Jill is a country girl who learned how to gig frogs and skin a buck by age eight. That was during her rural Michigan days. In the late fifties her mom left her dad and they repotted themselves to Southern California where she morphed into a Venice Beach surfer girl, long distance bicyclist and beach volleyball player. In the late sixties, while part of an Air Force helicopter rescue unit, she honed her pistol and knife survival skills -- and became very good at them. Later came the failed domestication attempts by husbands one and two. After a hiatus of several years she finally met me, still harboring a stubborn, independent streak that charmed my heart and made it ache so well. Jill is one of those rare women who enjoys being a card carrying crime scene search unit volunteer, even when the bodies haven't been bagged or tagged yet. Best of all, Jill will venture with me into remote places where the promise of the best gold and treasure beckons. Jill, in short, has a passion for life, yet understands risk and is not easily intimidated by natural things.

However, a further understanding of Jill sometimes lies beyond my grasp. She has this "other side." She possesses weird powers that enable her to channel divining rods. She has uncanny dreams that sometimes foretell future events. Her hands, with just a few soft touches, dispense healing both to humans and animals. There have been scary moments when she has seen things that I can not see. On very rare occasions I have followed Jill into these other worlds.

The night she met the Sasquatch was the night I saw him too. A Sasquatch is part reality and part joke. The reality is grounded in reports made by those who have seen, heard, smelled, felt and maybe even tasted the big-footed critters. Hoaxers, dressed up in hairy suits, contribute to the latter view. It comes down to a credibility question. Wide eyed, breathless witnesses tell an emotional, sincere story. But the reported encounters are rather ephemeral -- the sound of snapping twigs followed by shadowy outlines, disgusting odors, long hair, big feet and giant proportions. Grainy photos of alleged footprints have been taken, but what do they prove? Whatever it is, the creature is real to some and a laugh to others -- but surely it is not of the natural order of things. Or is it?

While traveling to our dredge site destination a few years back we stopped for lunch in Etna, California. A regional newspaper carried two front page stories. One was about a recent Bigfoot sighting in the forest to the west of town. I scoffed aloud at that one, but Jill just looked at me with knitted brows. The other news story told of a series of left feet found still inside their shoes up in the Puget Sound area. The story questioned whether those missing feet were connected in some way to a local left foot found snagged to a gravel bar on the Salmon River. This one was still inside a Brooks running shoe and belonged to a young Etna woman who had gone missing near a town called Sawyers Bar some weeks earlier. The rest of her had not yet been found.

Jill glanced up at me with raised eyebrows. "Oh, great. Right where we are headed," she said. "Not to worry, Sweetheart. You're not that young any more," I quipped, reaching to pat her shoulder. She knocked my arm away saying, "And guess who's sleeping in their own sleeping bag tonight!"

We camped at one of the rare flat places along the banks of the North Fork of the Salmon River many miles west of Etna deep in the dark forests of Northern California. Flat places are the same places that the early teamsters first selected to rest and feed their mules while carrying supplies to our American forebears who risked all to to reap the precious yellow dust, flakes and nuggets of pre-Civil War Siskiyou and Trinity Counties. Flat places with sufficient corral space are where trading posts sprang up. Flat places are where Jill and I were metal detecting Chinese coins, square nails, small steel wedges and other rusting artifacts of an age gone by. And, oh yes, a growing collection of nuggets, too.

Sawyers Bar is on most maps. A city person might look at that mapped dot by the Salmon River and assume it was a town. The local rural folks know better. Today it has no stores, no gas stations, no hospitals and no law enforcement. It doesn't even have a hundred people. But it does have more than its share of stories -- even some treasure stories. One of these stories concerns the "Mad Russian," a nineteenth century odd loner of a fellow who lived a secluded life in a primitive cabin built above his claim on a flat just downstream from the then thriving colony of Sawyers Bar. As the story has it, the Russian was an eccentric hermit who hoarded his gold in porcelain crocks and for some unknown reason would have little to do with women. A few post-Civil War nineteenth century men who actually viewed this hoard told of seeing at least six such crocks filled to capacity. They had accompanied a doctor to the Mad Russian's cabin when the old prospector had fallen terminally ill. Months later, after the Russian died, many an adventurer attempted to locate his treasure. None succeeded and people began to doubt the gold really existed. After nearly a hundred years the Mad Russian was almost forgotten .

