Beyond the Bear (10 page)

“Yeah, me too. I was pretty much convinced he wasn’t interested so I’m kind of surprised. I guess we’ll just have to see what happens.”

The following night, while Brian’s plane was still in the air, Julia was home watching the ten o’clock evening news. One of the top stories was about a bear mauling at the Russian River.

“The victim has been identified as twenty-five-year-old Dan Bigley . . .”

“What!” Julia stiffened and leaned in to the TV. That couldn’t be right.

“According to state troopers, the Girdwood man had been fishing with friends when . . .”

Julia slumped into her couch and chewed on the inside of her cheek as the news sank in. Amber must be going through hell right now, she thought. But what if she didn’t know? It was possible. Having her find out through the newspaper or waking up to radio coverage would be brutal. She did not want to be the one to tell her, but she felt she had to call. If Amber did know, at least she could offer to be there for her.

She dialed Amber’s house. The phone rang and rang and rang. She hung up. She paced. She tried again. And again and again. With each failed call it became harder to sit still. Finally around eleven, Amber picked up. Julia took a deep breath.

“Hey, Amber, it’s Julia. I’m just calling to see if you’re okay.”

“I’m fine, why?”

Oh god, she doesn’t know.
Julia closed her eyes and mustered up her courage. “You did hear about Dan, didn’t you?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh, Amber, you’d better sit down.” She told her what she’d heard on the news. When she finished, there was silence on the other end of the phone.

“They said he’s at Providence. I’m sure they could tell you more about what’s going on.”

“I’ve gotta go,” Amber said, and hung up the phone.

Amber’s roommate, Lindsay Pickrell, who’d been rooting for Amber and I to get together since the night of the beluga convergence, walked in about then. She’d known Amber since college, and had never seen her unglued. Amber was talking gibberish, something about a bear. She was walking in circles around the kitchen, wringing the bottom of her shirt in her hands.

“I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do.”

Amber got Bekkie on the phone and told her what had happened.

“I am freaking out, Bekkie. I have no idea what to do. Should I go to the hospital? Should I wait until tomorrow? Dan’s family is probably there and they don’t know me from Adam. I’m not sure of my place. I feel like I need to go, but it’s so late I doubt they’d let me see him. But I can’t just sit here. What should I do?”

“Hang up, get in your truck, and go,” Bekkie said. “Now.”

Amber arrived around midnight, not long after my brother. He had no idea who she was, but to show up that late she was obviously someone who cared a lot about me. He gave permission for her to see me. She stood outside my room a moment and stared at me through glass. Her face drained, she walked stiffly inside and gripped the side rail of my bed with both hands. She looked down at a face she no longer recognized. Her mouth opened but no words came out. She closed her eyes and hung her head. She had no frame of reference for this. Nobody did.

Over the next day or two, as I clung to life, the rest of my family arrived from the Lower 48. My biological father, Steve, showed up first. Returning from a cafeteria break, Brian was taken aback when he saw him waiting outside the ICU. Steve rose to his feet the moment he saw him, and wrapped him in a hug.

“Thank you so much for coming,” Brian said.

“There’s no way I could have stayed away.”

My mom and stepdad arrived soon after. Our mother never had anything but vitriolic things to say about my father, so Brian braced himself for a scene. My three parents encountered each other in the ICU hallway. They all hugged.

Next to arrive were two friends living in Oregon who were like brothers to me: a Prescott College buddy, Chris Van Ness, and my best friend, Jay McCollum.

I’d met Chris my first day at Prescott during an orientation backpacking trip into the Grand Canyon, a trip that nearly made felons out of us. Poking around during a lunch break, Chris and I came upon some old rusty cans scattered about and wondered who would do such a thing. Being fine stewards of the land, we picked them up and tossed them into our packs with the intention of hauling them out to the nearest trash bin. We carried them several miles to the Bright Angel Campground, where we showed the ranger on duty the good deed we’d done, and he informed us that our rusty cans were mining artifacts and that by taking them, we’d committed a felony. He’d just begun writing us up when a medical emergency arose in the campground. He reprioritized, let us off the hook with a stiff warning, and made arrangements for our “artifacts” to be put back where we’d found them.

