Looking for Alaska (8 page)

A great deal of speculation has focused on the level of disturbance caused by the seismic crew's activities and this event, and there should be. Although there had been no seismic blasting in the area, workers were drilling fifteen-to-twenty-five-feet-deep holes in preparation for blasting on a line two hundred yards away. They had walked past the den on at least two separate occasions when the lines were first established. Their trail was a measured fourteen yards from the den. The crew was transported to the area by helicopter. With several crews working in the area one can assume that human and helicopter disturbance was common.

Approximately one month prior to this fatal mauling a seismic worker stepped through the snow den entrance of a sow brown bear with cubs. The man and the bear reportedly both exited the den about the same time with the bear running one way and the worker running the other.

Since we have not received any reports of bears being out of their dens or problems, we have changed the initial decision to capture/collar any large bear found in the area. Since hair was collected at the site of the mauling, we will be able to make a positive identification if the bear responsible for this fatality is located. If the bear is captured, we will be able to monitor its activities in the event it establishes in a developed area.

What Ted did not write about in his report was that he had had to inspect the body of the fatally mauled man. Even after all his years in the field seeing what these animals can do, he said it was almost unbelievable what that bear did to that man so quickly.

PUNCTURED SKULL

As we drove back to Soldotna, we passed several large motor homes. The tourists were back. Some Alaskans are thrilled by their arrival; some can't wait until they leave again, usually sometime in September.

“Some of these folks will have some unforgettable run-ins,” Ted said, but didn't finish his thought. He turned his head sharply to the right; a political sign had caught his attention.

“Now, that reminds me of one of the investigations I did back in 1994. Talk about a close call. Right now the guy is running for borough mayor. He's a local guy, born and raised around here, his name is Dale Bagley. He lived to tell his experience.”

A few days later, back in Seward, I called Dale Bagley, told him I'd been talking to Ted, and arranged to meet him. If you met Dale at a national convention of Realtors, which he is, you would not be able to distinguish him from someone who grew up in New Jersey or Ohio or Oregon. Nothing about his look, his walk, his way of talking, or the way he looks at you would make you think he grew up in Alaska doing the things in the wilderness that he did. You would never dream that he was a marine.

He has no beard, no tattoos, no earrings, doesn't wear what people would call hip clothes, and for that matter, doesn't look terribly outdoorsy. He doesn't look like a macho hunter, or a homesteader or mountain man. He wears glasses. His personality is camouflaged by apparent normalcy. Looking at Dale tells you nothing much about who he is or what he has done. He probably represents the real white Alaskan far more than the ones that look the part.

When he was in the fifth grade, he and his best friend, now a doctor in Tok, took three- and four-day camping trips alone out through the mountains on the Kenai Peninsula. Their parents thought it was good for them. Dale Bagley's father moved to Alaska when he was three, then their family moved to the Kenai Peninsula when he was twelve. Dale spent his summers working on his grandfather's farm in Palmer, north of Anchorage, where the state's few farmers live and where the Alaska State Fair is held every year. He spent from 1983 to 1987 in the marines.

In Alaska, as in every place in the world, at times of the year large numbers of people have traditional things that they do. In some places, families take their vacation at the beach in July; some families go to football games in the fall. Many families in Alaska go moose hunting in September. It is a tradition, a way to get all your red meat for the year. Alaskans take their vacations to moose hunt; they close down their business, even break up with this year's boyfriend if he's antihunting.

If you get a moose, you have four, five, or six hundred pounds of some of the best-tasting meat the world has ever known. Alaska moose are bigger than many cattle, and instead of going to the grocery store for your meat or raising your own, Alaskans get out on the land and hunt down their own. It is brutal work, packing out hindquarters that can weigh 130 pounds through muskeg and knee-deep bogs and swamps. Carrying out the four quarters, two hindquarters, and two fronts, could break just about anyone.

