SCORE!
A BIG DAY WHICH BEGINS WITH A SLOG ACROSS
THE SUCKING SILT OF THE STORAGE RIVER IN HIP BOOTS,
TO FINALLY ARRIVE ON THE OPPOSITE BANK AFTER WADING THROUGH
DYING SALMON TO FOLLOW A LARGE DARK BEAR, WHOM I PHOTOGRAPH AT
ONLY 185 METERS AS HE SWIMS THE RIVER-A TROPHY IN MY SIGHTS THAT I LET GET AWAY.
SERGEI AND I THEN STALK A CHOCOLATE BROWN BEAR COMBING THE
BOULDER-FILLED GLACIAL SLOPES FOR BLUEBERRIES;
AT 185 METERS, IT STOOD UP WITH ITS HUMP BRISTLING
AND ITS CERVICAL SPINE SNAPPED,
NEVER KNOWING WHAT HIT HIM.
AS WE GO FORWARD TO INSPECT THE "NORMAL BEAR",
SERGEI LEAVES TO RETRIEVE HIS BACKPACK AS I STRIP
TO TRY TO DRY OUT FROM THE DUNKING.
FOR AN HOUR, I WATCH A MONSTER THREE-METER TROPHY BEAR
FILTER-FEEDING BLUEBERRIES ADVANCING IN MY DIRECTION.
WHEN SERGEI RETURNS AND SPOTS WHAT I HAVE BEEN WATCHING,
HE DISMISSES MY SMALLER BEAR AND RADIOS VICTOR WHO ALSO SUGGESTS I SHOOT THE BIG BEAR.
I GET ON MY BOOTS AND STALK CLOSER WITH RIFLE AND CAMERA-AT
120 METERS, I SHOOT FIVE TIMES---WITH THE CAMERA!
I RETURN AND POINT TO "MY TROPHY" AND WE BEGIN PREPARING
THE RUG-TO-BE, LABORIOUSLY LUGGING BACK ACROSS THE STORAGE RIVER
AND TURNING IN FOR THE NIGHT INTO THE TENT-BOTH ALAN AND I HAVING
TAKEN AVERAGE BEARS, BUT ON AN ETHICAL FAIR CHASE HUNT FOR THIS SPLENDID TROPHY.
August 26, 2001
BROWN BEAR HUNTING
ACROSS THE STORAGE RIVER
AMID BIG BEARS FEEDING ON SALMON IN THE RIVER
AND BLUEBERRIES ON THE MOUNTAINSLOIPES
MY SCORE ON URSUS ARCTOS HORIBILIS

August 26, 2001

During the night, I heard a sound right near my head reclining in the tent. I got out the small flash camera and my headlight, and turned neither of them on. I heard the noise of a large body moving through the grass. It would make short inquisitive excursions and then long pauses. I thought I knew which animal it was that would be most likely here, and quietly shifted to the tent's zippered door to open it. After the zipper noise, I waited until I heard the sound again, which took a while after the disturbance of the unzipping. When I poked my head out of the tent in the moonlight, I saw nothing. I turned on the headlamp, and there was only the large trail through the wet grass of something large that had passed that way. I was disappointed, having wanted to shoot the flash camera at the visitor-then I thought that I was the visitor, and this other creature was the long-term resident. I went back in to the sleeping bag, and a half hour later I heard the same sounds, but this time less frequent and further away.

When I was up around the time I was searching for breakfast porridge, I hesitated before telling Alan I had heard and searched for something large "that went 'Bump' in the night" since I had seen nothing at all to prove I was not hallucinating. I did tell him, however, and he just shrugged, saying that when he took his hearing aids out at night he was not one to confirm or deny any noises in the night around the tent. Oh, well, I was still probably just thinking of the Mama Bear I had seen standing upright and peering at me inquisitively as though she were the rubber-necking tourist and I was the local instead of the other way 'round. I had just imagined the nocturnal disturbance.

I went over to the fire where the hot water was boiling and ready to be poured over the dried porridge, which had pieces of dried fruit in it-and was more flavorful than oatmeal. I walked over to the tent to the same place where I had sat last night, and swirled the cupful to mix and cool the porridge. I halted abruptly. "What is this?" I reached out and combed a wad of thick brown hair out of the grass in front of the tent flap that had not been there when I had last had daylight while sitting here last night. I held it up to Sergei and even took a picture of it.

"Medved, of course;" Sergei shook his head in a nearly condescending way. "not here now." So, sometimes "things that go bump in the night" really are hairy bumpers!

