A Glibertarians Exclusive: Bear at Fortymile IV

September 7th

The day dawned bright and sunny, and I awoke feeling surprisingly good, considering how tired and sore I’d been when I went to sleep.  I got up, dropped my tent, packed up my gear in the big frame pack, made the area tidy, made one last pot of coffee, and then doused my fire.  Two or three hours and Wayne Johnson and his old Cessna would be back to pick me up.  After a moment’s thought, I decided to leave the meat hanging in the trees until Wayne had landed; it would only take a short time to drop it, and I was sure Wayne would be glad to help carry it the short distance to the gravel bar.  Instead, I just carried my pack down to the gravel bar and sat on a big boulder to enjoy the morning while I waited.

I was watching trout rising in the river, casting sparkles of sunshine across the water when the bear showed up again.

This time I heard him before I saw him.  I didn’t know what it was at first; the gentle sound of the river and the slight breeze masked it, until a twig gave way under a paw, and I turned to see the bear standing on his hind legs, reaching for all he was worth for another bag of meat where it hung in the spruce.

I froze.

The bear grunted in frustration.  He didn’t seem to notice me sitting there, only a few yards away.  He stretched a little higher, reaching with one paw towards the bag.

Somewhere, in the distant recesses of my mind, I noticed another sound – a buzzing sound, growing slowly louder – but my mind blanked it out.

My hand stole down towards my camp axe, tied to the side of my pack where it leaned against my boulder.  A totally uncharacteristic rage was building in me; this bear had already taken almost half my moose, and there he was again, just yards away, in broad daylight, trying to steal more.

My fingers found the axe and started undoing the lashings.  The buzzing was growing louder, but I barely noticed it over the pounding of blood in my ears, the pounding anger building behind my eyes.

The axe came loose in my hand.  The buzzing grew louder still.  I ignored it.

The bear stretched, and reached; its paw brushed the meat bag, setting it swinging.  He waggled his fat rump, getting ready for another try.

I couldn’t contain it any longer.  With a wild, animal yell that seemed to come from somewhere else, I raised the axe over my head and charged straight at the bear.  He dropped to all fours and spun to face me, eyes wide in surprise, just as I threw the axe with all my strength.  The blunt side of the steel blade clonked him in the side of the head, and the axe clattered to the ground.

Stop, a distant voice told me, but I ignored it just as I ignored the distant buzzing, grown now to the sound of an airplane engine.

The grizzly huffed in surprise.  He took one look at me, at the charging, screaming, enraged figure rushing straight at him – and turned and ran.  I scooped up the axe as I passed the tree and chased him, over the slope and up the riverbank.

Later, after he’d landed, and after I’d come back down the river, exhausted, drained, dragging the axe behind me, Wayne Johnson told me about his approaching just in time to see a young but full-size grizzly burst from some streamside brush, fleeing for its life “as if the very Devil himself was after it,” chased by a crazy man waving a camp axe over this head.  He laughed while he helped me get the meat out of the trees, and he laughed while we were loading it onto the plane; he chuckled on the entire flight back to Tok. He was still chuckling as we loaded my meat and gear onto the plane, and when we got to Tok, he insisted on taking me with him into town, to his favorite restaurant and bar, where he repeatedly told an admiring crowd the story, over and over – embellishing it here and there for effect, never failing to draw a roar of laughter.  “Damndest thing I ever saw,” he kept repeating, “Damndest thing I ever saw.”

Finally, I was able to break away, after giving Wayne a handsome tip of cash and moose meat, to climb in my familiar old green Bronco and rattle away south, toward Soldotna and home.

A few days later, I fixed the moose antlers to a plaque and hung them up over the fireplace in my house.  They’d serve as a remembrance of that trip, that adventure, like the other sets of antlers I had hung up – a few elk, a few deer, one pronghorn.  Not trophies but touchstones to memory.  I always knew, though, that what I’d always remember would be not that moose, but the bear.

The next spring, I went back up the Fortymile to the spot where I’d killed the moose, this time with a revolver of my own strapped to my belt, a big .44 Magnum – I’d learned that much.  I camped for a few days, hiked, and caught fish.  I saw some bear sign, and late in the afternoon of the last day, I saw a sow grizzly with two cubs, high on a slop a half-mile or so away, and I knew that the young male wasn’t likely to still be in the area.  Somehow, I felt kind of bad about that, even though I knew it wasn’t me but probably that sow grizzly that chased him off.

Despite the stolen meat, despite the moments of fear, despite the sudden rage on that last day, despite all that had happened – or maybe because of it – I was sorry that he wasn’t in the area any longer.  Somehow, I kind of missed him.