Bear At Fortymile

	Bear At Fortymile September 1st You’re not supposed to watch the plane fly away. I did. Maybe that’s why things happened the way they did. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, and I was standing on a gravel bar somewhere on the upper stretches of the Fortymile River, watching the little white Cessna buzz overhead. Wayne Johnson, the bush pilot who’d flown me out for a seven-day moose hunt, waggled the plane’s wings once at me before turning back towards Fairbanks.
The river ran through a well-defined valley beginning just upstream from the landing site, with forest of spruce rising away from the banks. Willows lined the river. The sun was shining, and the temperature, while not exactly balmy, was comfortable; I would certainly not be cold while hiking upstream with my big trail pack and assorted gear. Hours of daylight left, this far north, this time of year. I picked up my backpack and put it on, adjusting the straps carefully, and buckled the waist belt as tightly as was comfortable. Then I grabbed my bow and started up the river. It was rough walking. The willows grew up thick along the river, and higher up it was thick with brush. I had good maps; about four miles up from the landing site, a small spring-fed creek wandered off to the north. I stuck to the riverbank, walking on gravel bars wherever possible, enjoying the scenery. Colorado had some wild places, but nothing like this. “You don’t want to camp anywhere along the river out here,” Wayne Johnson had warned me. “The river’s a buffet table for bears. Stay away from it at night. Camp up on higher ground.” Wayne had also warned me to carry a firearm of some kind, for the same reason. He carried one himself, a big stainless steel .44 magnum in a shoulder holster. He wore several bad scars on one leg from a bear that chewed him up a few days after his eighteenth birthday, and I figured he was just a bit more than normally paranoid. I figured a few normal precautions would keep me safe from bears. I hadn’t been in Alaska that long. Four hours, eight o’clock, and I finally made it to the little creek on the map. I turned north there, following it about a half-mile upstream until I came to a little pool. A small bald ridge stood nearby, maybe fifty yards and twenty or thirty feet above the pool; I headed that way. It felt good to drop my pack at last. I laid my bow down carefully on a lichen-covered rock. My little nylon tent was tied to the pack frame. I removed it, pulled the tent out of the bag, spread it on a level spot and staked it down. Two springy plastic poles went in fore and aft, forming bows to hold the tent up. Then four cords, front and back, ran to four more stakes and pegged down tight to draw the nylon tight as a drum. I got my old down sleeping bag and unrolled it inside the tent, and arranged a few more items from my pack. A big spruce stood a few feet away. I took a spool of line from my pack – actually, old Army “parachute cord” that I’d had around forever - tossed it over a limb about fifteen feet up, and tied the other end to my pack. Before I went to bed, I’d use the cord to pull the pack up into the tree, keeping all my supplies sheltered up off the ground. It was starting to get dark. Somewhere off in the distance, a wolf howled, once. Another answered, farther away. There was one more thing to do. I scraped out a shallow hole in the dirt with a small folding shovel, and gathered a few rocks to surround it. I had to hurry to gather some dry wood, but after about ten minutes of that, I had a nice fire crackling merrily away in the new fire pit. I stuck my wire grill over the fire, and walked down to the pool with my coffeepot to dip up water. I sat on the ground for a while, waiting for the coffee, watching the fire, and listening to the occasional howling from the wolves. Above, the stars blinked on, one by one. Silence, all around me, except for the barely audible bubbling of the creek, fifty yards down the hill. I was seventy miles by air from the nearest road, and four and a half miles from the nearest gravel bar big enough to land a plane on. A lifetime in the wilds, and this was the farthest in I’d ever been, my first fall in Alaska. A sudden hiss: the coffee boiled over, spilling coffee and grounds down the side of the pot into the fire. I laughed. A cup of coffee, I thought, and hit the sleeping bag. I had a big day ahead of me. September 2nd I’m a light sleeper. The first tiny beep from my watch woke me up at five, and I scrambled out into the glittering, frosty Alaska pre-dawn. Overhead, the stars glittered like chips of ice. I was, I admit, as excited as I’d been in years. I’ve always hunted my own meat, but this was my first time in my new home, and my first time trying for anything as big as a moose. I didn’t bother building up the fire, just packed my little butt pack with water and sandwiches before stringing my bow and heading off towards the river. It was a beautiful day for a hike. Were it not for the bow in my hand and the quiver of arrows on my back, it would have been easy to forget that I was out there with a purpose this time. I prefer wild meat, and a moose would last me a year – more than that, in fact, I’d probably end up giving some meat away. I’d been given to understand that was something of a tradition in Soldotna, my new, adopted home. The bow felt good in my hands, too. It was a hand-made English-style longbow I’d had for twenty years or so, built by a Michigan craftsman I’d met a long time ago. My arrows were cedar, fletched with real feathers, tipped with four bladed razorhead points – the only part of the rig, in fact, that you wouldn’t have been likely to see on an English bow at the Battle of Hastings. I liked the traditional rig, and it had helped me bring in quite a few deer and elk over the years – even a couple of antelope. This year, my goal was to bring down an Alaskan moose with that old bow. About noon, I saw the first track, in the sand near the riverbank. It wasn’t a moose track, though; it was a bear track. A big one. Living in Colorado as many years as I had, I’d seen plenty of bear tracks. But this one was different. I laid my hand in the track, and there was room to spare on either side, in front and back, too. The marks of long claws were plainly visible, inches in front of the pads. It was the track of a grizzly, and a big one if I was any judge. More disturbing was the pile of bear droppings I suddenly noticed, about ten feet ahead. They were still steaming in the chill morning air. The hair on the back of my neck stood up suddenly. The sun somehow lost its warmth; every tiny rattle of the willow leaves in the breeze seemed carry a threat. Slowly, ever so slowly, I reached over my shoulder for an arrow, nocked it. I started to back away, back down the way I’d come. Fifty yards, a hundred, I crept backwards, watching my footing, trying to stay silent while keeping my eyes focused on the brush. After about two hundred yards, I turned and walked quickly back down the river towards my camp. I saw two cow moose on the way, both at some distance, but my tag was for a bull, so I didn’t even slow down. At the last bend in the river before the creek that led to my camp, I finally sat down on a large boulder, and gave in to the shakes. All right, Nick, old boy, I told myself after a while. You’ve been around bears before. You’ve been alone in the wilderness before. That bear would probably be more afraid of you than you are of him. I pulled a sandwich out of my pack, and after a careful look around, ate it slowly. Gradually, I stopped shaking. Pulled myself together. Even managed a little chuckle at my own expense. Downstream, I thought. I think I’ll hunt downstream from camp. And that afternoon, that’s what I did. I found plenty of moose sign; saw one small bull, explored lots of beautiful country. I almost managed to forget about the bear track. About nine o’clock that night, an hour after dark, I finally made it back to my tent. Wolves were howling again, in the distance. The creek bubbled softly in the cold, still night. I made my supper, brewed coffee, and built the fire up high. I sat for maybe an hour, sipping my coffee, staring