It's lunch time dear reader(s) so I thought I'd check back into my favorite new escape place, my blog. My procrastinating typically follows this order online: personal email, Facebook, people.com, bank account, Lucky.com, Alaska air.com, Facebook, and then my work email accounts. I think my blog has jumped to the number one spot!
I have decided to bare my soul with an essay I composed about bear hunting (pun intended, pun intended!) several years back when I was first living in Alaska. I spent 2005 to 2009 in Alaska, finding myself. Okay, the truth is after my LTR ended in 2004 I just wanted to get the hell out of dodge. Somehow I procured a job for my semi-unusual health care profession and the keys to my father's Dodge and headed up the AlCan to arrive in Anchorage with one friend, no gas, a truckload of stuff and no idea what I was doing.
More to come on that part of my life for sure but in summary I met and fell in love with a man 10 years my junior who was a bit of a hermit. Okay, a lot of a hermit. He planned his year by which hunting or fishing season was upcoming. I thought it would be fun to join him and learn how to live off of the land, I was raised in rural Washington state after all so I could handle it. Right. I think. Well, we lived it alright. And killed it, gutted it, caught it, filleted it and ate it. The following is an essay I wrote about my first (and possibly last) hunt and kill. I had never actually held a rifle before this experience. It got rejected by every online magazine I sent it to but by the powers invested in me as the queen of this blog, it is now available to read!
~Single and 37
ps: Don't try this at home. Bear meat is icky anyway. Just ask my friends that I pawned it off to in Seattle.
Love and Hunting
A few things I learned about falling in love and black bear hunting in the Alaskan wilderness:
Bears may look fluffy and lazy, but they can move very quickly when they sense danger or fear (such as the presence of a 34 year old woman hunting for the first time in her life). The sweet, cuddly names that we give to stuffed and animated bears such as “Teddy” and “Fozzy” hardly seemed appropriate as I gazed at these amazing animals crossing a mountain hillside in mere seconds.
Men (boyfriends specifically) can move nearly as fast as the bears, especially when they are hiking up hills in search of the ‘biggest bear’. In fact, the speed at which the human male can move when hunting seems to accelerate with each complaint of the female companion: “This hill is too steep for me”, “I just know a bear is watching me right now”, and “You will NOT go any farther!” all equate to leaps and bounds on his part.
Holding a loaded pistol while going to the bathroom in the woods is more challenging than it should be. For those of you who have never worn a pistol in a shoulder harness (playing cops and robbers with your squirt gun doesn’t count), imagine a bra made of nylon cords that is oversized and doesn’t actually snap together. Then hang 5 pounds of steel on one side, with a trigger than doesn’t have a safety. At that moment, I mentally thanked my yoga teacher for forcing upon us those painful balancing while squatting positions. You know the ones.
The boyfriend had warned me to watch my feet while wearing the pistol; apparently shooting one’s foot is not unheard of. While squatting in the brush with one hand balancing myself to keep upright and the other hand on the pistol handle, and both eyes nervously scanning for bears, I didn’t give much thought to losing a toe or two. In fact, if it would have allowed me not to hike up one more hillside full of 5-foot thicket, prickly thorns, aggressive bees, and crouching bears, I may have taken a purposeful shot. But, my pedicure was barely a month old and it seemed a shame to waste it.
I decided I would join my sweet boyfriend for a black bear hunt for several reasons. First, I eat meat and concluded I should be able to participate in the whole process of hunting, gutting, skinning, butchering and preparing it. I told myself that if I couldn’t handle hunting, then I would become a vegetarian. I do love a good kabob and really didn’t want to become an herbivore. My boyfriend is an experienced hunter and loves the adventure of the whole process, specifically the self-sufficiency aspect of finding and bringing home his own food. But most importantly, it was springtime and bears were the only allowable animals for us to hunt in Alaska. Had squirrel or beaver been an option, I would have likely chosen those animals over black bear.
Hunting is hard work. I am baffled at how the typical hunter of my youth, with his beer belly and tobacco chew-filled mouth, managed to bring home any animal. It took us nearly 6 hours via kayak just to reach our remote mountainside. I hadn’t seriously kayaked in at least 10 years so that in itself was a feat for me. Of course the boyfriend had done the entire trip BY HIMSELF two weeks prior so he was at ease. When he asked how I was doing, my pride answered “Great!” while my arms and back groaned.
