The Moose Jaw (10 page)
Every other day, more or less, I’d take along the shotgun and pot a ptarmigan or spruce hen for dinner.
Twice I shot geese and cooked them up with rice and a packet of brown gravy mix. They were absolutely delicious, but much more than one person can eat. They were lesser Canadian geese, and they were fat and very rich. At least, nothing went to waste, as I ate the leftovers for breakfast and saved the rendered fat for treating my leather gear. When I wasn’t dining on fowl, I’d have grayling, fresh out of the creek. I’d rub them with butter, stuff them with herbs, wrap them in tin foil, and roast them on the coals of the fire. I was using the old stone fireplace for my campfires. The hearth was built up about a foot above ground level and the chimney still worked well enough to draw the smoke up and keep it out of my eyes. It was a pretty good arrangement.
Eating fish or fowl every night can get a little tiresome. There were plenty of snowshoe hares around, so I tried my hand at setting snare traps to catch one. I know it’s supposed to be easy, but I never had any luck. I had several opportunities to shoot them but, once I’d started my trapping experiment, I refused to resort to the shotgun. It was a point of honor, you see. When I couldn’t face another meal of fish or bird, I’d get into the jerky. Thank God for jerky.
As I had with my days, I fell into a comfortable routine in the evenings. I suppose “evening” doesn’t really apply in a country where the sun sets after midnight and rises again three hours later. I’ll just call it my post-dinner routine. Most nights, when I had finished eating, I’d do a good clean up of the pots, pans and dishes, and dispose of food scraps and garbage in the fire. If I kept the camp clean there was less chance of having another bear visit. Then I’d spend some time tinkering with the cabin design or working on a project like cleaning out the catch basin for the spring. After that, I’d pour myself a whiskey, fire up my pipe, and update my journal as I had promised Haywood I would do..
I tried to remember all the things I’d seen and done during the day and record them as truly and accurately and objectively as I could. I know I tend to focus more on the activities and the positive aspects of a given trip or adventure and, I’m afraid, I did the same in my Moose Jaw Journal. In fact, to be perfectly honest, I left out things I didn’t really want to share with anyone else. If I had been completely objective, I would have pointed out that it wasn’t all peaches and cream that first three weeks. The splendid solitude of the first few days gradually gave way to a mild longing for some company and, ultimately, turned to aching loneliness. As much as I detested the hassle and hubbub of civilization, I had to admit, I was, at bottom, a social animal. I liked company. I missed companionship.
Perhaps it was this loneliness that accounted for my occasional feeling that someone else was near.
Sometimes I’d feel them watching me from behind, and I’d snap my head around to catch them in the act; but there would be no one there. Other times, I’d hear what I thought was people talking, but I could never make out the words. I attributed this phenomenon to the wind, or the murmur of the waters of the creek. Twice I awoke in the night with the absolute certainty that someone was there, in the darkness of the tent with me. Both times, I got up and lit a candle, only to discover that I was alone. But, on both occasions, after blowing out the candle and returning to bed, the sense of the unseen presence remained. And, once I could smell just the slightest trace of a delicate perfume in the darkness.
Another subject I made light of in my journal was the element of danger. Aside from the bears, there were a number of ugly ways a man could meet his end alone in the Alaska wilderness. That point was driven home to me early in the second week. I was on a logging trip up at the burn and had, foolishly, gotten on the downhill side of a rather large tree I had just felled. I was shifting it with my peavey when the peavey, and my feet, slipped simultaneously and the tree rolled downhill. I found myself sitting in the mud with both legs pinned under it. I hadn’t broken any bones, but I was well and truly stuck. It took me the better part of an hour to dig and twist and squirm my way out from under the weight of the trunk. When I had finally extricated myself from beneath the big timber, it occurred to me that such a simple accident could easily spell death to a man out here alone. Alaska didn’t forgive stupid mistakes. I’d have to remember that and be more careful. Since this incident spoke volumes about my carelessness, I left it out of the journal.
Then of course, there were the bears.