into the fire. Alaskan outback nights are amazingly silent. Growing up in Minnesota, I used to camp by myself in the woods along the river near Prairie Ridge; summer and fall nights there were full of sounds, from crickets to owls and whippoorwills. Colorado mountain nights are quiet, but the silence is regularly interrupted by coyotes, owls and in the all, elk bugling. But this Alaskan night was the quietest I’d even experienced; only the crackling of the fire and the soft bubbling of the creek broke the stillness. Tomorrow, I thought, I’ll go back to that meadow downstream where I saw the small bull. There was a lot of sign right in there. I looked at my watch. Ten o’clock. Time to sleep. I crawled into the tent, took off my shoes and pants, and crawled into my sleeping bag. It had been a long and tiring day; I went to sleep quickly. September 3rd Breathing. My eyes snapped suddenly open in the pre-dawn dark. I lay perfectly still, hardly daring to breathe myself. The moon had set, and the tent was absolutely pitch black. Breathing. Not my own. Outside the tent. Softly, softly, I reached for the belt of my wool pants, which were lying alongside my sleeping bag. A barely audible crunch; a footstep. Something was outside the tent. In the utter darkness, my fingers finally found the leather of the belt. I felt along it until I came to the handle of my skinning knife. Breathing. I managed to unsheathe the knife, brought it up slowly to my chest. Another slight crunch. Then another, farther away. I couldn’t hear the breathing any more. Whatever it was, it was moving away. I lay in my sleeping bag, wide-awake, until the sky grew bright enough to see. Somehow, I managed to get dressed, and crawled out of the tent. My first action was to string my bow and nock an arrow, before having a close look around the camp. My backpack still hung in the spruce; nothing was touched. The ground around the tent was hard; I couldn’t find any sign other than a few spots of flattened grass. Dilemma time. Whatever I’d heard, it could have been a bear, it could have been a moose, it could have been anything. I’m not one to take chances, though, when I’m alone in the wild. I broke camp quickly, and moved about two miles down the Fortymile, closer to the pick-up point. By ten o’clock, my camp was set back up on a dry hillside overlooking the river valley. There was still a moose out there somewhere with my name on him. So, after a bite to eat and some more coffee, I set out again. I had crossed a small creek coming back down the river valley. After consulting my maps, I decided to head that way. It looked like the creek bottoms opened out upstream from the river into a semi-open area that should be good moose habitat. And sure enough, it was. Late afternoon found me sneaking through a boggy area along the creek, about two miles from my camp. A fresh moose track invited me into the brushy, swampy stretch, with scrub willows a bit over head-high. It took about two hours of patient tracking, step by step, but finally – about a hundred yards away – I spotted them, moose antlers raised briefly above the brush. I worked my way in slowly, freezing whenever the bull raised his head, creeping forward when the antlers dropped out of view. Another thirty minutes passed while I cautiously cut the intervening distance, yard by yard, step by step, eighty yards, forty, twenty. The slight breeze was in my face, the rangy, wet-dog scent of the bull strong as I came to a spot fifteen yards away from the bull, his whole body now in view as he stood cropping twigs from a small willow. Slowly, ever so slowly, I raised the longbow, came to full draw. Sighted, the steel arrowhead on the bull’s chest. As always at such moments, time seemed to slow to a crawl as the string slipped from my fingers; the arrow slid across the rest, floating, floating in a gentle arc to thwump between the bull’s ribs, leaving only the bright red and yellow fletching protruding. The bull let out a bellow, and lurched out of the little hollow where he’d been feeding. I froze, listening as the crashing sounds of the moose retreating faded for a moment, then stopped. I looked at my watch; I’d give him thirty minutes. I sat down on a down log and pulled a sandwich out of my pack. The activities of two buntings and a ptarmigan filled the half-hour. When the time was up, I followed a faint blood trail in the failing light, about three hundred yards to where the bull had piled up and died in a small clearing. I stood for a few minutes, just looking. There’s always that moment of mixed feelings just after a kill, elation tinged with regret, excitement, a touch of sorrow, anticipation, all sorts of things all kind of mixed up together; I just stood there, enjoying the sensations, not wanting to rush anything. He wasn’t a trophy bull by some people’s standards, but to me every animal is a trophy. Still and all he was a nice bull, with a respectable set of broad, palmated antlers. Finally I remembered the little digital camera I carried in a nylon pouch on my belt. I laid my bow across the moose’s antlers and took a couple of pictures. Now, the exciting part of the hunt was over, and it was time for the work to begin. Field-dressing and quartering big game by the faint light of a battery-powered lantern isn’t much fun. I’d done it before, but never anything as big as this. My first moose wasn’t a trophy bull, his rack was middling average – but he probably weighed twice as much as any elk I’d ever killed. It was past midnight by the time I had the bull dressed, the meat boned out, wrapped in cheesecloth and bagged up in six cloth meat bags. I had more line in my butt pack, and I used it to hang the six meat bags from a big spruce that stood nearby. It was well past midnight when I finished. I headed for my camp, intending to start packing meat out the next day. My watch read two thirty-four in the morning when I finally crawled into my sleeping bag and laid my head on my rolled up jacket, exhausted but very, very pleased. September 4th Morning came quickly, and the sun already high in the east when I finally woke up. I could hear the faint breeze whispering over the nylon of the tent, and the calls of birds. I lay there for a while, listening, enjoying the warmth of the sunshine heating the tent, until nature’s call drove me out into the chilly morning air. A few clouds were coming in from the west, puffy, white fair-weather clouds. I started a fire for coffee, munched on a bagel, and set about removing my backpack bag from the frame to pack moose meat to the pickup point downriver. I suppose I set out for the kill site about a half-hour later. From my map, I figured it was about five and a half miles from the kill site to the big gravel bar where Wayne Johnson would be picking me up at noon on the 7th. Figure six trips with meat, one more for the antlers, I told myself. Two today, two tomorrow, two the next day, get the horns out early on the 7th; if I can hold that schedule, it should work. I wasn’t counting on Alaska. The first trip went without incident. I hiked easily to the kill site, unencumbered with anything but the light aluminum pack frame. It was the work of ten minutes to lower one cheesecloth-covered, boned-out quarter from the tree and lash it tightly to the frame. Getting the frame on my back with sixty pounds of meat on it was another story; I managed by propping the frame against a tree, sitting down to work my arms into the straps and fasten the belt, and using a stout stick to lever myself to my feet. The four mile hike took over three hours with that load, but finally the first installment was hung in a spruce a hundred yards or so from the gravel spit, and I set out again. When I arrived, sweating and tired, back at the kill site, the place was in chaos. One of the meat bags, one that I hadn’t hung quite high enough, had been pulled down and dragged off. A few yards away, the offal pile had been sorted through and some of it eaten; bits and pieces were strewn over a wide area. And a large pile of droppings in the middle of it all proclaimed a bear, a big bear, maybe the same bear that had left the sign behind two miles upstream on the first day. No weapon was