by Will Hobbs
I tried again. This time, through the willows, I spotted the head and the motions of a feeding bear. A grizzly, I thought—the head and the forelimbs were shades of brown. The grizzly had something pinned to the ground, and was ripping meat from it. Something about the claws wasn’t right. They weren’t as long as a grizzly’s. “Bear in camp,” I whispered. “Behind the willows.”
“Where behind the willows?”
“To the right of the tent and behind it—sight on the gap between the two big clumps of willows.”
I looked again and got a better view as the bear stopped feeding and peered directly through the small break in the willow brush. Now I could see its body. The bulk of it was covered with dirty white fur. “It’s the grolar bear, Ryan.”
“You’re pulling my leg.”
“I wish I was. Look, he’s got a satellite collar around his neck.”
Ryan adjusted his lens. “Now I see him.” He took three quick pictures. “Come out in the open, big fella. Let’s get a look at you.”
At that moment, the bear lumbered through the brush and into a clearing. Its strange patchwork coat was on full display. Ryan’s shutter whirred and whirred. “How bizarre is that,” he said under his breath. “Just like you said—more like a grizzly’s head, more like a polar bear’s body, except for the brown legs. Whoa, he’s huge.”
I held my breath, hoping the grolar bear wasn’t on to us. So far it wasn’t.
The grolar bear went to feed on something behind the tussock grass. Next time it lifted its head, it had a human arm, elbow to fingers, in its jaws.
“Oh no,” I said. “Oh no.”
“Get the sat phone,” Ryan said under his breath. “Make the call before the storm breaks. We might lose the signal.”
“Who do I call?”
“The numbers are on the inside lid of the ammo can. Start with Search and Rescue in Inuvik. They’ll dispatch a helicopter.”
I tried to unbuckle the lid as silently as possible, but it opened with a screech. I looked across the river. The grolar bear rose to its full height, with that arm still in its mouth. Ryan took a picture. I stopped breathing. We held dead still.
I couldn’t be sure the beast was on to us. The grolar bear dropped the arm, then walked in our direction, three upright steps to the shore. Ryan took another picture. The bear woofed at us two, three times, then came down on all fours, growled, and laid back its ears—Ryan taking pictures all the while. “Ryan,” I whispered. “Let’s slip out of here before it decides to charge.”
“You got it!”
The bear woofed again.
Ryan didn’t take the time to put away the camera. He let it hang from his neck as he reached for the oars. I snapped the lid of the ammo can closed so our sat phone couldn’t get wet. I’d have to wait to make the call; rain was sweeping toward us in sheets from the mountains. Ryan began to ply the oars. Soon as he did, the grolar bear charged into the river.
Lightning struck barely downstream, shocking me half to death. Unfazed, the bear kept charging. By the time Ryan reached the current, and had the raft moving as fast as he could possibly power it, the bear was closing on us fast, splashing through the river with unbelievable speed. Ryan stopped rowing, but why?
When I turned around and looked, he was handing me the pepper spray out of its holster. “Here, take it,” he cried. I did, and he started rowing again.
By chance, we were over deeper water. Soon, the bear was too. Rather than swim after us, the grolar bear swam toward the shallows bordering the island. It hauled out on the island and started racing after us along the shore. “Good grief,” Ryan said, “the thing is a monster, like you said.”
Ryan was heaving on the oars with all his might. Pulling the raft downstream meant looking over his shoulder to see where he was going. Somehow he was able to keep in the fastest current. I was looking upstream off the front of the boat. My eyes were on the bear as it raced down the shore of the island. It was about to draw even with us where the island came to an end.
As the current swept us around the bottom of the island toward the current coming in from the other side, the grolar bear plunged into the river with a roar.
The thing swam faster than I would have thought possible. It was gaining on us, breath whooshing in and out of its nostrils. The beast was twenty feet behind us and closing.
I looked back at Ryan, my eyes begging for more speed. “Boat’s heavy,” he panted. “Get ready with the pepper spray. Safety off?”
“Safety off!”
“In this wind, you’ll have to wait until it’s close!”
“How close?”
“So much wind … arm’s length!”
When I looked, the bear’s face was right there, no more than ten feet away from me. The grolar bear’s small amber eyes were filled with the same rage I’d seen on the Mackenzie. With powerful strokes, the creature quickly closed the gap. Up came a paw, about to slash the raft. I leaned forward and blasted the monster’s face. Its flailing claws knocked the pepper spray into the river.
I could barely see, I could barely breathe.
“You got him!” Ryan cried.
My eyes and my throat were on fire. “I got myself!”
“The bear got the worst of it! He’s heading for shore—can’t even swim straight.”
“Glad to hear it,” I managed.
Ten minutes later the searing pain was backing off, and I could function again. We were onshore, in a torrent of rain. Ryan had the sat phone out, and was punching numbers without even trying to protect it from the rain. He reached Search and Rescue in Inuvik and told them what we had seen at Last Mountain campsite. The dispatcher asked if one or both of the victims might be alive. Ryan said he didn’t think so but didn’t know for sure. “How soon can you come?” he asked.
