Beyond the Bear (8 page)

By then it was fairly dark down there. They say I was talking one minute—“Where’s Maya? Where’s my dog? Has anyone seen my dog?”—and silent the next. Talking, not talking, fading in and out. Jaha kept checking my pulse. It was erratic, then weak, then he couldn’t feel it anymore.
Oh, Jesus.
On his knees leaning over me, he crossed his hands over my heart to begin CPR. Before he could make his first compression, I gasped for breath like someone yanked from the bottom of a pool.

As word got around, a posse began to assemble. Some stood guard with .44s and shotguns since there was no telling where that sow might be. Even if she was long gone there were still a lot of edgy bears out there. Others illuminated the scene with flashlights and headlamps, and offered jackets and space blankets to help keep me warm. Not all were helpful.

“Oh my god!” one man gasped, covering his mouth with his hands. “Is he dead?” Colonel Valentine got him out of there.

“You know what would be a big help? Why don’t you go up to the road and wait for the ambulance to make sure they know how to find us.”

Among the first responders called out of bed was Todd Wilson, chief of Cooper Landing’s volunteer fire department, who lived just a few miles away. He tromped down the stairs with his medical kit and found a crowded, chaotic scene. I was lying on my right side, my head resting on my arm to keep blood from running down my throat.

“Why the shirt?” he asked.

“You don’t want to know,” Jaha said in a low voice so I wouldn’t hear.

“Well, I’m going to have to move it so I can see what’s going on.”

“You don’t want to see this.”

“Well, I really have to.”

Jaha shook his head. Together they carefully peeled back a corner of the shirt. That was enough. They laid it back down. In twenty years as a first responder, it was the worst injury Wilson had ever seen, and he wasn’t about to touch it. He caught his breath, then checked my vitals. He dug scissors out of his medical kit and cut open my waders from my chest to my waist to look for other wounds. I was fully conscious at that point, fueled by surges of adrenalin. I asked over and over about Maya. Nobody could believe I could speak, let alone fret about my dog. But what really got them was when I kept asking, “I can hear you guys, why can’t I see you?”

Carrie Williams, who lived just up the road from Wilson’s place, was the next medic
on the scene, and the most credentialed as a volunteer Level III Emergency Medical Technician. She’d been sound asleep when the emergency tone went off on the handheld radio on her nightstand. She awoke with a start, groaned, and turned to her husband, a retired US Marine who knew the routine so well she didn’t have to ask: “Honey, would you warm up the truck for me—please?” She rolled out of bed, got dressed, headed downstairs, climbed into the jumpsuit hanging by the back door, and grabbed her gloves and hat on her way out to the idling truck. At the ambulance barn across from the post office, she met up with teammate Phil Weber. They jumped into the ambulance and, siren blaring, lights whirling, headed down the Sterling Highway, pulling into the Grayling parking around one in the morning. Bystanders led Williams down to the scene, while Phil stayed up top with a radio waiting for orders. She did a quick 360 to make sure that between the bears and firearms there wasn’t some other accident waiting to happen. She then set down her medical kit and knelt down next to me in the grass.

“This is what we’re dealing with,” Colonel Valentine said
as he lifted the T-shirt.

Breathe. Focus.
“Okay. Got it.”

She’d save her reaction for later. Off duty, guard down, that’s when she’d let the things she saw hit her. Like the time she worked a car accident that injured a mother and several children and left the youngest, a baby strapped into a car seat, brain dead. The mother and grandmother in Carrie didn’t come out until she got home. That’s when the shaking started. That’s when she doubled over and threw up.

In EMT mode now, she took charge of the scene, radioing up to Phil: “We need a backboard down here. We need a C-collar, IVs, heat packs, oxygen . . .”

Bystanders in the parking lot helped carry gear down, and everyone stood back as she and Phil worked on me, checking my airway, monitoring my vitals, sliding IVs into both arms, suctioning blood from my mouth. Oxygen was a problem. There was too much damage to strap on the mask, so it had to be hand held above my mouth.

