Beyond the Bear (7 page)

CHAPTER 5

Hanging on in the Dark

It would be years before I would piece together what
happened
in the minutes, hours, days, and weeks that followed my decision to fight for my life. I remember vividly, unfortunately, some of the most disturbing moments between me and the bear. But I recall only scraps of what happened after the blue place dissolved into darkness and I lay alone on the forest floor. The friends I fished with that day, as well as medics, law enforcement, forest service, and other officials called to the scene, plus others who were down at the river or up in the campground have filled in details of my rescue. I continue to run into people now and then who tell me more, most recently, eight years later, as I was emerging from a restroom.

“Hey, are you Dan Bigley?”

“I am. Who’s that?”

“I’m Wes Masters. I was with you in the ambulance that night.”

Medical records, doctors, surgeons, nurses, hospital staff, my family, my friends, and many others who passed through my life without me even knowing it have helped me reconstruct the times for which I have no memory. They’ve helped me make a bit of sense of the morphine-induced hallucinations—or dreams, I’m not sure what to call them—that occasionally intercepted reality while I was clinging to life in intensive care. Physical descriptions of people, places, and events I could not see, of the expressions, gestures, and body language of those around me, were provided by many along the way.

I know that memories, my own and those of others, can be fickle. They can fade, evolve, and distort in both the heat of the moment and with the passage of time. But as far as I can determine, what happened went something like this.

About the time John and I were packing up to leave The Sanctuary, Jaha and Emily were topping the stairs to the parking lot. Finding the doors locked, they leaned their poles against the side of John’s car, slid out of their packs, and set them down next to their rods. Fifteen minutes came and went. Then thirty. Although the sun hadn’t officially set, it had ducked behind the mountains a good while ago, so it had to be around eleven. It was a beautiful evening for killing time, but they both had to work in the morning and were getting antsy. More time went by. What the hell was taking us so long, they wondered.

They noticed people taking pictures on the bluff above the river, so they wandered over to see what was up. What was up was bears. Emily hadn’t been in Alaska long, and she had yet to see one. Jaha, who’d worked at the Russian River Campground the previous summer and had since landed a job as a river guide on the Kenai, had seen a lot of them, especially lately, like fifteen the previous week, mostly at night. Seeing a bear was always a thrill, but something felt off this time. Upriver, a large grizzly sow with two cubs was bounding through the water, swinging her head from side to side, slapping the water with a paw, clearly worked up over something. To Jaha, it seemed her cubs weren’t listening to her, and she was not taking it well. The cubs then wandered off toward shore and disappeared into the brush toward the Angler Trail paralleling the river. The mother bear veered off after them on a trajectory that gave Jaha a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach.

Moments later, four guys dressed in camo and fatigue greens started down the stairs, all amped up and ready to slay themselves some reds. Each clutched a pole in one hand and a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon in the other.

“Hey, guys,” Jaha called out, “just so you know, I saw a mama bear with a couple of cubs down there, and that mama looked really pissed. There’s been a lot of bear activity in the evenings lately, so you might want to be extra careful.”

“Yeah, thanks. We’re from here. We’ve got guns. We ain’t worried about no bears.”

“Okay,” Jaha shrugged.
Jackasses
, he thought. “Well, good luck with the fishing, then.”

He watched them tromp down the stairs and disappear on a potential collision course with a stressed-out sow. He and Emily lingered at the bluff a while, then wandered back toward the car. Emily pulled out a pack of rolling papers and a pouch of American Spirit tobacco, rolled herself a smoke,
and lit up. Then came the screams. Horrid, hideous screams.

That sow got somebody; Jaha was sure of it. He shuddered, assuming it was one of the guys he’d just tried to warn. He and Emily dashed back to the bluff and leaned over the railing to see if they could see anything down below. They couldn’t.

“Are you okay down there? HEY, you guys all right?”

More shrieking, flailing, and thrashing. A bear roaring. Then came a second voice a ways downriver screaming for help. Emily stayed put, while Jaha started down the stairs. He didn’t get far. He whipped around with a crazed look in his eyes.

“Emily, RUN!”

The cubs were bounding up the stairs, and he knew that meant mama wouldn’t be far behind. She wasn’t, but she was charging straight up the bluff directly below where Emily was standing.

