Seeking Solitude in Sasquatch

Tyler Landry's Old Caves focuses on a retiree, living alone in a cabin in the woods. The man, never named, is methodically searching the woods. Landry shows bits of the cabin's interior that suggest he's looking for Bigfoot, but as the story plays out, it becomes apparent Bigfoot is really a symbol or avatar of what the man's after.

The book moves between present and past, showing the man's progress through the woods on a single excursion, contrasted with scenes of he and his wife when they first moved there. For the first half of the story, the wife's absence is unexplained. The old man carries a packet of letters, but for a long time doesn't read them. One flashback shows her being frightened by wolves appearing at the edge of the clearing where they grow crops. On his search, he finds tracks, and later encounters some of the wolves again. We're allowed to draw our own conclusions until Landry reveals the truth near the end.

It's a quiet book. Even the parts where he and his wife are together, set in summer, there are long panels of silence. One or the other working at something, or simply the two of them enjoying each other's company. In the present, the man alone in the forest, it's especially sparse. Those take place in winter, and the forest is blanketed in snow that erases much of the variety. It's an overwhelming amount of white, broken up by the shadows Landry uses to define the trees. Life is rarely seen, more often defined merely by the tracks it left in its passing. The man is, after all, looking for something that may not exist, and that he's never seen. He'll have to find some sign of it first.

While speech balloons and captions representing notes the man makes have soft borders, any radio broadcasts are outlined in jagged borders, demonstrating their intrusion into a world the man is trying to immerse himself in, where the hosts and their jabber have no place. When he sits in front of a fire or asleep in his tent, Landry draws so only the face is visible against a entirely black background. The man's pared his world down to simple binaries. Sleep or search. Find or don't find. Everything else was left behind, or didn't want to wait to follow.

Despite that, there's a sense of unreality, on unreliability of perception Landry plays with. Are we seeing his boots, the tops obscured by swirling snow, or is he seeing bare legs? Or is he mentally regressing to a more primitive mindset the deeper he goes? While the man sleeps, surrounded by darkness, shadows that look like arms envelop him or ruffle his hair. Is he dreaming of his wife, or of the creature he spends all his time seeking?