My Sasquatch Encounter

D. E. Larsen, DVM

The school bus pulled up to the front of Myrtle Point High School, and everyone stepped out of the bus and ran through the light rain to the front doors of the school. 

Once inside, Ben caught up with Don Miller and me. 

“Terry and I are planning to go hunting this weekend on a section way back off of Catching Creek,” Ben said. “I don’t know who is going yet, but you two can join us.”

“Sure,” Don said. “What is the plan?”

“We have a couple of forties out behind Bushnell’s up Catching Creek,” Ben said. “Dad logged it and burned the slash last year. There is a little prairie up there. Right in the middle of it, there is an old cabin. It’s not much of a cabin, but it will sleep six or eight of us. I thought we could go in Saturday morning, sleep overnight and come out Sunday afternoon.”

“That sounds good,” I said. That would give us an evening hunt and a morning hunt.”

“Yes, we can drive about a mile up the little creek behind Bushnell’s,” Ben said. “There is a locked gate there. Then we have a five-mile hike into the cabin.”

“Six miles from Catching Creek must put us almost over the hill to the coast,” I said. 

“At the top of the ridge, you look down onto the upper reaches of Bear Creek,” Ben said.

“Wow!” Don said. “You mean Bear Creek out of Bandon?”

“Yes, it’s just about as wild as it gets around here,” Ben said. “Hopefully, we can get a buck or two out of there.”

***

Early Saturday morning, Terry, Dana, and Don stopped in front of our house and picked me up. 

“Did you bring the bacon?” Dana asked as I threw my pack in the trunk.

“Yes, Mom said it would be fine in this weather,” I said as I found a seat in the back. “It’s going to be a pretty cold trip, I think.”

“Ben will be waiting for us at Ward Creek,” Terry said. “We will be camping in a cabin, so things shouldn’t be too bad.”

“Those old cabins don’t have any insulation,” I said. “It will be just as cold as it is outside.

“You will be fine with a sleeping bag,” Terry said. “And when that bacon is cooking in the morning, you will forget about the cold night.”

Ben was waiting in his pickup at the intersection with Ward Creek. He saw us coming and pulled out in front of us. It was a short trip to Brewster’s place, and Ben pulled into the road just past the house.

There was a locked gate on this road, but Ben had the key. We pulled through the gate, and Ben locked it behind us and stopped at the car window.

“It’s just a little over a mile to the next gate,” Ben said. The road goes through some other property, and I don’t have a key. We will need to park at the gate and walk. Just make sure you don’t block the gate when you park.”

It took almost no time to come to the second gate. We parked, and everyone loaded up their packs and rifles. It was sort of a rag-tag assortment of gear. I had my brother’s old boy scout backpack, some kind of a rucksack with a change of underwear and socks, a bottle of water, a frying pan, a package of frozen bacon, and a box of shells. My oldest brother’s sleeping bag was lashed to the pack in a lopsided manner.

The left shoulder strap dug into my skin when I shouldered the pack. I sat it back down and adjusted the sleeping bag to a balanced position.

“We need to get one of those new sleeping bags that roll up in a short roll,” Don said as he also adjusted his pack.

“That’s a lot of money for something I use once a year,” I said. 

We shouldered our packs and climbed over the gate. Then hurried to catch up to the others who had stopped at the bridge crossing the creek.

“Does this creek have a name?” I asked.

“I’m not sure,” Ben said. “I think it is called the middle fork of Catching Creek.”

The country ahead of us was rugged timberland. It looked like one hill after the other. The good thing, we had a graveled road to walk on. The bad thing, we had five miles to go. And it was all uphill and downhill.

“We probably won’t see anything until we get to a couple of clear-cuts about a mile before we get to the cabin,” Ben said. “I think we should scan those, but we need to get to the cabin and set up for the night before we do any serious hunting this evening.”

There was no military discipline on the five-mile march. Guys would lag behind and run to catch up when they realized how far back they were. Walking through timber doesn’t lend itself to great views. It was just up one hill and then down the other side. Most of the small creeks in the gullies between the hills were dry, waiting for the fall rains to start.

Finally, Ben stopped as we neared the top of one hill.

“We better load a rifle or two,” Ben said. “There is a clear-cut just over this hill. It’s a long downhill stretch, then we cross a creek, and the cabin is just up the creek a bit.”

At last, we were almost there. Everyone loaded their rifles. Nobody wanted to be left out if there was going to be any shooting.

We crested the hill and stepped out of the timber into bright October sunshine. I sneezed at the change in light intensity, and everyone frowned.

