Beyond the Bear (6 page)

Bears could crash the party at any moment. We all knew that. But given the hordes and close proximity, what worried me most was catching a bullet if some fisherman got spooked and started blasting. What was more likely was catching a wayward hook, since reds are famous for spitting them out, sending them flying backward, return-to-sender style, and keeping the local medical community busy removing them from various parts of angler anatomy. Not to mention the kind of damage a weight can do slamming into an eye. Emergency room personnel at Central Peninsula Hospital in Soldotna remove something like seventy-five fishhooks a year, some years closer to one hundred, from the cheeks, chins, noses, elbows, and eyebrows of anglers fishing various rivers along the Kenai Peninsula. I heard from a Cooper Landing emergency medical technician that one unfortunate was taking a leak when he caught one in his privates.

South of the madness, John and I climbed into our waders and loaded up our gear. With Maya trotting on ahead, we hiked the short distance from the car to a bluff, got down on our butts, dangled our feet over the edge, launched off, dropped onto a trail, and made our way down the steep, narrow path while leaning our shoulders into the embankment, steadying ourselves with our hands as we went. At the bottom, we set down our rods, pulled off our packs, and sat leaning against the embankment to wait our turn. In the meantime, we scoped out stringers for a fishing report, and it looked promising. When the first opening came up, John went for it, while I remained on the lookout for the next potential slot to drop into. After about fifteen minutes, another angler reeled in his line and gathered up his gear.

“Mind if I jump in there?” I asked. He didn’t, so I did. My line ready, the drag set fairly tight to accommodate the current, I slid into his spot and waded in up to my knees. I glanced upriver, then down, taking note of the rhythm of those on either side of me. I merged into the cadence, casting in synch with the others to the ten o’clock position, then slowly pivoting as my line drifted downriver anchored by just the right amount of weight to keep my sinker skipping along the bottom, my coho fly dancing a few inches above, but not so much weight for it to get wedged between rocks. I felt the subtle bounce, bounce, bounce as it hopscotched along. When my rod reached two o’clock, I flipped the line fly-fishing fashion, pulling several feet free, then cast back upriver to ten o’clock.
Ker-plunk, bounce, bounce, bounce, flip. Ker-plunk, bounce, bounce, bounce, flip.
Over and over and over. After a few rounds, I zoned out as the river scurried by, circumnavigating my legs on its way to the sea. I couldn’t have felt more at peace. My grandfather would have been proud at how firmly his lessons on the lake had taken hold. I’d grown up to love fishing as much as catching, and especially that day, warmed by the brilliance of the sun and the glow of new love.

I’d been at it maybe twenty minutes when I felt it:
bounce, bounce, bounce. Thud.
Wait!
I held my breath. The jerk of a head.
There!
I yanked, setting the hook.

“Fish on!”

The sockeye hit the gas. Anglers on either side of me reeled in their lines full-tilt and backed out of the river to make room.

“Woo! Oooh, yeah. Yep, there’s fish in there,” I hollered.

“Damn! What are you messing around for, Bigley?” John shouted. “Bring that bad boy in!”

Adrenalin pumping, I reeled as fast as I could before my fish could bolt downriver into the current of no return. I reeled and reeled and reeled. Despite its vigorous protest, I dragged it closer and closer to shore, then steered it toward the bank with the tip of my rod. In one final, sweeping motion, I dragged it onto the riverbank, where, full of piss and vinegar, it thrashed about as if the stones were hot coals. I dropped my pole, pounced on it, trapped it between my knees, grabbed a rock, and brought it down hard between its eyes. It quivered. I whacked it again. The fish went still. Maya, perched on the bluff above, barked and wagged her entire hind end.

“Nice one, huh, Maya? You approve? I thought so. Good girl.”

I rinsed my hands in the river, put my fish on a stringer, secured it with a rock, then rinsed my hands again, shook them off, picked up my rod, and stepped back into the current.

By early evening, between the two of us, we had three reds the size of canoe-paddle blades on ice in the cooler, all caught within the first forty-five minutes, after which it seemed the reds ended their shift and punched out for the day. Although the limit was three per angler per day, after more than two hours without a single intercept, we called it quits, loaded up our fish, hoofed it back to the car, peeled off our waders, and headed toward home.

