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Bill Williams noticed that there was no sound in the
woods--no bird calls, no squirrel chirring. He was
lying on his stomach in a rivulet of snowmelt coming out
of the hills, the cold water seeping into his shirt.
Water penetrated his pants, wet his thighs, and made him
shiver, but he didn’t move.
Upwind and 40 yards away on the side of a
hill a smallish black bear was feeding in a blueberry
patch, and with a bite down and a swing of its head it
stripped everything into its mouth. The sound of tearing
leaves and brush was close enough for Bill to hear it.
He’d smelled the bear for some time, tracking it into
the breeze drifting down from the hills, the smell like
rotting salmon on the stream banks.
It was not a big bear. He had seen others that were
much bigger in the valley across the river from Arctic
Village.
Lying partway into the trail with the rifle
at his shoulder, he had a clear view of the bear’s
hindquarters. It had taken him some time to get to that
position but it had not been hard work--just slow,
tedious, and wet. When he had seen bears running, they
went so fast that it hadn’t occurred to him how
deliberately they moved when they were feeding. He
could wait as he had been taught to wait. If his father
were alive he would be proud to see him wait to take the
animal with one well-placed shot, no big damage to meat
or hide.
As his Dad had told him so many times, the
trick was to sneak up on the bear from down wind. If
luck was with the hunter, all he would see was the
bear’s hindquarters until the final moment. Done right,
it would be a clean kill. Bill would be able to tan the
hide and put it beneath his bedclothes to hold out the
cold, or give it to Ilene.
No doubt the bear had been searching the
stream banks for salmon and the sunny slopes for
ripening berry patches. This diet, he guessed, was what
made the bear’s coat shine as if it had been oiled.
But there was something else going on. It
was so quiet he thought for a moment he had gone deaf.
He opened his mouth and popped his ears, straining to
pick up a sound. He could feel his heart pumping, the
rhythmic beat like a drum. Something was wrong.
The bear stopped chewing and lifted its
head. It turned to the right, jabbed its nose in the
air and sniffed. Then it lifted a front leg and swung
to the left. Muscles bunched, ears twitching, it sensed
something and froze. In the next instant the bear
whirled around and rose up on its hind legs, jaws open,
claws raking the air. The roar sprang from deep in its
throat, passing over Bill with a vibration and volume
that hurt his ears.
He gasped. His mind registered the picture
the bear offered, but a louder roar from behind him
purged any thoughts of taking a shot.
With the roar he felt the ground vibrate
beneath him and turned his head in time to see a huge
grizzly fill his field of vision. The bear had to be
ten feet and at least 800 pounds, and it didn’t see him
or smell him. What it saw and smelled was the black
bear, on which it focused with its pig-like eyes.
In seconds the grizzly moved from behind
Bill, stepped on his leg, sprinted down the trail, and
with a powerful swing of his foreleg knocked the small
bear over. The bawling and roaring of the two animals
deafened Bill, who jammed his hands over his ears as
panic raised a sour taste in the back of his mouth. He
swallowed but it wouldn’t go away. He saw chunks of peat
moss flung into the air and a cloud of dust rising.
Through it all was the smell--a sour, dead, fish-stinky
odor that stuck in his nostrils. Pieces of plants, small
rocks, and earth were dropping like rain.
The black bear, forced on its back, was
raking the grizzly with its claws and teeth while being
pushed and pounded into the small stream. The grizzly
had it by the throat and was shaking it like a dog
shakes a rabbit. In seconds the battle was over, the
grizzly looking down at the still form between its front
legs, its nose sniffing for any remaining life.
Suddenly everything was still. Bill took his hands from
his ears as the peat dust settled on the ground and
water bubbled around the lifeless form partially
blocking its flow.
The pain in Bill’s leg had not yet
started--the leg was numb. Whether it was cut or broken
he didn’t know. But he was able to stand on it, and
clutching the rifle in his right hand he half ran, half
hobbled down the trail he had come up from the river.
Funny feeling--like running on a wooden leg.
He burst through an alder patch, where
low-lying limbs reached for his feet, Devil’s-club
thorns pierced his pants and stuck in his thighs. He
made no attempt to dodge them but wished he’d cut them
down on his way up the trail.
The back of his neck began to itch. He
imagined the bear coming on behind him faster than he
could run and his heart thudded in his chest. He wanted
to look back but knew he could not.