Every September as Dale Bagley grew up, his family and some of their friends would move to a place on the Kenai Peninsula called Hidden Lake and Skilak Lake. They'd set up army-surplus-style wall tents, stay a week the beginning of the season, and go out on the weekends after that. The Bagleys would hunt for moose in the mornings and afternoons and fish for salmon, rainbows, and lake trout in between.

All his life Dale had shared game trails with black bears and brown bears making their way through the woods. He'd seen them foraging on the sides of the mountains digging in the blueberries and tundra. He'd experienced plenty of them working high school summers at remote camps at fish weirs counting salmon as they returned to spawn. These places are bear and wolf magnets. As a kid out on a hiking trip, one time he had to climb a tree and wait for a brown bear to leave. One time he and a friend were charged by a black bear; his friend shot in the water in front of it and it turned away.

If he had run into serious trouble any of those times he was out in the wilderness alone or with his friend, he would not have been able to defend himself until he was in tenth grade. That year he got himself a .44. Most times bears smell you but you never see them. Most of the time when they see or scent you, their response is to run away. And that is good.

Being a Realtor, Dale has a flexible schedule, unlike many of his friends and family. So it is not unusual for him to take off a bit early from work, before the season. He drives by all of Soldotna's strip malls, an odd sight that can make a person too confident. In Anchorage, about two hours northeast of the Kenai, many people say, “From here you can be in Alaska in thirty minutes.” A few years ago a mother, her son, and her teenage grandson were jogging together down a trail in an Anchorage park on the edge of the city. They were unaware a brown bear was in the brush near them as they ran. The bear ran down the woman and her son, killed them both; the teenager only survived by climbing a tree.

“The way I hunt, I don't like to compete with road hunters, so I explore the roadless country. All my life I had used my uncle's model 760 Remington pump-action 30/06. I'd been working on the North Slope and made good money, so I gave the gun back to him and bought me a new rifle, a Remington 742, with a three-by-nine Leopold scope.”

Dale stopped, seemed to detect I was not visualizing the guns he described. “You know that rifle, right?”

“No, I can't say that I do. I don't know much about guns,” I answered.

“Well, it's not the biggest gun that people use in Alaska, but it's the one I use,” Dale explained. “That afternoon I was going out to walk through some creeks and swamps and I took it with me. I'd only shot a few times. It was April twenty-sixth, early spring. I was hiking near the end of Funny River Road.”

“Isn't that near where the man was killed just a month ago?” I interrupted.

“Yes, it is six or seven miles from there. I was walking cross-country, planning on hitting Killey River. I made it to the river, turned around, and headed back to the road where my truck was parked. There were lots of open swamps and very dense young spruce, young birch, some tall aspen. There were no leaves on the trees yet.” Dale didn't move at all as he talked, he didn't even blink.

“What did you have on?” I asked.

“I had on jeans, a T-shirt, a flannel shirt, baseball cap, hiking boots. I had my new 30/06 and my .44. Only reason I had the 30/06 was in case I saw a large black bear. Wasn't too far from the truck when something struck me, something told me I should pay more attention. There was, all of a sudden, quite a bit of bird noise, the kind that normally means a moose kill. Ravens, jays, they all gather around. Anytime there is a dead moose, there are birds feeding on it. They make lots of noise. For anyone in Alaska, hearing birds like that is as dangerous a sound as you can hear.”

I thought to myself, why would hearing birds be anything to worry about?

“Quickly, the sounds got louder and the danger signals went off in me. I smelled something, just slightly. I knew somewhere close there was a moose kill or one had just died. In the spring quite a few moose die from the effects of winter starvation.”

A cloud moved away from the front of the sun, and a shaft of light came through the window and hit Dale's face. The skin and muscles of his face appeared to be a bit misshapen, as if there had been some trauma and some repair. It was subtle and I did not want to stare.

“I immediately realized it was time to turn away and get out of there. I was basically retracing my steps. I didn't get far. I was quartering away, got about fifteen feet when I saw a bear sit up and look at me.” Dale's eyes began to blink.