More of them began showing up along the creek below camp every few days. I don’t think it was the smell of my cooking, as much as the approaching salmon runs, but by the end of the second week I had counted at least six new bears in the neighborhood. Eight if you counted the two cubs that traveled with their mother, an impressively large, cinnamon colored, grizzly sow. I, for one, counted them; one of the little bastards had nearly gotten me killed. I’d been doing my morning scouting up and down the bank, and was focused on the history lesson in the mud and not paying attention to the here-and-now and, all of a sudden, there was a bear cub in the water to my left. As soon as I registered the danger, the willows on my right exploded and a thousand pounds of hysterical motherhood came crashing out of the bush. I recorded in my journal, “It was one of those moments when you know you have to shoot or shit, or run and shit, or just stand there shitting and die. I ran. The shitting part is none of your business but, thank god, the cinnamon sow was more interested in the welfare of her cub than in catching me. So, for the time being, she let me live.” I knew Haywood would enjoy reading that. He has a sick sense of humor.
It appeared that all the new bears I saw were grizzlies. There were a few males, properly called “boars”, of various ages, and at least two sows with cubs. I didn’t know if they ran off the black bears or tolerated them on their fishing grounds, but I never saw another black bear after the grizzlies moved in. I’d done a lot of reading on the habits of the Alaska Brown Bear, or grizzly as they are commonly called, and I had read and heard a good deal of advice regarding how to get along in bear country without being torn to ribbons or eaten outright. The basic rule of thumb was to never get caught between – as in between a sow and her cub, between a bear and his food, or between a bear and escape. That pretty much covered it. If you stayed out of the between situations, you could usually act calm and non-aggressive and sort of shmooze your way out of bear trouble. On the other hand, when you did find yourself in the between situations there was really nothing you could do or say that would keep the bear from tearing you limb-from-limb. It was prudent to carry a big gun.
Of course, as the number of bears increased in a given area, so did the likelihood that, eventually, you’d find yourself between. And, with my frequent trips up to the burn and back, and my evenings of fishing on the water, the odds were tipping, more and more, in favor of another close encounter. Having said that, I did have to live, and I had a cabin to build, and I couldn’t very well just hole up in my tent and wait for the bears to go away. I’d just have to be careful and try to avoid them as much as possible. And, of course, I would tote a big gun. I decided to start carrying my .444 Marlin lever-action in addition to the .44 magnum. I didn’t really want to shoot one of these guys, but if I had to, I would.
The Marlin itself was, I suppose, the symbol of one of my rights of passage. After proving that I could kill a moose with my tiny 6mm Remington, I realized that little ego trips like that would, one day, get me killed. The guide on that trip had brought it home to me as we sat around the campfire the night I’d shot the moose. He had told me, in no uncertain terms, that danger in the Alaska bush was real, and it wasn’t to be taken lightly. I wouldn’t always be able to shoot my way out of it with my little pea shooter. A bull moose, or a grizzly, charging through heavy cover, would be the last thing I saw in this life if I didn’t grow up and get myself a sensible weapon.
He was right, of course. The Marlin was that sensible weapon. It was, to all intents and purposes, a cannon. It shot a three hundred grain ball and would stop a charging moose or grizzly in his tracks. It was, along with the .416 Rigby, the .375 Holland-and-Holland, and the .45-70 Government, one of the most devastating, close-range, big game rifles you could buy. I’d chosen it over the other three simply as a matter of practicality. The .444 would shoot any round that could be fired from a .44 magnum pistol, and, since my sidearm was a .44 magnum Ruger Blackhawk, I could use the pistol ammunition in both guns. This, of course, would never be necessary unless I ran out of proper rifle ammunition, which retained its hitting power well beyond a hundred yards. I considered that range much preferable to the “point blank” range of the Blackhawk. I hoped my targets would always endeavor to keep some distance between us.
