© PS
Drive west across the rocky spine of Vancouver Island along rutted logging roads to the fishing village of Bamfield and stand on the splendid beach at Pachena Bay.
Look out across the surly, roiling Pacific and try to picture a crack in the ocean floor, a tectonic fault known as the Cascadia subduction zone that runs south 1,300 kilometres to Cape Mendocino, the most westerly point in California.
Now imagine a chilly winter's night more than three centuries ago when that fault ripped apart in a deadly, magnitude 9 earthquake.
People of the Huu-ay-aht First Nation, asleep in their longhouses just above the high-tide mark, were jolted awake. The violent shaking of the earth lasted several minutes and left the houses intact. Their occupants survived, but what they could not see out in the dark was a rapidly falling tide.
A dark force was sucking the sea out of Pachena Bay, leaving the sands dry - but only momentarily - as a mountainous wave gathered strength. Suddenly it crashed like a battering ram against the shore, hurtling back into the bay so quickly that the people had no time to reach their canoes.
Everyone died, according to neighbouring villagers who witnessed the tragedy from homes built high on a nearby hill, a story passed down through the generations to the current chief, Robert Dennis, who told me.
Roughly eight hours later, the back side of that killer wave hit the coast of Japan, more than 7,000 kilometres away.