Other than caffeine, granola bars, and a couple handfuls of gorp, we hadn’t eaten all day, and our engines were sputtering like old Buick Skylarks with bad distributor caps.
So on our way back to Girdwood, we stopped for dinner in Cooper Landing, a community of tidy log cabins and quaint fishing lodges along a winding stretch of highway that skirts the shore of Kenai Lake and the upper part of the Kenai River. A sleepy settlement of 370 in winter, the town triples in size and never sleeps in summer, during which locals and non are interested in two things and two things only: fishing and talking about fishing. As the launching pad for fishing trips on the Kenai and Russian rivers, key services at the time were open for business all day and night, including the
bar at Gwin’s Lodge, which on a hopping night back in the day would close at five in the morning and reopen in time for breakfast.

We pulled into Gwin’s around 6:30 that evening. Burgers and beer at the half-century-old log roadhouse had become an end-of-the-day fishing tradition. We headed into the bar, parked ourselves at a table against a wall, and ordered without bothering to look at the menu since we knew it by heart. The place was abuzz with anglers comparing notes and guides dropping in for beers after work, several of whom we either knew or recognized, all of whom talked fish. Halfway through our burgers, we overheard a couple of guys talking about how the reds were holed up at The Sanctuary. From the sounds of it, they had limited out without much trouble.

John and I looked at each other, both thinking the same thing. I didn’t have to be at work until ten the next morning, but John was due back at the hotel later that night for the graveyard shift. It was just after seven, it was a gorgeous evening, and the sun wouldn’t be setting for about four hours, and even then “dark” would be relative. John threw it out there.

“What do you think about running down to the Russian real fast and trying to get those last three fish?”

“Hell yeah,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

John, who had no problem keeping his priorities straight, called in sick.

“We should swing by and see if Jaha wants to wet a line,” I said.

Jaha, short for Jeremy Anderson Hard Ass, a nickname earned in middle school for holding his ground against bullies half again his size, was the most natural-born fisherman I’d ever known, an angling genius who could practically talk a fish into skipping the drama and hopping straight into his cooler. My favorite image of him came from a day at that same fishing hole we’d just left down the highway. Standing atop a boulder at the water’s edge, he’d cracked open a can of Coors Light, raised it toward the heavens, hollered out the motto, “Tap the Rockies!,” tipped it straight back, chugged the whole thing down, crushed the can against his chest, tossed it over his shoulder next to his pack, cast into the river, and instantly nailed a fish. Everyone down there about died laughing.

“Do it again! Do it again!” we all chanted.

Jaha, a
woolly Wisconsinite like John, was working as a river guide on the Kenai and had been living out of a tent pitched on his boss’s property since the cabin he’d been renting got sold out from under him. It was his day off, and since too much fishing could never be enough, I had no doubt he’d be up for a quick jaunt to the Russian. I was right. His girlfriend, Emily, was game, too. We swung by, they tossed their gear into the back of John’s Subaru and climbed into the backseat with Maya, and off we went to the Russian River with hopes of better luck.

During the height of the salmon runs, there isn’t a spot to be had at the Russian River Campground or its day-use parking lots. Long lines of cars, pickups, and RVs wait at the entrance for hours, and sometimes an entire day, for an opening to come up. We were down there so much and were friends with so many of those who worked there, we had it wired. Sometimes we’d stash the car and go in on bikes. But mostly our strategy was way more obnoxious. We’d drive past the line of vehicles, turn into the “Exit Only” lane, pull up to the information booth, hand over a six pack of beer, and secure for ourselves the next available parking pass while those who’d been waiting their turn annihilated us with their glares.

On the night of July 14, our timing was such that there were only a couple of cars in line, so we entered the respectable, grown-up way, through the entrance. Around 8:30, we pulled into the campground’s Grayling parking lot, built on a bluff above the river. Maya hopped out, put her nose to the ground, and started skimming back and forth like a minesweeper while everyone sorted out gear. I climbed back into my chest waders and dropped extra weights, spare coho flies, and a pair of pliers into my front pocket. I grabbed my pack, which was set to go with a fillet knife, a stringer, a few garbage bags, a thin gray sweater, and a green fleece jacket. Before closing it up, as was my fishing ritual, I tossed in a bomber-size bottle of Midnight Sun Brewery’s Sockeye Red IPA for good luck.

