October 8, 2002

• In a comment to my latest blog, TheHorseYouRode asked about bears.  Indeed there are bears in our neighborhood.  Black bears are numerous and ubiquitous, and are sometimes seen even in winter if we have a warm period.  The bear trail I mentioned in that blog is used by them and by the grizzlies whose dens are up in the foothills of the Talkeetna Mountains, to get down to the river where they catch fish.

  
  

  

  
  

  This is my favorite bear picture, and the blog where I tell the story about the morning I followed this bear into the woods to take the picture, is here.

  
  

  The most exciting, harrowing bear story I’ve heard came from some neighbors who live a few miles away, up in the Caswell Lakes area.  It is a moose-and-bear story.  It started the morning they awakened to a thumping, bumping commotion in their yard.  A moose had gotten entangled in a dog’s tie-out chain.  Finding itself tethered to a tree in the front yard, the moose was in a panic, tugging and bucking and fighting the chain.

  
  

  These were part-time residents, summer people.  They didn’t own a gun.  I daresay that most if not all of the households who are here year-round have guns, at least one of which is big enough to stop a moose or discourage a bear.  Apparently, they didn’t have a cell phone either, with which to call a Fish and Game trooper to the rescue.  They watched in fascination as the moose wore itself out.

  
  

  They went on watching as a bear, a big grizzly boar known to the locals as Big Griz (in spring and fall when they are most active around here, the local bush telegraph [our gossip circuit] keeps track of the location and activities of the known bears whose territory this is), killed and started feeding on the moose.  The city couple was beseiged in their cabin for a few days, as the bear bedded down near its kill, waking and feeding at its leisure.

  
  

  When at last they decided the bear was truly gone and they could get to their car, they drove down to the lodge and told their story.  It traveled the bush telegraph rapidly, giving the rest of us cause for a sigh of relief that Big Griz was well-fed for a while.

  
  

  My other personal bear story took place the first summer after Greyfox moved here:  1992.  It was the beginning of July and we were in the process of packing for our annual trip to the Girdwood Forest Fair where I used to do readings, and had done since 1976 when I did my very first professional psychic gig there at the first annual GFF.

  
  

  This incident was all my fault, because I had left a bag of apples in a cool spot on top of the ice chest where we used to keep our perishables in warm weather, across the highway, before we moved in here and onto the power grid.  A young black bear had found the apples and was munching down on some right outside our door, our only door, which is not an uncommon feature of dwellings around here where extra doors and windows just mean more heat loss in winter.

  
  

  Doug was first to notice the bear.  It chased him back into the house after he went out and almost ran unheedingly into it.  All three of us checked it out through the windows and talked about options.

  
  

  The first remedial measure we tried was chasing it away with firecrackers.  That appeared to work; it ran away, out the driveway, and turned left on the road.  We did the usual primate twittering and hugging and sighing for stress relief, and then resumed hauling gear out to the Jimmy.

  
  

  Coming back from a trip to the car, Doug came face-to-face with the bear, which had circled around and come in through the woods on the back side of the house.  Again, he beat it to the door.  Another barrage of firecrackers sent it back into the woods, where it circled back around and came up the driveway to nose around the cooler for the apples I had grabbed and taken inside.

  
  

  We talked about what to do.  Greyfox had the .357 mag in his hand, but I advocated waiting a while to see if he wandered off.  We watched out the windows, and he did wander away, out of view of our windows.  We waited a bit longer, and then I picked up a broom for self-defense just in case and went out to see if he was truly gone.  He wasn’t.  I fended him off with the broom long enough to get up on the porch and through the door.

  
  

  I was moving from living room to kitchen, trying to catch a glimpse of the bear through a window, when I heard a shot.  Greyfox had shot it.  There was a spray of blood on my car parked beside the cooler, and a trail of drops leading into a thick bit of woods across the road.

  
  

  I called Charley and Duane, the two guys I’d called on to track and finish off the maddened moose I’d wounded when it charged me a little over a year previously.  They never found the bear, but a black garbage bear with a scar on its flank has been seen robbing trash cans and rummaging in compost heaps every summer since then.

  
  

  And then there are the missing kid posters we still see in places.  Not so many on local bulletin boards any more, but sometimes in town among the mostly feminine faces of missing kids, I see that young teen or preteen boy who vanished about seven years ago.  Two professional bear trackers examined the creekbank near his house where he had been sitting to write his homework.  Their conclusion was that he had been taken by a grizzly.  His parents preferred to believe he had been snatched by a primate predator, or had staged a vanishing act and run away.

  
  

  Bear stories–got a hunnerd of ‘em.

  
  

  

  • 4:24 pm
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