We watched both sides of the road as we continued downhill.

“There!” Dana said, pointing out to the left. 

There was a small group of deer, maybe two hundred yards out. 

“The one in the rear of the group is a forked horn,” I said.

“Are you sure?” somebody asked.

“Yes,” I said as the shooting started.

There was a short volley from five rifles, all with open sights. It sounded like a small army. The deer ran off over the hill, and we continued on to the cabin.

We all hunted that evening, all to no avail.

“All that shooting was probably not a good idea,” I said. “We just told all the bucks that we were here.”

“It will be better in the morning,” Ben said as he tended the fire. “Who’s cooking dinner?”

“I brought a sandwich for tonight,” I said. “I have bacon for the morning and a frying pan.”

“That bacon sounds pretty good right now,” Ben said.

I tossed Ben the bacon and the frying pan as I put half my sandwich back in my pack. They will all complain when there is nothing to eat in the morning.

It turned cold as soon as the sun went down. The weather forecast had said it was going to be a cold morning. There were two double bed iron bed frames in the cabin. No mattresses and the wire rack stretched over the iron frame. I threw my sleeping bag in the middle and crawled into bed before it got too cold.

Everyone was sound asleep when I woke up in the morning. I kicked Don on the foot and motioned for him to get up. We pulled on our boots, and I retrieved the half of sandwich from my bag. Tearing it in half, I handed Don a portion.

“This is probably all there is to eat this morning,” I said.

“I tried to tell them that last night when they were cooking that bacon,” Don said.

“It’s foggy out. I figure if we get to the top of the ridge by sunup, we will catch a little buck before he heads to his bed,” I said.

We grabbed our rifles and headed out. Looking back as we stepped out the door, everyone was still sound asleep.

We followed a cat road up toward the top of the ridge. This clear-cut had been burned last year, and there was no browse for the deer to eat. We needed to get up to the edge of the clear-cut and walk along the edge of the timber.

The sun was just peaking over the far ridge to the east when we reached the top of the ridge. A cat road was cut as a fire break along the edge of the timber at the top of the ridge. We started down the ridge top on the cat road,

The fog was thick. We had less than a hundred yards of visibility. A dog barking was far off on the Bear Creek drainage. We walked right into a group of four deer. They stood looking at us. One was a small buck, a fork on one side and a spike on the other.

“Do you want to shoot him?” I asked Don.

“He’s a little guy, hardly worth the effort to pack him out of here,” Don said. “Let’s let him go.”

“I agree,” I said as I waved my left arm. The deer quickly jumped into the timber.

We continued our walk down the cat road. 

Don suddenly stopped and pointed. There, right at the edge of our visibility in the fog, stood a massive dark structure.

“Bear?” Don whispered.

“I don’t know, looks too big for a bear,” I whispered back. Everyone stood motionless.

“Bigfoot?” Don whispered 

“You think?” I said. “Maybe.”

“Should we shoot it?” Don said.

“Let’s get closer,” I said. “I don’t want to shoot it if we don’t have to.”

We crept down the cat road, then moved off the road toward the bigfoot. He looked larger now that we were closer. At least eight feet tall with broad shoulders. In the fog, he was almost black, and he didn’t move a muscle.

“He has to know we are here. Otherwise, he would move,” Don said. 

Now we were close, the fog was still dense, but we were maybe twenty yards from him, separated by a small gully.

“You stay here,” I said to Don. “I will cross the gully and come up behind him. If he moves toward me, shoot him.”

Don readied his rifle, and I carefully dropped down into the gully. I lost view of the bigfoot in the gully, but glancing back at Don’s position, I plotted my path to come out behind him.

When I stepped out of the gully, the big foot was gone. I was standing by a big stump.

“He’s gone,” I said to Don.

“You’re standing right beside him,” Don replied.

I looked again and chuckled at myself.

“Don, it’s a stump. It’s just a damn stump.”

Photo by Photo Jon Sailer on Unsplash.

Eating Your Inventory

 D. E. Larsen, DVM

Sandy hung up the phone and looked at me with concern in her eyes.

“That was another appointment for a health certificate,” Sandy said. “These days, it seems like half our clients are moving to Alaska.”

“People have little choice,” I said. “They seem to close a mill every couple of weeks, and they have mostly stopped all the timber sales on federal lands.”

“If this continues, we will have trouble making a living,” Sandy said.

We moved to Sweet Home in 1976 and were instantly busy. Our practice actually grew too fast. That growth allowed us to make an easy living while investing in the practice with new equipment and an increased inventory. 

