Walking Home: A Traveler in the Alaskan Wilderness, a Journey Into the Human Heart

by Lynn Schooler

  I was five minutes down the trail, still chewing on the bittersweet notion of brevity, when a loud huff! jarred me from my reverie. I jerked to a halt, heart leaping at the sight of a broad furry bottom disappearing around a tree just ahead; while I had been woolgathering, I had almost walked into a brown bear coming the other way. And judging from the surprised snort and the speed of its departure, I imagined that the bear, too, may have been lost in contemplation as it strolled toward the beach. Startled into flight by the sudden appearance of a tall, shambling creature coming its way, it had spun around and started to run before I’d seen it.

  The encounter was over before I fully realized it had started, but a full dose of adrenaline was already burning through my veins, and I stood, heart racing, with my eyes fixed on the spot where the bear had disappeared, waiting for it to return. It took me a second to notice that the bear spray was already in my hand, that my autonomic response had been to draw it and I was holding it, arm extended, with the safety clip off. I thought to check the direction of the wind (I did not want the caustic spray blowing in my face if the bear came rushing back and I was forced to use it), but there was none. The forest was silent, the trees so still that the panting of my own breath sounded violent.

  For two minutes, five, ten—I really can’t say how long—I stood quietly, listening intently for some sign that the bear might be coming back. I stared down the trail, waiting for a branch to move.

  There was nothing. No rustling in the underbrush, no squirrels chattering in alarm.

  After my breathing settled, I lowered the spray, replaced the safety clip, and leaned on my hiking poles. A raven somewhere down the trail let out a shriek, then another, which I took to mean that it had seen the bear and the bear was still moving, putting as much room between itself and the odd creature on the trail as possible.

  I told myself to relax but kept the spray in my hand, thinking about what to do next. The forest no longer seemed a comforting embrace, but more like a maze, or a spook house with too many dark corners. Still, if my information was correct, another half hour on the trail would take me beyond the worst of the bouldered beach. The topographic maps of the area showed a series of muskegs dotted with small ponds north of Lituya Bay, and with a bit of luck, I thought, the trail might open up and the visibility improve, making it less risky to continue.

  I had almost made up my mind to keep going when a stick or branch cracked somewhere beyond a band of spruce trees to my right. I jerked upright, then bent low to try to peer under the spreading branches. Another snap, and the muffled sound of something walking, branches sliding along furred flanks, a shoulder pressing into a patch of old berry stalks with a sound like rustling paper.

  The Tlingit call the grizzly Elder Brother or Old Man with Claws out of respect for the power of an animal they consider an emissary from the spirit world, and twenty years earlier I had listened as a Tlingit elder addressed an immense brown bear, bulldozing its way through a nearby tangle of underbrush toward us, as Grandfather; he went on to explain to it that we were sorry to have disturbed it, meant it no harm, and would be grateful if it would allow us to go on our way unmolested. At the sound of the elder’s steady voice the lumbering brown bear stopped, peered at us through a patch of leafy alder, and began easing away. Afterward I decided it would be foolhardy to try to improve on an interspecies communication technique developed by a people who have been doing it for hundreds of years, and I have since used the same etiquette on several occasions when an encounter threatened to escalate, always with good results.

  So I shouted, “Hey!,” not wanting to surprise whatever was coming if it stepped out onto the trail too close to me. I was almost certain it was not the bear that had fled a few minutes earlier, but another one, or perhaps a moose. I thumbed the safety off the spray and started backing up the trail, my senses keyed to any motion, sound, or smell, while trying to speak in a calm but firm voice. “I’m here. No surprises,” then “I don’t want any trouble.”

  The forest fell silent. I waited, thumb on the trigger of the spray.

  More silence.

  Whatever it was seemed to have frozen at the sound of my voice and was probably doing just as I was doing, standing without moving, listening, sniffing the air, waiting.