Metal detectors were perfected following World War Two. In the early 1960s word was rumored that one of the crocks had been found, though details of this discovery were murky and limited only to the privileged few. Insiders of Sawyers Bar descendants then searched dusty attic trunks, moldy diaries and whatever other crumbling sources might render clues of where to look. No one any longer even knew precisely where the Mad Russian's cabin had been. But the remainder of the Russian's secret stash still persisted to tease into the twenty-first century.

After setting up camp the very first day, Jill soon determined we were being observed. Hints took the form of occasional downshifting and an engine idling high above us. Our dredge was a little further downstream and the place where we were crevicing was 70 or 80 feet below a skinny ribbon of mountain road that twisted its way to Sawyers Bar a few miles downstream. Those 70 to 80 feet are nearly vertical and the brush is thick. More ominous clues consisted of muffled sounds made by something very heavy. Periodically Jill's keen hearing detected a compression and then expansion of forest floor twigs and leaves just beyond the stands of river willows that cut our view across the river. Jill's nose caused her to comment a few times that something smelled bad and it wasn't too far away. I neither could hear nor smell anything unusual and the poison oak was too thick for me to attempt a closer inspection. We remained alert, though, assuming blackberry foraging bears were the source. We were careful at night not to leave anything in our tent and to tie our ice chest and all our other food items suspended high off the ground from the stout limb of an old pin oak.

This late in the dredge season the river was low and not often visited by others. We were in a remote spot accessible only via a heavily rutted, long abandoned logging road. Some days no other human activity was perceptible at all. But a day then came when we heard a distant car door shut, followed by the approaching crunch of large boots shuffling over steep gravel and pine needles down to where we were encamped.

"I see you have metal detectors," the gray bearded man said without any prior introduction. Jill right away noted the large caliber, long barreled revolver strapped to his leg, the clear quartz crystal suspended around his neck from a leather lanyard and his thick, uncut hair that reminded her of tie-dyed shirts, bell-bottom leathers and other remnants of the 1960s. "You finding anything of interest?" he asked, looking first to her and then to me. "And what are you doing on my claim?"

A brief exchange followed. We showed him our written permission to prospect on the "Broken Arrow" claim which ran down to the mile marker located high above our camp site alongside the narrow mountain road. "You're about 25 yards downstream from the Broken Arrow. See the reflector on that big Doug fir? That marks the boundary. I can understand your mistake, though. The mile marker up the ridge is deceptive due to the way the access road curves and switches back down to these flats. Since you already have pitched your tent and set up camp, how about paying me twenty dollars a day and you won't have to move?"

I briefly thought it through. It was our first time here. I originally believed we were on the Broken Arrow when we first arrived, but the directions given were sketchy and now I wasn't so sure. I didn't want to leave in light of the nice gold we were finding. "How about five?" I countered. He momentarily cocked his head while stroking his bearded chin. Then he said, "You're on a potentially great spot that I myself have never worked so I should be charging you a lot more. But there are only three more days before the dredge season ends and that little four inch Dahlke probably won't clean me out. So, okay, five dollars apiece per day. That will come to thirty dollars total and I won't quibble about the prior days that I didn't know you were here. But you'll have to be out of here by the opening day of deer season. My name is Alex. That cool with you?"

He extended his hand to shake on the deal. While I was shaking his hand Jill asked, "You mean you haven't been checking on us the last few days?" "No. I've been down river in Orleans and Forks Of Salmon. Just got back this afternoon." Then he noticed our small bucket, the bottom of which held odds and ends we had metal detected. Bent square nails were commented upon. "The old-timers used to burn down their cabins to salvage the nails," he explained matter of factly while rubbing one of our recently recovered Chinese coins between his thumb and forefinger. The large Minelab Extreme and the smaller Goldbug 2s then became the focus of conversation.

"I hear those new detectors can punch down pretty deep -- that true?" he asked, seemingly impressed with our finds. It must have been intended as a rhetorical question, though, because he simultaneously turned and proceeded to head back from where he had first come. "I'll be around, gotta go right now. I may have a proposition for you later. Meanwhile, be alert. There's been some strange stuff going on lately. Found a cur dog hung by its throat from a tree limb not far from here. Probably a Karuk did it -- most of the Indians are okay but there's a mean streak runs through some. The young pup belonged to an Etna gal who disappeared a short while ago," he said, leaving us looking blankly at each other.