One of the problems with that growth was we really had no need to manage the practice for efficiency. It didn’t matter what we did. More people came through the door than we could handle.

Then in the early 1980s, interest rates soared, new construction ground to a crawl, and the environmentalist demanded restraints on Oregon’s timber harvest. This all added up to bad news for small timber towns like Sweet Home. 

Lumber and plywood mills were the first to close. Sweet Home went from eight mills to two mills almost overnight. That accounted for nearly six hundred jobs. That was a major hit in a town of six thousand people.

Fifty-year-old men who had worked their entire adult lives in a sawmill were suddenly out of work. Many of these guys had no other skills. The local community college tried to offer retraining for many of these men. But a lot of men were not good students in high school and were reluctant to return to school.

But they were still cutting timber in Alaska, and there were plenty of jobs. At first, it was a trickle of families leaving town. A lot of times, the husband went and left his family here. But as the weeks became months and it became evident that the mills and the logging were not coming back in Sweet Home, the trickle became a flood. Much of our client base was on the ferry to Alaska.

***

Several months into this flood of folks leaving town, I could see Sandy struggling over the checkbook.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Our gross is down this month,” Sandy said.

“Well, when everyone is leaving town, you have to expect that to happen,” I said. “How far down are you talking about?”

“If I place our usual order this week, there won’t be enough left for our draw,” Sandy said. “We are going to have to cut back on the supply order so I can buy groceries and pay the mortgage.”

“We can get away with that for a time or two, but I have to have things on the shelf in order to practice,” I said. “We can’t just eat our inventory and expect to stay in business.”

“I don’t know what else to do,” Sandy said. 

“We have to change the way we do things, but we have to be thoughtful in making those changes,” I said.

So change we did. We learned to manage a smaller inventory and laid off one position. That meant everyone had to work a little harder. The rule became that nobody walks by a dirty kennel without cleaning it. That included me, much to the chagrin of the practice managers, I am sure.

We went from a one-and-a-half-man practice to a three-quarter-man practice in a matter of weeks.

Our client base changed almost overnight. The young families were gone. We had been considering making a child play area in one corner of the reception area. Now, we added padded chairs for older folks.

Then we had to start building the practice again. 

“How do we build the practice?” Dixie asked.

“We go back to the basics. That’s all I know,” I said. “Nobody comes or goes without me interacting with them. I shake everyone’s hand. There is no hiding in the back. Everyone has to feel like they are part of the family. That means we have to know them. We need to know what the grandkids are up to this summer, where they are getting the new puppy, all the little things to show we are concerned about them and their pets.”

“We see a lot of people every day,” Dixie said. “How can we all keep track of everything?”

“We read the local paper and listen when people talk,” I said. “Then we make little notes on their file, so when you learn something, I can follow up on it. You make a note when Anita goes to watch her grandson’s pinewood derby. Then the next time Anita comes in, I see your note, and I ask Anita, how did your grandson do in the pinewood derby?”

“I see, sort of like what Fred Briggs does when he comes in to sell Sandy on something new,” Dixie said.

“Yes, that is far better than talking about the weather,” I said. “Grandkids and pets are our main topics. That and special events for the folks. It won’t be easy, but it will be worth it.”

So, that was the plan, and it worked pretty well. We had dug a deep hole for ourselves before we recognized that we had a definite cash flow problem. After a few months of poor response, it took over a year of hard work to correct. But the client interaction stuff stuck and became a mainstay of our client relations.

Photo by Karolina Grabowska on Pexels.

The Change of Life, From the Archives

D. E. Larsen, DVM

“Jim is out front and wants to talk with you about that radio transmitter tower that he was talking about yesterday, Sandy said. “He says he has some new information.”

“Jim, how are you doing today,” I said as I offered my hand to shake.

“Sandy says you have some more information.”

“Yes, I found a tower that we could lease space on for a repeater,” Jim said. “This is a hundred-foot tower on Marks Ridge, and we can get a space at the forty-foot level for twenty-nine dollars a month. That removes all the upfront cost for tower construction that I was talking about yesterday.”

“Jim, I know you are excited about this repeater, but I’m not sure that it will help me out a lot. For the initial expenses and then monthly tower fees, it just seems like too much expense for my needs.”

“Don’t worry about the monthly tower fees,” Jim said. “We will have plenty of people using the service to cover those costs. They will also allow us to repay the money you put out to get things started. And then when we are at full steam, we will have a steady revenue stream for income and to cover any operating and maintenance expense.”

