UYAK BAY
Kodiak Island is enormous, more than twice the size of Long Island and larger than Crete or Corsica. On maps, it sits just south of the point where the tusk formed by the Alaska Peninsula and the Aleutian Islands starts to jut out toward Asia; Kodiak looks like a puzzle piece that could be picked up and placed into the gap of Cook Inlet, to the north. I flew in from Anchorage and spent a day poking around the main town, Kodiak, which is fairly large by Alaska standards. (It has a McDonald’s and a Walmart, both of which appeared to be very popular with personnel from Kodiak’s enormous Coast Guard station.) The next morning I caught a propeller plane flight across the island to Larsen Bay, a small village near the mouth of Uyak Bay, on Kodiak’s northwest coast. The other passenger and I seemed to be afterthoughts on a cargo run; boxes filled virtually every inch of space not occupied by human flesh. The aerial view confirmed Burroughs’s verdurous raptures: Kodiak was wet and hilly, with few trees and, in late summer, little snow or ice except at the highest altitudes. Pools of water and rocky brown spots took the shapes of golf hazards; all else was fairways. This year was the third in a row on Kodiak that had qualified as warmest ever. Berries that usually appeared in late July had popped out in mid-June. Bears were gorging so much on fruit that some scientists wondered if they’d have any interest in salmon once the fish returned to spawn.
Like Harriman, I’d come to Kodiak after getting a tip that this was prime country for getting close to big brown bears—on my own terms—and had put myself in the hands of a specialist. Harry Dodge III picked me up at the tiny airport. From what I could see, the town of Larsen Bay consisted of the gravel airstrip, a cannery, a couple of sportsman’s lodges, and a small school. After a quick stop for supplies at the cannery’s sparsely stocked general store, we boarded Harry’s skiff and motored into the wide green mouth of Uyak Bay.
Harry was uniquely qualified to discuss the topic of bears on Kodiak Island. He’d worked for years as a wildlife biologist and master hunting guide and now ran a company with his wife, Brigid, offering bear treks. The service was similar to guiding hunting clients, minus the guns: Kodiak Treks tracked bears so their clients could shoot them with Nikons and Canons. He was the first outdoor guide I’d met with an MFA in creative writing.
“As far as the East Coast of the United States is concerned, the Harriman Expedition really put Kodiak and its bears on the map,” Harry said as we cruised south. Now in his early sixties, Harry had spent a year in Vietnam during the Cambodia campaign, and had a vaguely John Muir–ish beard. He tended to nod distractedly when asked a question or not respond at all, which I took to be Alaskan taciturnity until I realized he was a little hard of hearing. (You can practically hear your heartbeat during an awkward silence in Uyak Bay.) He wasn’t the type to boast about his accomplishments. It was only after he mentioned one of Harriman’s hunting guides by name that he admitted he’d written a book titled Kodiak Island and Its Bears: A History of Bear/Human Interaction on Alaska’s Kodiak Archipelago.
Before the arrival of muskets with the Russians, killing a bear was a much more serious undertaking, and not merely because a hunter’s arsenal against an animal that could weigh fifteen hundred pounds consisted mainly of sharp objects attached to sticks. “Many early cultures considered the bear as intermediary between man and the sacred powers of nature,” Harry writes in Kodiak Island. “Most ancient hunting societies observed pre-hunt traditions, such as avoiding certain activities, seclusion or abstention from sexual relations, and ceremonial sweat baths.” The Russians had little interest in bears except as a nuisance, but “after the sale of Alaska, the Americans killed everything,” Harry told me. By the time the Elder arrived, in 1899, with sea otter populations dwindling, many hunters had turned their attentions to bears.
In the decades after Harriman’s much publicized visit, Kodiak was established as the place to kill a brown bear. Hart Merriam completed his ursine taxonomy in 1918 and categorized the Kodiak bear as a subspecies, in part because of its great size. Of the twenty largest trophy bears of all time, as tallied by the Boone and Crockett Club in the 1990s, seventeen of them had been bagged on Kodiak Island. Hunting is still a major business in Kodiak; Harry estimated that at least 150 adult male bears are harvested each year, a kill that costs an out-of-state sportsman at least twenty thousand dollars, between permit, guiding fee, and expenses. Mothers and cubs are off-limits, unlike in Harriman’s day. “There are more bears here now than when I got here forty years ago,” Harry said. “They seem to be at capacity.”
