by Wilbur Smith
Grizzly bears tend to be more aggressive than black bears when defending themselves, but they usually try to avoid contact with people, and, despite their physical advantage—the male can rise to a standing height of seven feet and weigh up to eight hundred pounds—they rarely hunt humans. However, it can attack if surprised at close range or protecting a food source, textbook behavioral characteristics I was, right now, in grave danger of triggering.
As if sensing my presence, the bear paused in his rummaging and lifted his head. Two black eyes considered me from a thick thatch of brown fur. They seemed to find me wanting.
From a distance, I stared at the grizzly. He was at least six hundred pounds of pure muscle and stood four feet wide at the shoulders, his fur shining with run-off from the river. It was naturalist George Ord in 1815, who, after careful study, formally classified the grizzly bear, not for its appearance but for its character, as Ursus horribilis (“terrifying bear”).
This was not the first bear I had seen. Hardly a trip went by to this part of the world when one of these lumbering giants of the forest did not make themselves known. I’d lost count of the number of times the wardens had lectured us before we set out into the wild. “This is bear country,” they said. “Never forget—you’re the interlopers in this part of the world.” They were eager to impress on us that, if a bear attacked, we should not scream—because, or so it seemed, loud noises would upset them. Sometimes we would see bears fishing from the banks of the rivers as we rode past. Once, a female grizzly had charged us—only to be repelled when our guide pulled his pistol and fired a warning shot over her head. They are magnificent creatures, true monsters of the wild, and this specimen eyeing me was one of the species’ finest.
Some kind of madness must have possessed me, because I did not feel fear, only outrage that he had torn apart my gear. Rather than the bear’s fight instinct being triggered, it was mine, and I charged straight at him.
I screamed, waving my arms indignantly like someone who had just been pick-pocketed. I was trying to drive him away, but I soon realized I was on my own, my fellow fishermen lingering behind, either because they were terrified or because they couldn’t suppress their laughter. Before I knew it, I was almost upon the bear. Seemingly unperturbed, he stood his ground. I was near enough to smell his heavy carnivorous scent, to see the ripple of the wind across his pelt. Then he moved with lightning speed. One instant, he was on all fours, claws still tangled in the remains of my anorak, the next, he had risen on his hind legs to his full height. Seven feet above the earth, his front legs stretched out wide as if he wanted to hug me in one final embrace, he opened his jaws and, from the bottomless cavern of his belly, erupted a sonorous, outraged, furious roar, a sound like no other in nature.
I stopped dead. The bellow filled the forest, blotting out all other noise. I looked up into his salivating, chocolate-smeared jaws. I looked at the savaged remains of my chocolate bars and my mangled anorak, relieved I wasn’t still inside it. What fire had been in me was extinguished in a second. If the bear desired my coat, if the bear liked the chocolates, he was welcome to them.
I turned and ran.
I did not look back until I was near the river. When I finally stopped and turned, expecting the bear to be at my shoulder and ready to pounce, he was nowhere to be seen. He’d left as nonchalantly as he’d arrived, having pillaged what he came for, and he was probably far away settling down for a snooze. He was not the only one who had disappeared. My companions had vanished. Eventually I heard a rustling in the bushes and from behind trees and under dense cover my friends emerged, one or two of them appearing to be doubled up, trying to hold in their guffaws of laughter. One of them came up to me, slapped me on the back, and said, “Wilbur, you’re the king of the jungle.” I would remember that grizzly bear’s roar for the rest of my days.
It was to be some time before the bush plane returned to take us further along the river.
•••
As a boy brought up on the remote Copperbelt of Northern Rhodesia, the United States had always been another world. In the days before 24-hour television news, and the instant access of the internet, images of that fantastic place across the ocean came only through the films and books I devoured. In John Ford Westerns, America was a land every bit as rugged and uncivilized as the Africa about which my grandfather spun stories, while in the pages of a John Steinbeck novel it was a continent of people striving to make their own way and do their best for one another. I grew up believing in an America of long open roads and fast cars, of daring frontiersmen pushing their way West to civilize a continent, of the glamour and glitz of Hollywood and the West Coast.
I first visited America in 1965. New York, that melting pot of a city and latter-day capital of the world, was a dizzying revelation. The seething metropolis of sky-scrapers and tightly crammed streets was far removed from the open skies and rolling bush land of my childhood. I returned to the skies and continued further west to a city I had seen garlanded in lights on the silver screen, of whose temples I had often dreamed. Las Vegas seemed to embody the excess and appetite of America. I lost a week there, in a whirlwind of shows, soaking up the atmosphere and absorbing the vast energy of that fabled city of the desert. Nevada was stark and beautiful, its desert as hot and unforgiving as the deserts I knew in Africa, but it was not the sun-burnished steppes and endless sagebrush that I had come to see. I was not a gambling man—I never have been, despite the exotic allure of cities like Las Vegas—and, apart from one feeble attempt at a game of baccarat, I did not lose myself at the tables of the great casinos. For me, it was enough to hear and feel America’s raucous lust for life.
That week, in October 1965, was the beginning of my lifelong love affair with the United States.