“Massive blood loss,” Carrie would later note in her run sheet. Phil would later say he’d never seen a scene so bloody.

EMTs are the finger in the dike in cases this extreme. They needed to get me out of there and into a surgeon’s hands as quickly as possible. After placing a C-collar around my neck, they supported my spine, rolled me onto my side, slid a backboard beneath me, then laid me back down and strapped me in. Getting me up to the parking lot would take some serious muscle, negotiating the two-tiered stairway with a six-foot-four man who couldn’t take much jostling.

“Okay, here’s the plan,” Carrie said. “I need two guys at the front, two at the back, a couple on each side. I’m going to squeeze in along the side to keep an eye on him and manage these IVs. If any of you start to get tired, I want you speak up and trade off with someone. Now on the count of three, we’re going to lift together. Okay, ready? One, two, three.”

It was slow and awkward going as they ascended the steep stairway up the bluff to the idling ambulance above. After the team had set the backboard down on a gurney, Jaha gave my hand a gentle squeeze.

“You’re going to make it, buddy. We’ll be fishing again before you know it.” I managed a thumbs-up.

Carrie hopped in the back. Helpers on both sides peeled away as she guided my gurney into place and locked it down. With Phil at the wheel, she’d be alone back there. She glanced out at those clustered around the rear doors.

“Need any help?” one of them asked. “I used to be an EMT.”

“You bet. That would be great. Hop in.”

Eric Christian was one of four fishing buddies staying at the campground, two of whom John and I had had a friendly chat with earlier that evening along the trail, all of whom had helped carry me up from the bottom of the bluff. Due to Eric’s EMT experience, Carrie assigned him to help monitor blood pressure and continue suctioning blood from my mouth.

“I could use one more,” Carrie said. “Any volunteers?”

Wes Masters, another of the fishing buddies, stepped forward. His job would be to hand her bandages, saline, and other supplies while she tried to keep me alive. Tom Swiech, another from the group, who a couple of days earlier had watched a sow charge a young couple at The Sanctuary, went along as backup. With the ambulance crew assembled, Phil closed the rear doors, climbed into the driver’s seat, and pulled out to meet the LifeGuard helicopter en route from Anchorage.

Left behind was Eric’s brother, Marco Christian. State troopers, forest service and wildlife officials, and campground manager Butch Bishop had arrived by then and were patrolling the area, waking up campers with coolers left out and dogs chained to their vehicles and RVs.

“Do you have a firearm?” one of them asked Marco.

“I do.”

“Are you afraid to use it?”

“After what I saw down there, nope.”

“You could help us out, then. If you run into anyone, let them know there’s been a bear attack. If you see coolers, tell people to get them inside. Dogs, too. We don’t want to attract any more bears.”

While word was getting around up top, armed wildlife and law enforcement officers headed down below to let those along the trail and river know there had been a mauling. Other officials gathered up bloody clothing and gear and dropped them into plastic bags. Marco helped pick up the bandage wrappers, IV packaging, and other medical supplies strewn about.

Meanwhile in the back of the ambulance, en route to rendezvous with the LifeGuard helicopter, I kept mumbling nonsense. “My girlfriend’s going to be so mad at me. She’s going to kill me.” I kept asking the same questions over and over: “I can hear you guys, why can’t I see you?”

Suddenly I began vomiting up swallowed blood. Carrie and her crew tipped the backboard onto its side to keep me from drowning.

“Hold on, man,” Eric said. “Hold on.”

Between the vomit and the blood, Carrie and Phil wouldn’t get back to their respective beds until around 4:30 that morning. Before calling it a night, they’d back the ambulance up to Carrie’s garage, hook her garden hose to the outdoor hot-water spigot, swab the ambulance out with a mop, and hose it down before returning it to the barn and signing off for the night.

It was a short ride to the roadside pullout near the Resurrection Trail that would serve as an improvised helipad. Troopers had closed the Sterling Highway on either end with flares and a roadblock of vehicles. A fire truck, lights whirling, had been parked beneath a set of power lines that crossed the road so they’d be easier to see from the air. Flares and headlights illuminated the landing zone. With the ambulance idling, we waited. And waited.

