As many know, Kodiak is home to a few bears. Big bears.
While biologically not that much different than your traditional grizzly bear it is a factual statement that Kodiak grows big bears, and a lot of them.
In my growing up there the reality is you rarely saw bears around town. Or even on the outskirts of town. For the most part you had to go south of town to get into bear country. There aren’t really any roads down that way so your options are float plane or a boat.
Annually my dad would go on these big 10 day hunts with friends out in the bush. They’d be gone, sans ANY communications, for those days and inevitably would return with incredible hunting stories and lots of racks from successful Blacktail buck hunts.
As a youngster you can imagine I had dreams of doing one of these hunts one day. And relatively early in my hunting days my mom and dad allowed me to join a hunt (though I didn’t get to go for ten days because they still wanted me to go to school and such)
My first “big” hunt was to a Lake called Karluk or the O’Malley river. I don’t know why we call the same place two names but it’s just what we do. O’Malley had life’s luxuries by any hunting standard that we’d known. The cabin was a little cabin that bunked four. The outhouse had styrofoam on the seat … a luxury that should NEVER be overlooked and O’Malley also had a meat cache where you stored food and meat. The bears tend to like to steal your food when they can so having a meat cache kept the lines a little clearer should a bear opt to want to attempt such a robbery.
We land in a Cessna 206 and fairly quickly set up camp. Load up the small amount of supplies we had in the meat cache, get things organized in the cabin and are finally settled in. It’s too late to really hunt but the group on this hunt (Larry Pank, Roger Smith, Gerry Garner, Vic Barnes and myself) decide to walk the couple of hundred yards down to the O’Malley river and glass a bit.
There was plenty to glass as there were a ton of bears fishing the river. My memory is far too faded to know the count but were I to guess I think we saw between 20 and 30 bears. It was inspiring and all in the party seemed comfortable that the world was right. So I thought the world was right as well.
We made our way back to the cabin to begin prepping a little dinner. We know we’ve got an early start in the morning so my dad suggests I head down to the meat cache to get some boxed milk for cereal in the morning. A dandy of an idea I thought.
The meat cache if I were guessing was about 100 yards in between Karluk lake and the cabin. With the meat cache being maybe 50 yards from the lake. As I’m leaving the cabin I scan the shoreline and all looks good … no big critters walking around. The walk to the meat cache is a joyful one and I’m excited about the next day. Now the trip into the cache is really quick. Open the door, find the box with milk in it and leave. No big deal. The issue was when I came out of the cache, from my perspective, things had changed fairly drastically.
You see the bank doesn’t just nestle up nice and neat to the shoreline of the lake. There’s about a three to four foot ledge there. When I leave the cabin I glance to my left and low and behold there’s a damn big bear there… about 50 yards away. My dad, an experienced bear biologist, has always told me to never run from bears so you can imagine I’ve got a few conflicts going on. I assess two goals … separate from the bear … expeditiously (but without running) get my butt back to the cabin.
To hear my dad tell the story I was out of breath when I got to the cabin. I still contend that I walked .. briskly. I can barely utter the words and I’m sure I simply spit out “buh buh buh …. bear!”
No one is nearly as upset as I but everyone walks out to take a gander. The bear isn’t there … he could have cared less about me. Or could he?
This bear became a bit of a nemesis for us over the week in camp. Ok … in fairness it may not have been the same bear but I sure have my suspicions.
A good Alaskan lesson for you all … don’t leave a white gas can outside your cabin at night. You see when they find a nice thing to bang around that makes a ton of noise they accept full responsibility to play with it. All night.
This first night in particular this young boar just knocks this can around for hours. Larry Pank (who was my dad’s boss at the time) say’s “Vic, are you going to do anything about this?” to which my dad replies “Um … no” (full disclosure, I am certain my dad’s answer was more colorful however my mom may read this at some point and there are certain words we simply are not allowed to say (hint, they begin with F, end with CK, and are NOT Firetruck))
You will recall though that I said the cabin slept four and if you’re good at math you can assess that there were in fact five of us. I was on the floor of the cabin. So none of the rest of the hunting party was too terribly concerned because if the bear opted to come in I would obviously be his first snack.
This isn’t the end of the story though. There is one final piece to this pain in the butt bear. We’d been hunting for a few days and you’ll recall my mentioning of the styrofoam seat in the outhouse. Let me just say a bare bum on cold wood is not an entirely pleasant experience. A little styrofoam goes a long ways.
Well… midway through the hunt this bear decided our luxuries were too indulgent so he decided he wanted the styrofoam. So he took it.
The remaining trips to the out house were never the same. I always took my Ruger Redhawk with me though….