all that came to mind. I’d left even my bow behind, wanting to travel light. I had my skinning knife at my belt, but it would be no more effective than a toothpick against a big grizzly. OK, Nick, I remember thinking. Move slowly. Listen for anything moving. Back slowly towards the tree. Slowly, I took one step back, then another, back towards the big spruce where the moose meat hung like ripe fruit. Almost five hours had passed since I’d picked up the first load of meat. I stood for a while, leaning against the bole of the tree, trying to listen for a footfall, a noise, anything over the pounding of my heart. Nothing. Working quickly, I dropped another bag out of the tree and lashed it to the frame. On an impulse, I tied the moose antlers on top of the meat; this bag was a good twenty pounds lighter than the first load I’d hauled out. It seemed like an eternity, but finally I was up and moving, watching continually over my shoulder and singing, in a loud voice, anything I could think of. I had no wish to take that bear by surprise if he was still in the area. It was pushing dark by the time I got the second load to the pickup point and hung up. By this time I had decided to move camp down to a big open bench just two hundred yards up the hillside from the gravel bar, and dark or not, I resolved to get that done yet that night. A bit of snow was starting to spit from the sky by the time I had my camp relocated and set back up again, and it was well past midnight before I lay my exhausted, aching body down for the night. September 5th As on the first two days, the beeping of my watch awoke me early. It was still dark, and I could hear pellets of snow hitting the tent, and the wind was snapping the nylon. It wouldn’t be as pleasant a day as the first four had been. I grunted, stretched aching muscles, looked at the time; four hours of sleep would have to do. I crawled out of my sleeping bag into the frigid air, dressed as quickly as I could, and scrambled outside. The stars were gone, the sky only beginning to show the first light of a dull dawn. The wind was blowing low, gray, scudding clouds overhead, and a steady spit of wet pellets of snow filled the air. No fire, no coffee this morning. I munched a bagel and grabbed my pack frame, and this time I took my bow and quiver along. In retrospect, I probably should have abandoned the rest of the meat – I already had a good hundred pounds or so out at the pickup site. But we don’t always follow our best instincts, and it goes against my grain to leave meat in the woods, even though nothing out there really goes to waste – this certainly wouldn’t have, not with a hungry grizzly in the area. But I had killed the moose, and it was my responsibility. It strikes me as unethical to leave good meat in the woods when I’ve killed an animal. Most hunters I know feel the same way. The snow died down to the occasional spatter as I hiked towards the kill site. The clouds glowered down at me, so low in the sky that it seemed I could reach up and touch them. The kill site was unchanged from the day before. Maybe he’s had his fill of moose, I told myself, and set about lowering and tying up another load of meat to pack out. The load was ready, and I had just got the pack frame back on and was adjusting the straps when the bear showed up. Unusually for me – I’ve got great hearing – I saw him before I heard him. He had approached silently, from downwind, and I never knew he was there until a big, brown head, the size of a washtub, poked up over a clump of scrub willows. I froze. The grizzly and I made eye contact. He was no more than twenty yards away. He was a magnificent animal. His damp fur looked almost black, but his face was lighter in color than the rest of him; even on the gray, dull day I could plainly see the dished face and humped shoulders that marked the species, grizzly, the first such I’d ever seen in the wild. I had sixty pounds of moose meat securely fastened to my back, and I was a good twenty feet from the nearest tree. The bear was, maybe, sixty feet from me. My bow lay at my feet, the quiver next to it, an arrow still nocked and laid across the rest. Whuff. The sudden noise from the bear made me jump. The slight breeze was blowing directly from me to the bear. His nose worked furiously, I could see his nostrils pulling at the air, and I realized that he knew I was there before he ever came in. Even here, in Alaska, bears are hunted, and I was surprised that this one would be so bold, especially here; the Fortymile isn’t really all that secluded as Alaska goes. There are people on whitewater expeditions, hiking, camping, boating and even gold panning all summer in the very area where I stood now. But today, I was alone, under the lowering clouds, face to face with a grizzly that seemed to regard me as no more than a not-too-troublesome obstacle between him and his breakfast. As slowly as I could move, I squatted down and retrieved my bow. The grizzly watched, seeming only mildly interested. I started to back away, slowly. The bear whuffed again and took a couple of ambling steps towards me. This isn’t good, I thought. Try something else. I raised my arms, stood tall, and shouted, “GET ON OUT OF HERE!” He took a step backwards. Cocking his head to stare at me, for all the world like a gigantic dog, he shifted his weight from one forefoot to the other, back and forth, back and forth, still watching. This time, when I started to back away, he sat on his hindquarters and let me go. After I had backed away about a hundred yards, he turned and headed for the pile of offal that still lay a little ways away from the tree where the meat was stored. I beat it out of there. It was about lunchtime when I got to the gravel bar. I felt like I had walked backwards at least half the way, but the bear had obviously chosen to stay at the kill site and enjoy his breakfast. While I was hanging the meat up in another good-sized spruce, I mentally reviewed what I knew about grizzlies. What surprised me was that the bear had stood so quietly and let me leave unchallenged. I had been given to understand that grizzlies, once they had taken possession of a carcass, guarded it viciously, attacking any and all that came too close. That bear had not only refrained from an attack, it had stood by calmly while I walked away with sixty pounds of meat. Maybe this bear was different. Maybe this bear had learned the tricks of scavenging hunter’s leavings. Then again, I also knew that animals, particularly wild animals, are anything but predictable. The question that faced me now was simple. Should I go back for more of that meat? Mister Grizzly had already taken sixty or seventy pounds in that one bag that I hadn’t hung quite high enough to be out of his reach. I had maybe a hundred and fifty pounds of moose meat and the antlers already hauled out to the pick-up point, and it would be forty-eight hours before Wayne would return with his bush plane to pull me out. There were two more bags of meat left, maybe another hundred to a hundred and twenty pounds, two trips worth. My camp was in a pretty secure spot, just up the hillside. In the end, I decided to leave it until the next day. The sun was beginning to peek through the clouds, and I had not yet taken any time to tramp around and explore. I spent the afternoon hunting spruce grouse with my bow and some blunt arrows I’d brought along. By suppertime I had a big, soft-feathered bird, which made for a nice dinner. I roasted and ate my grouse, and munched an apple from my pack. Then I built the fire up high, and sat reading a book I’d packed in – Hal Borland’s When the Legends Die, it was, a fact that lingers, oddly, in my memory. By nine o’clock, my eyes were trying to close, so I crawled in my tent and went to bed, feeling more relaxed than I had in several days. September 6th I snapped awake suddenly, trying to focus on something in the pre-dawn darkness. Glanced at my watch. It was about ten minutes before my alarm would have gone off. What woke me up? I didn’t know. I rolled over, unzipped the tent flap a few inches, and peered out. The sky had cleared off completely overnight, and a trillion stars sparkled overhead. In the faint