Three days passed. The visible gold pickers and small nuggets were adding up. But the fine gold locked inside our sub-30 black sand cons is what excited me most. So far four five-gallon buckets had been accumulated. When we returned home those concentrates might take days to process but likely would yield sufficient fine gold to fill a vial or two. Now it was the late afternoon of the "last dredging day" before deer season opened the next morning. Toward sundown is about when I hit "the deep crack".

It was actually more of a hole than a crack -- a four inch section of an otherwise thin bedrock fracture opened up maybe an inch wide right at the bottom of a bedrock bowl. A perfect gold trap! A dredger's dream! The longish brass nozzle at the business end of the Dahlke's high pressure sampling hose was inserted into this hole. It only barely fit maybe five inches into the crack before jamming between narrowing solid stone sides. Nevertheless a dozen gold flakes immediately blew out in a hazy cloud of clay and mud. These simultaneously were sucked up with the dredge's four inch hose. I could hear and feel gold pinging off the metal of the swivel suction nozzle. Hardly anything in life can feel so good. It made me tingle all over. Oh, would Jill ever be surprised! But, "Damn," I still could see golden glints dancing around in the suction stream, trying to rise up out of the little hole but then dropping back down. Try as I might, they were just too heavy or too deep to suck up with the Dahlke. The bedrock would have to be broken open later. Right now I had to get my dredge out of the water before the rattler's began coming out to feed on night critters.

Jill and I usually worked separately. Jill wanted nothing to do with dredging and preferred to "do her own thing." It could mean gridding an area with her divining rods, crevicing, sluicing or just working a pan. That particular morning of the last dredging day, after the sun peeked through a hole in the tree canopy and warmed an exposed spot on a grassy ledge adjacent to where Jill was running her sluice, a local buzz tail had come out for a tanning session. Jill, in turn, not amenable to sharing such a close space with a beady eyed reptile, chucked a rock at it. The snake, in turn, coiled and slithered, hissing its outrage at Jill's intrusion. "Just back off, snake, and be happy I don't roast you in little pieces over a camp fire tonight," she yelled, splashing water at it. No love was lost between those two.

With the sun setting, Jill was irritated that I was asking for her assistance. She hated snakes and knew she had made an enemy of one. Now she had to walk through high, thick grass to reach the dredge site. We worked quickly to disassemble the Dahlke -- a very easy task given its convenient, snap-open fasteners and quick disconnects. Soon all our equipment was loaded inside the shell of our truck. Just then we heard the approach of someone coming down the slope.

It was Alex. I didn't particularly like the way he surveyed my Extreme with its 16 inch coil, but what happened next completely disarmed me. He said there was a story of buried treasure on one of his properties. Would we agree to split with him if we located it? Alex didn't have to ask a second time! Hell yes, we would, but we already had broken camp and had nowhere to stay for the night. He then invited us to come up to his house in Sawyers Bar to talk over the deal. He had an extra room where we could stay.

We followed him into the dimly lighted town, not at all certain what to expect. He drove into a short side driveway and motioned for us to find a spot out front. We found a narrow strip along the already pinched county road just barely wide enough to park. Night air wafted a refreshingly clean scent of dampness up from the river below. Life was good. Then a voice called down to us, "Come on up the stairs, but hold tight to the rail. The light bulb's burned out." Jill accepted my hand to help make it up the first very high step. Thereafter we carefully ascended uneven, creaky stair boards which opened onto a deck-like porch overlooking the deserted road below. "Come inside," he murmured, ice cubes already clinking in a glass. "Let's talk."

He first discovered Sawyers Bar during the wanderings of his Hippy Days, staying on even after his friends returned to urban lives in San Francisco. He was circumspect about just what it was that he did for a living. Jill noted a vintage, dust free hookah on the fireplace mantle and drew her own conclusions. Alex was of Russian-American descent and had resided in this moss coated relic of a house for many years now, although he also owned and rented out a few others in town. Jill then asked the typical female question -- did he live alone? His answer was unexpected.

