The original 911 call had come from a woman named Lisa; she is married to Brian. Ted knows them, as he does most longtime residents of the peninsula. He’d been called to their place once before, something about a suspected Sasquatch. When you see a very large male brown bear’s tracks in powdery snow, I guess you could think they belonged to a Sasquatch, especially when they circled your horse corral. Maybe it was more comforting to think that something with feet that large was more human than giant male bear. This young couple has five small children; they live out in the woods by themselves. Brian’s family are some of the original homesteaders in the area; they came here in the 1940s, when most were commercial fishermen. Brian and Lisa live right off the Sterling Highway at Mile 117, the major road that goes from Soldotna to Homer. Their homestead is just nineteen miles from Soldotna.
Soldotna is a bigger town, more like Anchorage. It has some wilderness surrounding it, but it also has Taco Bell, McDonald’s, Kmart, Safeway, Fred Meyers (a twenty-four-hour superstore), car dealers, movie theaters, a sports bar, dentists and doctors, and much more. You can get your nails done, hear All Things Considered, and visit enough drive-in latte and espresso places on your routes through town to keep you wired. You just cannot say this about many places in Alaska. Some residents are delighted by this fact, some are horrified, and some don’t know the difference. Around Soldotna and neighboring Kenai, it would be easy to get comfortable, to feel man has tamed Alaska. Stay in your car and house, plug into the Internet or your PlayStation, and you could believe that there is no harm that can come to you and your family from the surrounding woods and mountains. You could even become so disconnected from reality by never venturing into the wild that beckons from so close by that you really don’t believe there is anything living in all those woods you drive by every day. Drink too many espressos in a day and you might think you were living in suburban Seattle.
This disorientation will never happen to Brian and Lisa or their five children, not after last night. Their nightmare began at about 2:30 A.M. It wasn’t yet completely dark; many shades of gray light were still mixing with the night’s black. Lisa heard something first; mothers sleep lightly when they have little ones. There was barking, some other noises. The family has several dogs, a couple sled dogs chained in the stunted spruce just beyond their front yard and their Great Pyrenees, which runs free and protects the place.
“In the last twenty years there have been more people killed by dogs than bears in Alaska,” Ted mentioned to me matter-of-factly in the truck on the way there.
The road we drove down was modern, straight and smooth, with wide shoulders. It comfortably carried thousands of tourists and locals year-round. It appeared devoid of risk, almost boring. White spruce dotted the hillsides and the gently rolling land alongside, which had occasional muskeg swamps carpeted in golden grass. They looked like little pastures; they attracted the moose.
Ted carried in a padded case a bolt-action .338 Winchester magnum rifle with open iron sights. Many would think this gun would not be enough to stop a brown bear. He told me about the other sow in the area about which he has gotten complaints. He said her territory overlapped with that of the bad-behaving sow.
“I wonder, was this shooting due to this extremely dangerous sow, a sow that had been causing real problems for years, but always escaped,” Ted said, trying to plan what our actions would be when we arrived at the site. “Will she ever cross the line from killing dogs, chickens, and goats and savaging property to destroying human life?” We were now just past Mile 100.
When the good sow entered human territory, she normally didn’t come out of the brush, he told me. She stayed hidden, making loud blowing and woofing sounds, trying to call her cubs away from people’s dogs, chickens, rabbits, and smokehouses. Ted said that she tried to teach her cubs that raiding human settlements is dangerous. This sow understood that her cubs could be killed if they began attacking someone’s dogs or killing someone’s goats. We drove by a homestead with a corral made of hand-cut spruce poles in front, holding a couple horses.
Ted said he had been dealing with the dangerous sow for years, cleaning up her attacks, her messes, but he’d never been able to trap and move her. He had never even seen her, he just knew her by her distinctive behavior and territory. She goes right into people’s yards; she roars, letting everyone around know she is afraid of nothing, she is supreme to all living creatures and seemingly unafraid of their biggest, baddest bullets. Naturally, she scares the hell out of people and doesn’t seem to care that her act is life-threatening.