Running from a bear is almost always a bad idea, say those who study bear attacks for a living. Grizzlies may seem ungainly, but they can sprint like blasts of wind, up to thirty-five miles per hour. Jaha knew that, but instinct said to run, and there was no time to argue.

They sprinted for the restrooms. Concrete walls. Metal doors. Bear proof.

No time.

Emily, just a few paces ahead, altered course and made a beeline for a Chevy Blazer that had pulled into the parking lot fifteen minutes before. It was closer and the back window was missing, busted out with a baseball bat, as twisted karma would have it, by the guy’s pissed-off girlfriend just the night before. Emily, still wearing her waders, tried to climb in, but her foot slipped off the bumper. Jaha had just enough time to hoist her up, shove her inside, and dive in after her. Glancing over his shoulder on his way in, he saw the sow’s head closing in, her mouth smeared with blood.

They scrambled over the backseat and into the front, where they ducked down, Jaha covering Emily’s body with his own. The sow, huffing and growling, circled the Blazer. Once, twice. Terrified it would climb in after them or come crashing through one of the windows, Emily reached over and laid on the horn.

Beeeeeep! Beeeeeep! Beeeeeep!

Jaha poked his head up in time to see the sow and cubs dash across the parking lot and disappear into the woods. With no time to think of dropping it, Emily still had a cigarette wedged between her fingers. Jaha, who didn’t smoke, reached for it and took two long, hard drags before handing it back. Shaken to the bone, Emily kept blasting the horn, hoping it would bring help. Nobody came.

Meanwhile, two Alaska National Guard buddies, Sergeants David Roberson and Bryan Irby, were hiking up from The Sanctuary when Maya came bolting down the trail. How strange, they thought. While they were cleaning their fish, they’d seen that same dog trotting alongside two guys who’d started back not long before they did. They continued on with Maya on their heels, and five minutes later heard cries for help. They started running toward the voice and came upon John at the Cottonwood Hole. He was shaking and could barely keep it together.

“A bear . . . it got my friend! I don’t know . . . what kind of shape he’s in . . . or if he’s even alive. We have to help him.” John shook his head in disbelief, his hands balled into fists. “What if the bear is still there? You have a gun?”

“We don’t. But don’t worry, we’ll help you find your friend. Now try taking some deep breaths.”

The three of them put their faith in safety in numbers and cautiously made their way back to where John had last seen me. Upriver, just past the turnoff to the stairs, a grim story unfolded in the trail. A fishing pole here, a pair of wader shoes there, a dented can of Pabst Blue Ribbon, a green ball cap with a Bonfire logo across the front. Gouges in the trail where something heavy had been dragged through the dirt. A trail of blood.

“Dan!” John shouted as they drew near. “Dan! DAN!”

They heard moaning and found where I’d been dragged below the bluff about twenty-five feet off the trail. I lay curled on my side in a grassy area all matted down in a ten-foot radius. Blood was everywhere. John’s mouth dropped open but no words came out. Roberson asked him to step back. He yanked off his T-shirt, covered my head, and applied pressure to stop the bleeding while Irby checked for other wounds.

“How old are you?” Roberson asked, knowing it was critical to keep me awake.

“Twenty-five,” I slurred.

“Do you know what day it is?”

Silence. “No,” I finally said.

“Can you move at all? Your arms or legs?”

No response. Afraid I was fading fast, they went for help while John stayed with me to keep applying pressure and prevent me from going to sleep. Once they were out of sight, John fell to his knees beside me.

“Oh, Dan,” he said in practically a whisper, so relieved to find me alive that the devastation failed to register.

“I’m fucked up, man,” I groaned. “I am
so
fucked up.”

“No. No, you’re all right, brother. You’re going to be okay.”

I was going to be anything but okay. My face was pulp, and with all the blood and grime, John didn’t notice that my eyes weren’t where they were supposed to be. All he saw was that I was breathing. A surreal calm came over him as he did what he could to keep me from going into shock, to keep himself from going into shock. Afraid of bleeding to death, and trained as a Wilderness First Responder, I tried to help him out.

“John,” I wheezed, “I need more pressure on my head. Not too much. Just keep it steady. God, it hurts. It really fucking hurts.”