Back at the campground, Marco finished down at the site and headed back up the stairs. As exhausted as he was, he wasn’t about to crawl into a tent with walls as thin as tissue paper, and both vehicles his group had driven down from Anchorage were locked. So he piled wood onto the campfire and sat up waiting for the others with a .44 Magnum in his lap.

Around 2:30, the womp-womp-womp of the helicopter filled the air. Phil talked the pilot down by radio, using a high-powered flashlight as a beacon. He had the pilot come straight down on top of the light, then ducked away as the chopper closed in on the ground. Once it settled, two critical-care flight nurses hopped out, and keeping their heads low, dashed over to the ambulance with a gurney. After a quick briefing, they transferred me to a medevac gurney, dashed back to the helicopter, loaded me inside, locked the gurney down, and closed the door.

Nearly three hours after the sow came tearing around the corner in the trail, the helicopter rose off the ground amid a blizzard of dust and swaying treetops and whisked me off to Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage. The beeper on Dr. Kallman’s beside table would soon yank him from his dreams.

CHAPTER 6

Little Red Riding Hood’s Hood

While I was fighting to hold on down at the river, John
was
fighting to hold on up in the parking lot. He’d been waiting with Emily and Maya, alternating between pacing and shaking his head, and sitting on the ground with his head in his hands. As I was being loaded into the ambulance, Marco and the others tried to console him.

“I should have done something,” he kept saying. “I didn’t know what to do. What should I have done?”

“You did the right thing, man,” they told him. “You went for help. What the hell were you gonna do? Get mauled, too? How was that going to help your friend?”

Once John heard the helicopter approaching, he felt free to go. But he was in no shape to get behind the wheel of a car. The Girdwood friends we’d stopped to chat with earlier that night at The Sanctuary, Jaelyn and Carl, convinced him of that. Carl offered to drive his Subaru, with Jaelyn leading the way in her truck. While Jaha and Emily stuck around to answer investigators’ questions and later bum a ride back home, they headed for Girdwood with Maya crashed out in the back of the Subaru and John in the front passenger seat staring at nothing, replaying the attack over and over and over in his head.

They made the turnoff to Girdwood about the time the pager went off on Dr. Kallman’s bedside table. A few minutes later, John and Jaelyn’s vehicles pulled up in front of my place. John clomped up the steps to the deck with Carl and Jaelyn behind him. My roommate, Jamie Berggren, and I rarely locked our doors but for whatever reason that night was an exception. So John knocked, and when Jamie didn’t respond, he banged. Still nothing. He walked along the deck to the back of the house and tapped on his bedroom window.

“Hey, Jamie, it’s John,” he called into the darkened room. “Hey, man, you need to get up.”

“Wha . . . ? What’s going on?”

“Throw on some clothes. I have something to tell you. It’s not good.”

“What? What time is it? What’s up?”

“Just get dressed. I’ll tell you inside.”

Jamie rolled out of bed, stumbled down the hallway, unlocked the door, and let the three of them in. Carl and Jaelyn sank into the couch, while John grabbed a kitchen chair and swung it around to face the living room. Jamie, dressed in sweats and a T-shirt, stood on the shabby carpet in bare feet, hair all confused, rubbing his eyes with the bottom of his shirt.

“What’s the deal, guys? Where’s Dan?”

John sighed deeply, shook his head, and started to talk.

John and Jamie took off for Anchorage just as the sun began to rise. They arrived at Providence an hour later, while Dr. Kallman was still assessing the gravity of my injuries and setting surgery plans in motion. They were ushered into a waiting room, where they spent the next hour mindlessly flipping through magazines and staring into space, too wired to doze off, too heartsick to speak. Finally, the door opened and in walked Kallman with a look on his face that did nothing to boost their spirits.