This would have to mean that my first close encounter with a large brown bear when each was aware of each other (discounting my dance last night with the mother bear and her two cubs) would have to come by daylight when I was armed. I still planned to shoot first with the cameras. We had a brief breakfast, and then pulled on the hip boots, and went up the hill. Alan and Victor went down toward a large volcanic cinder cone that stuck out into the river where they would be glassing the area along both banks. Sergei and I stopped on top of the hill behind our tent and we glassed the far side of the river. We spotted a large black phase bear which was coming toward the river where we were looking across it. It was only then that I realized that we were expected to wade across the river to get to the other side.

CROSSING THE BAR
AND BEING STUCK IN THE MUD

We waded down through the swampy reeds that were a backwater for the river, stirring up clouds of mosquitoes we had to avoid inhaling. When we got close to the river, I noted we were the less frequent visitors to its muddy banks, since there were bear tracks in all directions, most of them recent. The river, like most glacial rivers in the sub-Arctic is a braided series of channels with sand and mud bars swept up in flowing courses oriented to where the currents are, were, or will be. The trick was not to find a shallow spot and wade across, but to find a semi-solid bar of sand or gravel and follow it, and most often this was orinted in the same direction as the current. Sergei stepped in to the river and immediately backed off to an area where the water came up to his knees, but the soft bottom would only give way to about his ankles. He followed this path up the river about five hundred meters. I noticed there were salmon swimming by very weakly, some rolling over to fin upside down as they were finning their last, having completed their epic destiny by making their spawning run to the upper reaches of the Storage River where they themselves had hatched, and survived the long odds towards them ever getting back here-a mission now accomplished. The last of the gauntlet were these same bears we were watching, who considered these the good days, consuming a hundred pounds of salmon per day, hoping to put on as much fat as they could in these closing out good days before the early winters came in and pushed them into hibernation dens where they would have to live off the stored energy.

All of this I could consider at another time, since right now my own job was to survive this river crossing and get to the far side without being found belly up downstream also-another great energy source going to waste. I cautiously moved forward, placing one foot only half a stride forward, as I pulled the back foot out of the mud into which it had settled. Sergei had made it a long way upstream and about half the width of the river across it, and waved me to follow him. I thought I was doing reasonably well, and had found a bar in which I would only sing about a foot, while making a half meter slow progress with each stride.

And, then it happened. The next stride, I put my foot down and it kept going. I plunged down past the knee and almost up to the hip, dipping the top of the hip boot under water that began to fill. I tried to pull the foot out and it could not come out of the "quicksand-like" mud. It was sucking still deeper, when Sergei looked back and realized I was standing with one foot buried to the knee, and the other trapped to the hip. I was rocking back and forth, as any good Northerner would know about getting unstuck from the snow. But the current swirled around my leg and dropped more of the silt into the hole I could make, so I was anchored like a dock piling. Sergei sloshed his way back over to me, and started digging with both hands in the mud behind my leg in hauling out double handfuls of silt as I tried to continue to rock the leg. But, the action seemed to suck more silt into the space he was creating. He tried to get me to push off from his shoulder as I pulled at the leg, but that also made the foot come out of the boot, and I recognized that it would have to come along with me or there was not a lot of point in getting me out without it. With another flurry of digging and a rapid rocking action, I finally freed the trapped leg, only to realize I had trapped the other one and there was nowhere to go with the one just freed up since I did not know where the semi-solid bar was and where the soft sand and silt would trap me again. I simply reached out and planted the leg, figuring that if I were trapped again, at least I would have Sergei nearby to try the same maneuvers. He made a motion suggesting that I climb on his back, but that would seem to me to mean I would drive him deeper into the mud on each step. I slogged forward, and he dug out one more time. We both reached an area of the river where the bottom seemed scoured of mud, and had a rippled firm texture with occasional rocks and tree limbs that looked like the kinds of strainers that would be treacherous to get caught in. It was easier walking in the deeper faster current, since it had meant that the bottom had also been scoured of softer silt and despite taking in a few dollops of over-the-hip-boots water, it was better than getting stuck in the mud.

We crossed the main course of the river on this kind of bottom, and then had to negotiate the soft sand that had been marginalized on the other side of the current. This took us about twenty minutes, until we were slogging through the soft mud on the opposite river banks, again alongside bear tracks and dung piles of well-fed bruins. We had made it! Now we had to return to hunting.

A BIG BLACK (LUCKY) BEAR

We have been struggling with river crossing and survival and not at all focused on the bear we had spotted from across the river now almost two hours ago. Sergei looked up and spotted the bear, surprisingly, not too far distant from where it had been feeding in blueberries, when we had first spotted it form across the river. He was excited about the bear "Khorosho!" A "good bear." He compared notes with Victor who had been watching through the glasses from the peak down the river. The black-phase bear was surely a good one, going better than 2.5 meters. A nine boot bear (2.7 meters) is one in 300. A 3-meter (10 foot) bear is in world record class. I heard them talking about a very nice trophy, even though I was only a few hours into my bear hunt and about to take aim at the first shootable bear I would have seen.