Chris and I had just reconnected at the High Sierra Music Festival, where my favorite guitarist, Steve Kimock, played an extraordinary set that didn’t wrap up until nearly sunrise. Still,
neither of us had been ready to call it a night. After the roadies had shut down the stage, Chris and I had hiked to the top of a hillside overlooking the festival, where we watched the sunrise and waxed philosophical on the meaning of life.

He was watering his garden when he got the call. Working as a groundskeeper at the time, he scrambled to get someone to cover for him, and got himself on a plane.

Jay and I went further
back, back to the days my family lived in Cincinnati, headquarters for Procter & Gamble, which is where my stepdad’s job took us upon returning from Malaysia. Jay and I met after I graduated from high school, which I pulled off a year early, and he was fresh out of the Army. We raised a little hell, did a lot of environmental work, and spent countless hours dreaming up ways to save the world. Reveling in our newfound freedoms, we’d explored philosophy, spirituality, and wild abandon together. We became brothers at a time when we were invincible and prone to spontaneous acts of stupidity, like rolling down a hill in sleeping bags in the dark.

One of our dumbest moves was nearly a reenactment of the final scene in
Thelma and Louise.
We were hanging out in the Red River Gorge in Kentucky’s Daniel Boone National Forest when we leapt to our feet and started running, just running for no particular reason, hollering “Waa-hoo!” as we charged down a trail. Then we veered off-trail, and started down a steep hillside, hooting and hollering and paying zero attention as we ran full-tilt toward a cliff. Running side by side, we suddenly realized the error of our ways. We dropped down, skidding on our butts and the soles of our shoes, barely stopping in time to avoid plunging over the edge. We didn’t stop to think about what almost happened, but immediately popped up and started running in the opposite direction hooting and hollering even more. The only explanation I can offer is to quote John Muir, “We must risk our lives to save them,” although I doubt he had this kind of nonsense in mind.

As soon as Jay heard what had happened in Alaska, he put his massage therapy practice in downtown Portland on hold and flew up to be with me.

Once my inner circle had assembled, Dr. Kallman called a meeting. Down a hallway in the ICU, in a windowless conference room flooded with incandescent light, Kallman said what no one wanted to hear.

“There’s not a lot we can do right now. We need to let the swelling come down before we can go back in and put him back together.”

“You mean you haven’t already done that?”

“If you enclose a swelling brain in a confined space, you risk brain damage,” he explained. “Tissue ultimately loses blood flow and dies. So first we take care of the skin. We try to cover all the bone, putting vascularized tissue over it, to keep as much of it alive as possible. And then there’s the second stage of putting the skeleton back together.”

“When will that happen?”

“It depends on how he does this week.”

“Why the drug-induced coma?”

“With something like this, everything is kind of delicate and fragile so we like to avoid a patient thrashing around. And for obvious reasons, an injury this traumatic is very disorienting. He’s going to have pain and discomfort. We don’t mean to be cruel
,
but when we have a delicate situation like this, we typically keep the patient heavily sedated for a while. We don’t want him to jeopardize his chances of healing by banging his head against the side of the bed.”

“Do you know if there’s been any damage to the brain?”

“As far as we can tell his brain function is good—with the exception of his vision. He could move his arms and legs in the ER, and he was talking so he seems to be wired up right.”

“What about his vision?”

“I have to be honest. One of his eyes isn’t going to make it. The other has just enough connective tissue that there’s a chance it will survive. But I can tell you right now, there’s no hope for his vision. Both optic nerves were severed.”

“Are you saying he’s blind?”

“I’m terribly sorry.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“I’m afraid so.”

My mother’s eyes filled with tears. The men in the room were stiff-upper-lipped.

“Can’t the optic nerves be reattached?”

“I am not aware of any technology in the world to fix that problem.”

“Is there a possibility that could change in the future?”

“Dr. Carl Rosen is the eye expert here, and he can explain all this better than I can.”