As the salmon run approached I began watching the creek more each day. One morning I took my coffee down to the water’s edge. There were no bears in sight so I sat on a driftwood log next to the canoe and studied the stream. A grayling jumped and took an insect, and his feeding ring expanded across the glassy surface. A minute later another one rolled. I sipped my coffee and watched the rings spread across the water until they merged. I thought about the Chinook, coming up the stream. Their journey, in itself, was a wonder and a mystery. All of them, now making their way upstream would die after they spawned – every last one. It was predestined, yet on they came. What drove them? They sometimes traveled two thousand miles, braving sharks, and seals, and killer whales in the briny deep. Then, in the rivers, they’d run a gauntlet of waterfalls and bears on their mad dash to their spawning grounds. They would not eat along the way, and when they finally arrived, the bruised and battered males would fight one another to the death to win the “honor” of spawning with a female. A single female salmon could produce up to fourteen thousand eggs. Once she had deposited them in the gravel, and the male had fertilized them, they would both die, and the cycle would begin again the following spring.
That this beautiful tragedy would take place far back up in the headwaters of this very creek was a marvelous thing to ponder. From those headwaters, all the way down to the Yukon, the creek was one, continuous thing – like time itself. The salmon, now swimming upstream past Tanana, represented my future. And when they came up the Moose Jaw, to The Varmitage, they would be, simultaneously, my present and Tanana’s past. And when they fought and bred and died, up in their spawning beds, for me, they would exist only as a memory.
As I sat, lost in the depths of this philosophical train of thought, it occurred to me that a willow leaf, now falling into the creek up at the headwaters, represented my future also. It would ride the current, down the stream, and pass me tomorrow, or the next day. So, the salmon coming upstream, and the leaf coming down, were both my future – and the creek was all one. The past, the present, and the future could all exist, at the same point in time, at any given point along its course. And the lives of men and bears were nothing more than rings upon its water.
I shook my head to clear my mind. What the hell was I thinking? Maybe I’d been out here too long. The salmon would come soon, and the bears and I would kill and eat as many of them as we could. That was the future. My coffee was gone so I went back up to the cabin for another cup.
***
I would have thought, with all the bear activity in the area, that I wouldn’t see much other game. Quite the opposite was true. Moose, along with their calves, came down to the water on a daily basis and, although I knew grizzlies would take a caribou or a moose calf if the opportunity presented itself, the bears didn’t seem interested in them at this particular time. Maybe they were fasting before the forthcoming fish fest. Who knows? Whatever the reason, the order of the day seemed to be peaceful coexistence among species. That was fine with me, as the lone representative of one of the species. I wasn’t about to do anything to upset the status quo.
On the 10th of July, the first wave of Chinook came up the creek.
The bears must have sensed it coming because they began appearing all along the bank on both sides of the creek. After a quick breakfast that morning, I went back into the cache and climbed up on top where I had a pretty good view of the creek for a mile in either direction. The trees obscured some of the view, but, with my binoculars, I was able to count eleven bears on the water.
I stayed back at the cache for the better part of the morning watching them stake out their individual fishing holes. They chased one another this way and that, but their rushes and charges seemed, for the most part, to be more in sport than in earnest. There was the occasional serious confrontation, but, all things considered, they seemed to be having a good time. Just before noon the main body of fish came through and all hell broke loose. The bears entered into a no-holds-barred splashing, lunging and plunging orgy. They came up with wiggling salmon in their giant maws, and impaled them on their hook-like claws, and smashed and kicked them with their paws. Any and every method of getting salmon from the water to the gravel bar was exploited. After watching the spectacle for a few hours I ventured down closer to the creek with my camera. A couple of the bears on my side gave me a passing glance, but didn’t seem concerned or threatened by my presence. I took a few shots of them fishing and retreated back to camp.
The feeding frenzy continued for two days. Then there seemed to be a one-day lull, and then another wave of fish came up the creek and the rush was on again. I got so I could recognize a few of the bears by sight. They seemed to return to their same fishing hole each day and not stray too far up or down stream. Several of them had their own, unique, fishing technique. Some merely stood on all fours in midstream and bit at the fish as they came by. Others were more active, spending more time with their heads under water than above. One young adult male seemed to think he was an otter – he dove and swam after the salmon. I timed him as staying underwater for forty-six seconds on one dive, and he came up with a salmon in his mouth.