We scurried across a muskeg swamp as quickly as I could without falling into the drink, as Sergei beckoned me to catch up. Alan, who was watching this process through binoculars from a mile away, said he was glad it was I and not he who had to try to keep up with Sergei in the soup. When we got to the boulder filled rise beyond the swamp, I looked up through the binoculars, and saw the bear, heading toward us, apparently intent on reaching the river-ready to try the salmon course after the blueberry appetizer. He was getting closer as I swapped binoculars for the camera.

The bear looked very dark, rich and glistening in his wet coat. He rustled through the alders and came out on the riverbank on open sand, standing clear in front of me, as I shot the last of the pictures and slipped the safety off the rifle. I would be trying an off-hand shot since there was no rest at hand. I crouched forward and tried to tripod the rifle by balancing my arm on my knee. I did not want a poorly placed shot on this magnificent creature, in view of what a well-placed shot had demonstrably done on the bighorn ram, and this would be especially true of a carnivore that could take unkindly to a poorly delivered 190 grain Silvertip. I heard the safety snap off from Sergei's gun

I watched the big bear turn away from me, and present his broad rump. There was a long pause as the 18X scope was centered on his backside. I glanced over at Sergei, and he was making motions with his hands, which meant, "As soon as he turns broadside-Streyach!" I nodded and continued to watch. The bear ambled in the deceivingly clumsy appearance, and never turned. He came down to the river's edge and looked to his right without turning in that direction. Then he entered the water of a side branch that was one of the deeper channels of the river. Only then did he turn to be broadside, but at that point this meant that I had a broadside view of only his skull. I did not want to shoot him in the water, any more than I had wanted to deliver a coup de grace up the backside of such a magnificent creature, ignobly shot in the rear.

The bear made it to the opposite side and was immediately rear first in my direction as he entered the alders on the far side. We sprinted down to the riverbank sinking in to the soft sand he had just padded over gracefully, and I sat on a snag watching intently to see if he might stand up in the thick alders on the other bank. We both heard him moving through the cover, but neither of us saw him again. He was a lucky bear, and had been inside my range and centered by my scope for at least the last fifteen minutes-and what I had done was take pictures of him. The consensus of opinion on the far away hill was that I should have shot him up the rear. Victor shook his head that I had been in good range of several big game animals and had taken pictures when I might have shot. Sergei spread his thumb and little finger in a full span of his hand and placed over the track so fresh that we had seen it being made and said with a lilt "A good bear!"

It was also my first bear, and I was not eager to have this experience over with as soon as possible. I was unsure, however, if bears were plentiful enough to look over a number of them and pick and choose just the color phase and size one had pre-ordered. I would see about the next one, and it was not long in coming. Victor spotted it from several miles away, and reported on the walkie-talkie that there were two big brown bears on the hillside above us, one closer than the other, and we might stay downwind and climb toward him and have a look.

MY CHOCOLATE BROWN BEAR
AMID THE BOULDERS, THE BUSHES AND THE BERRIES

This time Sergei ran, which, in hip boots, is no mean feat across level ground. But we had to cross muskeg with unseen holes and then climb up a boulder filed obscured by alder bushes-and I struggled along alternately jarring my teeth as I stepped into a water-filled hole, or rolling over when I put my foot on unseen round rocks. But I kept up with Sergei even if less breathless than he, and still had a round chambered and ready to shoot. I got to the boulders and climbed over them looking up in the direction the bushes were moving. I got one glimpse of a large brown head and hump. I had no idea what was under them, but I knew I was looking at a chocolate brown bear, which was combing through blueberries; "filter feeding" like a baleen whale.

Sergei seemed quite excited about this bear. We got closer, and I crouched behind a rock from which I could not see the bear, while Sergei standing to my left could just see the top half of the bear. I went forward to another rock, this one conveniently notched with a cleft on top as a rifle rest. I propped the rifle in this notch and waited to see more of the bear. This time, although I did turn on the tape recorder, I did not shoot a picture of the mostly obscured bear.

I watched through the scope turned down to 10 X in case there would be any short distance hurried action, for which the autoloading BAR seemed an ideal bear gun. The 190-grain Silvertip Sierra boattail bullets were named for this species and seemed designed to do the job without a lot of need for extra support, but Sergei snapped off the safety of his rifle and said "Streyach!" I waited until I saw the head and hump come up on the unsuspecting bear at 185 meters. The bear was facing in my direction, and I could see the big head come up, with the hump of the shoulders behind it. The crosshairs were on the neck above the chest when the .300 Win. Mag. Touched off-and that is all there was to it.

