Looking for Alaska (6 page)

What Lisa and Brian wanted most was for the barking to stop and for whatever was outside to go away, to leave their little clearing. They all wanted to go back to sleep and not have to bring their own conclusion to this rapidly escalating situation. It was incredible how loud it was inside. They usually lived in the deep silence that exists in few places other than Alaska. They prayed, if they were praying people, that these sounds would not wake their children. They hoped beyond hope that whatever was out there would not come any closer to their hand-hewn log cabin.

And there were other sounds that Lisa did not recognize. Finally, there was so much sound outside their log cabin that it did wake up the kids. When the noise became unbearable, they decided to call 911, and that's what had led to our morning drive.

Reacting to the initial 911 call was Larry Lewis, forty-two, a State of Alaska wildlife technician and often Ted's sidekick, and Alaska state trooper Jim Moen, Fish and Game Enforcement. They arrived at Mile 117 at around 3:30
A.M
. Trooper Moen saw something run across the road and away from the house right as they arrived. Larry was there because Brian had fired his rifle and thought he had hit one of the bears. In Alaska, if you are being attacked or are in fear of your life, or your property is being destroyed—your dogs, your home, your boat—you can legally shoot a bear or moose. Then you must call the state, and if the animal is found dead, you must skin it and turn over the entire bear or moose to the state. These quintessentially Alaskan moments are called Defense of Property and Defense of Life Shootings. Because the hides and skulls and gallbladders and claws of bears are valuable, the shooter, regardless if the bear came within a hair of killing him, must turn over all parts of value to the state.

Larry and Trooper Moen were not going to follow a possibly wounded bear into the almost impenetrable underbrush and forest surrounding Brian and Lisa's in the dark. Even in bright daylight these woods, thickets, head-high wild grasses, and swamps have too many hiding places.

They'd gone home, and now it was 10:30
A.M
. and I was with Ted and we were to meet them and another guy where the road to Clam Gulch dead-ends into Sterling Highway between Kasilof and Ninilchik. A bunch of dog mushers, commercial fisherman, partially retired hippies, and Ed Borden live in Kasilof.

Ed, in his mid-forties, wearing his salt-and-pepper hair pulled back in a ponytail, has run the Iditarod but now supports himself by making exquisite racing sleds. He is also a seasonal employee of Fish and Game. Ted told me that Ed is an incredible craftsman and in great demand as a racing dog-sled maker. Tracking a wounded brown bear is one of the most dangerous things in the world anyone could possibly do; Ed is obviously not doing this for his state hourly wage.

Three trucks were waiting for us in the brown dirt parking lot that was our meeting place. Ed was out leaning against his.

“Ted, why am I here? I don't want to spend my time looking for another hairy female.” Ed was rarely serious. After all, he lived in Kasilof, where Ted said poaching is considered a right, where moose season begins three days early so the locals can get their winter's meat. The logic is “Hey, man, we've been feeding the things all summer from our garden, why should somebody from Anchorage or Soldotna get it before we do?”

“Peter,” Ted said, as he prepared to introduce us, “this guy Ed, here, he's got more girlfriends than anyone I know. They all love him, and look at him.” Ed's irreverent charm dripped off him; he was not a looker.

One of the guys said that Ed lived in a place called North Coho, an area where to buy property you needed to have “at least fifteen outstanding warrants.” It's a place, I was told, where curvy, skinny dirt roads empty into little clearings filled with little log cabins or shacks. “There are more hidden greenhouses back there than you could imagine,” someone else said.

“Larry,” Ed asked, “what does that brown bear look like, anyway?”

It seemed a perfectly serious question for Ed to ask, since he might soon be risking his life going after her. The three looked at each other and let Larry answer for them. This group obviously knew each other well.

“She looks just like the women you date. She's big and hairy and has a fat ass.”

“Seriously, guys, I want to have some idea what we're looking for before I go off into the woods. I don't make a habit of running into the woods where there are females with bullets in them.” Ed's serious tone seemed to catch the other men off guard.

