Soon comes the day when it will be safe to stumble out of the house like an average American. The new snow that rims the Chugach Mountains peaks these October days is viewed by some as "termination dust." They sense the approaching winter with unease and dream as many an Alaskan miner did a hundred years ago of the warm comforts of Seattle or San Francisco or cities even farther south.
Those of us who've made a home here, those of us who cling to the land like country's aboriginal, see the snow a little differently. It remains "termination dust," but it has a different meaning.
Soon the bears will disappear from the scene for the winter.
Soon it will be fine to roam the neighborhood trails unprepared.
Soon we will feel comfortable bumbling out of the house at any hour without looking both ways for bruin.
In the New York Times, Timothy Egan laments the fears of leaving the city behind to walk with the bears in the wild American West. "It would be nice to daydream, to let the city stress evaporate with each step into the woods of autumn's first week,'' he writes. "But the Park Service has made it impossible not to fear the predator who does not fear you."
"...Imagine," Egan says, "that behind every tree lurks the swollen head and tiny eyes of the grizzly with the apt Latin name -- Ursus arctos horribilis."
Ah yes, old horribilis. She was camped out much of the summer, up the valley not far from the house, with two nearly-grown cubs almost her size. They appeared to be living on a diet of berries, but they were a meat-loving bunch. They killed an adult moose. They wasted inordinate amounts of time and energy digging for ground squirrels just for the chance to sink their teeth into flesh. We humans are flesh on the sneakers. More than one neighbor remarked these bears were "the group you don't want to run into."
A still-protective sow with over-grown adolescent cubs? I know more about them than I would like. Adolescents of all species are the same -- prone to bad judgment. Once, two or three of them followed me through a dark stand of dense spruce on Alaska's Kenai Peninsula. They were curious. I was only wanting to slip away to the forest like a ghost before their mother realized what was up.
The cubs couldn't leave it alone. They spotted me and followed.
Mom arrived in a thunder of feet. She was very close in the thick before I saw her. I was moose hunting and armed but did not want to shoot. I thought she would stop. At five feet, I realized I was wrong, fired, and somehow missed. I still do not know how. She ran over me. She stepped on my head and left a claw mark in my jaw. Then she made a fatal error. She pivoted off my face and grabbed my leg in her jaws. I shot her off my foot. For a time after I took solace in the old adage that "lightening never strikes twice."
Life among the wild
Then along came Scott MacInnes. He had been mauled by a bear as a teenager on the Kenai Peninsula in 1967.
Thirty-eight years later, in 2005, he was out for a jog on a road near his Soldotna home when he ran past a moose kill that was apparently being defended by a bear.
The bear chased MacInnes and stomped him. He eventually recovered, but the attack hit close to home. I knew some of MacInnes' family. I thought about that second attack this summer when I was out on a hike in the neighborhood and encountered the moose the neighborhood bears had killed. Taking it down in the middle of a trail was not the most neighborly act.
I had a can of bear spray in my hand. One shouldn't leave home without it, right? The spray felt grossly inadequate. Fortunately, I didn't need to use it. The bears were still in the area, but as it turned out they'd eaten enough of the moose that they were no longer defending it aggressively. The evidence of where they'd been and what they'd done made the hairs on my back stand up, but then the dog and I beat it out of there and went on about our hike.
This is what life is like in on the edge of Anchorage, Alaska.
If someone thinks it scary to enter the woods in Wyoming or Montana, they better not stray far from Anchorage's urban core. In many places only five miles out from the city center, you best look both ways before going out the door of your house. Bears have been known to chase joggers. One of them nearly killed a mountian biker on a popular trail just a few years back. There's on ongoing debate about whether one city trail along a salmon-spawning stream should be closed when bears concentrate along its banks to chase fish.
One question that gets little consideration: is it more dangerous to be among bears gathered than to encounter the wandering bear alone?
One of my neighbors had eight different bears in his yard on various occasions this summer. Another neighbor had one in his garage --not Egan's horribilis, thankfully. Just a pesky, troublesome black bear.
It opened his freezer. It stole his ice cream before leaving. Thankfully, though, it took the cheap stuff. Another neighbor had a bear in her kitchen a few years back. She pepper-sprayed it. Cleaning the cayenne pepper out of the house afterward was no easy task.
