One Heck Of A Ride

25 The Making of a Hunter There were no tools and nothing to use for a pin, and Cliff was worried that we might be stuck on the water all night. “Take that oar and I’ll take the other,” I said. “We’ll paddle all night if we have to.” Fortunately for us, that didn’t happen. It wasn’t long before we heard an outboard motor. The other guides had been sent out to look for us, and after yelling back and forth, they eventually found us. It took about ten minutes to replace the pin and another hour to reach the lodge. When I walked into the dining room my friend Jimmy Standley from Tucson greeted me with: “Paulin, where the hell have you been?” My jacket and jeans were splattered with blood. I didn’t say a word. I just reached into my pocket and pulled out the oosic. A toast (actually, several of them) followed before we sat down for dinner and more conversation. Cliff and I were up early the next day and brought the bear back to the lodge. When I wrote an article about this hunt and submitted it to Craig Boddington, the editor at Petersen’s Hunting Magazine in those days, he called me to say he was returning it. “Some things are best not published in a magazine. They’re not reader-acceptable,” he said. A monster in the Aleutians The sign over the entryway at the Quonset hut that served as the airport’s terminal proclaimed in red, white, and blue letters that this was the gateway to the Aleutian Islands. Bud Dyer and I had flown to Cold Bay, Alaska, in May 1982 to hunt brown bears, arguably the largest of all the world’s land predators. The outfitter’s son, Warren Johnson met us as we were retrieving our duffel bags and rifle cases, and we soon were in the air again, this time in a twin-engine Navajo heading for Port Moller, where we landed and switched planes for the final flight to Don Johnson’s Big Bear Lake Lodge. (I’d originally booked this hunt with Ron Hayes, but his long career as a big game hunting guide in Alaska suddenly ended when he was charged with illegally hunting polar bears with his airplane. He ultimately would lose his plane, pay a large fine, serve time in prison, and be forbidden to possess a firearm. Before he was sent away, he returned my deposit and introduced me to Don Johnson.) Don had guided hunters for more than thirty years, and Warren had been helping him in the business for at least a decade when we booked our hunts with them that year. Their outfit, which they called “the Kenai Float Plane Service,” had an enviable success rate on big brown bears and The Tuktu bear, taken with rifle, axe and knife on a Quebec caribou hunt in 1981. From left, author, Jimmy Standley and Bud Dyer with caribou and the Tuktu bear.