  A hundred things snap through one’s head at such moments. In a microsecond I had thought to check the wind direction again (still calm); told myself it could be a moose (though for some reason I felt certain it was a second bear); looked for a tree to climb (I have been treed by a belligerent moose before); steeled myself not to run if it was a bear and for some reason it charged (which it almost certainly would not do, there now being no reason for it to feel surprised or threatened; in any case, because the majority of charges are bluffs, the safest thing to do is stand one’s ground); and last, felt a kick of regret at having decided not to carry a gun, even though Joel had offered to lend me a .44 Magnum handgun when I’d mentioned I was not planning to carry a rifle (owing to complications with carrying a weapon in a national park, the bulk and inconvenience, etc.). I pushed the regret away with the thought that even if I had brought a weapon, I would have left it behind with the stuff I had cached in the kayak to save weight.

  I shuffled through all of these thoughts and several similar ones in the space of a breath, before time took on a peculiarly elastic quality, passing slowly yet fully, with each of my senses fully tuned to one moment, then the next and the next, with each heartbeat and breath parsed from the one before it and the possibility of the one to come after by the necessity of inventorying what I could hear, see, or smell now, with no more distraction by what I could have done, or should have done, or would do next if any one of a dozen different scenarios developed in the following moment. In short, I stopped thinking and started simply sensing.

  An empty mind does not miss much, and details stood out clearly—the complex colors of the mosses patterning the ground beside the trail; the cool smell of old snow drifting out from the shadows beneath the trees, mingling with the earthy compost of last year’s dank and rotting grasses; a distant, faint piping so high-pitched as to be nearly inaudible that I knew to be the call of a greater yellowlegs, a sandpiper known for its habit of circling endlessly above whatever patch of marshy ground or shore it has claimed as its own, while emitting a staccato cry so relentlessly irritating that it has been known to drive humans, dogs, deer, and other birds out of the neighborhood. The yellowlegs was probably orbiting above one of the ponds I had noted on the topographic map, and the faint quality of the call gave me a measure of its distance, and thus the probable distance to open ground—information that my subconscious used to convince me that the best course of action would be retreat. I was no more than three or four hundred yards into the forest—a quarter of a mile at the most—and I had already had two run-ins. Over the next mile or so, before the trail curved back toward the beach, how many more grizzlies would I meet? Two? Three? Maybe more? Perhaps none, but there was no way to know, and after two encounters in less than half an hour, I decided to take my chances with the boulders.

  I hunched my shoulders to ease the weight of the pack, tightened the hip belt, and started slowly back down the trail, glancing behind me every few steps. A jay whistled somewhere in the distance, but it was the calm too-weet of one jay talking to another and not the ca-ca-ca of an alarm call.

  The forest fell quiet again. I called out, “Hey, I’m leaving,” then remembered my manners and added, “Sorry to bother you.” After decades of living and working in proximity to every species of Alaska’s wildlife, from humpbacks to hummingbirds, I seldom hesitate to speak to an animal as if speaking to an equal, though the practice has on occasion brought an askance look from a client or a bit of amused ribbing. I usually reply by asking if they have ever spoken to a pet, or if when traveling in a foreign country where they do not understand the language, they give up speaking and resort to grunts and hand waving. It did not feel strange to try to make peace with the bear (o
r moose, or whatever was out there) with a liberal application of courtesy; what felt odd was a clear impression that I was suddenly talking to myself. Whether the animal was out-waiting me or had cat-footed away without making a sound, there was no sense of another presence, no tension in the air. I felt alone. The forest felt like an empty house.

  So I holstered the spray and kept walking.