The "thump!" of the hit, was followed by the slump of the bear, and my chocolate brown bear was spread out like a rug, its cervical spine severed. At this range the bullet did exit, right through the center of the hump, which was stained an auburn red when we came across the gap between the bear and us, which he might have so easily loped across if he still had any locomotor capacity left. When we reached him and Sergei was still being cautious about getting too close, I reached out and touched his eye with the rifle barrel and found that he was stone dead.

Sergei seemed disappointed. He looked at the bear, and then said somewhat apologetically, " a good bear, 'normal'." He said it was smaller than he had thought, probably being about 2.4 meters. That would be about seven and a half to eight foot of bearskin rug, so I thought it was a good trophy with an excellent color and texture to its hide. I shook his hand, and we propped the bear on the rock over which he had fallen. WE took a few pictures of the bear and with each of us, with the Storage River basin spread out as a large backdrop of the environment as characteristic of this species as had been the high mountain pass for the snow sheep. The bear had fallen at 55* 14.18 N, 160* 45.43 E at 465 meters altitude, and 6.25 miles by the great circle from TENT at 13* bearing and 1.31 miles from our spike camp DOM-1 at 10* bearing. Those miles would have to be added to considerably by an intervening river that had sucked us down into its silt without the additional load of the bear's hide ("oskura") and skull ("chairup") and other body parts that would be disassembled when Sergei returned form the spot he had dropped his backpack during our earlier stalk of the black-phase bear-about forty minutes hike back.

I would strip down to try to dry out in the intermittent sun as the clouds would pass to wring out my socks and other gear that had got wet in my river dunking and make a few notes and observations at the site of the bear kill as Sergei was off retrieving his backpack. I made a note for the plaque that would accompany the bearskin, probably as a rug:

RUSSIAN BROWN BEAR

Ursus arctos horibilis

Glenn W. Geelhoed, Hunter

Sergei Maximov, Jaeger

August 26, 2:45 PM, 2001

Storage River, Kamchatka, Russia
55* 14.18 N, 160* 45.43 E, 465 meters altitude, glacial valley
Range: 185 meters, single cervical shot, .300 Win. Mag. BAR, 190 grain Silvertip
Eurasian Expeditions, George Sevich, Outfitter

ALAN'S BROWN BEAR:
A MATTER OF TARGET SELECTION

Before he left to go back to retrieve his backpack, Sergei stopped for a cigarette, and as he did so I heard a transmission form Victor that implied that he was in the process of skinning a bear that Alan had just shot. I later learned that they had watched the whole process of my stalk of the black-phase brown bear, the "real trophy" which, in their opinion, I should have shot, and then the stalk and solid hit of the chocolate brown bear, so they had figured my brown bear hunt was over. They had been watching a good bear coming their way, and had estimated the size to be about 2.6 meters. They watched for quite a while, since there was some other activity they had seen, but that had also included a sow with cubs, and they wanted to zero in on the bear they had decided Alan should just climb on down and shoot. It was going to be as simple as that, and Alan had only to shoot the bear when they saw a second bear approaching the first. This one was an old bear, and looked like his skin was hanging off from him, as though he had lost about a hundred pounds. Victor thought that this was the bigger and better of the two bears, although Alan had said that he appeared to have bare patches where the hide had been rubbed. After a brief debate, they had decided upon the second bear, which led to two different afterthoughts on Alan's part-he said if he could do it over again, he would have shot the other bear, and not shot the one he got twice.

At the shot that went through the bear's chest, it ran forward about 150 meters. At this point it was obvious that the bear was going down, but Alan heard the safety come off on Victor's "War Gun" as he describes it, a short automatic carbine that he carries for bear hunts loaded with a ten shot clip. This concentrated firepower should definitely discourage an advancing bear, particularly one already wounded. Fearing that the bear pelt would soon be riddled with multiple holes from an autoloading high capacity assault rifle, Alan fired again, hitting the chest, and the bear went down to stay, but with an exit wound through the jaws.

When they checked the bear, Alan and Victor both considered it a "normal" bear, as Sergei had appraised mine-but both were taken in a fair chase, and neither of us was expecting a second record class trophy to match the superb sheep specimens we had already collected. We were more content with the bears we had taken than were our guides who were shaking their heads over the "ones that got away." I heard and saw none of this, even the two shots, which could get disseminated as sounds throughout the vast valley space without ever being heard as close as the couple of miles we were away at the time. We had both collected two sheep and two bears on the same days in totally independent hunts within miles of each other, but we might as well have been on different continents, since neither of us interfered with or assisted in the other's hunt, besides the obvious of the radio call to remind each others that there "were a lot of bears out there." From his higher observation post, Alan figured he had seen at least twenty bears in the single day, most of them very far away and many of them not trophy size. I had seen half that number, but mine were much more "up close and personal."

