Beyond the Bear (4 page)

“I thought about you a lot down in California. Actually, I couldn’t stop thinking about you.”

Amber stared down at the creek and felt her face grow hot. She turned to me with a crooked smile. “Oh, did ya now?”

I couldn’t stand it any longer. I looked at Amber, and she looked at me, and for a moment we both forgot to breathe. I reached for her hand, and led her back into the house and down the hall to my bedroom, closing the door behind us.

My room had little to offer in terms of sitting options. So we sat cross-legged on my bed facing each other, the sound of the creek pouring in through my open window. I took Amber’s hand and placed her palm against my heart, then put my own against hers. We sat without talking, without needing to.

“I feel like I’ve known you my whole life,” I told her.

It wasn’t anything either of us said that cinched it. We knew without saying that we would be making love. But not that night. Both of us were half-tanked, and we didn’t want our first time to be that way. We lay snuggling on top of my comforter, talking in near whispers, soaking up the warmth of each other’s bodies. We held each other until four in the morning before finally drifting off to sleep.

My buddy, John Duray, broke the spell when he showed up around 10:30 that morning. He knocked on the front door, and when no one answered, he let himself in. He shouted down the hallway. “Hey, Dan! You awake in there? Let’s not keep those reds waiting!”

I awoke with a start. “Ah, yeah. Be right out.”

When I wasn’t, John walked down the road to the Aloha Alaska deli and returned a little later with my ritual morning elixir, a sixteen-ounce cup of Americano.

“Yo, Dan! Time to rally. I’ve got you some coffee out here.”

A little embarrassed and more than a little groggy, Amber and I rolled out of bed and stumbled out to the kitchen. I didn’t want to leave her, but like I’ve already admitted, fishing was my weakness. I liked to say that if I lost both arms, I’d figure out a way to fish. I considered inviting her along. But we’d had such an intense night I figured we could each use some space to let it percolate. So I didn’t. I hugged and kissed her goodbye.

“I’ll give you a call when I get back from fishing to see what you’re up to,” I told her.

It was a promise I would be unable to keep.

CHAPTER 2

River of Bears

I was well aware I was heading into bear country. I could
see that from my deck. In Girdwood, it wasn’t unheard of for bears to bury their heads in garbage cans or dog-food sacks stored on people’s porches. A friend of mine had his truck stolen by a bear. He was living up Crow Creek Road when he heard a commotion one morning, got up to investigate, and discovered his truck was gone. A black bear had climbed in through an open window and knocked it out of gear, sending truck and bewildered bear rolling down the driveway and off an embankment. (The bear was fine; the truck, not so much.) Even Anchorage, inhabited by Walmarts, Jiffy Lubes, and nearly half the population of Alaska, had bears in its backyard, and upon occasion, its front. Now and then a black bear or grizzly would forage its way into the land of car dealerships and mattress barns, crossing bike trails, lawns, sidewalks, parking lots, and busy roads before being stopped by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s urban wildlife conflict-resolution team, with a tranquilizer dart if public safely allowed, with a slug if not. Bears have been hit by cars in Anchorage. They’ve been hit by bicycles. Just the day before, as I was getting a capture the flag game underway with a group of kids, a young grizzly popped out of the woods. The hair on the back of my neck went red-alert, but the situation ended the way nearly all encounters do, with the bear taking one look, wanting no part of us, and motoring off like its butt was on fire.

I had tremendous respect for bears, especially grizzlies—or brown bears as biologists refer to the larger, coastal dwellers—as powerful symbols of the wild lands I loved. I’d studied them as part of my senior project at Prescott College, and was convinced they were more tolerant of humans than the other way around. I also knew what they were capable of. Bears kill one or two people a year in this country. A person is much more likely to be killed by a dog, and even more likely to die of an allergic reaction to the sting of a bee. Although my parents would disagree, I wasn’t much of a risk taker. I never felt the need to BASE jump off a cliff or kayak whitewater courses more waterfall than river. But for me to avoid the kinds of places large predators roam would be unthinkable.

Before a chance encounter with an indignant bear hijacked my dreams, my interactions with bears had ranged from amusing to annoying, and either way had left me with a good story to tell. Like the grizzly I came upon at Kluane Lake on my way up the Alaska Highway one summer. The bear was lying on its back on a rocky beach, tossing a driftwood log into the air, catching it, tossing it again, catching it, even giving it a little twirl, like a circus bear.

