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...Continued
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And for the moment, I was alone.
Well, not quite. Just 150 yards or so upstream, a brown bear also stood hip-- deep in the creek, up to the same business I was, with a little more emphasis on the salmon and less on a suntan. As I watched, he leaned forward, made a quick snatch and hauled a thrashing pink back to the gravel bar, ringed by an audience of mewing gulls. The evening sun slanted in, casting a silver aura about him as he fed.
There would have been a time, only a few years ago, when the presence of an 8-foot bear would have given me a bad triple dose of the willies, heebie-jeebies and shakety-shakes-a genetic relic, no doubt, of a time when being on the short end of the sometimes-you-eat-- the-bear, sometimes-the-bear-eats-you adage was a definite and daily proposition.
I had two decades of experience with less predictable, more twitchy arctic grizzlies (technically the same species), and had found that these Chichigof Island brownies were pretty mellow guys, especially the ones along this stretch of creek, where they were used to almost daily human traffic. So, based on the experience of four autumns here, where the per-square-mile density of brown bears is as high as anywhere in the world, I hadn't bothered to bring a rifle. And I wasn't worried in the least.
Fact is, I knew this particular bear-- and bears, like people, have distinct personalities and habits. He and I had crossed paths a dozen times, sometimes at distances less than 30 feet. Once, a couple of years ago, while still a teenage hooligan, he sneaked up behind a buddy and me and snatched our pile of salmon-which was about as bad as he got. A year after that, on a rainy fall evening, I walked right past him on the trail as he crouched in the brush just a couple of body lengths away, waiting for me to pass. I didn't see him until I'd gone by, but he never so much as growled or raised a hackle-more than I can say for some dogs I've known. And I'd watched him since, studiously minding his own business and politely giving ground to humans, regardless of their manners. I think I could have stood next to this bear with a pork chop tied to the top of my head.
So he and I fished together in the fine evening light, me flicking out a half-ounce Pixee and occasionally connecting with a pink or silver, and him cleaning up on the old reliable Bearpaw Special. I think he had me about six to one. He knew I was there, too; the breeze wafted my scent upstream, and I saw him lift his muzzle more than once, cock his head and glance my way. I'd like to think he recognized me, too (not a ridiculous notion, considering the acuity of a bear's sense of smell), and knew that all was copacetic. Who knows, maybe he even enjoyed the company. This despite the fact that last fall, when he and his brother, a slightly smaller, darker bear, had crowded in on this very hole while a friend and I were fishing, I'd sent them both packing with a magnesium flare shot from a plastic boat pistol. I'd felt momentarily crummy, but when they emerged downstream a few minutes later, moving at an unhurried stroll, I'd golfed another flare after them. Mess with me, eh? Well, I showed 'em.
Real remorse had set in that evening, at home, without an audience to play to. What the hell had I been thinking? Did I not want to see bears while I was fishing? Did I not want them to trust me? Was standing my ground and showing who was boss the relationship I wanted to cultivate with the very symbol of all I loved in wild Alaska-superhuman creatures who allowed me and my scrawny-necked cohorts to trespass with total impunity, day after day, smack-dab through their back yards? What kind of biological bully was I, anyway?
There was that '60s novel, The Ugly American, which detailed the culturally insensitive, boorish actions of our countrymen overseas. Well, I'd just provided another chapter for the revised version, published by the Brown Bear Press, 2002: The Ugly Human. And at that point, I decided to make a new commitment to offer bears the same polite respect they'd always offered me.
Meanwhile, back on the creek, our little golden moment had come to an end. I heard the crashing and thrashing and hoo-hahs of my kind, making the type of approach the books tell us to use in bear country-an advance that has all the subtlety of a halftime marching band. The bear cocked his head, considered and quietly faded into the brush as three guys in head-to-toe camouflage came splashing across the stream, then galumphed along the far bank toward me, yammering back and forth the whole time.
They were, to put it mildly, armed-- two of them slinging stubby, bolt-action rifles stuffed with magnum shells that would stagger a rhino.
"Hey, ya slayin' the silvers?" one called. I allowed that it had been a bit slow and was subjected to a full-fledged game of one-upmanship regarding the number of fish they had caught at this very hole just the other day. Meanwhile, they whacked a few casts into the creek, some falling within 10 feet of where I stood, while they continued to plow upstream. I offered the polite but direct information that there was a good-sized bear just ahead.
"Yeah?" one guy grinned with bellicose satisfaction. "Then we'll just run his ass out of there." And they racketed on through the alders, flinging an occasional fruitless cast. Their hollering ahead, splashing and overloud conversation gradually faded upstream, and then grew again 15 minutes later as they retraced their steps past me and downstream toward the next hole, around the bend and out of sight.
I stood in the stream casting and retrieving, alone again as dusk descended, all my pleasure in the evening gone. I caught myself clenching my jaw, and my neck muscles knotted tight as I muttered imaginary, clever barbs to those imbeciles. These were the sort of lowlifes that thought everything in the whole wide world was for them and stomped down anything that got in their way, quoting for justification that Biblical nonsense about dominion over all birds and beasts. The mountains up the valley shone with the bald scarring of clearcuts, and a sunken beer can at my feet completed my disgust.
And then it struck me: I might as well be cussing into a mirror. Here I was, whipping around a treble-hooked contraption, blithely gouging creatures in their faces for my own amusement, toting bunches of plastic and metal junk made in factories that screwed up the water and air, driving a car that contributed equally to the mess and living in a house made of the same sort of wood that had been ripped from these hills. The story kept on going and going, just as our species did, making infinite copies of themselves at the expense of everything else in this world, with no end in sight. This was one of the last best places left, and here I was, contributing to its ruin just by existing. To paraphrase cartoonist Walt Kelly, I had met the enemy and he was me.
Meanwhile, 70 yards upstream, a dark shape slipped out of the brush. He peered downstream in the twilight, detected nothing, gave what seemed to be an ursine shrug and strode down the bank, headed right toward where I stood. His form dissolved into the shadowy alders, but I could measure his progress by the rustle of leaves and an occasional gentle huff. I gathered my gear and slunk off, ashamed for all of us.
As I drove home, rattling over the miles of logging road in my rust-bucket Subaru, my thoughts spun with the wheels. Was I overreacting, making too much of a trio of loudmouth jerks? Was I having some sort of Greenie-weenie meltdown? There were as many bears on the island as ever, and trees grew back. If the environment was going to hell in a handcart, what were all those fish about? What was I going to do, not go out anymore? I'd almost talked myself back into shape.
Still, I knew the truth. All that angst back there on the creek was, as the Brits say, spot on. Twenty years before, there had been no road to that place, and the stands of ancient spruce at its headwaters hadn't been whacked down and stuffed into the holds of Korean log ships. Not that this was my home to mourn-I hadn't lived there nearly long enough to claim that-but it didn't matter where it was; the same thing was going on in Brazil, Mongolia, Oregon and upstate New York.
Things weren't going to stop there or anywhere else.
Next spring hunting season my pal the bear, who isn't my pal at all, might very well end up on some sport hunter's wall in a city far away, staring out with glass eyes and a silly snarl on a world stuffed to overflowing with scrawny, almost hairless, but exceedingly clever creatures-people who love the natural world, depend on it for their very existence, and destroy it all the same: people just like me.
NICK JANS has made his home in Alaska for the past 23 years. His essay collection, TRACKS OF THE UNSEEN, is available from Fulcrum Publishing.
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