Ted responded in kind, filling the others in on the theory he'd already shared with me about the cub they'd trapped at Lyle Winters's in 1994. He unzipped his coat as he talked, as it was warming up fast. I was as surprised as the others—what was I doing here? Certainly I hadn't realized we were going to be tracking a potentially wounded bear through the underbrush. I thought the bear had already been shot and killed.

But we all got back into our trucks and headed south to the site of the shooting at Mile 117. Ted's rifle had no scope. He said that he didn't use a scope because if there was to be any shooting, it would be at close range. The action would be fast and furious, and there would not be enough time for looking into a scope. He would more than likely have to shoot instinctively if we were charged or surprised.

The road was straight; it basically followed the west side of the peninsula, keeping away from the knife-sharp mountains and massive blue glaciers thirty or forty miles to the east, over where I lived. We could see them looming over us because the land between here and there was flat. The brown bears and the moose preferred this flatter country, which opened up periodically, usually around swamps and wetlands. Elsewhere, the peninsula was deeply forested with rivers, ponds, and creeks. Ted had told me that he and his fellow biologists and technicians felt there were somewhere between 250 and 300 brown bears on the peninsula and 2,500 to 3,000 black bears.

While we drove, Ted told me about another wildlife-disturbance call he'd gotten about two weeks before from a distraught woman. He felt that her problem could have been caused by this same bear. She told Ted that a huge bear was harassing her dogs, and that all the dogs had returned to the house but one, which was killed. Brown bears often come into a yard of chained-up sled dogs and eat some. But if the dogs are running free, it is rare for a bear to catch them.

Still, something perplexed Ted about this lady's dead dog. When Ted saw no marks on the dog, no blood, no bone breaks, he asked the woman how old the dog was. She told him that the dog was fourteen. Utilizing all of his twenty-plus years of experience, Ted felt every inch of the body to feel for internal injuries, hematomas like those made from moose kicks, and he felt nothing. Not one hair was out of place. Ted noticed when he'd arrived that the other dogs appeared incredibly happy to see him and came quickly out of the shed where they were hiding.

“You know,” Ted had suggested to the understandably distraught woman, “I think it is possible that your dog was scared to death. Its old heart just couldn't take it.” I was hoping my heart could take it if we had a confrontation of our own.

“After we check out what has happened at Mile 117, I will tell you if I think it is okay for you to track the bear with us, all right?” he said to me.

“Sure,” I said. A dog scared to death?!

“In the last thirty years,” Ted volunteered, answering a question I had not wanted to ask until we were done with this investigation, “only three people have been killed by brown bear attacks on the Kenai Peninsula and two of these have been in the last couple years. One was on February eighth, 1998, the other May twenty-fifth, 1999, just a few weeks ago. I knew the guy who died a couple weeks ago pretty well. Now, he was as experienced in the woods and with bears as you get around here. Both men were killed principally by the terrible bites they sustained to the head. A bear knows your head is a place of great vulnerability, and when they stand over you and bend down, it is the first place they bite.” Ted stopped.

I let the conversation die—I mean, I didn't pursue any more details. I didn't want to hear anything else.

AT BRIAN AND LISA'S

Ted slowed down, put on his blinker, and took a slow left into a rough, partially eroded dirt driveway leading to where Brian and Lisa, their five small children, dogs, horses, and cats lived. Brian and Lisa had hacked out a clearing in the Alaskan jungle. Their house was two log cabins that were put together, the logs probably cut off their land. One cabin was newer, built attached to the other. The edges of the logs were not perfectly flat; I wondered how they kept it warm. The ragtag assortment of different-sized outbuildings included one with a fenced-in pen to keep their chickens and rabbits separated from their dogs and bobtailed cats. They also kept a horse or two in a rough-hewn corral. They must have been able to hear just about any sound made outside; no human neighbors were anywhere in sight.

“See that corral?” Ted pointed at it, beyond the house and to our left. “Several years ago I got a call from here. They thought there might have been a Sasquatch out here. Hey, this guy is a descendant of a homesteader; they don't get worried about much. Brian has a sound mind, he doesn't imagine footprints or roaring in the woods.”

