sasquatchDear Forrest,

What do you feel was your best source for gaining knowledge about the Indian lifestyle? ~ sasquatch

 

Well, sasquatch (you must be Bigfoot)

The best way for me to learn is to select an Indian-made object or a subject, and research it on the internet. There is so much information out there today that one can become knowledgeable in just a few minutes.

For instance, did you know that in pre-historic times the Indians in the Southwest smoked four different kinds of tobacco? f

 

 

26 Comments

  1. I think that Forrest’s response to this question, like many others before, contains some hints about the kind of “rules” that we are to use to extract the nine clues from the poem.

    First, the first letters of the three paragraphs are an acrostic of WTF (shame on you Forrest!), so this might be a hint to look for an acrostic. If we take the hint and collect all of the capital letters in order, we get:

    W B
    T I T
    F I S

    Note that “internet” is deliberately NOT capitalized, probably in order to avoid generating one I too many.

    With minimal rearranging, we get:

    BTW, IT IS ….. F.

    But what fills the missing gap? It looks like it might be something important!

    Another “rule” might be to look for homonyms or (in this case) homophones.

    (BTW, homophonic and homonymous may seem the same but are not synonymous)

    We see for and four. 4 and 4? There happens a certain pair of letters that appears EIGHT times in his response, four times in the second paragraph and four times in the third:

    in

    So now we have:

    by the way it is in …. f.

    This is getting exciting!

    Just one more gap to fill. Another “rule” might be to look at pairs of letters that end words or sentences…

    I’ll leave it to you!

  2. One last comment about how to find a place to get started.

    Sometimes hints are hidden, and sometimes they display themselves like a flashing neon sign. Look at the first stanza and the line with the word “hint” in it. Taking the first three letters of this word and the first four as well as the last of “riches” and you get Hinrichs, the last name of Forrest’s dear friend. It would be nice to verify that this is not a coincidence, and using the same beginning letters-ending letters approach, one can easily find Everard in stanza 3, line 2. If you are still unconvinced, you can also find “Eric Sloane” in the first stanza (lines 3 and 1 respectively). None of this is particularly new, but it seems that few searchers have bought into this approach, so I thought it was worth reiterating.

    (Interestingly, in the podcast, unless I just missed it, Forrest mysteriously omitted Sloane’s name when he was asked to list his favorite Taos artists. One would have expected him to be at the top of the list…)

    It’s as easy as sawing logs and stacking firewood.

    For example, if you look carefully, you can even spot a couple of owls in the last two lines of stanza 5 and a reference to where they live in “look quickly down”

    Liz

    1. Liz – the fact that he chose to answer a question by Bigfoot might indicate this has something to do with measurement or feet. Perhaps a Google Earth measurement or something more intricate like from final blaze to resting spot?? Southwest might also be indicative of direction.

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