light, I could see a hard frost glittering bright on the grasses and brush around the tent. In the east, the very faintest traces of the dawn to come glowed, ever so faintly. Cold. I huddled back down into my sleeping bag. There was no hurry today; I’d stay warm a bit longer, maybe until the sun came up. I lay there, looking out through the little opening at the stars, until the sky brightened and blued; when the full rays of the sun finally hit my tent, I pulled on my wool pants and boots and scrambled out into the beautiful Alaska morning. A quick scout around my camp revealed nothing disturbed. My moose meat hung, untouched, in the spruces where I’d left it. Of course, no traces remained of my dinner; I’d dressed the grouse down at the river, and taken the remains a few hundred yards downstream and buried them. I keep a clean camp. There was nothing around to attract any local wildlife at all, much less a bear. Remembering, now, I looked nervously around at the far horizons, and then laughed at myself. You’re getting a little paranoid, Nick, old man, I told myself. I walked around the camp a few times, slapping my arms up and down to loosen up. My campfire still had a few coals going, so I added some wood, got the flames going again, and boiled up a pot of coffee. Two cups of coffee and an apple later, I felt ready to face another trip back to the kill site, so I strapped on the pack frame, grabbed my bow, and set out for another load of meat. Sun, trees, grass, birds, all seemed very alive that morning. Maybe it was just the wilderness rebounding after yesterday’s dismal weather, but I know that my own mood reflected the brightness of the Alaska outback morning. I whistled and sang as I walked, partly because of the beauty of the morning, partly to let any large, brown, carnivorous animals know I was in the area. When I approached the area where I’d killed the moose, I first climbed a ridge about a quarter-mile away and looked the site over carefully with my binoculars. Sure enough, there was ample sign of the bear in the area. He had pretty much polished off the offal pile, but the remainder of my meat – hung high in the trees – looked untouched. I didn’t see the bear around, but the area was brushy and boggy – he could have been lying in any of a number of brushy spots, unseen. I circled in, slowly, singing and shouting the whole way, arriving finally at the tree without incident. It was just as I was lowering the next bag full of meat that he showed up again. This time he didn’t mess around. He came in at a run, whoofing with each bound. I dropped the meat and scurried up the tree like a squirrel; I still don’t remember exactly how, but when I stopped I was perched on a limb a good twenty feet up. Beneath me, the grizzly – I could see now that he was a young male, probably his first year on his own – sniffed the bagged meat over carefully, picked it up, shot a look up at me and headed back into the brush. After a few minutes, I saw him again, a quarter-mile away, dragging the bag of meat over a ridgeline. Just to my left, one bag of meat remained. Well, I had to admit, he saved me two trips. Figuring I had some time while the bear ate his fill, I managed to get down out of the tree, dropped the meat, and made ready to pack it out. Ten minutes, and I was ready to go, and I didn’t waste any time – just a quick look around the place, the place I’d taken that first moose, and off I went for that last hike back to the gravel bar. Wayne would be back in less than twenty-four hours to pull me out. I figured on enjoying one last quiet evening in the wild, probably my last until next spring. The hike back was pleasant, but not quite as enjoyable as the walk in; seventy pounds of meat is a pretty good load for a man in his fifties. I whistled and sang, just as before, only not so much whenever there was a slope to climb. I needed every molecule of oxygen for my bloodstream, then; the exertions of the last few days were starting to catch up with me. A lazy afternoon lounging in the sun was starting to look pretty appealing. As I thought of the river a short ways from my camp, my only regret was that I hadn’t brought any fishing gear. The trip seemed at least twice as long as it had the day before, but at last I topped the last ridge, and my camp was in sight. My back and arms felt like someone had beaten them with a two-by-four, but somehow I managed to get the last bag of meat hung in the big spruce with the rest. Now, some rest and relaxation beckoned, but first I gathered some wood and built a pretty substantial fire. Before I had hung up that last bag, I had cut off a good-sized steak, and I set this to broil on a flat rock near the fire. Soon the air was filled with a delicious smell. Eating is different in the wild, especially after a few days’ hard work. They say hunger is the best seasoning, but woodsmoke and fresh air are pretty good spices as well; and just as trout tastes best when cooked right at streamside, a good piece of venison always seems to taste best cooked out of doors on an open fire. Maybe it’s something primal in our ancestry that makes it that way; it hearkens back to humanity’s days as hunter-gatherers, or maybe it’s just the fresh air and sunshine that give that feeling of well-being. Either way, I cooked that steak, seasoned it with nothing more than a little salt and pepper, and ate it off my old tin camp plate, with a fork and my skinning knife. I hadn’t tasted anything that good since the last fresh steak I’d eaten over a campfire. That had been an elk, taken two years earlier in the Holy Cross Wilderness, half a continent and seemingly a lifetime away. A lot of water under the bridge since then, I thought. After I ate, I brewed a cup of coffee. I seated myself in the grass, leaning back against an old fallen log. I thought about reading, but instead I sat with my cup and thought about many things. I thought about Ceilidh Ross, presumably working back at her practice in St. Paul. I thought about Jan, about what might have been if not for a truck with failed brakes, and felt a stab of the old pain. I even thought about Elaine Carroll, the girl I’d lived with in college. I remembered how the aspens in Colorado would turn a September mountainside to a glittering cascade of gold. I remembered that first summer in Colorado, working on my first book and tending bar in the old Adam’s Rib saloon, turned now into a delicatessen catering to the ski resort crowd. I remembered building my cabin on the Uncompaghre, sold now to a lawyer from Grand Junction. With a bit of excitement, I thought of my new little house in Soldotna, and the warm welcome I’d received from that tiny community. I plainly wasn’t going to be allowed to be a hermit in that little frontier village, and somehow, after years spent as a loner, that appealed to me. The only consistency in life is that it’s inconsistent. Things change, events ebb and flow around you; the only thing you can do is adapt. Something about quiet afternoons in the wild brings out the philosopher in me. As the afternoon passed, I sat, dozed a little, thought some more, and finally even read a little bit. What an adventure this had been! Tomorrow the plane would come, buzzing up the river, and take me back to Fairbanks, where I’d left my old Bronco at the airfield. Presently the sun went down, and I crawled into my tent to sleep. I didn’t know that the excitement wasn’t over yet. 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 the Wayne Johnson’s 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, 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, 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 whuffed 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 th’ very Devil himself was after it.” He was still chuckling as we loaded my meat and gear into the plane, and when we got to Fairbanks, 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 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 – 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. In spite of the stolen meat, in spite of the moments of fear, in spite of the sudden rage on that last day, in spite of 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.