“She is teaching her cubs the worst possible behavior,” Ted said, sincerely concerned. “Larry said they saw a bear running away from the house, across the road, but it was still dark and it could have been an older cub.”
Brown bear sows and their cubs on the Kenai Peninsula have home ranges of three hundred to four hundred square miles, males some five hundred to six hundred square miles. Keep in mind, Rhode Island is only 1,212 square miles. Ted clearly struggles with issues of problem bears and his official response. There had been shots fired. If she was severely wounded after her latest confrontation with humans, would they find her? What if she lived, what if next time she broke into someone’s cabin and killed a child or maimed an adult? There would be an intense public outcry, and if the public then found out that she had been terrorizing people for years, what would they say? Ted and his associates had to think about all of this. They usually made great efforts not to kill bears. They trapped problem animals, moved them a hundred miles away. Often of course, the bears came right back; as old and smart as this sow was, she would probably be too smart to enter a trap.
Two brown bears after some easy pickings. PHOTO BY PETER JENKINS
When their dogs had first started barking, Lisa hadn’t thought much of anything. It could have been a slow-moving porcupine just out of reach of the dogs, or a moose browsing on the hillside. A lynx might have killed a snowshoe hare in sight of the dogs. But then Lisa heard the barking become more pronounced, more agitated, higher pitched, faster, until it was incessant. She surely hoped the dogs would stop or slow as they usually do after the animal passes from view. Surely she hoped they would stop, just like any mother with five small children yearning for more sleep, rest, and peace.
But these dogs were not barking out of curiosity, or plain intrigue, nor were they stopping or slowing down. Whatever was bothering them was getting closer, more threatening, more terrifying. Their Great Pyrenees, who was loose, was normally fearless. Lisa went through the possibilities. This time of the year it was not likely to be a moose, unless maybe a late calf had somehow got scared and wandered in between the dogs. A mother moose could kill all the chained dogs, maim them; it would be a disaster. And there was too much intensity in the barking for it to be a porcupine waddling on its self-involved way. Stray dogs almost never came out this far; stray dogs in the Alaska wilds are like Snickers bars sitting on a fourth-grader’s desk—just waiting to be eaten. Wolves, coyotes, bears, love to eat them, so they are almost never a problem.
It just about had to be a major predator out in Lisa and Brian’s yard. If it was black bears or brown bears, this was a bad time of the year for them because the salmon were not spawning in the creeks yet and therefore they would go hungry. If it was a brown bear sow with twin two-and-a-half-year-olds outside, that would be about the worst possible thing. The two-and-a-half-year-olds are the equivalents of human teenagers, capable of real damage, not as big as an adult but still strong enough to kill a human or anything else. They are fearless, the bear version of “ten feet tall and bulletproof.” An old male could be a big problem, his teeth worn, his metabolism unable to convert meat and protein to muscle the way it used to, hungry, smelling dog food, or better yet, tasty dog. It could be the sow with year-and-a-half-old cubs. These young cubs, maybe 140 pounds if it was a male, 120 if it was a female, were more curious and rambunctious than dangerous, although if cornered, they could certainly kill a person.
A 110-pound black bear cub had recently killed a grown woman in the Smoky Mountains. In this case, though, Ted said the “good” sow normally ended up getting a cub out of a jam with aggressive sled dogs. She was smart enough to realize that to keep her cubs and herself alive, they needed to avoid being too threatening to humans and their property.
What Lisa and Brian wanted most was for the barking to stop and for whatever was outside to go away, to leave their little clearing. They all wanted to go back to sleep and not have to bring their own conclusion to this rapidly escalating situation. It was incredible how loud it was inside. They usually lived in the deep silence that exists in few places other than Alaska. They prayed, if they were praying people, that these sounds would not wake their children. They hoped beyond hope that whatever was out there would not come any closer to their hand-hewn log cabin.