“I’m not going to lie to you,” he told them. “It’s bad. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Kallman could have decided in the emergency room to have me medevaced to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, the Level 1 trauma center for the region. It did cross his mind. He’d later become a partner in Dr. Dwight Ellerbe’s ear, nose, and throat and plastic surgery practice in Anchorage, but at the time he was the new guy in town and more like Ellerbe’s employee. Kallman had tremendous respect for the man and some proving up to do. A graduate of the Citadel with a degree from the Medical University of South Carolina, Ellerbe had done two residencies, one in pediatrics, the other in otolaryngology, plus a fellowship at Johns Hopkins before becoming head of surgery at Elmendorf Air Force Base, then starting his own practice in town. The way Kallman saw it, his own medical degree and two board certifications were just pieces of paper until he could prove he could do what they said he could do.

So there was his future to consider. But there was also the possibility I would be better served by someone with more experience. Trauma surgery can be a thankless job. Severely wrecked people who get pieced back together often spend the rest of their lives steeped in bitterness, and especially angry at their doctors for not allowing them to die. Just as I had chosen the more arduous of the two paths as I lay at the crossroads down by the river, Kallman did the same. He didn’t ship me off to Harborview to become someone else’s problem. He made a commitment to stick with me.

Later that morning, while John and Jamie were on their way back to Girdwood after a somber breakfast in town, Kallman stood in the operating room, staring down at the explosion of my face, feeling much like the emergency room doctor had sounded on the phone. Standing there frozen, head cocked to the side, he felt all eyes upon him, and then a hand upon his shoulder.

“Doctor, would you like to shave the hair?”

“Right. That’s where we’ll start; we’ll start with shaving the hair.”

First he needed to clean me up so he could see what was what. He scrubbed the blood, dirt, and bear saliva off my neck, face, and forehead with gauze and
squirts of hydrogen-peroxide/sterile-saline solution. Then he took an electric razor to me. As he followed the contours of my misshaped head, my sun-streaked hair, matted with blood and forest debris, dropped off in clumps. Over the top and around the sides, he carefully navigated around my wounds. As Kallman worked up top, Dr. David Wrigley
oversaw the cleaning of the multiple puncture wounds from my shoulders down, on my arms and legs mostly, some deep enough to bury a finger well past the first knuckle.

Kallman covered the disaster area across the middle of my face with moist gauze and, to ensure a clear airway, bathed my neck in Betadine in preparation for a tracheotomy, a procedure he could do practically blindfolded. Extend the neck. Find the solid ring around the trachea called the cricoid. Move a finger’s width down in the soft spot below. Incise the skin horizontally. Then dissect vertically in the center down to the trachea. Enter the trachea with a horizontal incision. Insert the tracheotomy tube into the windpipe. Inflate the cuff. Confirm placement and secure to the skin. Done.

He then rotated the operating table away from the anesthesiologist 180 degrees so he could easily move from one side of my head to the other as he worked. He prepped my face with Betadine, covered the intact parts with sterile drapes, and began extensive exploration of my wounds. Starting at the top, he found that five of the six arteries to my forehead and scalp had been severed. From my mid-forehead down he found few recognizable landmarks. Where my forehead was split, the skin peeled back like an orange, he could see bone and bone fragments. It appeared to him that the bear had not only bitten me across the face, it had chewed. Some of the skin of my shattered nose was also torn back, leaving my nasal cavities open with brain tissue visible amid the ruins. Looking into the top of my mouth, he could see that my palate was split open.

He moved on to my eyes. The upper and lower eyelids were shredded. My left eye, hanging loosely from vascularized tissue, was detached from the optic nerve and lying on the right side of what had been my nose. My right eye, which didn’t appear to be attached to much of anything viable,
lay near the other.

Despite the initial washing, the wounds were still filthy. With a fiber-optic headlamp strapped to his forehead and wearing magnifying loupes that resembled Buddy Holly glasses fitted with miniature binoculars, he began to pick out every speck of dried blood, dirt, twig, grass, leaf, spruce needle, and bear hair, all of which were scrambled with tissue and bone shards and driven deep into my nasal passages, eye-socket rubble, and the base of my skull. This was going to be a marathon. He lowered the operating table and pulled up a stool.