Bear At Fortymile

September 1st

You’re not supposed to watch the plane fly away. I did. Maybe that’s why things happened the way they did.

It was four o’clock in the afternoon, and I was standing on a gravel bar somewhere on the upper stretches of the Fortymile River, watching the little white Cessna buzz overhead. Wayne Johnson, the bush pilot who’d flown me out for a seven-day moose hunt, waggled the plane’s wings once at me before turning back towards Fairbanks.

The river ran through a well-defined valley beginning just upstream from the landing site, with forest of spruce rising away from the banks. Willows lined the river. The sun was shining, and the temperature, while not exactly balmy, was comfortable; I would certainly not be cold while hiking upstream with my big trail pack and assorted gear.

Hours of daylight left, this far north, this time of year. I picked up my backpack and put it on, adjusting the straps carefully, and buckled the waist belt as tightly as was comfortable. Then I grabbed my bow and started up the river.

It was rough walking. The willows grew up thick along the river, and higher up it was thick with brush. I had good maps; about four miles up from the landing site, a small spring-fed creek wandered off to the north. I stuck to the riverbank, walking on gravel bars wherever possible, enjoying the scenery. Colorado had some wild places, but nothing like this.

“You don’t want to camp anywhere along the river out here,” Wayne Johnson had warned me. “The river’s a buffet table for bears. Stay away from it at night. Camp up on higher ground.”

Wayne had also warned me to carry a firearm of some kind, for the same reason. He carried one himself, a big stainless steel .44 magnum in a shoulder holster. He wore several bad scars on one leg from a bear that chewed him up a few days after his eighteenth birthday, and I figured he was just a bit more than normally paranoid. I figured a few normal precautions would keep me safe from bears.

I hadn’t been in Alaska that long.

Four hours, eight o’clock, and I finally made it to the little creek on the map. I turned north there, following it about a half-mile upstream until I came to a little pool. A small bald ridge stood nearby, maybe fifty yards and twenty or thirty feet above the pool; I headed that way.

It felt good to drop my pack at last. I laid my bow down carefully on a lichen-covered rock. My little nylon tent was tied to the pack frame. I removed it, pulled the tent out of the bag, spread it on a level spot and staked it down. Two springy plastic poles went in fore and aft, forming bows to hold the tent up. Then four cords, front and back, ran to four more stakes and pegged down tight to draw the nylon tight as a drum. I got my old down sleeping bag and unrolled it inside the tent, and arranged a few more items from my pack.

A big spruce stood a few feet away. I took a spool of line from my pack – actually, old Army “parachute cord” that I’d had around forever - tossed it over a limb about fifteen feet up, and tied the other end to my pack. Before I went to bed, I’d use the cord to pull the pack up into the tree, keeping all my supplies sheltered up off the ground.

It was starting to get dark. Somewhere off in the distance, a wolf howled, once. Another answered, farther away.

There was one more thing to do. I scraped out a shallow hole in the dirt with a small folding shovel, and gathered a few rocks to surround it. I had to hurry to gather some dry wood, but after about ten minutes of that, I had a nice fire crackling merrily away in the new fire pit. I stuck my wire grill over the fire, and walked down to the pool with my coffeepot to dip up water.

I sat on the ground for a while, waiting for the coffee, watching the fire, and listening to the occasional howling from the wolves. Above, the stars blinked on, one by one.

Silence, all around me, except for the barely audible bubbling of the creek, fifty yards down the hill. I was seventy miles by air from the nearest road, and four and a half miles from the nearest gravel bar big enough to land a plane on. A lifetime in the wilds, and this was the farthest in I’d ever been, my first fall in Alaska.

A sudden hiss: the coffee boiled over, spilling coffee and grounds down the side of the pot into the fire. I laughed. A cup of coffee, I thought, and hit the sleeping bag. I had a big day ahead of me.

September 2nd

I’m a light sleeper. The first tiny beep from my watch woke me up at five, and I scrambled out into the glittering, frosty Alaska pre-dawn. Overhead, the stars glittered like chips of ice.

I was, I admit, as excited as I’d been in years. I’ve always hunted my own meat, but this was my first time in my new home, and my first time trying for anything as big as a moose. I didn’t bother building up the fire, just packed my little butt pack with water and sandwiches before stringing my bow and heading off towards the river.

It was a beautiful day for a hike. Were it not for the bow in my hand and the quiver of arrows on my back, it would have been easy to forget that I was out there with a purpose this time. I prefer wild meat, and a moose would last me a year – more than that, in fact, I’d probably end up giving some meat away. I’d been given to understand that was something of a tradition in Soldotna, my new, adopted home.

The bow felt good in my hands, too. It was a hand-made English-style longbow I’d had for twenty years or so, built by a Michigan craftsman I’d met a long time ago. My arrows were cedar, fletched with real feathers, tipped with four bladed razorhead points – the only part of the rig, in fact, that you wouldn’t have been likely to see on an English bow at the Battle of Hastings. I liked the traditional rig, and it had helped me bring in quite a few deer and elk over the years – even a couple of antelope. This year, my goal was to bring down an Alaskan moose with that old bow.

About noon, I saw the first track, in the sand near the riverbank. It wasn’t a moose track, though; it was a bear track. A big one.

Living in Colorado as many years as I had, I’d seen plenty of bear tracks. But this one was different. I laid my hand in the track, and there was room to spare on either side, in front and back, too. The marks of long claws were plainly visible, inches in front of the pads. It was the track of a grizzly, and a big one if I was any judge.

More disturbing was the pile of bear droppings I suddenly noticed, about ten feet ahead. They were still steaming in the chill morning air.

The hair on the back of my neck stood up suddenly. The sun somehow lost its warmth; every tiny rattle of the willow leaves in the breeze seemed carry a threat.

Slowly, ever so slowly, I reached over my shoulder for an arrow, nocked it. I started to back away, back down the way I’d come. Fifty yards, a hundred, I crept backwards, watching my footing, trying to stay silent while keeping my eyes focused on the brush.

After about two hundred yards, I turned and walked quickly back down the river towards my camp. I saw two cow moose on the way, both at some distance, but my tag was for a bull, so I didn’t even slow down. At the last bend in the river before the creek that led to my camp, I finally sat down on a large boulder, and gave in to the shakes.

All right, Nick, old boy, I told myself after a while. You’ve been around bears before. You’ve been alone in the wilderness before. That bear would probably be more afraid of you than you are of him.

I pulled a sandwich out of my pack, and after a careful look around, ate it slowly. Gradually, I stopped shaking. Pulled myself together. Even managed a little chuckle at my own expense.

Downstream, I thought. I think I’ll hunt downstream from camp.

And that afternoon, that’s what I did. I found plenty of moose sign; saw one small bull, explored lots of beautiful country. I almost managed to forget about the bear track. About nine o’clock that night, an hour after dark, I finally made it back to my tent.

Wolves were howling again, in the distance. The creek bubbled softly in the cold, still night. I made my supper, brewed coffee, and built the fire up high. I sat for maybe an hour, sipping my coffee, staring into the fire.