In three hours I’d be blind.

Fishing rods in hand, we headed across the parking lot and down the long set of stairs leading to the Angler Trail that runs alongside the river. The four of us fished together at a spot called the Cottonwood Hole for a while without a single successful flossing. John and I decided to move on to The Sanctuary. New to Alaska, new to the notion of grizzlies being part of the landscape, Emily wasn’t up for that, especially after hearing how many bears were out and about at the time. So she and Jaha stayed in an area where she felt less skittish—closer to the stairs. Given that everyone but John had to work in the morning, we all agreed to meet at the car around 10:30. John and I had hoped to stay longer, but knew it would be wise to wrap it up while there was still plenty of light since bears tend to move in at night, or what passes for night in the height of an Alaska summer. Night was when a lot of anglers preferred to be on the river. Salmon tended to be on the move then, and there were fewer people to contend with. I’d done my share of middle-of-the-night fishing.

John, Maya, and I made our way downriver. It was a Monday night, but when the reds are running, every night is a Friday night at the Russian. We waded across the mouth of the river just below its confluence with the Kenai, while Maya did her beaver impersonation, paddling across the current with just her head, ears, and nose poking out of the water. A little farther down, John and I found ourselves a couple of nice spots to slide into. We took note of the rhythm and joined in.

It took more than an hour to catch those last three fish, for both of us to limit out. There’s nothing easier than to lose track of time when standing knee deep in a river. By the time we packed up, we were already behind schedule for meeting up with Jaha and Emily. We still had to clean our fish at the cleaning station across the mouth of the Russian and hike back to the car. Then we ran into some friends from Girdwood, Jaelyn Rockman and Carl Roesner, and stopped to swap fishing stories. At the cleaning station we ran into another Girdwoodian and chatted with him a spell.

“Hey, guys, be really careful,” he said before turning the table over to us. “There are a ton of bears around.”

“Thanks, man. We will.”

I had thirty minutes left to see.

We filleted our fish, wrapped them in garbage bags, and slid them into John’s pack. We loaded up and began hiking back to the parking lot, bantering back and forth, laughing, making ourselves well heard as one does in bear country, filling lulls in the conversation with an occasional “Hey, bear!” or a whistle or my signature bear-be-gone call, “Hootie-Hoo,” inspired by a hip-hop song I was fond of as a teenager. About three-quarters of the way back, we passed four guys in camo and fatigue greens on their way to The Sanctuary, poles in one hand, cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon gripped in the other.

“Hey, how’s it going?” I asked with a nod and a smile.

They tromped on by as if we didn’t exist.

John and I stopped a second and looked at each other.

“That was weird,” John said. “I wonder what the hell their problem is.”

“They sure didn’t seem to be having much fun. How can you not have fun going fishing? Maybe it’s their taste in beer. I hear fish can smell PBR a mile away.” We laughed and continued on.

I had five minutes left.

A little farther up we came upon a surprise in the trail—two cans of Pabst, one mostly empty, the other unopened. Both were dented.

“Score!” John shouted as he bent down to pick them up. As rude as those guys were, at least we would get a beer out of the deal. “Thanks, guys!” John slid the empty one into the top pocket of my pack, popped the other, took a swig, and passed it to me
.
We walked on.

Three minutes.

We reached the intersection where the riverside Angler Trail meets the path leading to the stairs and turned the corner. There, moments from the safety of the car, Maya glued herself to my side and let out a low, eerie growl.

CHAPTER 4

This Can’t Be Happening

A bear.

We hit the brakes. Blocking the trail thirty feet ahead, just below the stairs to the Grayling parking lot, was the hind end of a grizzly. It glanced over its shoulder, then whipped around to face us in the midsummer twilight. I slowly reached down and grabbed Maya by the scruff of her neck. John took a couple of steps backward so we’d be standing side by side, making us look bigger, nothing to mess with.

“What do you want to do here?” I whispered without taking my eyes off the bear.

“Let’s give it a second.”

“I don’t know, I don’t like this.”

Between the two of us, we’d encountered a lot of bears through the years. This one wasn’t like any of the others. Instead of the typical bear behavior—the take-note-of-humans-and-trundle-along routine, or better yet, take note and run for the hills—this one held its ground, hackles raised. Then it began huffing and woofing and bouncing to and fro on its front paws. We needed to get out of there. Now.