A few fifty-five-gallon oil drums were in the yard, most empty, a few filled with something. At a homestead out in the country almost nothing is thrown away. There will eventually be another use for whatever it is, even if it is five years from now. There were a couple piles of rough-cut corral pieces. Some car doors were lying in front of the corral, some old car engines on a rotting wood pallet. I also saw a couple long sections of fishing net hanging between two small spruce trees, and some salmon nets rolled up on racks.

In the partially cleared woods in front of the log cabin were patches, mostly round, of bare dirt where their sled dogs were chained. When they had dug too many burrows, they were moved to another patch of ground. The dogs had obviously started near the house and were now being kept closer to the road. Sometimes they dug burrows under large roots, not unlike wolves, to make safe places for their puppies. Brown bears are known to dig up several-hundred-pound boulders to get to a ground squirrel; no burrow, no matter how deep, would protect any puppies or dogs from a hungry bear.

“If I remember right, Brian and Lisa have one of the largest Great Pyrenees dogs I have ever seen. They let it run free, hoping that its guarding instincts would help against any invading bears, wolves, coyotes, wolverines, whatever. I don't see it; last time I was here, it came bounding up to our car. It could be hiding, shivering in some corner of one of the outbuildings,” Ted said.

I could feel a slightly out-of-control aura around the grounds and the house. Some broken plastic children's toys were lying in grass that hadn't been cut in a while. On the right side of the house rose a slight hill covered with a thick stand of white spruce and alder. Old and new bicycles were lying around, and some slab lumber that would someday be used for something. Ted and the others pulled up to the south side of the cabin and we all got out.

Ted pointed out to me an outhouse-sized shed with a door built on the side of the cabin. “That's what we call an arctic entry. No heat in it, just a place to step into when its way below zero, so as not to lose too much heat, plus you can take off and store all your bulky winter clothes in there.”

As we walked up to it, the door opened and out stepped a thin, tired-looking woman, maybe in her late twenties to midthirties, with black hair. She seemed shy; she went back inside, and through the door we could see that on the walls of the arctic entry were many large nails with snow-machine suits, heavy coats, and boots.

“You notice how their door swings out? You always want a door that swings out in bear country,” Ted said to me. He had the patience of a gifted teacher.

Ted explained that normally if you surprised a bear on your front or back porch, say, eating your dog's food, and you're in close quarters, they will respond by either fighting or fleeing. Bear and moose will tolerate a human about thirty or forty yards away, but any closer and they will decide either to fight or flee. If a bear decides to fight and stands up and pushes on your door, as some will, if you have a door that opens in, then here comes the bear.

Lisa came back out. “I had to tell my kids what was going on. They are still scared after what happened last night.”

“I see.” Ted's calm and orderly demeanor was immediately comforting to this woman. He did not have his rifle in his hands yet.

“I need to keep an eye on the house and the kids. My husband had to go do something. None of us have ever experienced anything like last night. The sound that brown bear made, awful.” Lisa didn't have much if any excess body fat. She shivered slightly at times, and it didn't seem to have anything to do with being chilled by the warming air.

Two broad-winged, black-black ravens soared over and spoke to each other. They circled over the woods near the dogs. Did they see something? It is uncanny how quickly ravens arrive at places of injury, death, and food.

“Last night was terrible and we still don't know what has happened. None of us was going out there after all that happened, after all we heard,” she said.

As I looked over at a side window on the log cabin, two children's faces stared at us from behind a curtain.

“So what did happen?” Ted asked, speaking gently so as to not rekindle the emotions. Ted and all the men seemed quite serious. They knew this family and knew they had experienced something serious here last night.

“First our dogs woke us up barking. We had a couple sled dogs chained out there,” she answered, pointing to the woods.

“The first barking, that was nothing too unusual. My Great Pyrenees, he runs loose, we want it that way. He can scare off most things, and he's smart, he won't let them draw him too far away from the house.”