Alaskan outback nights are amazingly silent. Growing up in Minnesota, I used to camp by myself in the woods along the river near Prairie Ridge; summer and fall nights there were full of sounds, from crickets to owls and whippoorwills. Colorado mountain nights are quiet, but the silence is regularly interrupted by coyotes, owls and in the all, elk bugling. But this Alaskan night was the quietest I’d even experienced; only the crackling of the fire and the soft bubbling of the creek broke the stillness.

Tomorrow, I thought, I’ll go back to that meadow downstream where I saw the small bull. There was a lot of sign right in there.

I looked at my watch. Ten o’clock. Time to sleep. I crawled into the tent, took off my shoes and pants, and crawled into my sleeping bag. It had been a long and tiring day; I went to sleep quickly.

September 3rd

Breathing.

My eyes snapped suddenly open in the pre-dawn dark. I lay perfectly still, hardly daring to breathe myself. The moon had set, and the tent was absolutely pitch black.

Breathing.

Not my own. Outside the tent.

Softly, softly, I reached for the belt of my wool pants, which were lying alongside my sleeping bag.

A barely audible crunch; a footstep. Something was outside the tent.

In the utter darkness, my fingers finally found the leather of the belt. I felt along it until I came to the handle of my skinning knife.

Breathing.

I managed to unsheathe the knife, brought it up slowly to my chest.

Another slight crunch. Then another, farther away. I couldn’t hear the breathing any more. Whatever it was, it was moving away.

I lay in my sleeping bag, wide-awake, until the sky grew bright enough to see. Somehow, I managed to get dressed, and crawled out of the tent. My first action was to string my bow and nock an arrow, before having a close look around the camp.

My backpack still hung in the spruce; nothing was touched. The ground around the tent was hard; I couldn’t find any sign other than a few spots of flattened grass.

Dilemma time. Whatever I’d heard, it could have been a bear, it could have been a moose, it could have been anything. I’m not one to take chances, though, when I’m alone in the wild. I broke camp quickly, and moved about two miles down the Fortymile, closer to the pick-up point. By ten o’clock, my camp was set back up on a dry hillside overlooking the river valley.

There was still a moose out there somewhere with my name on him. So, after a bite to eat and some more coffee, I set out again.

I had crossed a small creek coming back down the river valley. After consulting my maps, I decided to head that way. It looked like the creek bottoms opened out upstream from the river into a semi-open area that should be good moose habitat. And sure enough, it was. Late afternoon found me sneaking through a boggy area along the creek, about two miles from my camp.

A fresh moose track invited me into the brushy, swampy stretch, with scrub willows a bit over head-high. It took about two hours of patient tracking, step by step, but finally – about a hundred yards away – I spotted them, moose antlers raised briefly above the brush.

I worked my way in slowly, freezing whenever the bull raised his head, creeping forward when the antlers dropped out of view. Another thirty minutes passed while I cautiously cut the intervening distance, yard by yard, step by step, eighty yards, forty, twenty. The slight breeze was in my face, the rangy, wet-dog scent of the bull strong as I came to a spot fifteen yards away from the bull, his whole body now in view as he stood cropping twigs from a small willow.

Slowly, ever so slowly, I raised the longbow, came to full draw. Sighted, the steel arrowhead on the bull’s chest. As always at such moments, time seemed to slow to a crawl as the string slipped from my fingers; the arrow slid across the rest, floating, floating in a gentle arc to thwump between the bull’s ribs, leaving only the bright red and yellow fletching protruding.

The bull let out a bellow, and lurched out of the little hollow where he’d been feeding. I froze, listening as the crashing sounds of the moose retreating faded for a moment, then stopped. I looked at my watch; I’d give him thirty minutes. I sat down on a down log and pulled a sandwich out of my pack.

The activities of two buntings and a ptarmigan filled the half-hour. When the time was up, I followed a faint blood trail in the failing light, about three hundred yards to where the bull had piled up and died in a small clearing.

I stood for a few minutes, just looking. There’s always that moment of mixed feelings just after a kill, elation tinged with regret, excitement, a touch of sorrow, anticipation, all sorts of things all kind of mixed up together; I just stood there, enjoying the sensations, not wanting to rush anything. He wasn’t a trophy bull by some people’s standards, but to me every animal is a trophy. Still and all he was a nice bull, with a respectable set of broad, palmated antlers.

Finally I remembered the little digital camera I carried in a nylon pouch on my belt. I laid my bow across the moose’s antlers and took a couple of pictures.

Now, the exciting part of the hunt was over, and it was time for the work to begin. Field-dressing and quartering big game by the faint light of a battery-powered lantern isn’t much fun. I’d done it before, but never anything as big as this. My first moose wasn’t a trophy bull, his rack was middling average – but he probably weighed twice as much as any elk I’d ever killed. It was past midnight by the time I had the bull dressed, the meat boned out, wrapped in cheesecloth and bagged up in six cloth meat bags. I had more line in my butt pack, and I used it to hang the six meat bags from a big spruce that stood nearby.

It was well past midnight when I finished. I headed for my camp, intending to start packing meat out the next day. My watch read two thirty-four in the morning when I finally crawled into my sleeping bag and laid my head on my rolled up jacket, exhausted but very, very pleased.

September 4th

Morning came quickly, and the sun already high in the east when I finally woke up. I could hear the faint breeze whispering over the nylon of the tent, and the calls of birds. I lay there for a while, listening, enjoying the warmth of the sunshine heating the tent, until nature’s call drove me out into the chilly morning air.

A few clouds were coming in from the west, puffy, white fair-weather clouds. I started a fire for coffee, munched on a bagel, and set about removing my backpack bag from the frame to pack moose meat to the pickup point downriver. I suppose I set out for the kill site about a half-hour later.

From my map, I figured it was about five and a half miles from the kill site to the big gravel bar where Wayne Johnson would be picking me up at noon on the 7th. Figure six trips with meat, one more for the antlers, I told myself. Two today, two tomorrow, two the next day, get the horns out early on the 7th; if I can hold that schedule, it should work.

I wasn’t counting on Alaska.

The first trip went without incident. I hiked easily to the kill site, unencumbered with anything but the light aluminum pack frame. It was the work of ten minutes to lower one cheesecloth-covered, boned-out quarter from the tree and lash it tightly to the frame. Getting the frame on my back with sixty pounds of meat on it was another story; I managed by propping the frame against a tree, sitting down to work my arms into the straps and fasten the belt, and using a stout stick to lever myself to my feet. The four mile hike took over three hours with that load, but finally the first installment was hung in a spruce a hundred yards or so from the gravel spit, and I set out again.

When I arrived, sweating and tired, back at the kill site, the place was in chaos.

One of the meat bags, one that I hadn’t hung quite high enough, had been pulled down and dragged off. A few yards away, the offal pile had been sorted through and some of it eaten; bits and pieces were strewn over a wide area. And a large pile of droppings in the middle of it all proclaimed a bear, a big bear, maybe the same bear that had left the sign behind two miles upstream on the first day.