OBSERVATIONS AT MY BEARSIDE:
INCLUDING A TROPHY BROWN BEAR THAT COMES FEEDING INTO MY RANGE,
WITH AN INTERESTING ETHICAL CHALLENGE FOR THIS
"FAIR CHASE HUNT" IN THE MIDST OF ABUNDANCE IN SOLITARY
WILDERNESS SPLENDOR

When I was alone, perched on the rock next to my bear the flies had already found, I looked him over again. I remembered the brown bear that Bob Hobbs had shot multiple times from the snow machine sled fifteen months ago as I had taken multiple pictures of the rodeo chase in which that bear had been pursued and "rounded up" in an ursine rodeo, running by me with a spectacular volcano for a backdrop. Bob had wanted to shoot a big bear with his .45/70 lever action carbine that spits out big bullets, and five of them went into the rear of the bear, which went down in the snow. What I had first noticed about that bear were the long graceful polished claws. What Bob had first noticed to his chagrin was the size. "So that is my bear?" he asked. "Why did you tell me to shoot it, when it is much smaller even than the one I already have!" I had told him that it was a fine big game trophy and that there was no sense in blaming the victim for a judgment he had made to shoot the bear. I remembered those thoughts as I admired the very long and graceful claws and rich chocolate brown of the thick fur. This was my bear and he would make a good rug.

I had crawled up on the rock to dry out, and even took a few photos of me hopping around bare foot next to the bear feet. I then picked up the glasses and swept the area around my lookout on the boulder in the middle of the boulder patch interspersed with blueberry bushes in prime bear country.

And then I spotted him. He was big as a barn, even at the five hundred meters that separated us. I put down the Zeiss binoculars and took a couple of pictures of him with the short lens cameras, and even at that distance, he did not disappear as a speck. His heavy coat rippled as he lunged his head sideways and swept back and forth, "combining blueberries." I sat still on the top of my rock in my black underwear, watching as the big bear came closer in his sweeping through the blueberries just beyond the alder bushes around where the rocky boulder patch began. He was then four hundred meters, and became three hundred meters from me. Still, I did not move to chamber a round in the BAR, and made no move to get my pants or boots back on. I watched for most of the hour that Sergei was gone, and during the first half of that hour, the bear got to within 200 meters of me-within a range I thought he might sniff or spot me or the dead bear behind me. As he drifted up the hill, still "filter-feeding" blueberries like a great baleen whale, I said almost out loud-"so that is what a three meter bear looks like?" Later I turned to see Sergei coming across that gap we had crossed to get to the downed bear I had shot, which was lying spread-eagled on the rock behind me. I could tell by swinging the binoculars back to the big bear that he must have weighed in at twice the size of the bear I had shot. Sergei, looking up at me, knowing I had spotted him, but seeing that I was looking off into the other side on the downwind came up to me cautiously and silently, having immediately spotted what had drawn my attentions.

"Glenn!" he waved dismissively at the bear behind me; "Too much bears! Forget this 'Malinki' ("small one')-go, 'Streyach!" And he pointed at the grand "Bolshoi" brown bear beyond the alders, now still within my range, and moving uphill toward 300 meters from us. I shot a couple more pictures, and pointed to the dead bear behind me-"my bear."

He waved his hand as though sweeping the bear away-"Three meter Medved!" And he began fiddling with the Motorola in his shirt pocket, calling "Victor, Victor!"

It took twenty minutes before Victor answered, probably meaning that he was busy with the final skinning and trophy collection at Alan's bear being readied for the hide and skull to be carried to the other side of the river toward camp. Sergei handed the walkie-talkie to me after hurriedly describing what I was watching as the bear was now just out of comfortable range, but going nowhere fast. Victor started saying "Glenn, Glenn!" I told him I had been watching a very big bear for an hour, but that I had already shot my bear."

"Too many bears; I think you should shoot the big bear!" Victor said, and Sergei was nodding, "Da, Victor, Da!" I slipped off the rock and got into my pants and my boots, then slipped a clip of three rounds into the rifle and chambered a round. "OK, we go!" said Sergei to me and into the Motorola.

I was reluctant to shoot the big b ear, since I had just killed the largest land carnivore that lay on the rock behind me, and I did not think it ethical to push the smaller one into a ravine, while chasing down another half meter's worth of fur, particularly under the circumstances that found me, once again, bear hunting in Kamchatka. I would have explained that if Alan and Victor were here, and they could have explained my reluctance to Sergei, but he is a savvy fellow, and he picked up my ambivalence. "Who would know, out here this far into the wilderness, and with so many redundant bears around-like the abundant salmon choking the river just now-a waste of prodigious proportions only nature could get away with!" "Yes, and I would know-and it is only nature that can get away with such profligate waste in the redundancy even at the top of this pinnacle in predators" I answered in this rhetorical discussion as I sneaked forward in the alder bushes.

