Looking for Alaska by Peter Jenkins Read Free Book Online Page B

were going to be tracking a potentially wounded bear through the underbrush. I thought the bear had already been shot and killed.
    But we all got back into our trucks and headed south to the site of the shooting at Mile 117. Ted’s rifle had no scope. He said that he didn’t use a scope because if there was to be any shooting, it would be at close range. The action would be fast and furious, and there would not be enough time for looking into a scope. He would more than likely have to shoot instinctively if we were charged or surprised.
    The road was straight; it basically followed the west side of the peninsula, keeping away from the knife-sharp mountains and massive blue glaciers thirty or forty miles to the east, over where I lived. We could see them looming over us because the land between here and there was flat. The brown bears and the moose preferred this flatter country, which opened up periodically, usually around swamps and wetlands. Elsewhere, the peninsula was deeply forested with rivers, ponds, and creeks. Ted had told me that he and his fellow biologists and technicians felt there were somewhere between 250 and 300 brown bears on the peninsula and 2,500 to 3,000 black bears.
    While we drove, Ted told me about another wildlife-disturbance call he’d gotten about two weeks before from a distraught woman. He felt that her problem could have been caused by this same bear. She told Ted that a huge bear was harassing her dogs, and that all the dogs had returned to the house but one, which was killed. Brown bears often come into a yard of chained-up sled dogs and eat some. But if the dogs are running free, it is rare for a bear to catch them.
    Still, something perplexed Ted about this lady’s dead dog. When Ted saw no marks on the dog, no blood, no bone breaks, he asked the woman how old the dog was. She told him that the dog was fourteen. Utilizing all of his twenty-plus years of experience, Ted felt every inch of the body to feel for internal injuries, hematomas like those made from moose kicks, and he felt nothing. Not one hair was out of place. Ted noticed when he’d arrived that the other dogs appeared incredibly happy to see him and came quickly out of the shed where they were hiding.
    â€œYou know,” Ted had suggested to the understandably distraught woman, “I think it is possible that your dog was scared to death. Its old heart just couldn’t take it.” I was hoping my heart could take it if we had a confrontation of our own.
    â€œAfter we check out what has happened at Mile 117, I will tell you if I think it is okay for you to track the bear with us, all right?” he said to me.
    â€œSure,” I said. A dog scared to death?!
    â€œIn the last thirty years,” Ted volunteered, answering a question I had not wanted to ask until we were done with this investigation, “only three people have been killed by brown bear attacks on the Kenai Peninsula and two of these have been in the last couple years. One was on February eighth, 1998, the other May twenty-fifth, 1999, just a few weeks ago. I knew the guy who died a couple weeks ago pretty well. Now, he was as experienced in the woods and with bears as you get around here. Both men were killed principally by the terrible bites they sustained to the head. A bear knows your head is a place of great vulnerability, and when they stand over you and bend down, it is the first place they bite.” Ted stopped.
    I let the conversation die—I mean, I didn’t pursue any more details. I didn’t want to hear anything else.
    AT BRIAN AND LISA’S
    Ted slowed down, put on his blinker, and took a slow left into a rough, partially eroded dirt driveway leading to where Brian and Lisa, their five small children, dogs, horses, and cats lived. Brian and Lisa had hacked out a clearing in the Alaskan jungle. Their house was two log cabins that were put together, the logs probably cut off their land. One cabin was