“No time soon, if the forecast is right. Maybe not for three days. Has the storm arrived at the delta of the Firth River?”
“Big-time.”
“It might turn into what they’re calling ‘a marine bomb.’ Shingle Point has been evacuated. Hang on—we can’t fly in this weather. We’ll get to you as soon as we can.”
That was the last we heard. A bolt of lightning downstream sent a herd of musk oxen stampeding by us, heading upriver. The blast was like that bomb they were talking about. The thunder kept rolling, right through my bones. “Signal’s gone,” Ryan reported.
22
IN THE TEETH OF THE STORM
The rain was falling harder and faster than I’d ever seen, and the winds were ferocious. Ryan stowed the sat phone. “You hear what the man said, Nick?”
“Help is not on the way.”
“Is your family out at Shingle Point?” The rain was so loud, Ryan was practically shouting.
“I sure don’t think so. Some people go in late June, but we always wait for July. This time, there’s no way they would go early.”
“You don’t have to worry about your family, but they’ve heard about this storm and must be worried about you. You want to try to call them right now?”
“The signal’s out, and we’d ruin the phone in the rain. We don’t have time to mess around! We can’t row back upstream…. The river’s going to flood, isn’t it?”
“It’s gonna flood something awful, and soon. I can’t picture a safe place to camp on the delta—the whole thing is a floodplain.”
“So what can we do?”
“I think we have to run the rest of the river through the delta and hole up on Nunaluk Spit. Have you ever been there?”
“About five years ago, with Jonah. It was a really long way from Shingle Point.”
“How high above sea level is it?”
“I don’t know; maybe ten, fifteen feet?”
“That’s not very much. How big are your tides up here?”
“They don’t amount to much—a couple of feet.”
“What does the spit look like?”
“It’s an island made out of gravel and stones. I remember seeing
windbreaks—quite a few—made out of driftwood. The people who raft the Firth build them while they’re waiting for an airplane.”
Ryan went for his spiral-bound guidebook and turned to the maps for the delta and the shore of the Beaufort Sea. The waterproof pages were getting the supreme test. The rain was coming so heavy that I could have collected a cup of water off my brother’s beard in half a minute. “It’s not going to be pretty out on the coast,” Ryan said, “but what other choice do we have?”
“You’re right, we have to go for the coast and hope for the best.”
“At least we’ve got the boat to jump into if the sea washes over the spit.”
Ryan showed me the map of the Firth running across its delta. In its last fourteen miles the Firth split into dozens and dozens of channels. My job, every time Ryan had to make a choice, was to point his way into the one carrying the most water. Make a wrong call and we would get stuck in a channel to nowhere. In the wind and the rain, with the world gone dark under heavy clouds and my eyes seared from the pepper spray, I had to find the way.
We shoved off. Almost immediately, the channel we were on branched into three. I pointed Ryan down the one on the right. This was crazy. The split-second decisions had my heart pounding. Somehow I kept making good calls. In the delta’s last mile, Ryan had to row hard to keep us off a wall of ice ten or twelve feet high. Finally, the channel we were following flowed into the saltwater lagoon between the mainland and Nunaluk Spit.
Half a mile of white-capped open water lay between us and the spit. In the storm, we couldn’t see that far. We wouldn’t have had a prayer of making the crossing if the wind wasn’t blowing north toward the spit. While the wind was with us, we had to give it a try even though the lagoon was whipped into a frenzy.
The crossing was more than ugly. Waves kept crashing over the side, a mixture of freezing sea and river water. At last the spit came into view through a heavy curtain of rain. I jumped ashore with the rope and held the raft. Ryan came off the boat, green eyes blazing. “Let’s haul it out of the water, Nick, beach it as far up as we can!”
On the count of three, we jerked the raft maybe four feet onto the gravel. My brother got in my face and yelled, “You stay with the boat! I’m gonna go find one of those windbreaks for us!”
“Got it!” I yelled as a gust of wind nearly blew me off my feet. I had to brace against the raft to keep from going down.
Within seconds, Ryan disappeared in the rain and the wind and the eerie near-darkness. Evenings were normally bright as can be at the end of June, but the storm was blotting out the sun.
After about fifteen minutes alone, I wished I had told my brother not to be picky. He might get lost, or blown off the spit into the Beaufort.
Ryan materialized out of the storm a few minutes later. “Found a five-star hotel!” he hollered.
That turned out to be a five-star exaggeration. The windbreak was chest high and three-sided, made of driftwood. The whole coast is strewn with the stuff. It comes all the way down the Mackenzie from where the big trees grow.
For the time being, our windbreak was no windbreak at all. It had been built for protection against the wind off the ocean, not the mountains. It was a battle to get the tent up and secure its rain fly. We used all twenty-seven stakes and tied the corners off to heavy logs.
The spit was a couple miles long and generally about a hundred yards wide. Jonah and I had landed the motorboat here when I was ten, and had lunch behind one of the windbreaks. An hour before, we’d been on Herschel Island, where we visited the historical park with the buildings from the old whaling station. Some of the graves in the Native cemetery on Herschel had recently washed away during a storm.