We crossed an open space, and we saw the side swath that looked like someone had pushed a lawnmower through the blueberries, with that clear cut ending in the alder bushes, which were shaking two hundred meters ahead. We saw the head of the big brown bear, and I even looked through the scope at him, inside very lethal range. Sergei motioned that I should get ahead downwind and he would come up the track. There was a clearing toward which he was heading, and when he came out of that he would be close. I got into position where the big bear would emerge. Sergei was out of sight in the alders, in a much more vulnerable position than I. I heard Sergei moving forward, and never heard, but then saw the bear emerge, only 125 meters away. The rifle was ready, but I never raised it. Instead I raised the Nikon and shot five times. The bear heard the film advance and turned to look, not in my direction, but at his back trail. If he had looked in my direction, the Nikon would have been rapidly replaced with the rifle, and I had the scope cranked down to 4 X, since at the range I was looking at and which he could cover before my clip was empty, he would fill the scope at the lower power. The bear stood up, snorted, and vanished. I was relieved to see that it was not in the direction that Sergei was advancing, since I could then see him come plowing through the alders and into the clearing. He looked at me quizzically, then made sniffing motions and sounds, indicating that the bear had winded him and run off, implying "Had you not seen him?"

There was no doubt about what I was prepared to do if he had charged in my direction. But I had once stood in the Zala Marsh in the Congo with a magnificent bull elephant sidestepping to crab-walk around me through the heavy swamp muck as he backed up to his herd of elephant cows, which I had got in between him and them in my stalk of a cape buffalo. Here was a confrontation of the greatest respect-an awesome kind-in which he had no intent of squashing me unless he had to, and I never raised the .375 H and H Magnum, unless I had to. Each of us had gone away from the encounter a little wiser and appreciative of the other. That was my closest encounter with earth's largest land mammal, and here was my closest encounter with its largest carnivore, and each learned something respectfully about the other and themselves. It was another wonderful interaction-a close encounter of the epiphany kind.

Sergei had had a bit of a rush from crawling up the backside of a big bear in thick cover, and was still focused on the track and the direction the big bear had gone. But, now that he was in the clear, he turned to look at me, and saw me standing there, Nikon 8008 in hand. He suddenly smiled-he was on to me!

We both returned back to the backpacks and equipment, including the lunch that we had left at the dead bear. Without a word more about the big bear, he poured a cap full of Vodka and we toasted the dead bear lying before us that we would shortly set to skinning after we had had our light lunch of kielbasa and chai with white chocolate. After the vodka toast, it was Sergei who reached out and shook my hand. "Korasho!" I said-a good hunt and a respectable trophy! Then we set to skinning, dressing out, and packing up for the tough trip back to camp.

SKINNING, DRESSING AND PACKING OUT
GETTING BACK ACROSS THE RIVER HEAVILY LOADED
AND EXHAUSTED,
ANOTHER GREAT "RETURN FROM THE HUNT!"

The bear came apart as though the rug was already spread out-but upside down. The "cocktail stirrer" was saved, the "os penis", which the Pakistani Kentucky gastroenterologist in May of 2000 did not even know existed until I told him about it and thereafter he would go out to insist, "Don't forget the bone!" As though these folks do not already skin out bears for a living, he was giving them instructions on the first one he had ever seen!

Sergei adroitly skinned out the skull as well. There was only one hole in the cape and that was where the bullet had blown in the anterior neck and had shattered the cervical cord, which left him in no condition for motor action. The last step was to open the abdomen and to remove the gall bladder-a rather heroic bit of surgery, since Sergei simply took the lobe of liver to which it was attached and removed it "off the table." It was last seen drying near the campfire on its way to make potent medicines for some Koreans or other Orientals.

With a backpack, and now the bear hide skull and other parts slung in a waterproof sack up and over his shoulder, Sergei clumped back toward the direction we had some during our multiple bear stalking approaches on the side opposite the river from our camp. This meant that we now had to get back over the river, now near dusk, and through the treacherous bars and sinkholes while weary and unsure from the opposite side just where a safe passage might be. Just getting there was a strenuous hike, as I, once again, was in the "return from the hunt" mode-that weary, but satisfied feeling---carrying less weight than Sergei, but I had multiple things slung round my neck, including my rifle and his, binoculars and a couple of cameras-and each of these devices were designed to snag the alder bushes as we tried to transit through them and walk for a little distance down the mossy stones of the stream. I stopped periodically, at each little waterfall, to lap up as much water as I could, while bending over carefully to avoid dumping any of the pendants from my neck into the water.