When the Lion Feeds was launched in the United States in 1965. The Dark of the Sun followed soon after. Then came The Sound of Thunder, Gold Mine and more. It wasn’t until Eagle in the Sky in 1974 that my work climbed into the bestseller lists in America, but it didn’t mean my readership wasn’t slowly growing, nor was my love affair with the United States any less enthusiastic. As the years passed, I was finding more and more reasons to travel to the States. However, I had always known I would never set a novel in America. My agent Charles Pick’s advice to “write what you know” meant my novels would always be rooted in the Africas that had made me who I was. So my trips to America were never about work. Instead, the United States represented a place of adventure and enjoyment, a place of release. Every year I’d visit Alaska to fish for salmon and river trout; I skied for decades in Utah, outside Salt Lake City, at Robert Redford’s stunning Sun Valley ranch in Montana, and, most memorably of all, at Beaver Creek in Colorado, where the ancient White River National Forest is capped in snow in winter, and the churning Colorado river grows steep banks of ice. I had learned to ski in Europe after When the Lion Feeds was published and, though I would ski all over the world—in Australia’s Blue Mountains, between the volcanoes of Japan, on the picturesque slopes of Switzerland—I was never very good at it. It didn’t stop me from hurtling down the mountainsides of Beaver Creek with the forest and jagged peaks flashing past, or riding high in the chair lifts and seeing the untamed backwoods stretching out in every direction.
I sought out the best fishing and bird-watching locations where I could experience America’s nature in all its glory. I had fallen in love with the wild places of America. It is a continent like no other, a country where desert gives way to fertile plains, where one mountain range can encompass both the barren red and grays of the Sangre Di Christo in New Mexico, and the snowy evergreens of the northern Rockies. In no other country do these landscapes meet and combine: the otherworldly redwood forests, with trees vaster than any in the world, the arid sagebrush and desert, the snow-capped mountains and Great Lakes, the long empty stretches of highway pockmarked with villages and towns where hard-working Americans craft out their lives. There is more to see in the United States than a single lifeti
me could ever take in.
Nevertheless, I gave it a try.
•••
In 1982, I was immersed in the saga of the Ballantynes. The Angels Weep had just been published, and the series’ apex, The Leopard Hunts in Darkness, was beginning to take shape in my imagination. But, for several years, the workload had been intense—and never more so than with the Ballantynes, whose long history poured out of me in a fevered few years of work. I needed a break, something to restore my energies. It often happened in the middle of a novel, when I’d lose my way, feel the fear of the story running away from me, and a sudden safari or skiing expedition gave me the clarity to return to the novel in a fresher frame of mind. 1982 was the first year I had taken out of writing since When the Lion Feeds. Something was needed to let my creative well fill up again, and there was no better way of escape than to voyage out into the far-flung places of the world.
We began in Barrow, the overnight flight from London bringing us across the unsettled wilderness of the Arctic Circle. Outside the city, the headland of Point Barrow marked the northernmost tip of the United States; north of here was empty tundra, a thousand miles of barren whiteness stretching to the very end of the earth. Barrow was an oil town, so remote from the rest of the United States that people still relied on hunting to survive, carefully managing and harvesting the seals, polar bear, caribou and walrus which lived beyond the borders of town. From Barrow we journeyed south, through the untamed national parks where bears and wolves held sway, and at last to the Katmai peninsula. This wild part of the world was easy for a fisherman to fall in love with. A lifetime could have been whiled away here, with only me and the fish in the rivers, the river trout happily taking my bait wherever it was cast.
After our sojourn in America’s frozen north, it was time to make a pilgrimage to that other far-flung state, Hawaii, as far from mainland America as London is from Cairo. In the cobalt waters of the Pacific there was yet more fishing—only, here, our hunt would be for a fish that could fight back.
I have always loved fishing for marlin. There is an elemental thrill in the tug of war, something pure in the fight, which had appealed to me from a very early age. By now I had fished for marlin all over the world—in the Indian Ocean where my father and I would sail out together, on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, where Lee Marvin beat me to the prize—but the Pacific blue marlin is the largest of the billfish species and it had always been my ambition to land one. The waters of Hawaii have an almost mythic status for marlin hunters. Here, the largest marlin ever caught with rod and reel was brought in at an enormous 1,805 lbs.—ten times the weight of a powerful man—by Captain Cornelius Choy from Oahu island in 1970.
The blue marlin is one of the most beautiful fishes of the ocean. They are deep blue on top and silvery white below with a large dorsal fin and a long, lethal, spear-shaped upper jaw. They are extremely fast swimmers and use their spears to thrash through schools of fish, circling back to consume their stunned and mutilated prey.
We set out with the dawn, bound for the deep waters where the marlin lay. The Pacific seemed unnaturally still that morning. From west to east, north to south, the ocean shimmered in the sun but was calm. The skipper cast out our lures and we began to ply a circuit of the waters, waiting for the lures to be taken. We were using live bait, small skipjack tuna to tempt the marlin, but for long hours, there was nothing; the marlin remaining elusive in the blackness below. On the boat, there was nothing we could do but wait. Most of the time, patience is the fisherman’s best friend.