No weapon was all that came to mind. I’d left even my bow behind, wanting to travel light. I had my skinning knife at my belt, but it would be no more effective than a toothpick against a big grizzly.

OK, Nick, I remember thinking. Move slowly. Listen for anything moving. Back slowly towards the tree. Slowly, I took one step back, then another, back towards the big spruce where the moose meat hung like ripe fruit.

Almost five hours had passed since I’d picked up the first load of meat. I stood for a while, leaning against the bole of the tree, trying to listen for a footfall, a noise, anything over the pounding of my heart.

Nothing.

Working quickly, I dropped another bag out of the tree and lashed it to the frame. On an impulse, I tied the moose antlers on top of the meat; this bag was a good twenty pounds lighter than the first load I’d hauled out. It seemed like an eternity, but finally I was up and moving, watching continually over my shoulder and singing, in a loud voice, anything I could think of. I had no wish to take that bear by surprise if he was still in the area.

It was pushing dark by the time I got the second load to the pickup point and hung up. By this time I had decided to move camp down to a big open bench just two hundred yards up the hillside from the gravel bar, and dark or not, I resolved to get that done yet that night. A bit of snow was starting to spit from the sky by the time I had my camp relocated and set back up again, and it was well past midnight before I lay my exhausted, aching body down for the night.

September 5th

As on the first two days, the beeping of my watch awoke me early. It was still dark, and I could hear pellets of snow hitting the tent, and the wind was snapping the nylon. It wouldn’t be as pleasant a day as the first four had been.

I grunted, stretched aching muscles, looked at the time; four hours of sleep would have to do. I crawled out of my sleeping bag into the frigid air, dressed as quickly as I could, and scrambled outside. The stars were gone, the sky only beginning to show the first light of a dull dawn. The wind was blowing low, gray, scudding clouds overhead, and a steady spit of wet pellets of snow filled the air.

No fire, no coffee this morning. I munched a bagel and grabbed my pack frame, and this time I took my bow and quiver along.

In retrospect, I probably should have abandoned the rest of the meat – I already had a good hundred pounds or so out at the pickup site. But we don’t always follow our best instincts, and it goes against my grain to leave meat in the woods, even though nothing out there really goes to waste – this certainly wouldn’t have, not with a hungry grizzly in the area.

But I had killed the moose, and it was my responsibility. It strikes me as unethical to leave good meat in the woods when I’ve killed an animal. Most hunters I know feel the same way.

The snow died down to the occasional spatter as I hiked towards the kill site. The clouds glowered down at me, so low in the sky that it seemed I could reach up and touch them.

The kill site was unchanged from the day before. Maybe he’s had his fill of moose, I told myself, and set about lowering and tying up another load of meat to pack out. The load was ready, and I had just got the pack frame back on and was adjusting the straps when the bear showed up.

Unusually for me – I’ve got great hearing – I saw him before I heard him. He had approached silently, from downwind, and I never knew he was there until a big, brown head, the size of a washtub, poked up over a clump of scrub willows.

I froze. The grizzly and I made eye contact. He was no more than twenty yards away.

He was a magnificent animal. His damp fur looked almost black, but his face was lighter in color than the rest of him; even on the gray, dull day I could plainly see the dished face and humped shoulders that marked the species, grizzly, the first such I’d ever seen in the wild.

I had sixty pounds of moose meat securely fastened to my back, and I was a good twenty feet from the nearest tree. The bear was, maybe, sixty feet from me. My bow lay at my feet, the quiver next to it, an arrow still nocked and laid across the rest.

Whuff. The sudden noise from the bear made me jump. The slight breeze was blowing directly from me to the bear. His nose worked furiously, I could see his nostrils pulling at the air, and I realized that he knew I was there before he ever came in. Even here, in Alaska, bears are hunted, and I was surprised that this one would be so bold, especially here; the Fortymile isn’t really all that secluded as Alaska goes. There are people on whitewater expeditions, hiking, camping, boating and even gold panning all summer in the very area where I stood now.

But today, I was alone, under the lowering clouds, face to face with a grizzly that seemed to regard me as no more than a not-too-troublesome obstacle between him and his breakfast.

As slowly as I could move, I squatted down and retrieved my bow. The grizzly watched, seeming only mildly interested.

I started to back away, slowly. The bear whuffed again and took a couple of ambling steps towards me.

This isn’t good, I thought. Try something else. I raised my arms, stood tall, and shouted, “GET ON OUT OF HERE!”

He took a step backwards. Cocking his head to stare at me, for all the world like a gigantic dog, he shifted his weight from one forefoot to the other, back and forth, back and forth, still watching. This time, when I started to back away, he sat on his hindquarters and let me go. After I had backed away about a hundred yards, he turned and headed for the pile of offal that still lay a little ways away from the tree where the meat was stored.

I beat it out of there.

It was about lunchtime when I got to the gravel bar. I felt like I had walked backwards at least half the way, but the bear had obviously chosen to stay at the kill site and enjoy his breakfast. While I was hanging the meat up in another good-sized spruce, I mentally reviewed what I knew about grizzlies.

What surprised me was that the bear had stood so quietly and let me leave unchallenged. I had been given to understand that grizzlies, once they had taken possession of a carcass, guarded it viciously, attacking any and all that came too close. That bear had not only refrained from an attack, it had stood by calmly while I walked away with sixty pounds of meat. Maybe this bear was different. Maybe this bear had learned the tricks of scavenging hunter’s leavings.

Then again, I also knew that animals, particularly wild animals, are anything but predictable. The question that faced me now was simple.

Should I go back for more of that meat?

Mister Grizzly had already taken sixty or seventy pounds in that one bag that I hadn’t hung quite high enough to be out of his reach. I had maybe a hundred and fifty pounds of moose meat and the antlers already hauled out to the pick-up point, and it would be forty-eight hours before Wayne would return with his bush plane to pull me out. There were two more bags of meat left, maybe another hundred to a hundred and twenty pounds, two trips worth. My camp was in a pretty secure spot, just up the hillside.

In the end, I decided to leave it until the next day. The sun was beginning to peek through the clouds, and I had not yet taken any time to tramp around and explore. I spent the afternoon hunting spruce grouse with my bow and some blunt arrows I’d brought along. By suppertime I had a big, soft-feathered bird, which made for a nice dinner. I roasted and ate my grouse, and munched an apple from my pack. Then I built the fire up high, and sat reading a book I’d packed in – Hal Borland’s When the Legends Die, it was, a fact that lingers, oddly, in my memory. By nine o’clock, my eyes were trying to close, so I crawled in my tent and went to bed, feeling more relaxed than I had in several days.

September 6th

I snapped awake suddenly, trying to focus on something in the pre-dawn darkness. Glanced at my watch. It was about ten minutes before my alarm would have gone off.