Everything he knew about bears screamed at
him to climb a tree, but his feet and legs moved
unattached to his mind and even as he told himself to
climb, he couldn’t make himself do it. He would have to
stop to climb a tree, and if the bear was close, it
would get him before he got high enough to be out of its
reach.
His balance was threatened by his feet
wind-milling out of control while a picture formed in
his mind of him falling on his face, heart pounding,
chest heaving, the bear standing over him. Miraculously
his feet missed every root, every hole.
As he cleared the brush line, the bank of
the river was in front of him. He dropped the rifle,
planted one foot in the sand, and launched himself into
the river, legs churning, arms thrashing, head back,
gulping air as he crashed through the surface, kicking
hard under water.
Underneath, water bubbled past his ears. He
held his breath and swam against the current. The water
tugged at his clothes, pulled him downstream, slowed him
down. He broke out of the water with his eyes shut
tight, the air exploding from his lungs like a breaching
whale.
He had no idea how far he was from the
bank. He gulped air and was ready to dive again when he
heard laughter. He tried to stand, tripped and fell,
then tumbled further downstream until his feet found a
shallow place and he stood up and shook the hair from
his eyes. He cast a quick glance at the bank he had
just left, then turned in the direction of the laughter.
Herb Chulpach and his uncle Charlie stood on
the bank, laughing. They pointed at the bear pacing
back and forth upstream from the trail, sniffing the
rifle. It turned and disappeared into the brush. Bill
took a huge breath, then waded to the opposite bank and
sat down, his head in his hands.
Herb and Charlie came over to him. They
didn’t speak but glanced at each other. The skin around
Herb’s mouth puckered up and then relaxed, and it looked
to Bill like he was laughing inside. Bill didn’t look
at Charlie.
"Fast bear," Charlie said.
Herb snickered. The old man looked straight
ahead as if he were plotting where the bear would come
out next.
"Were you teaching the bear to dance?”
Charlie asked.
Bill sighed. "I was hunting the bear." He
wrung out his shirt.
"Hunting." Charlie nodded. "Pack on the
ground. Gun on the ground. Feet in the air."
Herb pursed his lips. Both hands clasped
around one knee, he rocked back and forth, a smile on
his face.
"Just as I was getting ready to shoot the
black bear, this grizzly made a fight with it. On its
way, it stepped on my leg."
Charlie nodded, the smile fixed on his
face. "Were they both male bears?"
"I didn’t examine their privates." He held
the shirt up and shook it.
"Maybe you got in the middle of their house
and that old bear figured you were trespassing."
Charlie snorted little bursts of air out of his hairy
nostrils while Herb continued to rock back and forth.
What a pair.
“Did it occur to you that I could have been
killed?”
He took off his boot and rolled up the pants
to look at the place where the bear had stepped on him.
The claw imprints were red in the center, blue-black in
between, with blood trickling out of each imprint.
Charlie put his hand on the pants and pressed them down
so he could see better. He looked at the muscle that
was beginning to swell, touched the claw marks with his
fingers, then looked at Bill.
“You’re lucky,” he said. “To be between two
bears and get some bad meat on your leg and a cut or
two. You’re dumb--but lucky.”
Herb rolled up on his feet in that squat he
always used on wet ground and appraised Bill’s leg.
Head tilted back, eyes squinting, making small sounds
with his mouth. At last done with the examination, he
looked Bill in the eye, nodded his head several times,
and sat back down on the bank.
The wet socks clung to Bill’s feet and he
had to work to get the boots back on, his leg pulsing
and pounding now that the numbness was wearing off. He
lifted the leg a few times. It didn’t seem broken.
Past injuries had taught him that the real pain would
come tonight or tomorrow, maybe not for two days.
His rifle and pack were on the other bank.
He thought about what Herb would tell Ilene and Verda at
dinner tonight, about his father and Carl and the way
they had killed bear. And then he said “To hell with
it,” got up and sloshed back into the river, picking the
shallow spots to walk over, swimming the deeper channel
to the far bank.
He opened the rifle bolt, removed the
cartridge, and blew down the barrel, dislodging the dirt
jammed in it. He allowed himself a quick glance at the
bear’s tracks on the bank, then limped upriver where he
could wade across and get home. He was hungry and his
leg hurt. The three-day bear hunt had lasted three
hours.
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