For decades, Kodiak’s guiding business was in conflict with an unlikely foe. We were deep in the Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge, in what looked to be primeval forest, but Harry said that homesteading had actually been attempted in the area starting in the 1920s. “Some ranchers came here and saw all this grass and thought it would be a good place for cattle,” he said. Livestock and bears don’t mix, for obvious reasons. Several cattle ranchers pushed for the complete eradication of bears. In 1963, Alaska’s governor approved a secret program to deal with the perceived problem. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game mounted a semiautomatic rifle onto a Piper Super Cub, which patrolled for bears. When a target animal was spotted, the pilot circled above until the copilot could get a clean shot. One rancher recalled, “If a bear hid in the alders, firecrackers were dropped in the bushes and the bear would come running out.” The aerial slaughter ended a year later, but a few ranchers still raise cattle on Kodiak, which, as Harry notes in his book, with typical understatement, “has proven to be a challenging enterprise.”
Harry and Brigid own several acres on a small island in the middle of the bay—an island tucked inside a remote nook of a larger island separated from the mainland by a twenty-five-mile-wide strait. Uyak Bay is not a great place to go looking for action on a Saturday night, but it is an excellent place to go looking for bears. An estimated twenty-three hundred live in the wildlife refuge. Every year, more people come to Alaska wanting to see bears, primarily from airplanes and buses. Harry and Brigid promote a more low-impact, sustainable approach that requires a little more patience.
We slowed and pulled into a small cove. Harry jumped into the shallow water and tied up the boat. His black Lab, Loyal, chased Harry ardently until he spotted the new visitor, at which point he smothered me with paws-on-the-chest attention. A path through a rocky slope ran up from the pebbled beach, leading to a red house, around which were arranged a few outbuildings where guests slept. In the kitchen I met Brigid, who offered me a cup of coffee and introduced me to some of the other guests, all of whom were speaking French. Brigid speaks several languages, and Kodiak Treks sees a lot of business via European travel agents. She told one of the other guests that I was staying in a room à côté de la serre, which sounded extravagant but meant a small room attached to the greenhouse—cozy accommodations that most gardeners would identify as a potting shed. (The Dodges had squeezed me in during a busy week.) The setup was actually pretty close to perfect: The camp bed was comfortable, and just outside my door stood a thicket of wild salmonberry bushes, their fruit at the peak of ripeness. Everyone else had eaten so many already that no one objected when I stood and gorged myself until my fingers were stained red.
After dinner, we all piled into two boats and rode deeper into the wedge of the fjord. I went with Harry in an open aluminum boat with an outboard motor. Everyone was dressed in enough rain gear to work on a trawler. At the Kodiak airport, I’d checked the forecast in New York: ninety-eight degrees and sunny. In Uyak Bay it was fifty-five and drizzling. I asked Harry, who’d interviewed dozens of Kodiak hunting guides for his book, if he’d gleaned any time-tested techniques for staying dry. He mulled it over for a few seconds. “You just sort of get used to being wet a lot of the time,” he said.
Before long the sky cleared, revealing the high green sides of the scooped-out valley. After ten miles, we landed in a wooded area where Harry and Brigid kept their satellite camp. We sat around a big fire talking for an hour or two, most of which I didn’t comprehend. Brigid tried to explain the phrase “Who cut the cheese?” to one young Parisian, a question that not only lacked a direct analogue in French but seemed to imply negligence when performing an essential duty. We went off to sleep in our tents. Harry said not to worry about bears, so I didn’t, and slept like a stone.