We backpedaled slowly, calmly, keeping an eye on the bear while negotiating a right-hand turn in reverse at the corner where the path to the stairs intercepted the trail paralleling the river. We would continue upriver, we’d decided, and take a roundabout way to the car, giving that bear plenty of space. Once we made the corner, we were out of sight. We continued up the trail a ways, and I let go of Maya. She shook herself, then scampered on ahead. John and I relaxed our shoulders and picked up our pace.

“Whoa, that was kind of crazy,” I said. “Something
must have really pissed that thing off. I wonder if those guys we just passed . . . Oh shit!”

We screeched to a halt. Up ahead, the alders were shaking violently. John grabbed me by my shoulders and yanked me backward a step. My stomach plunged. My heart felt like a fist trying to pound its way out of my chest. Was that bear stalking us? Had it circled around to cut us off? Instantly, and without need for discussion, we about-faced and started hoofing it back the way we’d just come. We didn’t get far.

In a flash, the bear we thought was now behind us came tearing around the corner in front of us so fast it had to dip its shoulder to make the turn. Head lowered, ears flattened against its neck, eyes on fire, it took a running swipe at Maya. Maya yelped and leapt sideways off the trail, avoiding the blow. Without breaking stride, it took a running swipe at John. John launched sideways into the alders with such propulsion he flew out of his wader shoes, leaving them behind on the trail. The bear blew by him like a missile, eyes locked on mine.

Those eyes, I remember them as yellow and burning like comets. Those eyes would be the last thing I would ever see.

In the nanoseconds I had to decide how to save myself, I whipped around, took two running steps, and dove headfirst off the trail into the brush. The bear slammed into me like a wrecking ball and had me before I hit the ground, snagging my left thigh midair with a powerful swing of its paw. Crashing through a barrage of snapping branches, I landed with a thud, the wind knocked from my lungs, in an explosion of pain.

Slow motion is cruel, the way it draws out the horror, each second crawling along, dragging its hindquarters.
This . . . can’t . . . be . . . happening.

With its claws embedded in my leg, the bear yanked me from a tangle of brush back out to the trail in short, jerky motions like a dog playing tug-of-war with a sock. Lying facedown, fingers interlaced around the back of my neck, elbows tucked tight around the sides of my head, I tried to play dead. From somewhere above, I heard sickening, primal screams that didn’t sound human. It didn’t register that they were coming from my own throat.

Lying ten feet away, stabbed and scraped by branches that had splintered on impact and made a sieve of his waders, John lay in dense brush, armed with nothing more than a fishing pole, listening to the roars and screams and thrashings of the bear killing me
.
Eyes wide, chest heaving, unable to see more than two feet in front of him, he rose onto his elbows and started a frantic belly crawl through a thicket of prickly branches and devil’s club spines that bloodied his hands and face.
Upon reaching the edge, he stood, stumbled, and started running, screaming for help
.
Remembering the fish on his back, thinking it bear bait, he wriggled out of the shoulder straps of his pack and winged it on the run as far as he could into the brush. He stopped a short distance later, at the Cottonwood Hole, where earlier we’d all been fishing together. Hyperventilating, he paced back and forth, back and forth on rubber legs. He felt sick about leaving me. About running.
What to do? What to do? What to do?
The urge to go back was overwhelming. But the bear. . . He whipped around toward the parking lot and cupped his hands to his mouth.

“HELP! SOMEBODY HELLLP!”

After dodging the bear, Maya had bolted downriver, but came charging back when she heard John’s screams.
“Get out of here!” he hollered, giving her a kick in the chest, partially for her own good, partially for fear a freaked-out dog would make matters worse. Maya yelped, turned around, and dashed back down the trail toward The Sanctuary. Still within earshot, John paused to listen. All he heard were dogs barking off in the distance and the river flowing by. I had passed out, and the bear had wandered off a few paces to wait and watch, as bears do when neutralizing a threat, real or perceived. Thinking the bear had gone, John called out.

“Dan! DAN! ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?”

He could barely make it out but he heard me moan. The bear heard me, too. It returned, and the roaring and thrashing and shrieking started all over again. Suddenly, I felt the ground rushing by beneath me, my head bouncing over jagged roots and rocks, one clocking me so hard I lost consciousness. The bear dragged me twenty-five feet off the trail and into tall, thick grass below the bluff. When I came to, it was standing over me, panting. I could feel the massive volume of its hot, rank breath heavy upon my face.

