When I looked up again, my hands resumed trembling. The bear was a long stone’s throw away, coming head-up and sniffing the air. I fumbled a shell into the flare gun and snapped it shut. The bear’s ears twitched at the plastic click.
Flare guns are meant to lob a shell skyward in an arc that maximizes “hang time,” or how long the pyrotechnics remain visible in the sky, so I aimed high, above the bear’s back, imagining the shell’s trajectory as a parabola. Thumbing back the hammer, I pulled the trigger. There was a snap, a pause, and the flare ignited.
It missed. The range and power of the flare were much greater than I had thought, and instead of arcing in to hit at the bear’s feet, the meteor hissed straight and level, passing a yard above the bear’s neck.
The bear did not seem to notice. It did not jerk or flinch. It just kept coming as the flare struck the ground fifty yards beyond it, burst into flames, and started tumbling back and forth in erratic fits.
Smoke curled from the breech of the pistol when I broke it open to pry out the spent round, and the smell of burned propellant filled the air. The second meteor shell fought back as I tried to load it, resisting my efforts to thumb it into the hole, and I had to force myself to take my eyes off the bear, to focus on reloading, to stop trembling and groping, to simply stop . . .
I took a deep breath, then willed myself to take another, and the shell went in. Cocking the hammer, I raised the pistol. Sighting down the barrel, I wavered between shooting to hit the bear and firing low, using the speed of the shell to “skip” the flare in so it would burst immediately in front of the animal.
The gun quaked in my hand. Somewhere on the other side of the planet a seismic needle recorded my heartbeat. Using a target shooter’s trick, I filled my lungs and let the air out slowly, finger tightening on the trigger, and fired at the bottom of the breath, in that fraction of time when one is breathing neither in nor out and the pulse does not stir the hand. A ball of flame drifted from the muzzle of the gun and floated slowly toward the bear hissing pleeeaazzzz . . .
The flare skipped off a patch of gravel a few feet in front of the bear and burst into bright phosphorescence. The bear turned and loped away, looking over its shoulder as it ran, and disappeared into the trees. But a lope is not a run, and I knew it would be back; its departure seemed more strategic withdrawal than retreat. It was clearly not as frightened by the flare as it had been by the rocks I’d thrown earlier.
“Reality” had never seemed so clear. There was the forest with its complex understory of shadows and greens on one hand and the sea unfurling itself against the shore on the other. Overhead were the clouds and the sky. I noticed the weather was changing. The wind was clocking to the northwest and easing. Never had the world felt so huge and so empty, so full of space without safety or refuge; never so wild . . .
And I was nothing. Not a human with centuries of technology and culture and history behind me. Just part of the food chain. Second place.
I started stuffing the scattered contents of my pack back together, wasting no time on sorting things into their proper place or taking inventory. I had the pack on my back and was leaving when I remembered the radio and smoke shell, grabbed both off the log, and shoved them into a pocket of my raincoat, where they beat against my thigh as I ran.
I had gone no more than two hundred yards when I looked back and saw the bear coming again with the same bloodhound intensity, its snout in my tracks, snorting at every step. As I watched in growing horror, it came to me that among all the bears I had watched, photographed, tracked, and filmed over the past twenty years, I had never seen one work a scent trail so closely. It is common to see bears hurrying along with their noses lifted to the wind as they seek out the distant source of an interesting odor, or sniffing for rodent nests deep underground. Researchers have estimated a bear’s olfactory senses to be seven times as sensitive as a bloodhound’s and a bloodhound’s to be three hundred times as sensitive as a human’s, giving bears an almost supernatural ability to detect the slightest odor. One group of biologists working in the Arctic documented a male polar bear that apparently detected a female in estrus from ninety miles away; they followed by helicopter as it beelined the entire distance without wavering. Some researchers believe that bears may be able to scent a meaty pile of carrion such as a dead whale from over a hundred miles away, but I had never seen one hoovering through grass and driftwood, over logs and through the sand, with such ferocious, single-minded intensity. It never looked up. It just kept coming.