I walked through a filed of what Lewis and Clark called "bear grass", since wherever they had encountered these white puff balls in their early explorations of the upper reaches of the Missouri River, they also encountered Ursus arctos horibilis, the grizzly bear. They tried to shoot every one they could get close to, and actually wiped out a large population of these "pinnacle predators", a subject for considerable congratulations at that time, a bit like trying to exterminate wolves. This specimen now wrapped up as a bear hide and its parts in the sack riding ahead of me through the alder willow snags is the same genus and species as that "interior grizzly;" the difference in the "coastal grizzly"-the other name for the "brown bear"-is that it gets so much bigger and is so much more prolific because of the habitat that allows it so high an intake of protein and fats from the additional food source of the rich salmon run. I have always said about the bear, particularly the grizzly/brown bear, that it is in a precarious position in its habits and habitus: it has the massive bulk of an herbivore and the dentition of a carnivore. If you add the other environmental fact that it lives in remote environmental conditions where its best response is to go into feast and famine mode and retire to sleep through the lean months, it has a nearly frenetic need as an omnivore to add as much weight as possible in a short time of plenty in storing calories as fat against those lean times ahead. In other words-this big brute sounds pretty much like us.

There was an amazing resemblance of the bear's beheaded and de-pawed carcass to that of a human habitus. The worrisome thing for the animals here and now is that there was very little fat on this animal's carcass, and to get ready for the next five months of environmentally enforced starvation, it would have to put on more than a third of its weight in layering as much as fifteen centimeters of subcutaneous fat as well as visceral stores in its liver and muscles. This may explain why it has to have the unfriendly disposition to pig out, even turning on its own kind or close resemblances thereto-such as, me, for example. There are a lot of things we might learn form bears that are rather typical features of the entire group of we, the feast-or-famine hunter/gatherers. This has got to be their busy season. They cannot waste time with frivolities, such as using up prodigious amounts of energy chasing the little morsels, annoying as they may be, like ground squirrels. It has this enormous seasonal food resource delivered to its upper streams in the fatal salmon run, but it also has a sweet tooth, and enjoys feasting on the brief flurry of ripe blueberries, and even pine nuts. If you add up its top food resources: salmon, berries, nuts, herbs, tubers -it has good reason to be coming after us-a principle competitor on this end of the food chain!

I crossed a small pond of a bywater of the Storage River. In it were a flock of ducks, that took off at my presence and formed a linear streak across the purple/azure sunset sky to gain altitude over the glacial valley before flying over the rim of sub-Arctic mountains. The vignette made me shiver with its pristine primitive beauty. I had first paused to identify the ducks as mergansers and the ubiquitous mallards/black ducks, and then stopped to say that whatever their taxonomy, the aesthetics of that scene in that setting was beautiful beyond words.

I was beyond words since I was, once again, in heavy breathing endurance mode, slogging my way toward the riverbank's soft sands. When I arrived, I had a proprietary sense about the large bear tracks I was crossing. I had seen these being made. These were the property of that dark black large bear we had first stalked, and who was still out there in the alder bushes. The other hunter pair-Victor and Alan-had said through the walkie-talkies that this was the bear that should have been wrapped up in the sack on Sergei's back which was making its way already half way into the Storage River, the added weight driving Sergei down lower against the "Plimsol Line" on his boots-the line on a ship beyond which it is in danger of taking on water. But, I felt a peculiar satisfaction in knowing that the first magnificent bear I had been really close to, was out there on the riverbank feasting on salmon, without having received a missile from me sent his way-in fact, not ever even knowing of my presence in watching him so closely with such deadly intent. This was a salute between pinnacle predators.

Now, again, the fun began in earnest. I waded into the river and picked a course I thought would have corresponded to Sergei's travels, though footprints in a riverbed last even less long than they might inscribed on the wilderness tundra. He looked back to see my slow progress, gesturing occasionally to point me the way to deeper water and firmer riverbed. It was slow going.