What woke me up? I didn’t know. I rolled over, unzipped the tent flap a few inches, and peered out.

The sky had cleared off completely overnight, and a trillion stars sparkled overhead. In the faint light, I could see a hard frost glittering bright on the grasses and brush around the tent. In the east, the very faintest traces of the dawn to come glowed, ever so faintly.

Cold. I huddled back down into my sleeping bag. There was no hurry today; I’d stay warm a bit longer, maybe until the sun came up. I lay there, looking out through the little opening at the stars, until the sky brightened and blued; when the full rays of the sun finally hit my tent, I pulled on my wool pants and boots and scrambled out into the beautiful Alaska morning.

A quick scout around my camp revealed nothing disturbed. My moose meat hung, untouched, in the spruces where I’d left it. Of course, no traces remained of my dinner; I’d dressed the grouse down at the river, and taken the remains a few hundred yards downstream and buried them. I keep a clean camp. There was nothing around to attract any local wildlife at all, much less a bear.

Remembering, now, I looked nervously around at the far horizons, and then laughed at myself. You’re getting a little paranoid, Nick, old man, I told myself. I walked around the camp a few times, slapping my arms up and down to loosen up. My campfire still had a few coals going, so I added some wood, got the flames going again, and boiled up a pot of coffee. Two cups of coffee and an apple later, I felt ready to face another trip back to the kill site, so I strapped on the pack frame, grabbed my bow, and set out for another load of meat.

Sun, trees, grass, birds, all seemed very alive that morning. Maybe it was just the wilderness rebounding after yesterday’s dismal weather, but I know that my own mood reflected the brightness of the Alaska outback morning. I whistled and sang as I walked, partly because of the beauty of the morning, partly to let any large, brown, carnivorous animals know I was in the area. When I approached the area where I’d killed the moose, I first climbed a ridge about a quarter-mile away and looked the site over carefully with my binoculars.

Sure enough, there was ample sign of the bear in the area. He had pretty much polished off the offal pile, but the remainder of my meat – hung high in the trees – looked untouched.

I didn’t see the bear around, but the area was brushy and boggy – he could have been lying in any of a number of brushy spots, unseen. I circled in, slowly, singing and shouting the whole way, arriving finally at the tree without incident. It was just as I was lowering the next bag full of meat that he showed up again.

This time he didn’t mess around. He came in at a run, whoofing with each bound. I dropped the meat and scurried up the tree like a squirrel; I still don’t remember exactly how, but when I stopped I was perched on a limb a good twenty feet up. Beneath me, the grizzly – I could see now that he was a young male, probably his first year on his own – sniffed the bagged meat over carefully, picked it up, shot a look up at me and headed back into the brush.

After a few minutes, I saw him again, a quarter-mile away, dragging the bag of meat over a ridgeline.

Just to my left, one bag of meat remained. Well, I had to admit, he saved me two trips. Figuring I had some time while the bear ate his fill, I managed to get down out of the tree, dropped the meat, and made ready to pack it out. Ten minutes, and I was ready to go, and I didn’t waste any time – just a quick look around the place, the place I’d taken that first moose, and off I went for that last hike back to the gravel bar. Wayne would be back in less than twenty-four hours to pull me out. I figured on enjoying one last quiet evening in the wild, probably my last until next spring.

The hike back was pleasant, but not quite as enjoyable as the walk in; seventy pounds of meat is a pretty good load for a man in his fifties. I whistled and sang, just as before, only not so much whenever there was a slope to climb. I needed every molecule of oxygen for my bloodstream, then; the exertions of the last few days were starting to catch up with me. A lazy afternoon lounging in the sun was starting to look pretty appealing. As I thought of the river a short ways from my camp, my only regret was that I hadn’t brought any fishing gear.

The trip seemed at least twice as long as it had the day before, but at last I topped the last ridge, and my camp was in sight.

My back and arms felt like someone had beaten them with a two-by-four, but somehow I managed to get the last bag of meat hung in the big spruce with the rest. Now, some rest and relaxation beckoned, but first I gathered some wood and built a pretty substantial fire. Before I had hung up that last bag, I had cut off a good-sized steak, and I set this to broil on a flat rock near the fire. Soon the air was filled with a delicious smell.

Eating is different in the wild, especially after a few days’ hard work. They say hunger is the best seasoning, but woodsmoke and fresh air are pretty good spices as well; and just as trout tastes best when cooked right at streamside, a good piece of venison always seems to taste best cooked out of doors on an open fire. Maybe it’s something primal in our ancestry that makes it that way; it hearkens back to humanity’s days as hunter-gatherers, or maybe it’s just the fresh air and sunshine that give that feeling of well-being. Either way, I cooked that steak, seasoned it with nothing more than a little salt and pepper, and ate it off my old tin camp plate, with a fork and my skinning knife. I hadn’t tasted anything that good since the last fresh steak I’d eaten over a campfire. That had been an elk, taken two years earlier in the Holy Cross Wilderness, half a continent and seemingly a lifetime away.

A lot of water under the bridge since then, I thought.

After I ate, I brewed a cup of coffee. I seated myself in the grass, leaning back against an old fallen log. I thought about reading, but instead I sat with my cup and thought about many things. I thought about Ceilidh Ross, presumably working back at her practice in St. Paul. I thought about Jan, about what might have been if not for a truck with failed brakes, and felt a stab of the old pain. I even thought about Elaine Carroll, the girl I’d lived with in college.

I remembered how the aspens in Colorado would turn a September mountainside to a glittering cascade of gold. I remembered that first summer in Colorado, working on my first book and tending bar in the old Adam’s Rib saloon, turned now into a delicatessen catering to the ski resort crowd. I remembered building my cabin on the Uncompaghre, sold now to a lawyer from Grand Junction. With a bit of excitement, I thought of my new little house in Soldotna, and the warm welcome I’d received from that tiny community. I plainly wasn’t going to be allowed to be a hermit in that little frontier village, and somehow, after years spent as a loner, that appealed to me.

The only consistency in life is that it’s inconsistent. Things change, events ebb and flow around you; the only thing you can do is adapt.

Something about quiet afternoons in the wild brings out the philosopher in me.

As the afternoon passed, I sat, dozed a little, thought some more, and finally even read a little bit.

What an adventure this had been! Tomorrow the plane would come, buzzing up the river, and take me back to Fairbanks, where I’d left my old Bronco at the airfield. Presently the sun went down, and I crawled into my tent to sleep.

I didn’t know that the excitement wasn’t over yet.

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 the Wayne Johnson’s 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, 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, 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 whuffed 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 th’ very Devil himself was after it.” He was still chuckling as we loaded my meat and gear into the plane, and when we got to Fairbanks, 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 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 – 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.

In spite of the stolen meat, in spite of the moments of fear, in spite of the sudden rage on that last day, in spite of 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.