The questions kept coming. Kallman gave what answers he could. One of his
mentors had been especially good at talking to heartbroken families. Kallman had learned from him the importance of working the word “devastating” into the conversation, of using it as many times as it takes until it sinks in that nobody on the planet has the ability to put their loved ones back the way they were before.

“Dan has a devastating injury,” he emphasized, pausing to let the word percolate. “Devastating. His wounds were very dirty. Dan was not only bitten by the bear, he was chewed. His wounds were also open to the outside world for many hours before he got here and we were able to clean him up. These factors significantly increase a patient’s risk of infection.

“The good news is he’s young, he’s in good shape. He’s got a good heart and lungs, so he’s got resources. But he could still get meningitis or some other life-ending infection. We’ve got him on antibiotics to try to prevent that, but this is a waiting game now.”

Although there was little more medical science could do for me at this stage, there were things my family and friends could do, Kallman told them. He didn’t care how conservative or close-minded certain doctors might be, they had all seen recoveries that couldn’t be explained by science.

“Let’s bring in some things that are familiar to him, to keep him connected to the world,” he said. “Bring in his favorite music, anything to keep him with us. And, if you have any kind of faith, now would be a good time to pray.”

CHAPTER 8

Armchair Quarterbacks

As I was clinging to life, the armchair quarterbacks were going
at it, quick to offer opinions about how and why I got myself mauled and what I could have done to prevent it. Among those chiming in on news websites and online sportsmen’s forums were self-proclaimed bear experts who’d never crossed paths with a bear, and supposed Alaska experts who’d never set foot in Alaska.

I should have blasted that bear with pepper spray, they wrote. I should have shot the damn thing before it had the chance to charge. I should have climbed a tree.

I barely had time for “bear charging” to register in my brain before I got slammed. A highly motivated grizzly can sprint up to thirty-five miles per hour, covering major ground not just in seconds, but split seconds. Maybe bear spray would have made a difference. But from my vantage point, even if I’d had the canister aimed at the bear with my finger on the trigger, it would have been like a fireman trying to stop a backdraft with a squirt gun.

In Scott McMillion’s book
Mark of the Grizzly,
retired researcher Barrie Gilbert, who lost an eye and half his face to a grizzly in Yellowstone National Park in 1977, best sums up this kind of second-guessing: “When you’ve been on the ground with a bear, then you tell me.”

Bear maulings are rare, even in Alaska, where if Alaska Department of Fish and Game population estimates for all three species are within the ballpark,
there’s a bear for every five residents in this state. So maulings always make big headlines. Mine was so chilling, it went out on the national wires and appeared in newspapers from Seattle to Miami. On the flight to Anchorage, my mother noticed the woman in the seat next to her reading about me in
USA Today
. She leaned over and pointed to the article: “That’s my son.” In Alaska, the headlines kept coming and people couldn’t stop talking about it.

“Did you hear? Some poor bastard on his way back from the confluence got his face ripped off by a bear.”

“They say the bear clawed out his eyes.”

“I heard he left one of his eyeballs down by the river.”

My mauling was exceptionally hard for people to take, not only because a bear had blinded some poor bastard, but because it happened not much more than a stone’s throw from the often jam-packed Grayling parking lot at one of the state’s most popular campgrounds. Armies of people go up and down that same trail day and night between May and September, somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred thousand trips a year, according to Chugach National Forest figures. My mauling might have been more understandable had the situation been, say, some clueless tourist who’d come within swiping distance of a sow and cubs to snap a picture. This attack, however, seemed so random, and random was too frightening to consider, especially for people who regularly stock their freezers at that river and have walked that same trail more times than they can count.

“He must have done something stupid,” they rationalized. “Or maybe he just
is
stupid. Since I’m not stupid, it could never happen to me.” This belief made their world seem safer.

There were so many rumors flying around. I’d thrown rocks at the bear, and that’s what set off the attack. Better yet, I’d thrown beer cans at the bear. Or I was carrying fish in my pack, so no wonder. Not only was I not carrying fish in my pack, John was carrying fish in his pack and the bear blew right by him. If carrying fish was enough to provoke a mauling, then anglers would be getting jumped by bears on a regular basis.