And there were other sounds that Lisa did not recognize. Finally, there was so much sound outside their log cabin that it did wake up the kids. When the noise became unbearable, they decided to call 911, and that’s what had led to our morning drive.
Reacting to the initial 911 call was Larry Lewis, forty-two, a State of Alaska wildlife technician and often Ted’s sidekick, and Alaska state trooper Jim Moen, Fish and Game Enforcement. They arrived at Mile 117 at around 3:30 A.M. Trooper Moen saw something run across the road and away from the house right as they arrived. Larry was there because Brian had fired his rifle and thought he had hit one of the bears. In Alaska, if you are being attacked or are in fear of your life, or your property is being destroyed—your dogs, your home, your boat—you can legally shoot a bear or moose. Then you must call the state, and if the animal is found dead, you must skin it and turn over the entire bear or moose to the state. These quintessentially Alaskan moments are called Defense of Property and Defense of Life Shootings. Because the hides and skulls and gallbladders and claws of bears are valuable, the shooter, regardless if the bear came within a hair of killing him, must turn over all parts of value to the state.
Larry and Trooper Moen were not going to follow a possibly wounded bear into the almost impenetrable underbrush and forest surrounding Brian and Lisa’s in the dark. Even in bright daylight these woods, thickets, head-high wild grasses, and swamps have too many hiding places.
They’d gone home, and now it was 10:30 A.M. and I was with Ted and we were to meet them and another guy where the road to Clam Gulch dead-ends into Sterling Highway between Kasilof and Ninilchik. A bunch of dog mushers, commercial fisherman, partially retired hippies, and Ed Borden live in Kasilof.
Ed, in his mid-forties, wearing his salt-and-pepper hair pulled back in a ponytail, has run the Iditarod but now supports himself by making exquisite racing sleds. He is also a seasonal employee of Fish and Game. Ted told me that Ed is an incredible craftsman and in great demand as a racing dog-sled maker. Tracking a wounded brown bear is one of the most dangerous things in the world anyone could possibly do; Ed is obviously not doing this for his state hourly wage.
Three trucks were waiting for us in the brown dirt parking lot that was our meeting place. Ed was out leaning against his.
“Ted, why am I here? I don’t want to spend my time looking for another hairy female.” Ed was rarely serious. After all, he lived in Kasilof, where Ted said poaching is considered a right, where moose season begins three days early so the locals can get their winter’s meat. The logic is “Hey, man, we’ve been feeding the things all summer from our garden, why should somebody from Anchorage or Soldotna get it before we do?”
“Peter,” Ted said, as he prepared to introduce us, “this guy Ed, here, he’s got more girlfriends than anyone I know. They all love him, and look at him.” Ed’s irreverent charm dripped off him; he was not a looker.
One of the guys said that Ed lived in a place called North Coho, an area where to buy property you needed to have “at least fifteen outstanding warrants.” It’s a place, I was told, where curvy, skinny dirt roads empty into little clearings filled with little log cabins or shacks. “There are more hidden greenhouses back there than you could imagine,” someone else said.
“Larry,” Ed asked, “what does that brown bear look like, anyway?”
It seemed a perfectly serious question for Ed to ask, since he might soon be risking his life going after her. The three looked at each other and let Larry answer for them. This group obviously knew each other well.
“She looks just like the women you date. She’s big and hairy and has a fat ass.”
“Seriously, guys, I want to have some idea what we’re looking for before I go off into the woods. I don’t make a habit of running into the woods where there are females with bullets in them.” Ed’s serious tone seemed to catch the other men off guard.
Ted responded in kind, filling the others in on the theory he’d already shared with me about the cub they’d trapped at Lyle Winters’s in 1994. He unzipped his coat as he talked, as it was warming up fast. I was as surprised as the others—what was I doing here? Certainly I hadn’t realized we were going to be tracking a potentially wounded bear through the underbrush. I thought the bear had already been shot and killed.