She had "gone missing" a few months back. He did not elaborate. Beer and vodka drinks were passed around. A few "Zdorov'ya!"s later the talk took a lighter turn. It was then that we learned about the Mad Russian and the lost crocks of gold. Jill's impatience simmered until she asked, "Uh, you were saying that your girlfriend went missing?" Alex then asked us if we believed in the existence of a Sasquatch. A creature who occasionally revealed itself and was whispered among the townsfolk to be associated with several missing person reports.

"Are you kidding?" I asked. Jill shot me 'The Look'. 'The Look' is her code for, "Shut up, let him finish." But too late. Alex already had withdrawn into a quiet shell. "Perhaps we should get some sleep. I'll show you to your room," he said.

The next morning found the three of us fording the Salmon down river from Sawyers Bar across a wide, shallow crossing point barely sufficient for Alex's Jeep and our four wheel drive F-150 to negotiate. Then an old logging road twisted and snaked us to one of his properties. A beautiful river meadow opened up when we emerged from the thick fir forest. It was there that we parked and got the metal detectors out.

"I think the cabin must have been somewhere up above this flat. If you find something, let me know back at the house. Otherwise I'll come back tonight after I deal with some unfinished business." Then Alex departed and our strange odyssey began.

An hour later I recovered a bent square nail, then another and another along with charred bits of wood. The forest floor was covered beneath one or two feet of dry needles and pine cones. Time to get closer to the earth. We spent the next hours carefully clipping away the poison oak and raking away pine needles. Finally, the source of my Minelab's huge overload signals peeked up through the dirt. It was a complete flat side of a nineteenth century stove, still with a white porcelain handle attached and faintly discernible words engraved in the rusting metal. Some stoves back then were made with detachable flat sides in order to carry them down low, strapped beneath the undercarriage of a wagon, and then easily assembled when needed. Such stoves could serve both to provide heat in the winter and a cooking surface at all other times. It was the central feature of a small nineteenth century cabin. Another flat slab of stove metal was found nearby, then a flattened length of stovepipe came out of the clay-like dirt. By late afternoon we had enlarged the site to a crude square about 15 feet by 15 feet and a picture of sorts began to emerge.

Jill uncovered a line of bricks at what would have been the rear of a dwelling. She squealed out loud when her Goldbug 2 detected something metallic beneath the bricks. I put my own Goldbug 2 down to help her dig. "Hey, this is MY find," she said. "I can get it out MYSELF!" Then I saw her jump back and throw down a black object as if it were a snake. We both just stood there staring at what appeared to be a size five woman's high-laced leather boot. It was very old. In the center of the opening a broken piece of a hard, whitish structure protruded. Jill looked up at me and I then bent down to examine her find.

The whitish structure turned out to be an old root. The rest of the boot was filled with twigs, seeds, dirt and pine needles. The leather layers were stiff and coming apart. Hundreds of tiny, hooked boot tacks, however, still held it together. Very strange indeed. The Mad Russian supposedly was a hermit and never was known to associate with women. In fact, he was said to dislike and avoid contact with women. But here was a lady's boot. How did it get there and why was it buried beneath the low line of bricks?

The next find puzzled us even more. A huge fir had been blown down years earlier just beyond what would have been the front of the old cabin. I swung my coil over the exposed underside of the uprooted root ball, hoping to snag a nugget thus pulled up from the underlying bedrock. The Goldbug 2 zip-zipped loudly each time I passed it across the center of the fallen giant's exposed roots. My Estwing pick soon dislodged the source of the signals. It was another old leather boot -- possibly the mate to the size five!

Jill mentioned it was getting late and maybe we should just head home. "No way! Are you kidding? This could be the find of our lifetime, Babe. We will camp here tonight. Right on this spot that we have cleared." Jill looked at me as though I had just sprouted horns and a forked tail. "No. I have a very bad feeling about this place. Trust me. This is not going to end well," she replied. She, as usual, was right. But I, as usual, prevailed.

We then proceeded to take advantage of the remaining daylight before erecting our tent by continuing to sweep the exposed clearing for more signals. Out popped several very old brass buttons and rivets. Levi Strauss began manufacturing his famous jeans shortly after the Civil War. These buttons were about that vintage. Then a solid brass 45-70 shell casing came out of the dirt. That confirmed this spot to have been post-Civil War. Exactly the time period the Mad Russian worked his claim. Lastly, a woman's brass sash-clip emerged from the soil.