Our bear hunt commenced after breakfast the next morning. We moved single file like an army patrol, starting down the beach because that was the clearest path. The tide had just gone out, and moon jellyfish littered the shore like giant contact lenses. Harry and Brigid walked in front, her tight blond ponytail providing a beacon amid our earth-toned clothing. (Bears don’t like bright colors.) They wore rubber hip waders and had the sort of lean and sinewy builds that one earns from carrying a heavy pack through hilly country for several hours each day. (They had once hiked ninety miles from near their Uyak Bay home to the town of Kodiak for a music festival, a feat I learned about only later back at their house while eating a cookie, because I happened to pick up a book of essays Harry had written.) Where Harry was reserved unless someone asked a question, Brigid was gregarious, demonstrating how to estimate the size of a bear by its paw print, pointing out otter holes and creepy ancient burial sites—one of which had a set of human teeth in it—while passing around binoculars so that everyone could see the goats on the far shore. (“Voilà, chèvres!”) Occasionally Harry would say something fascinating about bears in a low voice and Brigid would shout, “Please say that again a little louder, sweetie, so everyone can hear you.”
We filled water bottles from a fast-running stream (no purification needed this far out), crossed a mudflat and joined a bear trail leading up a hill. The tall grass had been matted down along a path about a foot wide and paved with scat. Bears did not merely shit in these woods—they asphalted them with fish bones and salmonberry seeds. The air smelled of rotting seafood, which I took as a good sign that the year’s early berry crop had not converted Kodiak’s famous omnivores into half-ton fruitarians. Brigid indicated a very large, very fresh bear bed (“This thing’s like an impact crater”) and some bits of brown fur clinging to trees adjacent to the trail. I tried to keep in mind what I’d come to think of as Harriman’s Rule: Just because you travel a long distance doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed a bear at your convenience. We parked ourselves on a slope overlooking a pond for about fifteen minutes, hoping that someone would turn up.
“What is that gun you are carrying, ’Arry?” asked Bernard, one of the two men in the French group. Harry kept a rifle lashed to his gigantic rectangular pack. From behind he looked as if he were hauling an enormous transistor radio. As usually happens in mixed-language groups in neutral territory, initial embarrassment about linguistic limitations had quickly collapsed against the human urge to communicate, and Bernard and some others spoke decent English. Combined with extravagant hand gestures that Marcel Marceau might have considered overwrought and some intermediate Spanish verbs on my part, we’d settled into a fairly effective mode of communication. Bernard was the sort of Frenchman whose charms were difficult to resist—funny and handsome, with a fondness for American popular culture. He sang snippets of Harry Belafonte songs as we walked.
“That’s a .338 Winchester,” Harry said, pulling a cartridge out of a side pocket and handing it to Bernard. “It’s not loaded, obviously.”
Bernard rolled the brass cylinder between his fingers and gave a Gallic nod of approval. “This is very good quality. When I am hunting, I also prefer the plomb to the plastic.”
We were walking above the bank of a river half an hour later when Brigid suddenly dropped to one knee, put her finger to her lips, and gave the signal for everyone to hunker down. All eight of us crawled behind a bush and tried to sneak glances into the shallow pool below. Dozens of salmon were swimming slowly in circles, making light splashing noises as they leaped and spasmed. “This is nothing,” Harry said. “Sometimes it’s like popcorn popping down there.”
“Are they, you know, doing their business before they die?” I asked Brigid quietly as she passed around a bread bag filled with sandwiches. I assumed this was the final chapter in the life cycle of the Pacific salmon: Swim upstream to where you were born, spawn, expire.
“Not yet. The males are waiting for a female to turn on her side, which indicates she’s making a nest,” Brigid said. Once the female had prepared the gravel just so, she and the dominant male would swim past to release their eggs and milt together, in a romantic crop-dusting. Some of these fertilized eggs would hatch, migrate to the sea, and (should they avoid predators and fishermen) return to this stream one day to sustain the cycle.
A lot of fish were definitely dying a little further downstream, because a mother Kodiak bear and two cubs had edged into view and were enjoying what looked like a beat-the-clock salmon-eating contest. The cubs would pick up a fish in their mouths, drop it, then pick up another one. “There must have been fifty pink salmon in that pool and those cubs caught every one,” Harry said. “That’s how they learn: by playing.” Their mother barked. The two abandoned their fish and ran to her.