As I lay unconscious beneath a warming blanket and blazing lights, Amber and her best friend, Bekkie Volino, were on their way to Bear Valley in Amber’s truck on one of the most gorgeous days of summer. Amber still had land on her mind, and wanted to show her friend some of the properties I’d shown her that spring, including my cabin and the piece of land she was interested in next door.

No one knew Amber better than Bekkie. They’d come to Alaska together on a festival-hopping road trip with a third girlfriend, two dogs, and all their gear crammed into Amber’s car, an Oldsmobile with blown shocks and a rear end slathered in bumper stickers with slogans like “Not all who wander are lost.” They had spent the remainder of that summer living out of a tent in Girdwood, using the trunk of Amber’s car as a closet, before upgrading to that off-the-grid cabin up Crow Creek Road that wasn’t much bigger than a chicken coop and had a zip line for hauling down firewood and gear.

Dressed in a gauzy shirt, a short skirt, and Birkenstocks, Amber had a daydreamy smile on her face as she drove up Turnagain Arm to the Rabbit Creek turnoff that would take them up to Bear Valley. She glanced over at Bekkie a second, then back at the road, then back at Bekkie, then back at the road.

“I’ve got to tell you, I had a truly amazing time with Dan Sunday night.
He came looking for me after the Galactic show and invited me over for a beer. Well, actually, I was pretty much waiting for him to come find me. Anyway, we ended up spending the night together, just cuddling, but connecting in a way I’ve never felt before. It was really kind of magical.”

This did not sound like the Amber Bekkie knew. The Amber she knew didn’t do touchy-feely, “magical” talk. She was a certifiable book-smart left-brainer. Earthy, but the kind with both feet planted firmly on the same planet she lived on.

“You sound like you’re in love or something.”

Amber laughed. “Well, I don’t know about that. I barely know him. I just know I’d like to go for it. He was supposed to call me last night when he got back from fishing, but he must have gotten in really late. I’m pretty sure he had to work this morning. Anyway, we’ll see where things go from here.”

Later, as they were ordering sandwiches and microbrews on the sunny deck of an Anchorage brew pub, Dr. Kallman was picking the last of the debris from the wreckage of my eye sockets. When the final speck was out, he pushed my eyes more or less back where they belonged and moved on.

Putting my bones back together, confining swollen brain tissue, could have cut off blood supply and left me a vegetable. Most critical at this stage was closing my skin to minimize the risk of infection and to give every piece a chance to survive. He began with the tears and punctures across my scalp, which required multiple layers of stitches topped off with staples. Then he began sorting out the shreds of my face.

He worked slowly, methodically, as he separated the tatters, pulling them apart like tangled fishing lines, one segment at a time, carefully studying each piece of the puzzle. Did it go here? Or there? When he was unsure, he put in a thinking-stitch to hold the skin in place until he was ready to commit. This took not only a steady hand and immense skill, but extraordinary patience. Growing up in a family that did jigsaw puzzles had to have helped. Kallman has fond memories of sitting in front of the fireplace at Christmas, putting jigsaws together with his father
,
the tougher the better, including a two-thousand-piece puzzle that was entirely red called “Little Red Riding Hood’s Hood.”

His mastery of shape recognition paid off as he searched for the remnants of my eyelids, and when located, reconstructed and reattached them with tiny stitches. He closed them over my eyes and sewed my eyelids shut.

Word gets around when cases this extraordinary come along. Over the course of the day, a couple of Kallman’s colleagues, scrubbed and masked, poked their heads into the operating room to see how he was doing and offer words of encouragement.

“Nice job, Jim,” they told him. “Impressive.”

By the time he came up for air, it was late afternoon. Cleaning my face and stitching it back together had taken nine hours.

Remarkably, nothing was missing. With all the skin and soft tissue accounted for, my face more or less came together in a meander of staples and stitches. I looked like a guy who’d tangled with a chainsaw, but at least I looked human again.