The fall before my freshman year at Prescott, I took a Sierra Institute wilderness field study course through the University of California Santa Cruz that had me living out of a backpack and sleeping outdoors for two months straight. One of those nights, sleeping under a full moon near Mammoth Lakes, I woke up to a black bear sniffing my face. Although my heart felt like it might make a run for it without me, I lay still as concrete as the bear sniffed its way on by—front leg beside my left temple, followed by sagging belly
,
then a hind leg, passing me by with hardly a sound. Once the bear cleared my head and became preoccupied with other campsite curiosities, I slowly sat up in my sleeping bag. The rustle of nylon gave me away. The bear stopped, turned, and glanced back at me. I held my breath. The bear swung its head back around and moseyed on. When it was about twenty feet away, I shimmied out of my bag, rose to my feet, and followed barefooted as it made its way to the edge of camp. Now and then the bear would stop, turn, and glance back. I would freeze. It would swing its head back around and take a few more steps. Then stop. Turn. Glance back. Freeze. We kept up this game of red light, green light until the bear strolled into a moonlit meadow, and I decided I’d pushed my luck far enough and stopped to watch. When the bear reached the far end of the clearing, it looked me over one last time, then ducked into the woods. I took that encounter as a gift.

Only once did I harbor malevolent thoughts toward a bear. Or, in this case, bears. As I remember it, on what was to have been a ten-day trip, a half-dozen or so of us Sierra Institute students and our instructor hiked deep into Sequoia National Park to set up a base camp. After choosing spots on a map, we all took off alone in various directions for three-day solos, leaving our instructor behind to hold down the fort and mind our food cache. While we were off communing with the redwoods, subsisting on gorp, oatmeal soaked overnight in cold water, and the writings of John Muir, our instructor spent those days and nights fighting off a black bear sow and her three cubs hell-bent on stealing our food. When we trickled back into camp three days later, we were met by this wild-haired, wild-eyed frazzle of a man. He turned camp security over to us, stumbled off to his tent, flopped inside, and was asleep before his head hit his Therm-a-Rest.

Sierra Nevada black bears are notorious for such single-mindedness, having long associated people with food. In Yosemite, some punks of the bear world have learned to think of cars as cookie jars, and have popped windows and peeled back doors going after goodies inside. Minivans seem to be a favorite, probably because they’re built to haul kids, and where there are kids there are Happy Meal remnants and wayward Cheetos. Once inside, they’ve torn through backseats to get at food stored in the trunk. They don’t just go for food; beer or toothpaste will do.

The bears we were up against on that Sequoia trip were just as determined and relentless. Our food bags were hung high in various trees, and the bears came at them from every angle. Mom would shake the trees, trying to get the bags to fall. The cubs would climb up the trunks and out onto branches to try to snag the bags from above and below. When one strategy didn’t deliver, they would try another. We took turns hollering, waving jackets, and pelting their butts with rocks. They’d scamper off, only to come trundling back fifteen or twenty minutes later. They kept this up all night long. The next day and night, as well.

Wiped out by then, we decided to abort mission, and hiked halfway back to the trailhead. The bears followed. We’d stop for quick lessons along the way, dropping our packs and huddling around, say, a pile of scat to debate its contents and determine its depositor. The bears would be on our gear in an instant. My pack got gnawed, but a classmate’s got shredded to the point we had to divvy up his load among us.
We
finally ditched the bears after our fifth day under siege.

Of the hundreds of miles I’d hiked and climbed and biked and boated in bear country, I’d only been charged once and it wasn’t by a bear. It happened when two friends and I and our three respective dogs were backpacking near Boulder, Colorado, and made camp in a clearing in the Ponderosa pines. This was not only black bear country, we’d been warned of mountain lions in the area. Late that night as we stared into a campfire our dogs suddenly went ballistic, barking, snapping, and lunging, with the one named Gimli dragging the backpack he was tethered to behind him. I leapt to my feet, spun around, and saw a large, shadowy figure at the edge of the flickering campfire light.

What the . . . ?
Heart revving, I reached down and grabbed a flaming log poking partway out of the campfire
to wield as a club. As I wound up to swing, with the creature now illuminated by the campfire, I found myself staring into the most menacing eyes I’d ever seen.

Normally when confronted with danger, a porcupine will pull an about-face, warn off its enemy by flashing a tail-load of quills, then hightail it out of there with a determined waddle. Instead, this thing charged. Having no idea porcupines were capable of such locomotion, I staggered backward, took a swing with my flaming club, then launched the whole log right at it and took off running.
Ahhhhhhh!
The campsite, only moments before as peaceful as a quilting bee, turned madhouse with three guys darting around chasing the three dogs that were chasing the porcupine that was chasing me. Realizing it was outnumbered, maybe, the porcupine finally slipped back into the shadows and scurried off into the woods.

Since coming to Alaska, the first time to work on an independent study project in the summer of 2001, I had crossed paths with several bears, both blacks and grizzlies. Alaska’s bears are generally wilder than Lower-48 bears, especially compared to black bears in areas as heavily traveled as the Sierra Nevada, and are therefore much less inclined to associate people with food. By mid-July, 2003, I had fished Alaska rivers the better part of three summers, enough to know bears could pop out of the brush anytime, anywhere, especially in places I most loved to fish.