I slogged forward. About the time I could put all my weight on one foot, it had settled so deeply into the silt that it was worrisome to see if I could get it out again, and I would have to make about three or four lunges to break the suction to raise it as the other boot sunk in to knee depth. Now was not the time and place to have an annoying problem screaming for attention. My left pyriformis went into spasm such that I could hardly go forward without stopping to stretch it. As I pulled at my left leg long enough to stretch the pyriformis muscle-although not in the right direction to get relief from the strangling around the left sciatic nerve-my right boot was sinking ever deeper, as though I had been pile driving it into the silt by pushing don to pull the left leg. It was now stuck. Sergei had made it to a sand bar in mid-river, and looked back at me bent over hauling hard to free my right boot. He slung the big bag off his shoulder, and left it on the bar and returned toward me. I had learned his maneuver the last time, and trying to keep all the dangling devices around my neck from reaching the water, I pawed at the sand below water behind my right boot. By the time he had sloshed back toward me, I had freed the right and now was working on the left, which had got planted deeper when I shifted my weight off the trapped right leg. Sergei got close to me, and turned around. He gestured that I should try to climb on his back! Not only did he have confidence that he could navigate through this stuff with himself and a dead bear, he figured he could also do it with my dead weight on his back! I waved off the offer, and just tried to identify where he had walked that had supported him, and I made small strides and as rapidly as I could before there was time for the weight-bearing leg to get sucked down further.

He looked relieved that I had not taken him up on his generous offer, and slogged ahead so that this time I was following a turbid muddy trail through the water. At this point I stopped and swung the Nikon from around my arm to pull it up in front of my face. There, following me like a "Jaws" re-run was a dorsal fin protruding form the water's surface. A discolored salmon that was exhausted and dying, was using the eddy in the current behind me to hold its place in the current against which it was weakly finning just to keep its head upstream and water passing through its gills with less effort. Perhaps such unlucky maneuvers make it prone to stand in the leeward current shadow of fishing brown bears. But, maybe such a phenomenon would not be unlucky for either the bear or the doomed salmon, since either way the end was sure for the spent fish, and heedlessly hanging out in the slipstream behind a fish-feeding mammal would result in a quicker, perhaps less pretty, end than slowly turning belly up and getting caught in a weedy strainer downstream. It might be cold comfort, quite beyond the salmon's cogitations that, at least, its death would be to some useful purpose-rather like the same limitations in the big bear's response to my standing in front of his progress, with gun and camera.

I shot a picture of the salmon surfacing as I plugged ahead. Sergei looked back at the sound of the film advance as though he had heard that sound earlier today at another "moment of truth" in a blood sport.

I made it to the riverbank below the hill of our spike camp. This meant instead of fighting my way through the silt and the current, I could now stop and try to stretch the pyriformis muscle before climbing the hill in hip boots. As I did so in the marshy river overflow area, I had an acute coughing spell, the result of inhaling a cloud of mosquitoes. I had almost got to the point of ignoring these "Sikorsky-sized" syringes when they landed on my skin, accepting the inevitability of it so as not to be distracted from other things unique to this experience. But, in my ears, eyes, or airway, they were definitely of first order in my attention. I was still gasping and wet from the exertion when I made it into camp where Alan was sitting alone at the cook fire. I did not go to him directly, but pulled into the tent to shuck off the wet layers and find the one set of dry clothes I had in my backpack as a backup. I was eager to stick my head in the stream and shampoo away the sweat, oil, mosquito repellant that had layered on me, but I knew the shock of that glacial stream would set me to shivering if I were still all wet. I also wanted to secure the rolls of film and tape from today's adventures in the Ziploc bag in which I was accumulating them, with another waterproof bag for my notes and serial letter. I was also eager to rest for a few moments on my sleeping bag while re-ordering my experiences of the day so as not to lose any memorable moments. They had come along at a high price in effort, and I was eager to retain them as I had experienced them. When I emerged from the tent, I joined Alan with apologies for my anti-social arrival. His opening comment was "Well, did you get almost enough exercise for the day?" (He had watched some of it through binoculars from his mountain perch lookout.)

We reviewed the story of his bear. I hardly needed to tell about mine, since he had watched, and had checked through Victor and the walkie-talkie, even getting some translations of what was going one when we went in pursuit of the big bear before returning to the one that I had shot-which is a lot like his bear. I think he, too, was glad I had watched and photographed the big bear rather than shooting a second one. I learned that Victor had returned to call the base camp on the walkie-talkie and had not been successful, then had tried to call Vasili and the helicopter on the INMARSAT phone he had carried down from the base camp, after having run the generator for an hour to charge it. It had no charge in it, and to carry our the proposed plan, with which Alan and I were in enthusiastic agreement, rather than crawling up the mountain reversing yesterday's hard trek with backpacks, he left immediately after returning to camp to hike up the hill to the base camp, where he would arrive in the night to hook up the INMARSAT to the generator and arrange that the helicopter arrive first at the base camp, and then, at a time, still to be scheduled, it would come down to the opposite side of the river, where we should have made multiple crossings to deliver our spike camp gear and the bears on a blueberry-filled plateau that could accommodate a riverside helicopter landing. Sergei had prepared a couscous and hash semi-warm dinner-no threat to the cuisine of our base camp cook, Irena, and we turned into our sleeping bags-and needed this repose after an eventful day-the day of Ursus arctos horibilis.

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