"You don't suppose that old Russian was some kind of mass murderer sex freak, do you?" Jill asked. "That thought did cross my mind, Sweet Pea," I answered. "But not to worry. He's long ago dead and done with. Let's get the tent up while it's still light."

Alex did not show up that evening. Our food rations were nearly depleted so we ate what leftovers we could scrounge. Peanut butter smeared on Ritz Crackers, marshmallows and two cans of sardines constituted the main course. A bottle of Chablis helped rinse our palates. We analyzed the situation for a while. Jill said, "If we could determine where the windows were, then that might cut down the range of possibilities." "How so, Sweetie?" I asked. She explained, "Well, if I were a hermit and if I hid my stash of gold I would want to keep an eye on the spots. I wouldn't hide it inside the cabin. Too easy to find. I would select a hiding place that would be observable by me from this cabin site and bury it there." Jill had a good point. If someone were seen getting too close to your gold and was within rifle range, well that would solve the problem. Hmmm. I soon fell into a deep slumber.

Jill, however, stayed awake until well past midnight. Her restless leg syndrome began kicking up. Finally she began drifting off only to stiffen awake a short while later at the sound of a softly cracking twig. Our heads were next to the tent flap opening. Only a thin veil of mosquito netting stood between us and the wilderness beyond. That is when she smelled a foul, moist odor and the sound of heavy breathing just outside the mosquito netting. It was a guttural, throaty sound. The deep kind that a large animal makes.

"Oh my God," she thought to herself, "I forgot to finish all the marshmallows!" Indeed, the unfinished bag of marshmallows lay beside her beneath the unzipped sleeping bag that served as a large blanket that covered both of us. Jill formulated a silent plan. "If I can just get a good hold on that bag of marshmallows, then I can toss it out of the tent and that might give us a chance to escape to the truck or up a tree." Jill then rejected that plan when she realized the mosquito netting was zipped shut and we were essentially trapped inside with no way of quickly getting out. Suddenly our predicament began to deteriorate with the beginning of a very, very deep, rumbling growl. This was followed by a putrid odor that permeated the tent. Jill was paralyzed, unable to think. She just laid like a large icicle beside me and slowly slid her hand over to my unconscious form. She silently and gently tapped fingertips against my ribs, wanting me awake, but not wanting me to awake suddenly.

The growling suddenly sputtered, shifting to a coughing, snoring sound. Adrenaline surged through Jill's circulatory system. "That's no beast. I know that sound. It's my husband!" she muttered as she hammered me awake with balled fists. "Damn you, damn your damned farts and your damned snoring! I thought there was a Sasquatch out there about to eat us!" Just then we both fell silent as something very large quickly shuffled away from the tent flap and crashed into the inky darkness.

Jill grabbed our camp lantern and turned it on. My backpack lay opened and some gold nuggets glinted on the ground next to my leather poke. We cautiously exited the tent. Jill's left hand held the beam of light. In her right was a Browning 9 mm. I had my Colt .45 hammered back. We waited for more sounds. None came. But a strange odor wafted up from the river. Then we noticed a shadow slowly circling us in an eerie, dead silence. A BIG shadow. "How could it move like that without making a sound?" Jill puzzled to herself. It was then that I saw the Sasquatch. "Look, there he is," I said. "Where, where. I can't see anything but the shadow," she hissed. "Look where I am pointing, Dear One," I said rather calmly. Jill's gaze followed my pointy finger to the source of the shadow. It had six legs and slowly crawled around the rim of her lantern.

Our perceptions are strongly influenced by our expectations. We often see what we expect to see. Reality lies somewhere beyond our perceptions, sometimes beyond our grasp. The reality of that night is that Jill decided, bottom line, we were going home THAT NIGHT! It might have been a raccoon or maybe a bear or maybe Alex or a Karuk. Maybe even a Sasquatch. But if I wanted to come along with her, I had better get a move on. NOW! And so that is how Jill met the Sasquatch. And me, too. We still prospect. We still find nuggets. Just not where we met the Sasquatch. Well, we haven't been back YET, anyway.