“Check with me next week,” I said. “I am going to talk with a couple of the loggers and forestry guys around here to get a feel for their experience with the repeaters they use.”

“Okay, but don’t take too long to make a decision. I have to push ahead, and if I come up with another investor, I will have to go with them.”

“Don’t let me slow you down, Jim,” I said. “I have to be careful with my capital. A veterinary clinic in a small town doesn’t make a fortune.”

***

Every Tuesday, I attended a Rotary lunch meeting. It gave me a good break from the office, and I could mingle with other business people in town. This Tuesday, I grabbed a seat beside Jack. He would be the most knowledgeable about the use of radio communications in the area.

My experience in the Army was closely tied to radio and radar reception all over the world. I knew from that experience that the tower and repeater Jim was pushing would have definite limitations in the many little valleys around Sweet Home.

“Jack, I want to pick your brain a little today,” I said as I slid into the chair beside him.

“That might not take very long,” Jack said with a big smile.

“I have a guy wanting me to go in partners with him to install a radio repeater on a tower on Marks Ridge,” I said. “You have guys out and about all the time. What is your experience with radio reception around Sweet Home?”

“If you think you’ll have a functional radio connection with your office from a single tower on Marks Ridge, you’ll be disappointed,” Jack said. “We purchase usage on multiple towers around the area, many towers really. We do pretty well, most of the time, finding one that we can use. But there are areas that we have no reception. And that is with the use of many repeaters and multiple frequencies.”

“That is what I was afraid of when I was looking at the map,” I said. “Line of sight frequencies don’t tend to go through ridges very well. I think I will just have to continue doing things the way I’ve done them since I came to town.

***

It was some years later that the cell phone was thrust upon the world. The first models were large and cumbersome, and reception in the Sweet Home area was limited. But things progressed.

Bob Lester joined my practice for several years, and we needed to have a little better communication when on farm calls. Finally, Motorola came out with a handheld cell phone. It was still large but smaller than the old walkie-talkie that the Army used. It didn’t fit in your pocket, but it was functional for us.

***

Thursday golf was a big event for me most of the time. I liked it mainly because the phone never rang on the golf course. This one Thursday, Bob was gone, but I had this new cell phone.

Sandy came out of the office as I was getting in the truck to head to the golf course.

“You need to take this with you,” she said, holding the cell phone out to me.

“I guess it will fit in my golf bag,” I said as I took the phone and unzipped the side pocket of my golf bag. I switched the phone on and zipped up the bag, not giving it much thought.

The game went well. I golfed with the same group of guys most of the time. This week, we were in the Men’s club game and played a skins game amongst our group.

In our skins game, the skins that were not won on a hole carried over to the next hole. It was one tie, all tie game, and you had to have the low score on the hole to win the skin. This day, everyone was playing well, and when we came to the seventh tee, no one had won a skin yet. This hole was worth seven skins. At two bits a skin, this hole was worth seven dollars.

The seventh hole at Pineway Golf Course was a par three hole that played about a hundred and fifty yards to a small, sloping green. I hit a hard eight iron and stuck my ball about four feet from the hole.

Everyone was on the green, but I was closest to the pin. The others all putted and had tap-ins for their pars. I had the stage with the only realistic birdie putt.

I carefully addressed the putt.

“What is that,” Gil said as he looked around.

I thought he was trying to distract me from concentrating on the putt that was facing me.

“There it is again,” Jim said. “What the heck is it.”

Then it happened again. I heard it this time.

“It’s coming from Larsen’s bag,” Mike said.

Oh no! It was that damn phone, and it kept ringing.

“Just a minute,” I said as I walked over and unzipped my golf bag. I picked up the phone. The ringing stopped, so I returned it to the bag and zipped up the pocket.

“What’s that thing,” Jim asked again.

“It’s a new cell phone,” I said.

“You better get rid of that before it takes over your life,” Mike said. “We can’t play a game with that thing ringing in the background.”

I addressed the putt again, and the phone started ringing. I concentrated on the hole and stroked the putt. 

The putt broke to the right. The ball rolled up to the edge of the hole and seemed to stop for a moment. The phone rang again, and the ball fell into the hole.

“So that how it works, the damn phone pushes the ball into the hole,” Jim said.

“Seven skins,” I said. “Not bad with the phone ringing in the background.”

Everyone picked up their bags and headed for the eighth hole. I took the phone and called Sandy.

“I was just wondering when you were going to be home for dinner,” Sandy said.

Photo by Tyler Henry from Pexels.