One Heck Of A Ride

29 The Making of a Hunter Luke Miller spent more than $75,000 to repair the damage a brown bear did to his SuperCub. while Brad and Bud continued hunting. I spent the remaining days of our two-week hunt fishing for arctic char, shooting ptarmigan and ducks, and chatting with the lodge’s guests and staff. The pressure was off, the weather had improved, and I was enjoying every minute of having nothing better to do. Bud didn’t shoot a bear on that hunt, or on his next two brown bear hunts. We lost touch with each other after he sold his business and moved to Port Townsend, Washington, a few years later. He died three or four years ago without my knowing if he ever shot a brown bear. I had the taxidermist mount my bear standing, and I used a photograph of me with the mount to advertise a promotion I called a “Brown Bear Remnant Sale” at our store. When the ad appeared in our newspaper in Lompoc, it launched a firestorm of protests from local animal rights advocates, as well as a death threat from someone who said he wanted revenge for the bear. Nonetheless, the sale went well, and my customers were as impressed with the size of my bear as I was the first time I saw him. AWeek For A Pair Of Alaskan Grizzlies More than thirty years passed before I returned to Alaska in July 2014 to hunt bears again. The state’s wildlife agency was concerned about the number of moose calves that bears were killing in the state’s interior and were allowing hunters to buy tags for two grizzly bears and a black bear every year. I had booked a seven-day hunt with Mark and Felicia Miller. With their son, Luke, they operated two businesses (Alaska Hunting Adventures and Talaheim Lodge and Air Service) on the eastern slope of the Alaskan Range eighty miles from Anchorage, and they advertised that their lodges were the only place brown, black and grizzly bear, moose and Dall sheep could be hunted on the same trip. Luke greeted me at the airport in Anchorage and flew me in his SuperCub to one of his family’s two lodges, where I met Mark and Felicia and spent the night. We flew to a remote cabin the next morning and landed on a gravel bar on a river. “Did you recognize this plane?” He asked as he strung a wire for a solar-powered electric fence around it. “Not really. Should I?” I asked. “It’s been in newspapers and it’s still all over the Internet,” he said. “A bear really tore it up.” Luke said he had parked the plane at a friend’s lodge when a storm forced him to make an overnight stop four years earlier. During the night a grizzly bear nearly destroyed the 1958 SuperCub. A newspaper article described the incident by saying, “Imagine a model plane made of paper- thin aluminum (having) a run-in with Edward Scissorhands.” The bear chewed both tires, broke a window, ripped off the plane’s “skin” from a rear window to the tail, and bent the horizontal stabilizer. To get the plane back to Anchorage, Luke had another friend fly in a new stabilizer, tires, plywood and Plexiglass, twenty-five rolls of duct tape and some industrial-strength plastic wrap. Three days later, he flew his patched-up plane a hundred miles to Anchorage. (Some news reports claimed the bear smelled bait or fish, or game meat or blood, and ripped the plane open to get it, but Luke said he had no idea what had prompted the animal’s wrath. There was