We landed at our campsite at around 10 pm, pulling up to a beach at the base of a mountain. As the Alaskan solstice was only a month away, we still had a sun visible in the sky. I had fallen into the icy glacier water as we beached the kayak and was marveling at the amount of sand that had made it’s way into my underwear when the boyfriend began ‘glassing’ the hillside (looking for bears with binoculars). “There’s one! And another! Honey, this hillside is crawling with bears. Oh boy, there are some big ones!”
The last time I had been close to a black bear was a just under year before. I had gone on my first overnight hike as a newcomer to Alaska, having just moved from the urban jungle of Seattle. A girlfriend and I had brought can of bear spray but were convinced we wouldn’t need it. On day two, with very little sleep and no water left (I did mention it was my first overnight hike in Alaska, didn’t I?), a sow and 2 cubs crossed our paths. I was a mere 10 feet from an unhappy mama bear when my friend released the spray. As the mother bear and I both choked it back, my friend had hit us both dead on; I saw the fierce protectiveness in the bear’s face. It took me a few weeks to recover fully from that encounter and there were many times I’d considered bringing the bear spray when out and about in nature, or the local park. Needless to say, the thought of sleeping next to a hillside ‘crawling with bears’ did not put me at ease.
My eager hunter wanted to go out that very same night to take me on my bear hunt. Still wet from falling out the kayak, with arms that felt like jello and a decent sunburn, I pleaded fatigue. I could tell I wasn’t living up to his ideal hunting partner, but this was no time to be unnecessarily brave. Sleeping in our seemingly very thin, non-bear claw resistant tent that night was nearly as difficult as the 6 hours of sea kayaking. Leaving the tent for a bathroom run that night was an impossibility. I held it.
When we woke the next day to the brilliant sunshine, bald eagles circling overhead, a spectacular glacier, and the ocean waves crashing at our beach, I felt much better. That is until it was reported to me that those bears that were being ‘glassed’ again on the hillside 1000 yards away could “get to us in 10 minutes no problem”. I had to wonder if I could elicit the same fear reaction in the boyfriend by asking him to go on a shopping marathon with me?
Many, many hours later (2 days actually) I was back on that hillside watching the black bears roam around. We saw several groups of mamas and cubs, the little bears appearing fun and playful, like puppies. I knew better than to doubt the ferociousness of the mothers however. As I leaned into the thicket on the hillside, loaded pistol on one side, wearing a full backpack, swatting bees while trying to remain absolutely still, I saw the contentedness in the boyfriend’s face and his wide grin. I knew this adventure meant the world to him, and that I had made it to ‘really cool girlfriend’ status.
“There’s one right there, are you ready?” he whispered eagerly and pointed out a male bear about 200 yards farther up the hillside. As he handed me the rifle and I viewed the bear through the scope, it was all I could do not to drop the weapon and curl up into the fetal position. But, remarkably, my very first rifle shot hit its mark cleanly and we had ourselves a bear.
After a few seconds of relief, I realized I had just shot a large wild animal. That meant other large wild animals were aware of our presence on their mountain. The boyfriend was already bounding up the hillside to locate the fallen animal. As I scrambled up after him and prayed to the gods of good karma that we would be safe for the next few hours as we prepared the bear in the field, I did feel a sense of pride and satisfaction from my hunt. I would no longer eat a piece of meat without truly appreciating the work and skill it took to become my meal. I would also feel good about eating free-range, game meat instead of a hormone-stuffed caged animal when it was time to cook up our bear. But, we still had to find the potentially wounded animal and I was just plain terrified.
Several days later as we kayaked back to town, bear hide and meat stowed away in the boat, I was daydreaming about the hot bath I would be taking very soon. The boyfriend asked what I was thinking about and I replied, of course, how happy I was to have gone black bear hunting with him. “Oh good because I already have the rest of season planned out. I know great spots for deer, caribou, moose and grizzly. We might even have to take a plane into some places because they are so inaccessible!” The status I had earned as a girlfriend willing to hunt hit me like a ton of bricks.
Living in Alaska for just under a year has already exposed me to many things I’d never dreamed I’d be doing in my thirties for the first time: deep sea fishing from a kayak, plugging in my truck in sub-zero weather, black bear hunting, shoveling moose poop, and falling in love with a man who did things such as plucking turkeys in his truck. I knew I would be more than willing to go on many adventures with him, but the thought of chasing grizzly bear was outside even my comfort zone. That’s why when he recently brought up the grizzly hunt again; I suggested a power yoga series for couples. All’s fair in love and hunting.
Postscript: Since the writing of this essay the author has been flown in a float plane over glaciers, spent 3 days hauling trees and chopping firewood, and been nearly charged by a female moose protecting her newborn calf. However, there is no planned grizzly hunt in the (near) future.