  Chapter 15

  Boulder Hell. It was a good description. It seems like it took hours of stepping carefully from stone to stone, with the metal tips of my hiking poles clicking against the smooth, hard surface of each boulder as I braced and balanced, leaned and reached, and swung myself across the up-and-down obstacle course, feeling carefully for the stone that would roll or shift beneath my foot before I committed my weight. A fine mist drifted across the beach from the booming surf, and gulls chanted above the sound of the waves. It is a defining characteristic of the mammal class that all of its members have a total of 206 bones, which in humans includes 26 in each foot, or 52 in both, for a quarter of all the bones in an adult’s body. Then there are 3 bones in each knee—the patella, the tibia, and the femur, the last of which also knobs into the fused ilium, ischium, and pubis of the pelvis at the hip joint, from where the twenty-nine vertebrae of the spine ladder up to the shoulders (clavicle, scapula, and humerus) and the skull, which I began to think I must have been out of when I decided to trade the slight inconvenience of going toe-to-toe with a few grizzlies for the start-and-stop mixture of mincing steps and heavy leaps required to work my way across the boulder field. No two steps were alike, no course across the jumble preferable to any other, and before the boulders finally petered into gravel and the gravel into sand, I could feel the effect of the combined weight of my 180 pounds and the 50 or so pounds of the pack and kayak in every one of those 206 bones. It could not possibly have taken as long or been as far across the moraine as I remember it, but when I finally walked out on the other side onto level ground, it was a huge relief.

  I unbuckled the hip belt, let the pack slide off my aching shoulders, and sat on a drift log to look around. While crossing the boulder field, all I could look at was my feet. Now a long run of beach stretched away before me between a dark forest and the sea. A stiff wind cut through my clothes, and a flock of gulls drifted sideways overhead in the breeze. In the distance the blue-green hump of Cape Fairweather pushed into the sea.

  A dozen western sandpipers fluttered to a stop at the edge of the surf and took off again. High overhead, a thin, wavering line of dots broke apart, coalescing again as I watched and reshaping itself into a lopsided V. A rusty, musical trumpeting, barely discernible above the thump of the surf, identified it as a flock of cranes.

  Half a million sandhill cranes migrate to Alaska from wintering grounds in Texas and Mexico every year, flowing north up the middle of the continent to spread across the Arctic and into Siberia. The ones overhead were probably part of a small breakaway population of some 25,000 to 30,000 that travels the Pacific Flyway every spring to reach nesting grounds in Bristol Bay, a thousand miles west of Juneau. It seemed late in the year for the cranes to be migrating—they often reach their destination by mid-April—but the unusually long and lingering winter may have delayed them. All along the coast of Alaska, from the Canadian border in the south to the Arctic, dozens of species and millions of birds were probably running late for their appointments with procreation.

  The V formation stretched and re-formed as it drifted inland, finally disappearing out of sight beyond the tops of the trees. I knew it was going to take more than a late winter and a hungry spring to stop the cranes; the fossil record indicates that they have been around for at least ten million years, making them one of the oldest living animals in the world, and during that time they have been through several ice ages, immense volcanic eruptions that darkened the sky for months, and assorted other environmental calamities beyond imagining. They flew above Alaska when it was still the home of saber-toothed tigers and woolly mammoths, watched the camels and rhinoceros-like creatures that once populated the Great Plains die off, and witnessed the steady hand of evolution create great herds of bison. For the last 150 years they have spiraled aloft in the thermals over North America as the bison’s prairie has been swept under by a tsunami of cornfields and asphalt parking lots.

  The honking rattle of the cranes’ calls grew thin and faded as the flock moved away. The tide was falling, exposing a swath of muddy beach studded with broken rocks, and I watched as a cluster of sandpipers swooped in from nowhere to settle down along the foaming edge of the surf, where they darted back and forth, needling tiny worms from the sand. A quarter of a mile or so offshore a whale rose, surging to the surface like a submarine. Its back was black and shining in the gray-green waves. It spouted, took a single deep breath with a paaah! like a distant cannon shot, and dove again before the wind could tear the spume of its spout away.