“The mother can give all sorts of vocal commands,” Brigid said. “Come. Stay. Go climb that tree.”
We continued down the bear highway through chest-high grasses. Brigid told me she’d first come to Kodiak Island during college, one summer in the 1980s, because a friend working at a Minneapolis restaurant had waited on a customer who said it was a nice place. The two of them flew to Anchorage, hitchhiked south to the end of the Kenai Peninsula, caught the ferry to Kodiak, and got cannery jobs the day they arrived. “Ask Harry to tell you the story of how he got into the guiding business,” she said.
Harry had also come to Kodiak for a summer job, in 1975. That September, an opportunity came up to join a crew transplanting red salmon from one location on the island to another in an old amphibious Grumman Goose, an airplane designed with a wide, boatlike hull.* The move required carrying adult fish in a portable wooden tank. Bad weather rolled in, trapping six men in a lakefront cabin for three days. On the fourth day, things cleared enough for Harry and the pilot, Hal Derrick, to attempt a run. But rains had raised the lake level, and water now slopped against the fuselage. “By the time I got the door closed, the water was above the floorboards of the plane,” Harry said. The first fish drop went okay, though the Goose “felt a little tail-heavy.”
The second takeoff was more sluggish. The lake was still too high to drain the water from the plane, but Hal finally got the Goose airborne. “We got about five hundred feet up in the air and the water rushed to the back of the plane,” Harry said. “The plane just stood straight up, with the nose pointed at the sky. Hal somehow got the plane down to about forty-five degrees. We hit the water hard.” As water poured into the cockpit, Harry remembered an old episode of Sea Hunt in which Lloyd Bridges had survived a similar crash by sticking his head into an air pocket near the cabin ceiling. He took a lungful of air but couldn’t open his window, which he later learned had been wired shut. He followed Hal out the pilot-side window. The two stood on a wing and considered their options. “Then we started sinking.”
Hal’s back had been wrenched by the crash, and he was in too much pain to swim. “I’d had lifeguard training, so I jettisoned my big boots to get us both to shore,” Harry said. Hal was a large man, and the cold water sapped Harry’s strength, but they finally reached the shallows, where they could stand. “Hal told me to follow the lakeshore to a creek that led to an old cannery,” four miles away. “I was so glad to be alive, I didn’t care that I was barefoot.”
Harry followed a bear trail, his feet going numb from the autumn cold. He finally spotted smoke rising from the cannery’s chimney. When he knocked on the door, he was greeted by Bill Pinnell, one of Kodiak’s bear guiding legends. Pinnell sat Harry down by the fire and poured him a whiskey. A rescue party set out to find Hal, but he managed to reach the cannery on his own. Pinnell and his guiding partner, Morris Talifson, were evidently impressed with Harry’s tenacity, because they offered him a job working as a packer on bear hunts that fall. “I never imagined I’d be working for them for the next seventeen years,” Harry said. “They taught me a ton about bears.”
The Grumman Goose was salvaged from the lake bottom and rehabilitated. “Hal started his own flying business later on,” Harry said. “He and four passengers died in a crash.”
It turned out to be a very good day for tracking bears. We hiked from one spot to another, crawled on hands and knees until we were caked with mud, reached into one another’s backpacks for cameras and sunglasses and binoculars. Sitting on a slope above one stream, we munched Pringles until a male brown bear strolled past about fifty yards away, slowing slightly to give us an over-the-shoulder double take. (Harry and Brigid disagreed over whether he’d smelled us or spotted someone’s fuchsia-and-aqua jacket. Bernard and I theorized he’d heard the Pringles.) Another stream dead-ended like a cul-de-sac in a shallow pool where a mother and cub were vacuuming up the unfortunate salmon who’d swum from the ocean expecting to spend their final moments triumphantly propagating the species. As the sun began to set, we sat on a hillside above the beach, waiting for the tide to go out. A feeling of immense gratitude descended upon me, not so much for the perfect day of bear watching—though it had, as John Burroughs described his time in Kodiak, been both epic and lyric—but because I realized that Alaska’s savage biting insects had closed up shop for the year.
