Friday, June 25, 2021

A close encounter of the bear kind

Not the same bear. This one ran 
through our yard in Valdez then 
hid behind a tree in a yard across
the street.
 After a black bear and her cubs interrupted a foot race in Anchorage recently, an Alaska-themed 
facebook page asked followers to offer their stories of bear encounters. While considering that I realized I had never put an account of my closest grizzly encounter here, so rather than lose it among many and perhaps more exciting stories, I’m putting mine here instead.

It happened this way: If you’ve read this blog before you probably know the cabin at the East Pole stands high on a hillside. In the days when I smoked, rather than have the place smell like a smoker lived there, my favorite place to smoke was leaning out an open window with a view downhill and all the way to Denali. Doing that a day after I’d hiked in one August, I heard a loud crack of wood below me and somewhat off to the west. As I watched, a full-grown grizzly broke out of the brush at the bottom of the hill. Behind her came one, and then another and then a third cub. These were second-year cubs almost fully grown but just enough smaller than the mother to identify them as yearlings.

As they progressed across the bottom of the hill the sow approached the beaten down weeds I had trampled on my way up to the cabin the day before. I figured she would catch my scent and want nothing to do with a human and head on to the east. Instead, she halted, snuffled a little, lifted her head to look around and then put her nose down and turned to follow my trail. I watched her slowly progress toward the turn that led uphill and when she reached it she started up the hill with the cubs hot on her heels. As the situation developed, it proved fascinating for a time until I realized she would follow that trail right to the cabin and maybe I should get ahead of this situation before it turned serious. With a warning flashing in my head of a friend’s comment one time:  “I like to make it uncomfortable for bears to be around me,” I crossed the cabin considering the options. I decided to grab the large-bore rifle I carry for bears, but also a handful of bottle rockets and a lighter from a stash I keep next to the door for just such occasions.

Then I stepped out onto the porch. I did that just in time to see her back as she turned the corner in tall grass that led straight to the cabin, her nose still down on the trail. At this point she only had about 50 feet to where I stood and she was approaching fast.

Not letting go of the rifle, I fumbled a bottle rocket out of the pack and holding it in the hand and arm that also cradled the rifle, I flicked the lighter and lit the fuse. I held it long enough for sparks to begin coming out of the cracker with enough force to fly off and let it go. It landed in front of her just before it went off.

What happened next left a lasting impression. First I heard a roar, then she stood up on her hind legs, her head swinging from side to side trying to locate the source of what to her probably had changed from food to danger. Now, any grizzly or brown bear I had ever been close to was stuffed and on display. In those poses, the fur is always matted down and the bear looks skinny. Let me tell you a full-grown, live bear only 20 feet from you with its fur puffed out looks a whole lot more formidable  than that bear in the airport. Still I kept my head and managed to light off another bottle rocket. This one hit her high in the chest between her forelegs when it went off. With that she let out another roar and did something of a bear pirouette, dropped down onto the first cub in line where it squealed loudly. All three took off running back down the hill.

I watched them disappear into thick brush, but as I listened, the sounds of their escape stopped way too soon. They had gone out of sight, then apparently stopped still trying to figure out what she was running from. I’m not sure she ever saw me standing on the porch above her.

After that experience I found a use for this gift from my
            kids. Motion detector Billy Bass ought to frighten any
            bear off the porch. "Take me to the river …"
With my friend’s advice still loud in my head, I tried to make their visit more uncomfortable yet and fired another rocket in the general direction they had run. I heard another roar and then what sounded like four bulldozers hurriedly pushing through the brush in a generally northwest direction. This time their noise slowly fell off as they made their way farther from the cabin and I started to breathe a little easier. In time I couldn’t hear them anymore and figured that was the last I would see of them, at least that day. I took some bear precautions like putting some pots and pans on the porch that would make noise if they came up onto it.

About half an hour later, I was moving around outside (my rifle close at hand) and I heard three distinct gunshots quite a distance away in the direction the bears had headed. At that point I found myself hoping someone hadn’t shot them — that those were just “bottle-rocket” warning shots.

At that point I took a little measure of congratulations to self; we had met with no damage to anyone and we all lived and maybe even the bears had learned a lesson in avoiding humans. When I hiked out a couple of days later I watched the trail carefully where I guessed those shots had been fired but saw no signs of a violent meeting anywhere.


Black bears interrupt Mayor's Marathon

Lost hiker found after bear encounter

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Memorable quotations

The best way to know you are having an adventure is when you wish you were home talking about it." — a mechanic on the Alaska State Ferry System. Or as in my own case planning how I will be writing it on this blog.

