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This is the first of two parts.
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Until the grizzly bear sow that ranged along the Chugach Mountain Front Range above Anchorage met a 24-year-old man from Wasilla with a shotgun, life was good. Her three cubs of the year were sleek, healthy and fat. Some of the few who saw the grizzly family mistook her young for yearlings they were so big. Mainly, though, mom and her gang of roly-poly youngsters stayed out of sight.
This is not an easy thing for a sow with three cubs on the edge of Alaska's largest city.
Bears, especially young bears, are curious animals, and the suburbia that sprawls up onto the edge of the mountains that separate the modern metropolis from the half-million acres of still wild Chugach State Park is full of attractive smells and interesting sounds. The grizzly sow and her cubs were no doubt attracted to the lures of people, but they somehow managed to stay out of trouble with their two-legged neighbors until the night the mother bear got too close to civilization and ended up shot dead.
"I'm sure people had seen her before,'' said Jessy Coltrane, area biologist for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. But "she was doing a good job. I'd had no calls about problems.''
Or at least no calls until a homeowner in Bear Valley, a high basin between the drainages of Rabbit and Potter creeks, called to report three, yearling bears hanging around the neighborhood looking for food and generally getting into a trouble.
The yearlings, as it would turn out, were really just oversize cubs of the year lost and confused without their dead mother around to guide them. They would later become almost famous, saved by Coltrane and others and shipped off to the Detroit Zoo after being "orphaned by a poacher in Alaska,'' as the Detroit Free Press and other national media put it.
The only problem is that the poacher story is nowhere near that simple. Brian Garst, the shooter, insists he is no poacher, although he freely admits to shooting the bear. He killed the sow, he said, because in the dark he thought it was a big boar that had been tearing up the house the Wasilla resident now shares with his new wife.
"It was an accident of me shooting this sow,'' Garst said. "I made a mistake. I feel really bad for what I did.''
What exactly Garst did was shoot a fleeing bear twice in the back and kill her in what he claims was a legal defense-of-life-and-property shooting.
Alaskans will likely find themselves debating this October killing at length because events that came before and after the bear died are as much a part of this story as the death of the bear itself.
Where the city meets the wilderness
Bear Valley is one of Anchorage's more unique neighborhoods, a mix of older, budget-prized hideaways and some expensive new homes. Here you can find a few MacMansions with jaw-dropping views of the city below and the Aleutian Mountain Range to the west, and rundown houses with dogs living in the long-dead pickup trucks in the yard.
The valley itself was named for its main inhabitants back when the city itself was a tiny cluster of tents and the first houses far below along the shores of Knik Arm. Over time, the city grew, and the people began moving up the mountainsides. More and more of them settled in Bear Valley over the years, and there have been off-and-on problems with the animals ever since.
"We're called Bear Valley for a reason,'' said Cheri Lipps of the Bear Valley Community Council. "Black bears especially are abundant throughout. Generally people moving into the area understand that and are very tolerant... Residents who recognize (problem) situations send out an alert around the neighborhood, especially if there is a bear-(killed) moose so the hikers, joggers and kids can stay out of the area until (the carcass) is gone.''
A fair number of people like to see bears in the neighborhood. Lipps is among them.
"They walk right by us while we are in the yard,'' she said in an e-mail. "We have a handful of regulars and easily recognize a few generations. They are very curious animals and are always sticking their nose in whatever my husband is doing, although sometimes quietly sneaking up unexpectedly and giving him a quick surprise."
Peaceful as this sounds, Lipps admits it is not a perfect world. There are, she said, "a few idiots who leave out trash or (have) bear-delicious pets running amok, ie. chickens loose, not in a pen, etc.''
Coltrane, the state wildlife biologist, seconds the chicken problem as one might call it, but it's not just chickens. There's dog food, which is about the tastiest thing next to salmon that most bears ever encounter. There's also livestock, which to a bear can look like little more than small and incompetent moose waiting to become lunch.
And lastly, as was the case with Garst, there is actual moose meat, a natural bear food, cut up and left in the yard just waiting for a bear to feast on it. The moose meat in Garst's yard must have looked like carrion nirvana to the mama grizzly. She had a leg of moose in her mouth and was running back to her cubs when Garst shot her.
How to bait a bear
"One of our neighbors was out hunting,'' Garst said by way of explaining the moose meat in the yard.
Moose are big animals. A mature bull can weigh 1,000 pounds. The neighborly hunter ended up with more moose meat than he could store after making his kill. With his freezer stuffed full with the best cuts of meat, he called Garst. Garst remembers the man saying there was free meat to be had, and "if you want it, come and get it.''
Garst went and got it. There was a whole rib cage, he said, and two rear legs with some meat still left on them. Garst was butchering the moose's rib cage in his wife's home when the sow grizzly showed up. The two moose legs had been left out in the yard, he said, because there wasn't room for them in the kitchen. When Garst heard a commotion outside, he grabbed his father-in-law's shotgun and went to investigate. Man and bear met face-to-face over a moose leg.
"It was about midnight,'' Garst said. The night was dark. "I didn't see the cubs at all,'' he said. The bear was very close in the lights of the house.
"I could almost touch her nose,'' Garst said. "She bent down to my foot to grab a (moose) bone.''
With that prize in her mouth, the sow turned and took off.
"The only thing that was running through my mind was either that I shoot it, or it's going to come back,'' Garst said. "I shot her in the butt. I shot her right in the butt twice with two, 3-inch slugs. Twice in the ass in the same hole.''
The sow didn't go far. The slugs tore through her from back to front. Garst walked across the yard to make sure she was dead. "I went out with the Maglite,'' he said, "and then I saw these three sets of eyes.''
He wondered about that, he added, but he didn't realize until 24 or 48 hours after that what he'd been looking at were the eyes of three cubs now motherless. It wasn't until later that "these little cubs started coming around,'' he said.
Read Part 2
Contact Craig Medred at craig(at)alaskadispatch.com