Egan talks of hiking where there are a few bears, 15-to-25 or so, per square kilometer. Alaskans live where there are a lot of bears. Bear densities here are as high as 551 per square mile. Fortunately, the latter is a Kodiak Island number. It's not that bad in Anchorage -- but still, there are a lot of bears.
I sometimes wonder how the idea of bears in the house and the garage sits with neighbors who often won't go out of the house in the summer for fear of the animals. Do they hole up in bear "panic rooms" or stand ready, round the clock? I visualize them hunkered down in the living room clinging to a .458-caliber elephant gun or bazooka. Too bad Alaska isn't a bona fide third-world country (we come close, but don't quite make it), where one might purchase on the black market a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. It would be a comfort to be packing an RPG when you're pedaling up a neighborhood trail and you encounter a grizzly huff, huff, huffing in a thicket of alders just off to the side.
This is the bear's not-so-polite way of saying, "Get your ass out of here. Now!"
I danced with one such bear in August just up the valley. Tough guy that I am, I jumped off my bike and pulled out a puny can of bear spray. I had a sense of how weatherman Al Roker might feel trying to turn back a hurricane with a household fan. I have large hands. The can of bear spray almost disappeared into them. I know the spray is supposed to work. I've seen it demonstrated. I also knew that about the last thing I want to do is try stopping a charging grizzly bear with a cloud of airborne cayenne pepper.
So I turned and ran. I know: don't run from bears. They will catch you. And they will eat you.
But I didn't really run. Flipping the bike around and pointing it downhill, I jumped on and rode as fast as I could with the pepper spray still in hand -- praying that I didn't crash and spray myself -- and wondering about the speed at which bears run. I know that biologist Will Troyer claimed he once clocked a grizzly fleeing in front of his car at 35 mph on Kodiak Island, but that's a bear running for its life. How fast would a bear run to catch something? Specifically, how fast would a bear run if all it wanted was to chomp a mountain biker's butt?
Fortunately, this bear either thought I was too fast, or it wasn't interested in my butt. It never gave chase, or I didn't see it. I admit I wasn't looking back up the trail through the alder tunnel. I was looking ahead, focused on trying not to crash, thinking about whether the bear would chase.
I know the rule says never run from a bear, but there are so many exceptions it's hard not to wonder about the rule. Almost everyone I know who's spent a long time in Alaska, including some respected wildlife biologists, has run from a bear at some point. None of them got caught. Bears might sometimes chase but they certainly don't always chase.
Why would they? Most bears appear to want little or nothing to do with humans. They're just not that into us. But we sometimes seem in a panic about them, especially those hanging on to their old habitats in the increasingly populous American West.
"There have been two deaths this year in the great mountain ecosystem that links Yellowstone and Teton parks -- awful, swift, gory encounters. Another 51 instances of bruins charging people have been reported," Egan writes. "Mortality, the randomness of death -- these things have been on my mind with news of the two deaths by bear mauling in Yellowstone, the first in that park in 25 years. And then I thought of the movie 'Grizzly Man,' about Timothy Treadwell, who felt that he and the big mammals had a relationship, of sorts. At the end of one long, uncomfortably cozy season with the brown bears of Katmai National Park, Treadwell and Amie Huguenard were partially devoured by the subjects of his camera, their corpses found by a pilot."
I spent a lot of time going back through Treadwell's life once. He was a man misled by his delusions. He invited the bears to kill him, and yet it took them more than a decade. Why? Because they are far less dangerous when we would like to believe. Some 3 to 4 million people visit Yellowstone National Park every year. There are millons more who visit nearby Grand Teton National Park. Fifty-one charges among millions of people doesn't seem like much. Only three fatalities among those 51 charges sounds like pretty good odds.
Still, it is hard not to sympathize with Egan's fears. Walking through the woods becomes something different when it must be accomplished fully alert to danger. It is nice at times to just wander aimlessly and largely unawares. That time is coming. The bears will soon be headed for bed for a nice, long winter sleep. It will be a pleasant change to be able to walk out of the house without looking both ways for bear.
Contact Craig Medred at cmedred@alaskadispatch.com