I may have whimpered. I felt like crying. I did not know whether to run screaming into the trees or hurl myself into the sea and swim for it—neither of which were truly options. Desperate, I hurried to unbuckle the pack and drop it to the ground, thinking to sacrifice every foil-wrapped package of freeze-dried food, candy bar, and dried apple I had left, scattering them along the ground and across my trail as a delaying tactic. Maybe the small offering would distract the bear long enough for me to escape.
Under normal circumstances, giving a bear food is not the last thing you want to do; it is something you never want to do. Bears are fast learners, and a single incident of obtaining food from a human may condition a bear to associate all humans with food, which inevitably leads to trouble, as the bear becomes more comfortable raiding campsites and confronting hikers and campers who come after you. But I did not care. The immediacy of the situation easily overruled a lifetime of belief and habit, making me selfish, and it required no effort to convince myself that so few people traversed the area I was in that it was not a concern; nothing I did could make this bear more aggressive. I was more concerned that the idea would not work, that the bear would simply ignore the foil and plastic packages and keep coming, or gobble them up and still keep coming. I was reluctant to waste the precious seconds it would take to dig out the food and scatter it. I was still vacillating as I unstrapped the top of the pack and started to empty it. The first item out gave me another idea.
My hands were awkward as I fumbled to unfold the square of waterproof fabric I use as a ground tarp. My fingers felt as if they had been removed and put on backward. For years the black tarp had served as insulation between my tent bottom and soggy ground; now I was hoping it would save my life.
I grabbed a hiking pole and extended it to its maximum length, twisting the knurled locking knob into place. My hand shook so badly that I had difficulty slipping one of the tarp’s corner grommets over the spiked tip. It took two or three tries to lash it to the end of the pole with a piece of line.
I stepped behind a thicket of berry stalks, gripping the loose tarp in one hand and the shaft of the hiking pole in the other. Then I waited for the bear. A few years earlier I had run into a medium-sized brown bear on a trail so overgrown and hemmed in by head-high blueberry bushes and devil’s club that hiking on it had been like walking down a green hallway. Surprised, the bear lowered its head and came swaggering toward me, popping its jaws and staring, which in bear language is a clear warning that an animal feels crowded. I knew that if I turned around or backed up in that narrow space, it might lunge for me, so while speaking as calmly as I could, I unzipped my raincoat and opened it wide, holding it out to the sides to increase the size of my silhouette. The ruse worked. The bear stopped, and if a bear can be said to look confused, it did so as it backed up a step or two, then crashed off into the brush, apparently flustered by how the small-fry it had thought to bully had suddenly doubled in size.
From my hiding place now I could hear the bear coming. There was the rustle of old grass, and a stick cracked; a muffled snort came, and I eased around the brush. The bear was forty feet away.
Unfurling the tarp, I stepped out, spreading it as wide as I could, clutching a corner with one hand and extending the hiking pole with the other, creating the largest silhouette possible. My legs felt like they weighed a hundred pounds. If I had hesitated, I wouldn’t have been able to raise my arms.
I took a step forward, then another until the b
ear spotted me. It reeled back on its haunches and stared, black eyes impassive, dark nostrils flaring at the end of its muzzle.
I moved forward and shook the tarp.
The bear started to ease away. Taking an agonizingly slow step sideways, it drew its head into its shoulders and tilted its body away from me in a way that made it appear both coiled and indecisive. I had seen the same posture in bears that were being threatened by larger bears, so I did what a bigger bear would do: I charged. Yelling with what I hoped was a roar but probably sounded like a turkey call, I lunged forward, shaking the cloth.
The bear exploded. Its claws threw clots of dark earth and dead vegetation into the air as it spun and ran. I yelled and sprinted a few steps after it. As it ran, it kept its hindquarters tucked toward its stomach as if a larger bear were nipping at its haunches.