The anonymous, insensitive, misinformed online commentators had themselves a field day with me.

“I heard this a.m. that the attack occurred because the victim’s dog chased the bear, then, of course, reversed itself and came back.”

“Well, this actually sounds like one of those rare and unusual cases where they had plenty of warning that the bear was going to go ‘off.’ They watched it run up and down and work itself into a frenzy.”

“Just like some people, the sow went postal.”

“People want so much to be ‘one with nature’ that they don’t understand what a wild animal can do to a human being if it gets in its way.”

“I remember a day when a cute yuppie couple and their doggie went on a little canoe ride in Florida. Cute little doggie jumped out of the canoe and was immediately chowed by a big ol’ gator. . . . The guy actually dove in and tried to get the doggie back, he had the claw marks to prove it. . . . This bear situation sounds similar.”

All the misinformation, judgment, and self-righteousness was deeply upsetting to my family, and convinced them not to grant interviews to the press. They could have set some facts straight, but they were too distraught to engage and didn’t see any good coming of it.

It didn’t take long for the debate over what I had done to deserve this to morph into a gun battle.

“He should have been better prepared,” someone posted. By “better prepared” I can only assume the person who posted that thought I should have been carrying a firearm. The closest I had to weaponry was a pair of pliers and a fillet knife. But is packing heat
the best way to go in bear country?

“Yes and no, maybe and sometimes, for some people and not for others,” writes the Canadian expert on bear behavior, Dr. Stephen Herrero, author of
Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance
, and considered the leading authority on the topic. Firearms can give people a false sense of security, maybe even make them less alert for signs that bears are near. And there’s a big difference between packing a firearm and being proficient at using it.

“To kill a charging grizzly bear in order to defend yourself, you must be capable of shooting to kill an object hurtling at you, perhaps through dense brush, at speeds of up to forty-four feet
per second,” Herrero writes. “If you aren’t expert enough to do this, then you may be better off without a firearm.”

That would be me, better off without a firearm. Had I been carrying one, I would have been as likely to shoot John as the bear. But Alaskans love their guns, and so online discussions degenerated into the “knuckleheads” versus the “idiots” squabbling over whose firearm was bigger and badder for putting down a charging bear. A snub-nose S&W 629? A WWG Copilot 457? A twelve-gauge shotgun with three-inch magnum slugs? Clearly manhood was at stake.

“I’ve hunted bear many times and am well aware of how to kill one, having killed several,” one poster boasted.

“This is
not
a urinating contest,” someone finally pointed out.

Lost in all this chest-beating was me. The backcountry-wandering, ski-bumming, river-running fishing junkie who was never going to see another sunset, the newly in love guy who’d been in such high spirits about the way his life was going, about the only thing that could have cranked up his happy meter would have been the sudden ability to fly. Lost in all the bickering was that if I pulled through, I would emerge from a coma into a world of pain, loss, and darkness.

One who understood the blame-the-victim mentality better than most was Craig Medred, longtime outdoor writer for the
Anchorage Daily News
. He understood because he’d gotten a piece of that action himself after being mauled by a grizzly sow while moose hunting alone in 1992. Here was a fully armed, seasoned hunter with more than twenty-five years of experience with firearms who was so confused about exactly what he should do in the heat of the moment that by the time he heard the pounding of the sow’s feet and decided he had to shoot, it was too late. In the subsequent confusion, he missed his first shot. Before he could get off another, the bear had the scope of his .454-caliber Casull in her teeth, with the barrel perpendicular to her mouth. The impact knocked Medred over, leaving tooth marks on the gun’s scope and an S-shaped claw wound where she stepped on his face while bowling him over. Somehow he managed to hang onto the gun. He still had it in his hand when she grabbed him by the leg.

His first shot had clean missed this enormous moving target an arm’s length away. He did better with his second. With the sow’s teeth clamped down on his right leg just above the ankle, he pointed the gun again.
Jesus, don’t shoot yourself in the foot
. He pulled the trigger.