Almost two hours later, I was standing on the flying deck, ready to admit defeat, when the lure closest to the boat disappeared in a sudden cascade of water and the reel started screaming, the line peeling away at a terrifying rate. I looked at the skipper, the skipper looked at me and in that split second, the adrenaline coursed through our veins. I sprang for the fighting chair, snatched the rod and reel and clung on for dear life as the skipper buckled me in.
In only a few minutes I knew that this was a big fish. I could feel his power reverberating in the line, sense how wild and frenzied he was becoming at the knowledge he had been snared. Then, as if from nowhere, the angle of the line started coming up and a monstrous blue marlin burst out of the sea, leaping and gray hounding away from the boat.
The battle began. Soon, the marlin had drawn the line to its full extent; almost five hundred feet of line now lay between me and the beast. I began to reel him in, felt the bite as the reel fought back. It had been spinning so fiercely that the oil in its runner was boiling, bursting out of the seals in clouds of scalding vapor. I continued to hold up the rod, draw in the line on the reel. My whole world had closed in. There was nothing but me and the marlin: his raging defiance and my determination to bring him aboard.
One hour of combat turned into two as time slipped by in a haze of muscle strain and mental focus: two hours into three and then four. My right hand was scraped and cut up, my left arm in paroxysms of cramp, but I fixed myself to the reel and centered my mind and would not let go. Hemingway’s words flashed through my brain from his own chronicle of marlin fishing, The Old Man and the Sea: “Man,” he had written, “is not made for defeat . . .” By now I could feel the fight in the marlin fading. I too was exhausted, but little by little I brought in the line, and every turn of the reel gave me the strength to rotate it once more. After four hours, the war was nearly over. The marlin rose from the water—first his sword, then his body, and finally the razor-sharp contours of his tail. He must have been the most spectacular fish I had ever seen, a true-blue gladiator of the deep.
At last, I staggered from the fighting chair on trembling legs, and with aching arms stood over the marlin as it came alongside the boat and the skipper hauled him on board. Here he was, lying on the deck beneath me: five meters long from tail to the tip of his sword, five hundred kilograms if he was an ounce, deep azure, slippery silvery white, a heft of compact muscular power. I had bested him, but now that he was caught, it was only right to return him to the oceans to live another day. Perhaps some other fisherman would take on the arm wrestle in another bout of sport or he would win his next challenge, but he deserved to be free and untamed. Sadly, the decision was taken from me. I was quite upset with the Hawaiian authorities, for, like every true hunter, I am as much a compulsive conservationist as I am a compulsive fisherman. I normally catch and release and I wanted to put him back into the waves but that year the marlin was the one fish the authorities were not allowing to be released. I looked down at him with great sadness. This was the end of his journey, and, despite the unfortunate circumstances, I would take his meter-long sword as a trophy and a tribute.
It stands in a place of honor in my study to this day.
•••
There was a journey I had been dreaming about making for a long time, one that recalled the best of the American legends, and, as we stepped off the plane at LAX airport, into a bustling crowd of Californians from every walk of life, the anticipation stirred us onward. The long ocean road from Los Angeles to San Francisco was a part of the Americas I felt I knew already, mainly through the novels of John Steinbeck I had read ravenously many years ago. Now it was time to see it for myself.
I had been drawn to the West Coast of America long before I had come to the United States. New York City would always be a dizzying, frenetic place, and I love its Broadway shows, Christmas lights, restaurants and museums, especially the galleries where you could see some of the most stirring pieces of art in the world, like the French Impressionists I had always admired. But the West Coast embodied an aspect of America with which it was impossible not to fall in love. California was the home of Hollywood, the playground of the rich and famous, and it would never lose its allure, even after my own disillusioning escapades in the world of movie-making. The West Coast is magical, California unique.
We had been staying in the Beverly Hills Hotel, idly fantasizing about partying with the glitterati, when the temptation of wild places
and vast, open skies became all consuming. I was a spontaneous traveler, but once a decision had been made, I always planned it in intricate detail. For a day we pored over maps and guidebooks, and the next morning we were on the road: up from LA toward the sprawling wilderness of Yosemite National Park.
The moment I first saw the park I knew I would come back time and again. A meticulously preserved piece of old America, Yosemite is one of the continent’s true marvels. El Capitan, the granite cliff looming over the valley, put me in mind of the rock-climbing adventures of my youth, while the groves of giant sequoia trees were spectacular. Leaving our car behind, we ventured deeper into the park, and for long hours we roamed its scrubby sun-baked chaparral, marveled at its stately groves of trees so vast a man could walk through tunnels carved into their trunks, its alpine meadows and turbulent waterfalls. This was America as it was long before the Europeans arrived. All around us, the forest was ancient woodland as it was back then, never logged, never exploited. And the bird life that abounded in those shadowy groves was enough to make me want to spend another lifetime here. There were woodpeckers, crows and black finches, tiny flycatchers darted in the branches, while regal great gray owls made their roosts up high. There were gray wolves and bears as well, though we did not see them, but it was enough to imagine them carving out an existence in a corner of the country preserved entirely for them.