But we all got back into our trucks and headed south to the site of the shooting at Mile 117. Ted’s rifle had no scope. He said that he didn’t use a scope because if there was to be any shooting, it would be at close range. The action would be fast and furious, and there would not be enough time for looking into a scope. He would more than likely have to shoot instinctively if we were charged or surprised.
The road was straight; it basically followed the west side of the peninsula, keeping away from the knife-sharp mountains and massive blue glaciers thirty or forty miles to the east, over where I lived. We could see them looming over us because the land between here and there was flat. The brown bears and the moose preferred this flatter country, which opened up periodically, usually around swamps and wetlands. Elsewhere, the peninsula was deeply forested with rivers, ponds, and creeks. Ted had told me that he and his fellow biologists and technicians felt there were somewhere between 250 and 300 brown bears on the peninsula and 2,500 to 3,000 black bears.
While we drove, Ted told me about another wildlife-disturbance call he’d gotten about two weeks before from a distraught woman. He felt that her problem could have been caused by this same bear. She told Ted that a huge bear was harassing her dogs, and that all the dogs had returned to the house but one, which was killed. Brown bears often come into a yard of chained-up sled dogs and eat some. But if the dogs are running free, it is rare for a bear to catch them.
Still, something perplexed Ted about this lady’s dead dog. When Ted saw no marks on the dog, no blood, no bone breaks, he asked the woman how old the dog was. She told him that the dog was fourteen. Utilizing all of his twenty-plus years of experience, Ted felt every inch of the body to feel for internal injuries, hematomas like those made from moose kicks, and he felt nothing. Not one hair was out of place. Ted noticed when he’d arrived that the other dogs appeared incredibly happy to see him and came quickly out of the shed where they were hiding.
“You know,” Ted had suggested to the understandably distraught woman, “I think it is possible that your dog was scared to death. Its old heart just couldn’t take it.” I was hoping my heart could take it if we had a confrontation of our own.
“After we check out what has happened at Mile 117, I will tell you if I think it is okay for you to track the bear with us, all right?” he said to me.
“Sure,” I said. A dog scared to death?!
“In the last thirty years,” Ted volunteered, answering a question I had not wanted to ask until we were done with this investigation, “only three people have been killed by brown bear attacks on the Kenai Peninsula and two of these have been in the last couple years. One was on February eighth, 1998, the other May twenty-fifth, 1999, just a few weeks ago. I knew the guy who died a couple weeks ago pretty well. Now, he was as experienced in the woods and with bears as you get around here. Both men
were killed principally by the terrible bites they sustained to the head. A bear knows your head is a place of great vulnerability, and when they stand over you and bend down, it is the first place they bite.” Ted stopped.
I let the conversation die—I mean, I didn’t pursue any more details. I didn’t want to hear anything else.
AT BRIAN AND LISA’S
Ted slowed down, put on his blinker, and took a slow left into a rough, partially eroded dirt driveway leading to where Brian and Lisa, their five small children, dogs, horses, and cats lived. Brian and Lisa had hacked out a clearing in the Alaskan jungle. Their house was two log cabins that were put together, the logs probably cut off their land. One cabin was newer, built attached to the other. The edges of the logs were not perfectly flat; I wondered how they kept it warm. The ragtag assortment of different-sized outbuildings included one with a fenced-in pen to keep their chickens and rabbits separated from their dogs and bobtailed cats. They also kept a horse or two in a rough-hewn corral. They must have been able to hear just about any sound made outside; no human neighbors were anywhere in sight.
“See that corral?” Ted pointed at it, beyond the house and to our left. “Several years ago I got a call from here. They thought there might have been a Sasquatch out here. Hey, this guy is a descendant of a homesteader; they don’t get worried about much. Brian has a sound mind, he doesn’t imagine footprints or roaring in the woods.”