While remote fly-in fishing is the quintessential Alaska experience, it can make the price per pound comparable to precious metal. The Kenai and Russian rivers on the Kenai Peninsula are prolific, world-class rivers accessible by road in a state where roads are rare, offering between the two of them trophy-size Dolly Varden and rainbow trout, and runs of four species of Pacific salmon—Chinook, sockeye, coho, and humpback. I was partial to the Russian, the narrower and shallower of the two rivers,
with its water running clear, as opposed to the cyan-tinted Kenai, a liquid conveyor belt of glacial silt. The Kenai can be excellent salmon fishing, but the Russian can be phenomenal. To me, the Russian River was the fisherman’s equivalent of a neighborhood bar. When the salmon were running, I’d be down there after work and on my days off three times a week, not giving the 140-mile round-trip drive from Girdwood a second thought, especially considering how hard the salmon work to get there.

Theirs is a pilgrimage of epic proportions, which increased my reverence and gratitude whenever one intercepted the business end of my fishing pole. After surviving the freshwater phase of their formative years, they go to sea, spending two to seven years, depending on the species, dodging whales, salmon sharks, and other ocean-dwelling predators, and evading commercial fishing nets, before returning to Cook Inlet, then the mouth of the Kenai River. Then they basically run a marathon while on a hunger strike as they bulldoze their way against the current more than seventy
miles to the confluence of the Kenai and Russian rivers, where they rest up before pushing onward and upward
—
all to sacrifice themselves for the posterity of their species, or, with any luck, a spot in my cooler.

The confluence of the Russian and Kenai rivers is the mother lode of fishing holes known as The Sanctuary. This is ground zero for combat fishing, with anglers standing practically elbow to elbow along the banks during the most prized salmon runs. Although the fish we were after that day, sockeyes—or reds as we call them—are on a spawning mission and stop eating once they hit fresh water, they plow their way upriver with mouths open, closed, open, closed, forcing water through their gills. The only way to catch them, legally anyway, is to intercept them with fishing line at a mouth-open moment. As the current drags the line downriver, you hook them in the mouth. This is called flossing, and it isn’t as hard as it sounds when the runs are so thick it would be just as easy, it seems, to wade out into the river and pounce on them.

A side effect of such great fishing is that, through the years, great fishing has drawn more and more fishermen, and more and more fishermen catching more and more fish means literally tons of guts and carcasses get left behind. That has drawn more and more bears. People like me come for the fillets. Bears come for the leftovers, the egg sacks and carcasses rich with brains and other delicacies that are winged back into the river after we’ve cleaned and filleted our catches. The US Forest Service, landlord of the Russian River Campground and its day-use parking lots, installed fish-cleaning stations to address, among other issues, the problem of fish being cleaned along riverbanks, which drew bears, and fish being cleaned at the campground, which drew bears. The cleaning stations were positioned so people could toss carcasses into the main current where they were more likely to disperse, providing nutrients for aquatic life rather than a buffet line for bears. Instead, carcasses piled up here and there, caught on snapped fishing line, on rocks, and in eddies—which drew bears.

The way it’s been explained to me, anglers discarding an average of 114,000 pounds, or fifty-seven tons, of fish waste annually within what’s now called the Kenai-Russian River Complex (a five-mile radius from the confluence of the two) have lured bears to an area where they normally wouldn’t linger or congregate in such high numbers. It’s not that bears don’t fish. They do fish. But there are much better fishing spots for bears, including farther up the Russian River valley where the water is shallower, fish are easier to catch, and people are few. As one local biologist explained it, bears would normally fish later in the runs, at times much less appealing to fishermen, when salmon are closer to being spawned out and dying, and therefore easier to catch. So I’m not saying bears are lazy. I’m saying bears are smart.

By the time I started fishing down there, the fabulous fishing and ensuing carcass pileup were putting bears and humans in the same place at the same time, both in ridiculous numbers, making confrontations inevitable. Bear cubs were growing up learning carcass-grazing as a legitimate means of making a living. A handful of brazen juveniles were losing their fear of humans, learning that all it took was a stroll along the riverbanks looking all badass to clear people out, leaving coolers, backpacks, and fish on stringers theirs for the taking, a no-good situation for either species since people can get hurt and bears can get shot.

The situation at the Russian had been years in the making. “What we’ve done is create an artificial food source,” Alaska Department of Fish and Game bear biologist Sean Farley told the
Anchorage Daily News
after a grizzly sow was gut-shot at the Russian two years after my attack. “I know I’m going to get in trouble for saying that. It’s a very strange, bureaucratic, Byzantine mess.”