Here I was in a storm worse than that one. It might even be worse than the one when I was six. Back then the coastal community of Tuktoyaktuk lost big chunks of the land that protected it from the sea.
Ryan’s tent was taking a terrible beating. The storm raged on, and the wind—still out of the south—was horrendous. We lay in our sleeping bags and talked about the flood coming down the Firth River, what that must be like. We could hear the roar coming from the back of the lagoon where the river met the sea. “The canyon must be brimful,” I said. Ryan said he believed I was right.
“Do you think one or the other of the couple from Montana might still be alive, Nick?”
“I saw the bear feeding in two different places. Sure don’t think so.”
Ryan had brought his precious camera box off the raft, and had it with him in the tent. He showed me the pictures of the grolar bear he had taken from the raft. The one of the bear standing up with the arm in its jaws made my blood curdle. “Will that be in National Geographic?”
“I’m glad you asked me that,” Ryan said. “There. I just deleted it.”
“Why’d you do that?”
“It would go viral. People would get the wrong idea. I would never want to demonize bears.”
“But that one is a demon.”
“I know, but maybe the grolar bears to come won’t be like this one. I’ll write about what this one did, and call it a man-eater, but I’ll also say that the grolar bear appears to be a creature of climate change, and climate change is the beast we should be worrying about. I’ve even heard it put that way, by a scientist who’d been studying the increase in severe storms around the world the last ten, fifteen years.”
“What did he say?”
“That the climate has become a beast, and we are poking it with sticks.”
I thought about what Jonah had said about everything changing, and all the bad signs. We’re going to have to deal with whatever comes, Jonah had said. We just have to adapt.
I put my head down and gave in to my exhaustion. The sleep I got was anything but restful. That last thing Ryan had said—about poking a beast with sticks—worked its way into my fears. I dreamed I was trying to fend off the grolar bear with a chunk of driftwood.
I woke up hours later, with a start, to lightning and thunder. Wind was buffeting the tent so bad, Ryan was bracing the poles with his outstretched arms.
“This is unreal,” I said.
“The wind’s coming from both directions now, north as well as south.”
“Those two storms are colliding, like Ken said?”
“Yep, the storm off the Beaufort is on us now, too.”
Before long, the wind blew only from the north. The storm off the ocean was more powerful than the one that had crossed Alaska. The rain wasn’t so loud on the tent anymore. I peeked outside and found out why. The rain had turned to wet snow, blowing horizontal off the sea.
“Don’t worry,” Ryan said. “We’re in the best four-season tent money can buy.”
Suddenly I realized that the sound of the surf on the ocean side of the spit was much louder than before. “Hear those waves crashing, Ryan?”
Ryan reached for his rain gear. “Sounds bad. I’m going out for a look.”
My brother was gone for about ten minutes. Before he came back inside, he shook the snow off the tent fly. He didn’t say anything as he crawled through the vestibule, shucking his rain gear along the way.
“What’s up, Ryan?”
“The waves are. The Beaufort Sea is surging against the spit. Let’s hope the wind doesn’t get worse, or we’ll be swimming.”
After he said that, there was no going back to sleep. Time slowed down. I kept checking my watch, and that didn’t help a bit. Ryan looked grim. Twenty minutes later—half past three in the morning—I said, “Is it getting worse, or is it my imagination?”
Big brother pulled on his beard. “It’s not your imagination. I’ll take another look.”
“I’ll do it this time.”
“You stay put.”
“No, I want to see for myself.”
“Okay, we’ll both go.”
We pulled on our rain gear, crawled out of the tent, and staggered into the teeth of the storm. By this time of day we should have had no end of light to see b
y, but the clouds were too thick. We had to lean forward into the wind and snow to keep from being blown over. The crashing of the surf boomed louder as we got closer, and the salt spray stung our faces.
Closer yet, enormous white waves appeared in the murk. The wind-driven seas were up like I couldn’t believe. A towering breaker was about to crash on the shore. It was awful to look at, by far the biggest surf I’d ever laid eyes on.
That wave broke across the top of the spit. We turned tail and ran hard to get out of its reach. Looking east down the spit, I saw the same wave race clear across it. When the surf hit a big windbreak, it broke those timbers down like they were matchsticks.
Luckily, our tent was on higher ground, but not by much. We had a few minutes, and we needed them to stuff our sleeping bags and strike the tent. With our river bags over our shoulders, we hustled toward the raft. I looked back and saw a wave demolish the windbreak that had sheltered our tent.
The storm surge swept over that whole stretch of the spit as Ryan rowed us into the lagoon.
23
TOO HUGE, TOO POWERFUL
Ryan had to heave on the oars to keep from being blown across the lagoon and onto the mainland shore, where the flooding Firth was dumping into saltwater. We heard the river but couldn’t see it. We couldn’t see more than a hundred yards.
Where to now? The wind was howling, and the storm showed no sign of letting up. The snow was coming hard as ever, wind-whipped and salty.
“We need someplace to go,” Ryan said. “You were here once before, Nick. Any ideas?”
“I was on the ocean side of the spit, not in the lagoon.”
Ryan gritted his teeth and kept rowing. All kinds of driftwood had swept over the spit, and he had to work hard to avoid it.
