One Heck Of A Ride

27 The Making of a Hunter Slim Gale, a tall man with a very calm manner and eyes that didn’t miss a thing. Bud’s guide was a young man named Brad, and Bud was his first client for brown bear. Bear Lake was in a wide, flat valley surrounded by mountains that climbed nearly straight up for 5,000 to 6,000 feet to the tops of their glacier- covered peaks. From the lodge, we could see caribou herds and hear ptarmigan, ducks and geese calling. Tundra was everywhere, and there was water under much of it, making hip boots a vital part of our hunting gear. Trouble was, walking in hip-high boots and stepping from one mound of sponge-like tundra to the next was almost impossible at first. The day before the season opened, Warren flew Bud, Brad, Slim and me to the head of Heridon Bay on one of the Aleutian Islands, and we drove the company’s three-wheel Honda ATVs along a beach to a cabin. (The tide rose and fell thirty feet twice daily, making timing critical.) It was and still is illegal to hunt the same day a hunter is airborne, so we spent the rest of that day in the timber and tarpaper cabin. It was comfortable enough. There was a main room and two small bunkrooms, plus a spotting tower and a privy outside. We awoke the next morning to the aroma of Slim preparing scratch cakes, eggs, and coffee. After breakfast, we set out on foot in a light drizzle dressed in rainwear and hip boots. In my backpack were a camera, extra ammo, a knife, and various other necessities. After three miles of struggling to keep up with the pace Slim was setting, we stopped to glass a valley where he said Craig Boddington had killed an eleven-foot bear the previous year. We spent the next two hours there with our eyes glued to our binoculars. “Look at that,” Slim suddenly said. He had found a big brown bear sliding down a hillside like a kid on a playground slide. The more we watched it, the larger that bear seemed and the more we needed to get a closer look. Bud and I flipped a coin before we began our stalk, and he won the right to shoot that bear if he wanted it. Bears are near-sighted, so we weren’t concerned about concealing ourselves during the first part of our stalk, but there is nothing wrong with their hearing and sense of smell. We tried to be as quiet as possible and keep the wind in our faces. Thirty minutes later, after we had crossed several creeks and worked through a couple of alder groves, we suddenly saw a big bear running for the top of a mountain, stopping occasionally to look at his backtrail. He had been spooked by something, but what it was we never learned. He ran through a pass and we never saw him again. Slim said there was a chance this was not the bear we’d seen earlier. Disappointed, we decided to find somewhere to get out of the cold wind and eat our lunch. I was eating my share of a half can of Spam while sitting in a little canyon when some six hundred yards away a big brown bear meandered out of an aspen grove. “How big is he?” Bud asked after watching the bear in his binocular. “Dunno. Maybe eight and a half, maybe nine foot. It’s hard to tell,” Slim said. Brad didn’t say anything. “I ain’t shooting a @$%&*#@! little bear like that,” Bud said. “I will,” I said, remembering how few ten-foot bears are taken in Alaska. We left Brad and Bud to guide us with hand signals while Slim and I went after the bear. I had thought he was a fast walker, but I suddenly realized Slim had been going easy on me. He didn’t slow down until we were about a hundred fifty yards from where the bear was feeding. “Can you kill him from here?” Slimwhispered. “Let’s get closer,” I said. The alders were so thick I didn’t have a clear shot. We used a ravine to hide our final approach and briefly lost sight of the bear. When we moved