The 260-grain slug stopped the attack. The bear lay two feet from his right foot, horribly wounded. When he went to put her out of her misery, he discovered his gun had jammed. The bear got up, fell, rolled downhill away from him, got up again, rolled further away, got up again, and staggered off into the brush presumably to die. Medred was grateful to be alive, but sick about having to shoot a mother bear, and even sicker about leaving her wounded. And did he ever catch hell for it, both online and through letters to the editor. For hunting alone. For his choice of weapon. For getting himself mauled by a bear. For surviving, as some seemed to be saying.

Eleven years later, Medred, along with Doug O’Harra, covered the story of my mauling, its aftermath, and the impact it had on management practices along the Russian River, where Medred himself had fished for twenty-some
years. He’d heard the rumors and read the comments about me, and wrote a column taking on this blame-the-victim mentality.

“When bears attack, people want a reason for it,” he wrote. “In our comfortable and protected society, bad things like this just aren’t supposed to happen to good people. . . . In the absence of explanations, people start making them up. . . . True outdoor accidents—as opposed to bad decision-making—are rare. But this appears to be one of them.”

As details of my mauling and dramatic rescue unfolded in the news, it became obvious something had to be done about the Russian River problem. The day after my mauling, for the first time in Alaska history, state and federal officials ordered access to the river, its trails, and banks, closed by emergency order to nighttime fishing in the vicinity of The Sanctuary, and it remained closed from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. for more than a month. Many were happy to comply, while others griped considerably, seeing it as misguided, as doing nothing to solve the bear-people problem once and for all, as surrendering the river to the bears.

Medred was among those who thought the nighttime closure was not the answer: “Who’s the lucky person who gets to kick the bears out at 6 a.m.?” he wrote.

Until a better, long-term solution could be worked out among the various agencies involved, the intention was to keep the two species from bumping into each other along the river in the dark. Maulings—even if a mother bear is just protecting her cubs—tend to stir up anti-bear hysteria. With so many nerves on edge after my mauling, it seemed likely that more people were going to be packing firearms whether they were proficient at using them or not. If bullets were going to fly, far better to be shooting in the daylight than in the dark.

No one can say for certain exactly what happened that night, what it was that set off the sow Jaha saw running down the river not long before he heard my screams, or whether that was even the same bear that got me. There were plenty of potential suspects out there.

“The US Fish and Wildlife Service advised there are approximately fourteen bears on the Kenai River (in the confluence area) at this time,” read the trooper report regarding my mauling. “Also, about three sows with cubs in the immediate area of the Russian River Campground.”

No one can say for certain why of all the encounters between people and bears that end in mutual agreement to go separate ways, this one went so wrong so fast. The only thing that makes any sense to me is that the shaking in the alders—the shaking that startled us as John and I were retreating from the bear at the bottom of the stairs—was made by that sow’s cubs. Although neither of us saw any cubs, Jaha saw cubs before and after the mauling.

There’s more than one theory, more than one version of the various stories that converged at that spot by the river where the bear left me to die. That’s often the case when adrenaline and fear shift time, space, and perception into surreal alternate dimensions.

Those closest to ground zero, John and Jaha, have their version. They believed those “We ain’t scared of no bears” guys that Jaha had tried to warn about the sketchy sow he’d seen running down the river did, in fact, bump into her. Or maybe they ran into her cubs, little things about the size of half-grown golden retrievers. They believe those guys threw beer cans at the bear, or her cubs, to shoo them off. That would explain the dented cans John and I found strewn on the ground after passing them along the trail. It doesn’t explain why these guys gave us the cold shoulder. It makes no sense at all that they wouldn’t have mentioned such an encounter, that they wouldn’t have warned us. Maybe they were too proud. Maybe they were unwilling to let on that they’d been unnerved. Maybe it didn’t happen that way at all. All of this is speculation. But John and Jaha are convinced that’s what happened, that throwing beer cans pissed off an already stressed-out mother bear, separating her from her cubs. If what they believe is true, then John and I walked between them and right into a trap.

Once all the witnesses had been interviewed, officials consulted, and reports filed, the reason I got mauled became clear: I was unlucky. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong bear.