"You can't promote principled anti-corruption without pissing off corrupt people." — George Kent

"If only the British had held on to the airports, the whole thing might have gone differently for us." — Mick Jagger

"You can do anything as long as you don't scare the horses." — a mother's favorite saying recalled by a friend

A poem is an egg with a horse inside” — anonymous fourth grader

“My children will likely turn my picture to the wall but what the hell, you only get old once." — Joe May

“Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.” — Ernest Hemingway

When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth. Kurt Vonnegut

“If you wrote something for which someone sent you a cheque, if you cashed the cheque and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.”Stephen King

The thing about ignorance is, you don't have to remain ignorant. — me again"

"It was like the aftermath of an orgasm with the wrong partner." – David Lagercrants “The Girl in the Spider’s Web.”

Why worry about dying, you aren't going to live to regret it.

Never debate with someone who gets ink by the barrel" — George Hayes, former Alaska Attorney General who died recently

My dear Mr. Frost: two roads never diverge in a yellow wood. Three roads meet there. — @Shakespeare on Twitter

Normal is how somebody else thinks you should act.

"The mark of a great shiphandler is never getting into situations that require great shiphandling," Adm. Ernest King, USN

Me: Does the restaurant have cute waitresses?

My friend Gail: All waitresses are cute when you're hungry.

I'm not a writer, but sometimes I push around words to see what happens. – Scott Berry

I realized today how many of my stories start out "years ago." What's next? Once upon a time?"

“The rivers of Alaska are strewn with the bones of men who made but one mistake” - Fred McGarry, a Nushagak Trapper

Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stared at walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing. – Meg Chittenden

A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity. – Franz Kafka

We are all immortal until the one day we are not. – me again

If the muse is late, start without her – Peter S. Beagle

Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. ~Mark Twain Actually you could do the same thing with the word "really" as in "really cold."

If you are looking for an experience that will temper your vanity, this is it. There's no one to impress when you're alone on the trap line. – Michael Carey quoting his father's journal

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing. – Benjamin Franklin

It’s nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums of money to get rid of. – Shirley Hazzard

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence -- Bertrand Russell

You know that I always just wanted to have a small ship to take stuff from a place that had a lot of that stuff to a place that did not have a lot of that stuff and so prosper.—Jackie Faber, “The Wake of the Lorelei Lee”

If you attack the arguer instead of the argument, you lose both

If an insurance company won’t pay for damages caused by an “act of God,” shouldn’t it then have to prove the existence of God? – I said that

I used to think getting old was about vanity—but actually it’s about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial. – Eugene O’Neill

German General to Swiss General: “You have only 500,000 men in your army; what would you do if I invaded with 1 million men?”

Swiss General: “Well, I suppose every one of my soldiers would need to fire twice.”

Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.—Gloria Steinem

Exceed your bandwidth—sign on the wall of the maintenance shop at the West Coast/Alaska Tsunami Warning Center

One thing I do know, if you keep at it, you usually wind up getting something done.—Patricia Monaghan

Do you want to know what kind of person makes the best reporter? I’ll tell you. A borderline sociopath. Someone smart, inquisitive, stubborn, disorganized, chaotic, and in a perpetual state of simmering rage at the failings of the world.—Brett Arends

It is a very simple mind that only knows how to spell a word one way.—Andrew Jackson

3:30 is too late or too early to do anything—Rene Descartes

Everything is okay when it’s 50-below as long as everything is okay. – an Alaskan in Tom Walker’s “The Seventymile Kid”

You can have your own opinion but you can’t have your own science.—commenter arguing on a story about polar bears and global warming

He looks at three ex wives as a good start—TV police drama

Talkeetna: A friendly little drinking town with a climbing problem.—a handmade bumper sticker

“You’re either into the wall or into the show”—Marco Andretti on giving it all to qualify last at the 2011 Indy 500

Makeup is not for the faint of heart—the makeup guerrilla

“I’m going to relax in a very adult manner.”—Danica Patrick after sweating it out and qualifying half an hour before Andretti

“Asking Congress to come back is like asking a mugger to come back because he forgot your wallet.”—a roundtable participant on Fox of all places

As Republicans go further back in the conception process to define when life actually begins, I am beginning to think the eventual definition will be life begins in the beer I was drinking when I met her.—me again

Hunting is a “critical element for the long-term conservation of wood bison.”—a state department of Fish and Game official explaining why the state would not go along with a federal plan to reintroduce wood bison in Alaska because the agreement did not specifically allow hunting

Each day do something that won’t compute – anon

I can’t belive I still have to protest this shit – a sign carriend by an elderly woman at an Occupy demonstration

Life should be a little nuts or else it’s just a bunch of Thursdays strung together—Kevin Costner as Beau Burroughs in “Rumor has it”

You’re just a wanker whipping up fear —Irish President Michael D. Higgins to a tea party radio announcer

Being president doesn’t change who you are; it reveals who you are—Michelle Obama

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