I moved just as fast in the opposite direction, stuffing my gear and the tarp willy-nilly into the pack, hoisting the pack on my back, and running. The rising tide had narrowed the beach to a thin slope of sand between the fringe of the forest and the breaking surf. Blankets of foam surged up the beach with every wave. I had covered no more than a hundred yards when I suddenly understood that the bear had been following me with its nose so intently to the ground not because its sense of smell was ungovernably powerful, but because it was not; whatever accident the bear had suffered, whether a fall off a cliff or a beating by another bear, the event had not only affected its ability to feed itself but also curtailed the animal’s sense of smell. Otherwise it would have been able to trace me down the beach as any normal bear would have done: head-up, at a dead run if it wanted to. It could only be because it could not do so that it had kept its snout in my tracks, sticking as close to my scent as possible.
Still running—jogging, really, in a stumbling, bent-kneed shuffle, with the heavy pack bouncing from side to side, out of balance from its hurried repacking—I edged down the beach into the froth of the breaking waves. The ground there was soft and sucked at my feet. The larger surges threw a slurry of sand and water over my boots, but I kept plunging, praying that the wash of seawater over my tracks would pale my scent to a point where the grizzly could no longer follow me. A knee-high wave almost knocked my feet out from under me, but I kept running.
Chapter 26
Two Hours Later I ground to a halt, exhausted. It was high tide, late evening, and I felt like I had been beaten with a club. I had no idea how many miles I had covered, but it was not many; for most of that time I had been moving at a pathetic pace, staggering to a near halt every few minutes as the adrenaline faded, then forcing myself back into motion. Every part of my body was in pain or trembling.
A stand of large spruce trees offered a likely stopping spot. It seemed a reasonable bivouac, free of brush, with a clear view in both directions. I had no idea what to expect, whether the bear would keep coming or if I had outwitted it, but I could go no farther, and a rib of rotting snow under the trees would provide a source of water.
Once free of the pack I had to push myself to keep moving, to break out the stove, to think about food, to do everything I needed to do before nightfall. My stomach did flips at the thought of the coming darkness.
The stove hissed beneath a pan of melting snow while I got ready. There was no way I was going to spend the night in the tent, blind to the world outside and wrapped in a sleeping bag like a burrito, so I threw up a rough shelter by tying the corners of the tarp to a spread of limbs and propping one edge up with the kayak paddle. After sorting out a ration of freeze-dried food, the headlamp, the bear spray, a knife, the wire saw, and the flare gun, I used the hundred-foot coil of line to hoist my pack and the remaining food and gear as high as I could into a tree a few yards down the beach. Then I used the knife and the saw to carve an escape route up a tree beside the shelter, clearing branches out of the way until I had a series of hand- and footholds I could find in the dark. I should be able to get twenty or thirty feet up the tree in seconds.
Climbing was no guarantee of safety. There is a common belief that grizzlies cannot climb trees, but this is inaccurate; brown bears climb well when they want to, particularly the smaller ones. Only two years earlier, in June 2005, a thirty-six-year-old woman had been pulled from a tree and killed by a grizzly in Alberta, Canada. By all accounts Isabelle Dube had been exceptionally fit and athletic, a champion mountain biker, but she had not been able to climb high enough or fast enough to get away from the two-hundred-pound bear that had gone after her.
I tried not to think about it as I arranged my getaway. Dube had been young, fit, and fast; I was on the downslope of middle age and felt like I had been in a car wreck. I also tried, and failed, to block out the thought that she had been jogging with friends near a popular golf course, while I was a long way from the nearest human. And I could not help thinking about the victim of the last fatal attack in Glacier Bay, a man named Alan Precup who had disappeared in 1976 while on a camping trip. Precup had been killed thirty years earlier, sixty-five miles away, and across two deep fjords and a whole slew of ice fields and mountain ranges, but I knew that all that had remained of him when they’d found him had been one hand, his booted feet, and his camera, which had contained photographs of a small, undernourished grizzly like the one that had been stalking me. So distracted and exhausted was I that I did not realize until I’d finished eating that I had completely forgotten one of the most basic tenets of traveling and camping in bear country: Only a fool cooks in the location where he will be sleeping.
