Looking for Alaska (5 page)

*   *   *

In Alaska, more than most places on earth, the animals of the wild live out their dramatic daily existence haunted by the possibility of death. A bear or a wolverine, a lynx or a wolf, may find a dead moose. What a huge and thrilling pile of meat, but they may lose their life defending it. Every other predator wants it too. They may be crippled or have to kill something else to keep it. The wolves want the moose meat; the sly, shadowlike coyote wants it. So do the wolverines, the lynx, the eagles, and the black bears. The brown bears may want it the most—they have the largest need for it.

There is an order of dominance among bears; one brown bear may fight off every other predator only to be killed by a dominant member of its species. An orphaned set of twins might find the moose, the two cubs on the verge of starving, vicious to live, a gnawing in their stomachs so severe as to risk all for their prize. One big boar, though, can smell death from miles off if the wind is right and come to it. The orphans might growl a bit, the hair on their backs might stand up, but if they even attempt to fight the boar, they can easily be killed by just the physical force of the dominant male's nine-and-a-half-inch paws, his claws not even necessary.

Every minute of the day and night in Alaska these plays are acted out on the red- and blueberry-speckled tundra, in the rock- and snow-covered mountain passes, in the shadowed spruce woods, on top of the frozen lakes, up and down a once-gentle creek. Rarely do the few Alaskan humans see anything. But Ted has seen much as he has flown over the land that is home to the creatures he is charged to care for. Sometimes, Ted and his staff fly over the land looking to dart wolves; they give them shots to kill the horrible lice infestations they have gotten from dogs. In 1961, only one wolf was spotted on the 8,400 square miles of the Kenai Peninsula, where Ted is the state biologist. Today, twenty packs of wolves live on the peninsula.

Ted has a front-row seat, he and the hired bush pilot, to dramas where supreme predators lose their fight, their blood, their breath, their consciousness, to another, one more powerful, faster. He has seen the proof in the snow, a lengthy, drawn-out diagram that can easily be understood by those with his education, who can read the distance between tracks, the final body language of circling and confrontation.

He says that when they tranquilize the wolves to give them shots of Ivermectin to kill the destructive lice, it is amazing the severe injuries that they can see on almost every wolf, wounds that have mended. They've been kicked by moose before they've learned how to efficiently dodge and kill, bitten by members of their own pack, slashed with the claws of bears, embedded with porcupine quills, even scratched by ground squirrels that fight back.

THE NIGHTMARE BEGAN AT 2:30
A.M
.

Tension-filled calls come during regular business hours at the office, which is in a metal-sided building off Kalifornsky Road in Soldotna. Alaska Fish and Game occupies the upstairs; Doors and Windows Unlimited is downstairs. Ted knows the various situations are of utmost importance to the caller, but sometimes it's all he can do to maintain his professional demeanor. He took one such call yesterday.

Yesterday's call was all about a building invasion by squirrels. First they got into the attic of the Woman's Resource and Crisis Center in Soldotna, and then they ate through the dryer vent. Once they got into the main living area, the rampaging squirrels took to running through the building at will. They chewed through electric lines; one electrocuted itself. The director was afraid there would be an electrical short and the place would burn to the ground. Ted came to the rescue; those little gray monsters were much harder to catch than the moose wrapped in the swing set in the middle of the lake.

Today's call was a different story. For the next call, when it came, was much more serious. It was June 16, 1999; it had not been dark for more than a couple of hours on the Kenai Peninsula when Ted was first called at home at 4:35
A.M
. It was his coworker Larry Lewis on the line. Larry and a state trooper had responded at about 3:30
A.M
. to a 911 call, “a defense of life and property shooting.” It had been too dark to do any searching when Larry and the trooper had gone out there, especially once they learned from the callers that they were looking for marauding brown bears. Now it was later in the morning, and Ted had invited me along to answer the call in the light of day.

The original 911 call had come from a woman named Lisa; she is married to Brian. Ted knows them, as he does most longtime residents of the peninsula. He'd been called to their place once before, something about a suspected Sasquatch. When you see a very large male brown bear's tracks in powdery snow, I guess you could think they belonged to a Sasquatch, especially when they circled your horse corral. Maybe it was more comforting to think that something with feet that large was more human than giant male bear. This young couple has five small children; they live out in the woods by themselves. Brian's family are some of the original homesteaders in the area; they came here in the 1940s, when most were commercial fishermen. Brian and Lisa live right off the Sterling Highway at Mile 117, the major road that goes from Soldotna to Homer. Their homestead is just nineteen miles from Soldotna.

Soldotna is a bigger town, more like Anchorage. It has some wilderness surrounding it, but it also has Taco Bell, McDonald's, Kmart, Safeway, Fred Meyers (a twenty-four-hour superstore), car dealers, movie theaters, a sports bar, dentists and doctors, and much more. You can get your nails done, hear
All Things Considered,
and visit enough drive-in latte and espresso places on your routes through town to keep you wired. You just cannot say this about many places in Alaska. Some residents are delighted by this fact, some are horrified, and some don't know the difference. Around Soldotna and neighboring Kenai, it would be easy to get comfortable, to feel man has tamed Alaska. Stay in your car and house, plug into the Internet or your PlayStation, and you could believe that there is no harm that can come to you and your family from the surrounding woods and mountains. You could even become so disconnected from reality by never venturing into the wild that beckons from so close by that you really don't believe there is anything living in all those woods you drive by every day. Drink too many espressos in a day and you might think you were living in suburban Seattle.

