1942 - Slavomir Rawicz's "The Long Walk"
A Review

  In Daniel Furguson and Angus Hall's 1989 book Great Mysteries, Mysterious Monsters, is mentioned the story of Slavomir Rawicz. Rawicz was a Pole who escaped from a Siberian prisoner of war camp together with six other men in the midst of a war torn world. Hungry and half-starved, they made their incredible escape over the Himalayas to freedom in India.

Long a favorite story of mine, it is best told in Slavomir Rawicz's best selling book The Long Walk. The author wrote, that during his escape from Siberia in 1942, he and his companion escapees saw two eight-foot tall hair-covered creatures somewhere between Bhutan and Sikkim.

It is a riveting story of man's will to live free and the determination of a half dozen men to survive against the elements. Their superbly told story is one of courage and human endurance that was interrupted for two hours by an encounter with two creatures, which sought to block their passageway.

Most assuredly, this story bears repeating for it is a would-be classic for followers of this phenomenon. Here is that portion of Slavomir Rawicz's story that bears recounting for the current generation of new researchers to process if for no other reason than to compare Rawicz's observations to present day reports.

The significance of this recount is distinguished by the fact that it is written 25 years before the advent of the Patterson-Gimlin filming of a Sasquatch in Bluff Creek, California. As important a classic as any, here are a few central outtakes from Rawicz's book:

"The contours of the mountains temporarily hid them from view as we approached nearer, but when we halted on the edge of a bluff we found they were still there, twelve feet or so below us and about 100 yards away. Two points struck me immediately. They were enormous and they walked on the hind legs. The picture is clear in my mind, fixed there indelibly by a solid two hours of observation. We just could not believe what we saw at first, so we stayed to watch."

I set myself to estimate their height on the basis of my military training for artillery observations. They could not have been much less than eight feel tall. One was a few inches taller than the other in the relationship of the average man to the average woman. They were shuffling quietly around on a flattish shelf, which formed part of the obvious route for us to continue our descent. We thought that if we waited long enough they would go away and leave the way clear for us. It was obvious they had seen us and it was equally apparent they had no fear of us. The American said that eventually he was sure we would see them drop on all fours like bears. But they never did. Their faces I could not see in detail, but the heads were squarish and the ears must lie close to the skull because there was no projection from the silhouette again the snow. The shoulders sloped sharply down to a powerful chest. The arms were long and the wrists reached the level of the knees. Seen in profile, the back of the head was straight line from the crown into the shoulders, 'like a damned Prussian.'

We decided unanimously that we were examining a type of creature of which we had no previous experience in the wild, in zoos or in literature. It would have been easy to see them waddle off at a distance and dismissed them as either bear or big apes of the Orangutan species.

At close range they defied facile description. There was something both of the bear and the ape about the general shape, but they could not be mistaken for either. The color was a rusty kind of brown. They appeared to be covered by two distinct kinds of hair — the reddish hair which gave them their characteristic color forming a tight close fur against the body, mingling with which were long loose straight hairs hanging downwards, which had a slight grayish tinge as the light caught them. They were doing nothing but moving around slowly together, occasionally stopping to look around them like people admiring a view. Their heads turned towards us now and again but their interest in us seemed to be of the slightest. I looked back and the pair was standing still, arms swinging slightly as though listening intently.

What were they? For years they remained a mystery to me, but since I have recently read of scientific expeditions to discover the Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas and studied descriptions of the creature given to me by native hill men. I believe that on that day we may have encountered two of the animals. I do insist, however that recent estimates of their height as about 5 feet must be wrong. The minimum height of a well grown specimen must be around seven feet."

Some years ago, Napier wrote his own remarkable observations of that time, which were: "Unfortunately they complicate the issue even further because two of them, (buttocks and a chin) are not apelike but human characteristics, a conical head and short legs are ape-like. Slavomir Rawicz also mentions how the creatures stamped and swayed when moving about, a description which evokes the locomotion patterns of neither man nor ape."

Today, with highly detailed digital image analysis of the Patterson-Gimlin film, we know Rawicz's astute observations in matching likenesses to the North American Sasquatch in the 1940's, prior to the 1967 Patterson-Gimlin filming, were simply amazing field notes for that period of time and under those conditions of survival and fear. I cannot intellectualize how Rawicz could make such creature descriptions of the day, never having had prior knowledge and have it be so similar in detail to what we know about hominids today, roughly 60 years later.

Slavomir Rawicz also noted that these creatures were bipedal saying, "At no time did they drop to the ground on all fours and display the knuckle-walking habit of chimpanzees and gorillas." Knuckle walking is a term devised by American Anthropologist Russell Tuttle to describe the gait of African apes on the ground.

Surely Slavomir Rawicz's early field notes lack the peer recognition they so richly deserve. Rawicz's interpretations of his observations before the era of the Patterson film are intelligently thought out for a man under stress, fleeing captivity, in fact running for his life as an escaped prisoner of war. His field notes fall among the classics.

In a recent issue of the Fortean Times, Bigfoot Times editor Daniel Perez demonstrated a different viewpoint with regard to the Rawicz story. In his book review of Loren Coleman and Patrick Huyghe's, The Field Guide To Bigfoot, Yeti and other Mystery Primates Worldwide (1999), Daniel Perez makes this critical comment stating: "Long after this alleged episode, famous mountaineer Eric Shipton, expedition leader of the successful assault on Mt. Everest, studied the text of The Long Walk and later expressed considerable doubt about the terrain Rawicz claims to have traversed. Therefore, on the heels of questionable and shaky geography described by Rawicz, the damned testimony of the alleged witness [Rawicz] has to come into question."

From my point of view, I would suggest Perez does not illustrate Shipton's claims by rote, citation or page number sources and I could find no direct conflict with the terrain described by Rawicz or any difference of opinion by Shipton, who by the way, did not make the journey with the Rawicz group. Even if Shipton disagreed with the landmarks described by Rawicz, does that disaffirm the authenticity of the Bigfoot portion of Rawicz's book?

Without direct source citation, I would argue that what Daniel Perez suggests is flimsy evidence and tantamount to producing hearsay for the sake of verbal drama in his book review. Perez neglects to take into account Rawicz's "fleeing-state-of-mind" from his imprisonment in concentration camp type confinement and his determination to escape and survive in the harsh elements.

Under those conditions, I would be no better able to describe my environment as accurately or the creatures encountered. Anthropologist Dr. Myra Shackley also concluded Rawicz's story was questionable solely based on Shipton's statement. Shipton however, was admittedly unsure of Rawicz's route, therefore was most likely blowing smoke. I find these judgments poorly concluded and critically premature. Shipton was known to be a difficult man. Perhaps we human's err in judging the quality of witness sources based exclusively on a single person's account because the name alone carries more weight. Because opinion is written in a book, doesn't make it fact regardless of who or what the author may be or how important the writer deems him to be.

Neither Shackley nor Perez knew Shipton personally nor do they know if the famous Shipton was error free himself. I would write the whole matter off as unfounded information.

One of the great tragedies of life is that many people believe a text because it is published. But anything can be published, opinions, lies, deceits, hoaxes and premature philosophies. Truth can also be published and still be quite erroneous in descriptive detail. This is where the reader must weigh the principles of fact from fiction with some degree of personalized judgment in accuracy.

It is interesting, nonetheless, that what Rawicz chronicled in 1942 was before the world was aware of such creatures to any great extent and he described them not unlike we hear from remote villagers today. Moreover, Rawicz's description comes close to matching that of California's bigfoot, which came to the world's attention more than 20 years later.

Bobbie Short, 1999

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