Elias Charley and the Gumberoo
Filed August 12, 1953 · Recorded by Ada Merrick, Institute Founder
Eleven seasons reading the same drainages, and one afternoon that did not fit any of it.
The Testimony
I packed for the Forest Service eleven seasons. That August I was above the Skykomish with a survey crew, four of us out from camp and a boss named Garrett who stayed with the instruments.
I found the tracks on the Tuesday. Five toes, longer than a bear and set further apart, and the claw marks went deeper than the weight of a bear accounts for. Whatever made them was not being careful. It had come down the drainage in the open.
I told Garrett we should move the line east. He asked me what made them and I said I did not know, and he said find out.
On the Wednesday evening four of us were coming back along the bench above the creek, in the old growth where it is dusk by six. There was a smell in there, wet and sour, not a bear.
It was standing about sixty feet off the trail and it was not moving.
Eight feet, and I am giving you the low figure. Black, and it was not fur. It was skin, close and smooth and wet looking, and the light that got down through the canopy sat on it the way light sits on a rubber boot. The head was heavy through the brow. The eyes were set further apart than they ought to be and not far enough forward.
Nobody said anything. We stood there and it stood there.
Bill Tarrant was nearest to it. He was twenty three. He took one step backwards and put his boot into a rotten log and the noise went off in there like a gunshot, and the thing turned its head, and then it went into the timber. It did not run. It walked, and it was quick.
We walked the two miles back to camp without talking. Halfway down Tarrant said what was that, and nobody answered him, and he did not ask again.
I gave Garrett the whole account that night. He wrote it down. I watched him write it down.
The report went in at the end of the month and I saw a copy in October when the district office sent one out to camp. The tracks were in it, listed under wildlife sign, probably bear. The Wednesday evening was not in it. Not the four of us, not the sixty feet, not any of it.
I asked him. He said if that went in, every figure in the report gets read twice and the whole survey looks unserious, and he had eleven weeks of work in there.
I said there were four of us.
He said that is right, and there are four of you and one report.
I went to the other three. Alvarez said he did not want the trouble. Tarrant said he was not sure any more what he had seen, which I think was true by then. The third man, who I will not name because he asked me not to, told me he had a job and I should think about mine.
So it was not in the report and after a while it was not anywhere.
That is the part I want written down. I know what I saw and I can live with not being believed. What I could not get past was that it had happened to four people and then it had not happened at all, because a man with a typewriter decided it had not.
In December somebody told me, and they had it from somebody else, that there was a room above a hardware store in Hollowfield where things got written down. I took the bus.
Miss Merrick wrote it out in full and read it back to me. I asked her to read it a second time. She did, and she did not ask me why.
Documentation Notes
Investigator: Ada Merrick
Mr. Charley came to us. Nobody sought him out and nobody brought him. He paid his own fare from Tulalip and arrived at the room above Pruitt's on a Tuesday in December with no notice.
His account is recorded above word for word. He asked me to read it back twice and I did. He corrected one thing on the second reading, the distance, which he raised from fifty feet to sixty because he had paced the trail in his head while I was reading.
What can be checked. The survey exists and the report exists and I have seen the district copy. The tracks are in it under wildlife sign. Bill Tarrant and a man named Alvarez were on that crew and the dates match what Mr. Charley gave me. I have written to Tarrant twice and had no reply. I have not approached the fourth man, at Mr. Charley's request.
What cannot. Everything that happened on the Wednesday evening. There is no physical trace, no photograph and no second statement. Four men saw it and one of them will say so.
The name. Gumberoo is a lumber camp word from the Great Lakes and the coast, told as a joke about a black rubbery animal that cannot be shot and can only be burned. Mr. Charley did not use the word. He had not heard it. I am the one who put it in this file, after the fact, and I am recording that I did so, because a name a witness never used should not be allowed to become part of what he said.
On the report. I want it in the file plainly. A Forest Service crew boss took a full account from four men and filed a report with one part removed, for a reason he stated openly, and the removal worked. Within two months there was no record anywhere that anything had happened.
That is not a creature problem. That is a filing problem, and it is the reason this Institute exists.
What the Institute is not going to do. Mr. Charley is Tulalip and he did not offer me anything about his family or what they do or do not speak of, and I did not ask him. It is not in this file because it is not mine to put there.
The ledger records him as Mr. Charley.
Filing. Class II. One witness willing to give an account, three present and unwilling, no trace. If Tarrant ever writes back this moves.
The creature in this account is catalogued in the field guide, and can be photographed in the app.