It is difficult to describe the state I was in, other than to compare it with the numb exhaustion of an ambush or artillery-barrage survivor. I was depleted. My mind was out of gear, yet my body felt electrified. I couldn’t stop twitching; I barely noticed the fluttering calls of a flock of whimbrels flying along the beach, but the tap of a spruce cone falling on the tarp made me jump. Determined not to sleep, I looped the headlamp around my neck, arranged the flare gun close at hand, and nestled into the moss at the base of the tree. Pulling my sleeping bag over my waist, I leaned against the trunk with the pepper spray in my hand and the knife, absurdly, tucked in my boot. Then I prepared myself to wait.
Dawn.
A thrush trilling. Waves hushing themselves against the shore. The first thing I felt was my feet. They were freezing. My boots were still wet, and when I threw off the sleeping bag and tried to stand, I was sore all over. I was lying on the flare gun and had to look around for the pepper spray; it had slipped from my hand while I slept and was under the sleeping bag. An ember of pain smoldering between my shoulder blades burst into flame when I forced myself upright; my right arm was numb and tingling. The jolting of the pack as I’d run had irritated the pinched nerve in my neck.
Moving carefully, I filled a pan with snow and melted it, drank a large cup, then another, and melted some more to make tea. Then I took four aspirins and dug through my pack for dry socks. The rain had eased a bit, but I hardly noticed. Every step shot a dull pain through my heel.
Wolfing down a handful of nuts and dried fruit with a second cup of tea, I melted more snow to refill the water bottle, then shouldered my pack and started walking.
My journal stops at the confrontation with the bear. I made no more notes, scribbled no thoughts, penciled nothing in the margin of the map. Every bit of the elevation I had found in the rushing migration of the birds was gone. There was only the walking, at the edge of the surf, as far as I could get from the forest, looking over my shoulder, jumpy as a whipped dog. The weather had closed in again, blanketing the coast with rain and fog, and there was an odd, disoriented interval when I did not know if I had walked two miles or twenty, until I found myself standing on the bank of a swollen river. The swath of gray water poured across the beach so fast that looking at it gave me vertigo.
Coming up against the flooding river felt like finding myself at a dead end in a dark alley in the worst part of town. With the bear still somewhere behind me, I wanted badly to get across, but the creek, whi
ch had been hip-deep only a few days earlier, was now rushing wildly from bank to bank. If I had been with a group or a partner, it might have been possible to fasten one end of the hundred-foot line to the kayak, have one person paddle like mad for the far shore while someone else tended the line, and then rig a second line to “ferry” the kayak back and forth, but being alone made that impossible. I was not strong enough to take on this river, and I knew it. If I tried to paddle across, I would be swept into the surf. If I tried to ford it, I would drown.
The blowing rain was working its way down my collar. I stood there so long watching clumps of grass and roots wash by while I tried to figure out what to do that a chill set in. The sensible thing to do would have been to set up the tent, build a fire, and get warm, but all I could think about was how to cross the river, keep walking, and get home.
I started up the riverbank, listening to the sound of cobblestones being rolled downstream along the bottom of the river by the force of the current. Rain rattled on my raincoat like thrown gravel. A gust of wind twisted through the trees. Paddling across a river would usually mean scouting the opposite side for a back eddy of calm water behind a point or obstruction, then launching the kayak far enough upriver to aim for a safe landing in the eddy while being swept downstream, but there were no eddies in sight. The river ran full and straight between its banks.
I squatted on the riverbank and huddled in my raincoat as I tried to come up with a plan. Gravel trickled from the lip of the bank in front of me. The trickle grew and the bank collapsed. The river was still rising, undercutting its banks. The longer I waited, the more difficult it would be to cross.
Walking Home: A Traveler in the Alaskan Wilderness, a Journey Into the Human Heart Page 24