“The bear was about forty feet away. When it sat up, all I saw was its shoulders and head. The brush was very thick. My first thought was, you're never supposed to back away from a bear. So I held my ground and began to yell.”

Even though Dale had come to tell me his story, I could only imagine how horrific it would be to relive such an experience.

“Then the brown bear got up on all four feet, facing me. Once I'd been much closer to a black bear—we actually ran into each other and it took off running, shocked. I had my rifle in my left hand. I pulled out my .44, a pistol, from its holster and fired a shot over its head. That shot, and it was loud, didn't faze it in the least.”

Dale put his right hand in his pocket, then pulled it out again. He was sitting on a sofa and it appeared to be inhaling him, as if the retelling of this story were taking away his energy, making him smaller.

“After I shot and yelled more, the bear started running toward me. I slammed the .44 into the holster again and raised the rifle to my shoulder, and then took the safety off. By now it is running at me, full bore; there was no way I could see it in the scope. I didn't even try. That's one reason a lot of guys don't have scopes on their rifles in Alaska, so that you can do close-in shooting, shoot in the brush, shoot something charging you.” Dale breathed; it sounded loud but it wasn't.

There were no trees to climb and the bear was coming at him at about thirty miles an hour, forty-four feet per second. A world-class sprinter running the hundred-meter dash in ten seconds is only traveling at thirty-three feet per second.

“Next I fired. The bear stopped from the shock of the bullet like it hit a wall, then it started coming again, as fast or faster than before. I squeezed off another shot, nothing happened. I had fired about twenty bullets through this new rifle, and twice it had not fired. I pulled the trigger again, nothing happened and for a split second it was sheer panic. Then I remembered my Marine Corps drill instructor used to say, if your gun jams, just pull the trigger again. That got me thinking again.” Dale was looking off into the space in front of him.

“Now it was a few feet away. There was a small row of trees next to me on my left, the bear's right. I ran around the end of the trees. I pulled the .44 out and cocked it. As I turned around, I slipped on a root. I fell through the air. It was like I was in super slow motion, and then the bear was point-blank on top of me.” Dale's voice was filled with emotion.

“Before I hit the ground, the bear had me by the chin. I fired my .44 into the bear's chest. I am on my back, my body is under the bear's and my face is under his. The bear is pressing me to the ground with his chest, pinning me.”

Dale is five feet ten inches tall and about 180 pounds. A brown bear can kill an adult bull moose weighing sixteen hundred pounds with one bite or one twist of the neck. And that is a moose tough enough to live its life outdoors in Alaska, through every severe winter. Unarmed humans are not much more challenging to a brown bear than a bug.

“My head was immediately in its mouth. I could feel and hear bones in my face and jaw and skull breaking, being crushed. It bit me on my lower jaw area, then bit in the middle of my face and head, breaking through my temple, puncturing my skull. Then it bit down on the top of my head. I was on my back and pinned, both my hands were under its chest. I needed to get my right hand free, where I was holding my .44. I'm continuing to hear bones crunching, but I'm worried about shooting my left arm off. I've got my .44 in my right hand but it is pinned under the bear's chest, pointed right at my left arm.” I try, but I cannot visualize Dale pinned under the bear, his head being crushed in this predator's jaws. The fantastic bite into his temple broke out a piece of his skull.

“First he was pinning me to the ground with his body so I could not move. The bear seemed to be concentrating on crushing my head and breaking my neck. I struggled, as I heard the bones breaking in my jaw and around my eyes, to get my .44 free. I finally did and I shot once more at an angle. Then it got me by the top of the head and was dragging me through its front legs out from under its body. It wanted to shake me violently and break my neck.”

I did not want to move a muscle for fear of breaking his concentration. The brutal reality of this terrifying afternoon was brought so vividly to life by Dale's telling, the room actually felt as if it were getting colder.

“With a Smith and Wesson double-action revolver, you can just keep pulling the trigger. He was about to shake me violently, which most probably would have broken my neck, when I shot the bear three more times. It then dropped me and took off running.” Dale moved to the corner of the sofa.