This disorientation will never happen to Brian and Lisa or their five children, not after last night. Their nightmare began at about 2:30
A.M
. It wasn't yet completely dark; many shades of gray light were still mixing with the night's black. Lisa heard something first; mothers sleep lightly when they have little ones. There was barking, some other noises. The family has several dogs, a couple sled dogs chained in the stunted spruce just beyond their front yard and their Great Pyrenees, which runs free and protects the place.

“In the last twenty years there have been more people killed by dogs than bears in Alaska,” Ted mentioned to me matter-of-factly in the truck on the way there.

The road we drove down was modern, straight and smooth, with wide shoulders. It comfortably carried thousands of tourists and locals year-round. It appeared devoid of risk, almost boring. White spruce dotted the hillsides and the gently rolling land alongside, which had occasional muskeg swamps carpeted in golden grass. They looked like little pastures; they attracted the moose.

Ted carried in a padded case a bolt-action .338 Winchester magnum rifle with open iron sights. Many would think this gun would not be enough to stop a brown bear. He told me about the other sow in the area about which he has gotten complaints. He said her territory overlapped with that of the bad-behaving sow.

“I wonder, was this shooting due to this extremely dangerous sow, a sow that had been causing real problems for years, but always escaped,” Ted said, trying to plan what our actions would be when we arrived at the site. “Will she ever cross the line from killing dogs, chickens, and goats and savaging property to destroying human life?” We were now just past Mile 100.

When the good sow entered human territory, she normally didn't come out of the brush, he told me. She stayed hidden, making loud blowing and woofing sounds, trying to call her cubs away from people's dogs, chickens, rabbits, and smokehouses. Ted said that she tried to teach her cubs that raiding human settlements is dangerous. This sow understood that her cubs could be killed if they began attacking someone's dogs or killing someone's goats. We drove by a homestead with a corral made of hand-cut spruce poles in front, holding a couple horses.

Ted said he had been dealing with the dangerous sow for years, cleaning up her attacks, her messes, but he'd never been able to trap and move her. He had never even seen her, he just knew her by her distinctive behavior and territory. She goes right into people's yards; she roars, letting everyone around know
she
is afraid of nothing,
she
is supreme to all living creatures and seemingly unafraid of their biggest, baddest bullets. Naturally, she scares the hell out of people and doesn't seem to care that her act is life-threatening.

“She is teaching her cubs the worst possible behavior,” Ted said, sincerely concerned. “Larry said they saw a bear running away from the house, across the road, but it was still dark and it could have been an older cub.”

Brown bear sows and their cubs on the Kenai Peninsula have home ranges of three hundred to four hundred square miles, males some five hundred to six hundred square miles. Keep in mind, Rhode Island is only 1,212 square miles. Ted clearly struggles with issues of problem bears and his official response. There had been shots fired. If she was severely wounded after her latest confrontation with humans, would they find her? What if she lived, what if next time she broke into someone's cabin and killed a child or maimed an adult? There would be an intense public outcry, and if the public then found out that she had been terrorizing people for years, what would they say? Ted and his associates had to think about all of this. They usually made great efforts not to kill bears. They trapped problem animals, moved them a hundred miles away. Often of course, the bears came right back; as old and smart as this sow was, she would probably be too smart to enter a trap.

Two brown bears after some easy pickings.
P
HOTO BY
P
ETER
J
ENKINS

When their dogs had first started barking, Lisa hadn't thought much of anything. It could have been a slow-moving porcupine just out of reach of the dogs, or a moose browsing on the hillside. A lynx might have killed a snowshoe hare in sight of the dogs. But then Lisa heard the barking become more pronounced, more agitated, higher pitched, faster, until it was incessant. She surely hoped the dogs would stop or slow as they usually do after the animal passes from view. Surely she hoped they would stop, just like any mother with five small children yearning for more sleep, rest, and peace.

But these dogs were not barking out of curiosity, or plain intrigue, nor were they stopping or slowing down. Whatever was bothering them was getting closer, more threatening, more terrifying. Their Great Pyrenees, who was loose, was normally fearless. Lisa went through the possibilities. This time of the year it was not likely to be a moose, unless maybe a late calf had somehow got scared and wandered in between the dogs. A mother moose could kill all the chained dogs, maim them; it would be a disaster. And there was too much intensity in the barking for it to be a porcupine waddling on its self-involved way. Stray dogs almost never came out this far; stray dogs in the Alaska wilds are like Snickers bars sitting on a fourth-grader's desk—just waiting to be eaten. Wolves, coyotes, bears, love to eat them, so they are almost never a problem.

It just about had to be a major predator out in Lisa and Brian's yard. If it was black bears or brown bears, this was a bad time of the year for them because the salmon were not spawning in the creeks yet and therefore they would go hungry. If it was a brown bear sow with twin two-and-a-half-year-olds outside, that would be about the worst possible thing. The two-and-a-half-year-olds are the equivalents of human teenagers, capable of real damage, not as big as an adult but still strong enough to kill a human or anything else. They are fearless, the bear version of “ten feet tall and bulletproof.” An old male could be a big problem, his teeth worn, his metabolism unable to convert meat and protein to muscle the way it used to, hungry, smelling dog food, or better yet, tasty dog. It could be the sow with year-and-a-half-old cubs. These young cubs, maybe 140 pounds if it was a male, 120 if it was a female, were more curious and rambunctious than dangerous, although if cornered, they could certainly kill a person. A 110-pound black bear cub had recently killed a grown woman in the Smoky Mountains. In this case, though, Ted said the “good” sow normally ended up getting a cub out of a jam with aggressive sled dogs. She was smart enough to realize that to keep her cubs and herself alive, they needed to avoid being too threatening to humans and their property.