Alaska News

The spruce hen and the croquet ball

When I was 12 years old, friends and I went exploring the woods around Campbell Airstrip Road, now Bicentennial Park. The foothills of the Chugach Range rose above us toward Near Point, and Wolverine, Knoya and Tikishla peaks. My best friend Dirk asked his dad to drive us in. Andy drove a red 1947 International pickup, with a "three-on-the-tree" manual transmission and a suicide knob on the steering wheel. Some of us rode in the bed of the truck, and two of us teetered on the running boards.

Andy's smoldering Roi-Tan cigar filled the truck's cab with blue smoke as he steered between the ditches. He might have been having as much fun as we were.

Three miles up the road, we piled out of the truck to explore. I carried a weathered croquet ball, something I'd probably picked up kicking through a patch of weeds in a vacant East Anchorage lot. It felt good in my hand, the perfect size, small enough for my slim fingers to wrap around and big enough that in my mind it posed a deadly weapon. Ideas like that are important to skinny 12-year-olds walking in the woods.

Thirty feet ahead of me, a spruce hen made a wrong move, clucking on the ground beneath a spruce tree, confident in its invisibility from the cloak of its camouflage.

I chucked that croquet ball as hard as I could and the spruce hen erupted in a tornado of feathers. I ran to the spot, but the spruce hen was gone. I was grateful I'd missed, hoping the embarrassment of being grazed by something so odd as a croquet ball was the bird's only injury -- besides a few lost tail feathers.

I did not know what I would've done with the spruce hen had I killed it, or worse, wounded it, leaving it spinning in the forest duff, flapping its wings. A 12-year-old mind does not think about consequences so far in advance, not even 15 seconds in advance.

Back in the 1960s, Bicentennial Park was a military reservation and the airstrip had been an alternative landing strip for Elmendorf Air Force Base during World War II. The old road was 1 1/2 lanes wide and dove off of Tudor Road some 100 yards from where it enters now. Look closely and you can still find evidence of its military beginnings, mossed-over foxholes, tank trails and a few concrete bunker foundations. Early on, a guardhouse stood at the entrance, abandoned by the time I started exploring the park.

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We rarely saw anyone. Back then, there were no ski trails, no mountain bike trails, no groomed gravel walking trails. Sled-dog trails spidered out from Tozier Track and the Fur Rondy trail cut through the forest, but mostly it was tank trails, 12 feet wide, beaten down through the forest by tracked vehicles and jeeps on military maneuvers.

These days, I have a much better relationship with the park and its wildlife. I've been walking its trails for 45 years and try to bring a little maturity to the experience. I don't carry a croquet ball, or any other weapon other than a can of bear spray in the summer.

Last fall I was walking my dog, Oscar, down the Tour of Anchorage trail, which parallels the middle fork of Campbell Creek. Fifty feet ahead, a spruce hen sat gathering gravel until he saw me. Oscar saw it about the same time and made a run toward it that was laughable. The hen soared low and headed toward the creek, where it disappeared. I had no impulse to throw anything at it, not that my shot has improved. But the hen was better off unscathed and fully feathered, and I was guilt free.

Scott Banks is an Anchorage-based freelance writer.

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