  The whale was too far away and its appearance too brief for me to be sure what species it was, but humpbacks are ubiquitous in Southeast Alaska. Several thousand migrate north every spring from wintering grounds off Hawaii and Mexico. Over twenty thousand gray whales also make the 8,000-mile journey up the West Coast from calving grounds off Mexico’s Baja peninsula to the Arctic. The bulk of them have passed through Southeast Alaska by April, however, so although it was possibly a gray, I thought it more likely to be something else—perhaps a sperm whale, a minke, a fin, or a sei. Others, like the gigantic blue whale and the North Pacific right whale, have been driven so close to the verge of extinction, owing to the rampant slaughter that lasted until an international ban on whaling was put in place in 1986, that seeing one would be like finding a brontosaurus. A right whale calf spotted in 2002 in the Bering Sea was the first documented sighting of a North Pacific right whale calf in over a hundred years.

  Birds, whales, herring, salmon—I slipped to the ground to sit with my back to the log, dug into a pocket of the backpack for a bag of raisins, nuts, and chocolate chips, and watched the sandpipers flutter into the air and speed off toward Cape Spencer while I tried to envision the hundreds of species converging on Alaska from all over the globe. Even monarch butterflies are not exempt from the annual nervous compulsion that animal behaviorists call zugunruhe, the irresistible urge to cast themselves into the sky above their winter home in California and blow two thousand miles north to Alaska. Experiments have shown that the increasing sunlight of long spring days can penetrate the skulls of even caged domestic birds to reset some internal clock, which in turn sets off a storm of endocrine-induced, cage-beating restlessness and hyperphagia, or gluttony, meant to lay on a supply of energy-rich fat for the trials of migration.

  As I sat there alternately consuming handfuls of my own energy-rich food and swigs of water from a plastic bottle, I imagined tying a different-colored thread to each species swarming toward Alaska and watching the sky over my head and the sea at my side turn into an arabesque of every color in the spectrum, a tapestry woven over the globe from the Arctic Circle to Patagonia. The arctic tern migrates 24,000 miles a year between Antarctica and Alaska, but has the advantage of being able to land and take off from the surface of the water when it needs a rest; the blue ribbon for pure, stouthearted endurance has to be awarded to a relatively short-legged, plump-bodied wading bird called a bar-tailed godwit. One female fitted with a radio tag by scientists on New Zealand’s South Island was subsequently tracked by satellite as it flew 7,145 nonstop miles across the entire Pacific.

  “It was the equivalent of a human running 43 miles an hour for more than seven days,” said Rob Schuckard, the New Zealand ornithologist who headed the study. The godwit lost half its body weight during the trip, prompting Schuckard to call the long-billed bird an “outstanding organism.”

  Godwits, like many birds—the common mallard among them—are able to perform phenomenal feats of endurance by “sleeping” on the wing, shutting down first one side of their brain, then the other as they fly.

  Mo
st members of the avian nation have developed senses and abilities that are almost beyond my capacity to comprehend, the most miraculous of which come into play during migration. Tiny bits of magnetite in their heads sing to them of the earth’s magnetic field; all of those chicks about to be born in the Arctic and the marshlands of Alaska’s interior (“colts,” in the case of the sandhill cranes, an archaic term that reflects the newly hatched cranes’ ability to spring from the shell into almost instant mobility on gangly legs)* would spend the first nights of their lives memorizing the stars, instinctively supplying themselves with an infallible map of the constellations for their upcoming journeys. But most incredibly, birds, it seems, are able to hear in “infrasound,” frequencies so far below anything the human ear can pick up that their existence has been proved only in recent decades. Pigeons, for example, react to sounds as low as 0.05 hertz, while humans can hear only down to 20 hertz. This means we can hear things that vibrate as slowly as twenty times per second—far lower than the lowest note on a bass fiddle—but birds can hear things that move only a bit more often than once per minute—and the only thing that moves that slow is the planet.

  The minute, achingly slow movements of tectonic plates, volcanoes, and “microseisms,” generated by ocean waves a thousand miles away radiating from steep-sided mountains and valley walls, all help create an acoustic map of worldwide sonic patterns and landmarks that allows birds to remain oriented while navigating across thousands of miles, through fog, storms, and the dark.