Looking for Alaska by Peter Jenkins Read Free Book Online

first started barking, Lisa hadn’t thought much of anything. It could have been a slow-moving porcupine just out of reach of the dogs, or a moose browsing on the hillside. A lynx might have killed a snowshoe hare in sight of the dogs. But then Lisa heard the barking become more pronounced, more agitated, higher pitched, faster, until it was incessant. She surely hoped the dogs would stop or slow as they usually do after the animal passes from view. Surely she hoped they would stop, just like any mother with five small children yearning for more sleep, rest, and peace.
    But these dogs were not barking out of curiosity, or plain intrigue, nor were they stopping or slowing down. Whatever was bothering them was getting closer, more threatening, more terrifying. Their Great Pyrenees, who was loose, was normally fearless. Lisa went through the possibilities. This time of the year it was not likely to be a moose, unless maybe a late calf had somehow got scared and wandered in between the dogs. A mother moose could kill all the chained dogs, maim them; it would be a disaster. And there was too much intensity in the barking for it to be a porcupine waddling on its self-involved way. Stray dogs almost never came out this far; stray dogs in the Alaska wilds are like Snickers bars sitting on a fourth-grader’s desk—just waiting to be eaten. Wolves, coyotes, bears, love to eat them, so they are almost never a problem.
    It just about had to be a major predator out in Lisa and Brian’s yard. If it was black bears or brown bears, this was a bad time of the year for them because the salmon were not spawning in the creeks yet and therefore they would go hungry. If it was a brown bear sow with twin two-and-a-half-year-olds outside, that would be about the worst possible thing. The two-and-a-half-year-olds are the equivalents of human teenagers, capable of real damage, not as big as an adult but still strong enough to kill a human or anything else. They are fearless, the bear version of “ten feet tall and bulletproof.” An old male could be a big problem, his teeth worn, his metabolism unable to convert meat and protein to muscle the way it used to, hungry, smelling dog food, or better yet, tasty dog. It could be the sow with year-and-a-half-old cubs. These young cubs, maybe 140 pounds if it was a male, 120 if it was a female, were more curious and rambunctious than dangerous, although if cornered, they could certainly kill a person. A 110-pound black bear cub had recently killed a grown woman in the Smoky Mountains. In this case, though, Ted said the “good” sow normally ended up getting a cub out of a jam with aggressive sled dogs. She was smart enough to realize that to keep her cubs and herself alive, they needed to avoid being too threatening to humans and their property.
    What Lisa and Brian wanted most was for the barking to stop and for whatever was outside to go away, to leave their little clearing. They all wanted to go back to sleep and not have to bring their own conclusion to this rapidly escalating situation. It was incredible how loud it was inside. They usually lived in the deep silence that exists in few places other than Alaska. They prayed, if they were praying people, that these sounds would not wake their children. They hoped beyond hope that whatever was out there would not come any closer to their hand-hewn log cabin.
    And there were other sounds that Lisa did not recognize. Finally, there was so much sound outside their log cabin that it did wake up the kids. When the noise became unbearable, they decided to call 911, and that’s what had led to our morning drive.
    Reacting to the initial 911 call was Larry Lewis, forty-two, a State of Alaska wildlife technician and often Ted’s sidekick, and Alaska state trooper Jim Moen, Fish and Game Enforcement. They arrived at Mile 117 at around 3:30 A.M . Trooper Moen saw something run across the road and away from the house right as they