John closed his eyes and leaned back. He called upon his dead great-grandmothers, who he believed watched over him, to pull some strings for me up there.

Back up top, with all the shouting, car-horn blasts, and cacophony of dogs barking in the campground, people were poking their heads out of their tents and RVs, trying to figure out what the hell was going on. In the front seat of the Blazer, once he was sure the bears were gone, Jaha started climbing toward the busted-out window to get help for whoever had run into that bear.

“Where are you
going
?” Emily demanded.

“Those folks down there need help.”

“Are you kidding me? I am not getting out of this car.”

“Well, I’m going.”

Sprinting for the Blazer, the one thought in her head had been that this was it, she was dead. She was in no mood for heroics.

“Please don’t go,” she pleaded.

“You can stay here. You’ll be okay, the bears are gone. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

She didn’t want him going alone so she climbed out after him. They scanned the parking lot, then dashed to the nearest rig in the campground.

Frank and Celeste Valentine, former Alaskans visiting from Georgia, had driven their RV up the Alaska Highway and were spending the summer bouncing between their favorite fishing spots up and down the Kenai Peninsula and visiting family in Anchorage. Colonel Valentine, a former US Army Ranger who’d fished Alaska rivers religiously the years he was stationed at Fort Richardson, had also fished The Sanctuary that night. He’d come up that same trail not long before we did, just long enough to put the three reds he’d caught into the RV’s freezer, wash up, and get ready for bed. He and Celeste had just settled in when they heard all the commotion, first a lot of yelling from atop and below the bluff. Then, not much later, somebody blasting a car horn over and over and over.

Celeste raised her head off her pillow. “I wonder what that’s all about.”

Some kids having a party, they figured. Then they heard footsteps running through the woods getting closer and closer, then someone banging on their door.

“I don’t know if we ought to answer that,” Celeste whispered.

The colonel felt otherwise. He got up, climbed into a pair of jeans, grabbed the .44 Magnum he’d borrowed from his son-in-law, hid it behind his back, and slowly cracked the door. Jaha and Emily stood there wide eyed and out of breath.

“Please, can you help us? We just got charged by a sow with cubs, and that same bear got somebody down by the stairs.”

Colonel Valentine left the door open as he set down the gun, slipped into a pair of tennis shoes, picked his cell phone up off the table, and dropped it into his pants pocket. He holstered the .44 and strapped it around his hips, then pulled a sweatshirt over his head. Although there was still enough light to read by if you had to, it would be darker down below the bluff, so he grabbed a flashlight on his way out. The three of them jogged
over to the parking lot.

“No way am I going down there,” Emily protested
.

The men left her at the restroom; she locked herself in, and they headed down the stairs. John heard them coming and stepped out onto the trail to meet them.

“John!” Jaha gasped upon seeing him standing there in a daze. “John, where’s Dan?”

John led them to the spot. “This
is
Dan.” He lifted the T-shirt covering my head. Jaha reeled.

To Colonel Valentine, a combat veteran who’d pulled three tours in Vietnam, it looked as though a bomb had gone off in my face.
My god, this kid’s had it. He’s going to die right here.
He pulled the cell phone out of his pocket, dialed 9-1-1, and was surprised he was able to get through.

“Nine-one-one. What’s your emergency?”

“My name is Frank Valentine. I’m at the Russian River at the bottom of the Grayling parking lot. I have a fella down here who’s been attacked by a bear. We need a medevac down here right away. We’re . . .”

He lost the connection before the operator could acknowledge she’d heard what he’d said. He tried to redial but reception was too sketchy. He tried again. The call failed. He tried again. No good. Several minutes later, his phone rang.

“I’ve got the troopers on their way from Soldotna, and EMTs coming from Cooper Landing. Can you tell . . .”

Again his phone went dead. But at least he knew help was on its way. By then, John was looking thoroughly spent.

“Hey, man, let me take over for you,” Jaha said. They traded places. John stood by in silence, shoulders slumped, frozen in disbelief. “Why don’t you go up and wait with Emily? She’s hiding out in the restroom, and I’m sure she’d like to get out of there. Tell her what’s going on down here. Let her know it wasn’t one of those jackasses. Let her know it was Dan.”