Admittedly, I’m a skeptic of things mythical.

With Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster or even Wally the mysterious creature said to inhabit Wallowa Lake, I am not the first to say I believe.

Molly Gloss, though, makes me suspend disbelief, at least temporarily, in the Bigfoot myth with her carefully researched western adventure novel “Wild Life.”

The story takes place around 1900. The scene is the lower Columbia River and Mount St. Helens region.

Widowed feminist Charlotte Bridger Drummond, a character you grow to care about deeply, is supporting raising five boys by writing popular fiction. She’d like to write the Great American Novel, covering issues like women’s suffrage and male chauvinism. However, she needs a regular paycheck to keep her family clothed and fed.

Drummond plots stories starring strong heroines. Soon, though, she finds herself in the heroine role. Immersed in a struggle in the primeval woods, she becomes the leading character in her own quest for survival.

Her housekeeper’s granddaughter is lost at a logging site high in the mountains. Drummond joins the search, despite being told the search should involve only men.

Soon, Drummond faces an existential crisis when a man sharing her tent makes unwanted middle-of-the-night advances. She panics, runs away, losing her boots and matches, and is herself lost in the dark, supernatural and dripping-wet woods.

Finally, after days of wandering, slipping down slopes, wallowing in mud holes, climbing through wet shrubbery, devil’s club and lava beds, hemlock and cedar forests dripping from constant rain, she comes upon an elusive family of wild people. The giant hairy beasts, the sasquatches, take her in shoeless, freezing, nearly starved.

As they wander the primeval forest, she slowly gains their trust. In return, they teach her to survive living on roots, seeds and berries, worms and carrion.

She finds the beasts less argumentative and rancorous than her human companions. Their family structure treats females with more respect and dignity than that found in what purports to be “civilization.”

With compelling language and writer’s gifts, Gloss the master storyteller describes the challenges women faced around 1900.

Their job description included doing the washing sans machines, heating irons on the woodstove and pressing wrinkles out of clothes. Churning butter, making soap, scrubbing floors, beating carpet, cooking meals, baking bread and pies — all were part of the weekly routine.

Wood needed to be chopped. Cider, pickles and preserves needed to be made. Gardens needed watering and weeding. Children needed to be disciplined and taught to be good citizens with employable skills. Husbands needed to be catered to.

Drummond the widower swam against this tide. She smoked cigars, rode a bicycle, wore men’s clothing, was a free thinker, delighted in scandal.

She threw off the chains of domestication and entered the man’s domain of the deep dark woods where the old-growth forest was under assault.

The book enters the world of logging camps on the fringes of civilization. Like with Northwest authors Ken Kesey, Don Berry and H.L. Davis, in Gloss’ story people’s interaction with wild country is a central theme.

The wild people could evade detection only for so long as civilization encroached on their hideaways. Drummond learns much during her harrowing adventure about love, grief, being present in the moment and throwing off the shackles of an oppressive society’s expectations.