Loyal the Lab had been trained to keep calm in the presence of bears. He had more trouble staying cool in the presence of a fox that kept popping out of the woods every hundred yards or so to shriek at us as we walked down the beach toward camp. I had never heard a fox before and was unaware that its yelp is one of the most irritating noises in nature. “He’ll probably follow us all the way to camp,” Harry said. “If you hear something during the night that sounds like an old lady being skinned alive, that’s a fox.”
We were carrying on several loopy end-of-day conversations in Franglish when Brigid spotted a very large mother bear and two cubs in the distance, ambling slowly in our direction along the crescent of the waterline. Our only option was to crawl into the foliage behind the beach and wait for them to pass. The three walked past in single file, maybe fifteen yards away from where we were spying on them. I got a very good look at the distinctive shoulder hump and in my excitement took about three dozen blurry photographs that were so uniformly terrible, Brigid cried laughing when we reviewed them later. The cubs ran into the water and splashed each other playfully. We’d just started exchanging wide-eyed Can you believe this? looks when the same fox popped out of the forest to confront the cubs with its ululations. The mother bear growled, the fox ran away. Show over.
It was 10:00 P.M. before we got back to camp. Bernard brought out a flask of homemade Armagnac from his farm in Normandy and some charcuterie. Brigid and Harry busied themselves with dinner, and I fell into the temporary role of spokesman for America, trying to answer questions as best I could: Why do Americans eat so much processed food? Why do they get so little vacation time? (Everyone in our group had more or less taken off the last month of summer.) Why do they love guns? Having been placed in this situation frequently during my travels, I blamed everything on the Republicans, which always satisfies Europeans. Brigid said she and Harry were looking forward to spending the winter in one of Iowa’s Mississippi River towns, which at that moment seemed as far away as the moon. We stayed up past midnight and went to bed only when people started nodding off around the fire.
The fox returned around 3:45 A.M., with a friend. They both evidently had a lot to discuss. I was starting to understand the appeal of fox hunting.
The morning was cold. Harry was up early at the camp stove, making coffee. “Leaves on the ground, a little chill in the air,” he said, warming his hands over the gas flame. “Feels like summer’s coming to an end.” It was mid-August. Not everything about Alaska’s climate had gone haywire.
We had a long, leisurely breakfast, at which details of real-world lives emerged over instant oatmeal. Bernard was not just a cutup who liked to hum the “Banana Boat Song”; he was also a major exporter of automobiles and a major political figure in one of France’s eighteen régions. His partner, Natasha, was a geologist. Jean-Michel, who looked a little like one of the elves in Santa’s accounting department, was a former alpinist who’d climbed in the Himalayas. Brigid told a story in two languages simultaneously, about how, the year before, she and Harry had helped rescue three cubs whose mother had been killed by a hunter.
While Harriman had been stalking his prize near town in 1899, George Bird Grinnell and a team of hunters prowled the shores of Uyak Bay. In four days, they never spotted even a sign of bears. On our second day out at the Uyak Bay satellite camp, we enjoyed a gorgeous sunny day, walking for hours. The highlight was probably when Brigid coaxed me into climbing on top of a beaver dam that could’ve plugged a decent-size river. I said something about admiring their engineering. “To be honest, these beavers are kind of assholes,” Brigid said. Each year, their architectural creations seemed to block another salmon stream without regard for their neighbors in the ecosystem. The forests of Kodiak were infested with bucktoothed John Galts.
We never came close to seeing another bear. That night we took the boats back to the island. In the morning, a yellow de Havilland floatplane buzzed overhead and glided to the beach. We soared above the green hills to the city of Kodiak. With a few hours to kill at the airport, I pulled out my phone to check on some details about my bear hunt while they were still fresh in my mind. Among the results was a news story from Dayton, Ohio, describing an orphaned Kodiak bear cub who’d recently been adopted. His name was Dodge.