Oh shit! My face!

Somewhere between the bashing of my head and regaining consciousness, the bear had managed to flip me over. It stood over me now, straddling my body, claws sunk deep into my shoulders, pinning me to the ground with bone-crushing weight. My arms useless, I could do nothing to stop it as it cocked its head sideways and clamped its jaws across the middle of my face.

Crunch. Like a mouth full of eggshells. Crunch, crunch. Something inside my head went POP.

A flash, then an awakening in someplace new, suspended in luminous blue. I was floating, detached, as if gravity had given me up. No fear, no pain. So pleasant. So strange. I looked all around me. I was alone in a blue zephyr. I knew then that I was dying. How tempting it was not to resist. How tempting it was to continue drifting right out of this world.

An image of my mother formed in my head, like an old home movie from a time she was young and healthy. She was standing in a blue oscillating forest, smiling and waving, looking happier than I’d seen her in years. She was glowing. I was glowing, too. Pure mother-son connection—just me and the woman who brought me into this world. A surge of euphoria wrapped around me like silk. I felt the presence of family and friends holding onto me, infusing me with love. I felt my strength returning, and with it, my will to live.

I knew what I had to do. I had to fight to stay alive, no matter what it took. I remember this as a conscious decision. I remember promising myself that if I fought and lived, I would never look back and regret it. I didn’t know the mauling had left me blind.

Once I’d made my decision, my mother vanished but I was not alone. A figure materialized off in the distance, showing itself as a silhouette backlit by a starburst of blue light. My long-dead grandfather. I recognized his lanky legs and the outline of his favorite ball cap. Grandfather nodded. I took that as his approval of my decision not to give up.

Then I found myself lying on a table, with those who loved me clustered around, not in human form, but in essence as shimmering waves of light. They held hands in a circle, infusing me with love and energy. My Prescott friends, Blair Carter and Martha McCord, were overseeing the session, speaking in an ancient language I couldn’t understand and didn’t feel the need to. The others spoke in garbled whispers, their lips not moving. Telepathically, they let me know they were pleased with my decision but worried, knowing I’d chosen the much more arduous of the two roads. They wanted me to rest a while before returning to my body at the river. To be still. To breathe. Just a little while longer. Rest. Just rest.

Then it was time. Blair gave the nod that I was ready to go. The circle of friends dropped hands, raised them, palms open, and let me go as though freeing a bird. I was no longer floating on my back then, but looking down into the bottom of a well at an undulating image reflected in the water—my own body, curled up in the fetal position on the forest floor. Slowly I descended into it. Darkness replaced blue light. I could hear leaves fluttering around me in a gentle breeze and the river ambling by on its way to rendezvous with the sea. The bear was gone. All was calm. I was alive.

Pain started crawling back into my body, slowly at first, then in a huge hurry, throbbing and digging deep into muscle and bone. I tasted blood. It was trickling down my throat. I gagged.

Where’s John? Where’s Maya? How long have I been lying here?

I tried shouting but what came out was a pathetic wheeze. I tried to sit up, thinking I should crawl out to the trail. My arms, like bags of sand, wouldn’t respond. My legs felt shackled, as if roots had reached up from the soil and lashed them to the ground. I tried again to rise . . . and failed. I could hear blood dripping off my face and hitting the grass. Drip . . . drip . . . drip. I could feel blood pooling inside my waders.
God, it hurts. It hurts so bad
. My mind began racing with crazy, crazy thoughts.

Oh man,
I have to work in the morning, and now I’m probably going to be late. Oh, and isn’t this just great; I’m supposed to drive the kids to that compass course tomorrow, and the keys to the van are in my pocket. What a mess you’ve made of things, Bigley. Mom and Dad are going to be so pissed. And what about Amber? What’s she going to think of you now that you’ve gotten yourself mauled by a bear?

Lying on my back, wet and sticky and too weak to move, my thoughts continued to spiral until I just wanted to sleep.

How long have I been lying here? A half hour? More? Does anyone even know I’m here?

I started to shiver, just a little at first, and then violently.

John, where are you? Please hurry. I’m cold. So cold.