish; my name is Beatrice. He talked in words, not more than 3 words at a time but he was no older than me and my sister. He liked singing mostly, 'ring-around-the-rosey' was one song and my mother taught us, 'Shelby coming round the mountain when she comes,' and when the hairy wood-kid would sing song with us, he danced and we would then dance with him. His dance was arms out, head down in circles. We just thought he was poorer than we was.

At Christmas time my mother would read from a picture book and teach us words from it, one winter Christmas day the hairy kid was standing in the yard, (in snow) waiting for us kids while we got reading lessons, but we couldn't play outside because most of us had no shoes for snow and no heavy coats so he came inside but the warm house was not to his liking and he didn't like hot cocoa but he liked to lick nucoa butter off saltines and sometimes peanut butter when we had any. I don't remember what happened to the kid, but I remember once my mother wasn't happy when he went potty on the kitchen floor, that was about 1938.

I don't think we saw him again after mother hit him in the backside with a broom, that was because that summer he stripped the tomatoes off mother's tomato vine breaking the main stem. That is all I remember of that hairy kid.

Beatrice
Rodgers Lake, BC
Thursday, June 18, 2009 10:37 PM

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