Read Online Beyond the Bear by Dan Bigley, Debra McKinney - Free Book Online Page A

up, we were already behind schedule for meeting up with Jaha and Emily. We still had to clean our fish at the cleaning station across the mouth of the Russian and hike back to the car. Then we ran into some friends from Girdwood, Jaelyn Rockman and Carl Roesner, and stopped to swap fishing stories. At the cleaning station we ran into another Girdwoodian and chatted with him a spell.
    “Hey, guys, be really careful,” he said before turning the table over to us. “There are a ton of bears around.”
    “Thanks, man. We will.”
    I had thirty minutes left to see.
    We filleted our fish, wrapped them in garbage bags, and slid them into John’s pack. We loaded up and began hiking back to the parking lot, bantering back and forth, laughing, making ourselves well heard as one does in bear country, filling lulls in the conversation with an occasional “Hey, bear!” or a whistle or my signature bear-be-gone call, “Hootie-Hoo,” inspired by a hip-hop song I was fond of as a teenager. About three-quarters of the way back, we passed four guys in camo and fatigue greens on their way to The Sanctuary, poles in one hand, cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon gripped in the other.
    “Hey, how’s it going?” I asked with a nod and a smile.
    They tromped on by as if we didn’t exist.
    John and I stopped a second and looked at each other.
    “That was weird,” John said. “I wonder what the hell their problem is.”
    “They sure didn’t seem to be having much fun. How can you not have fun going fishing? Maybe it’s their taste in beer. I hear fish can smell PBR a mile away.” We laughed and continued on.
    I had five minutes left.
    A little farther up we came upon a surprise in the trail—two cans of Pabst, one mostly empty, the other unopened. Both were dented.
    “Score!” John shouted as he bent down to pick them up. As rude as those guys were, at least we would get a beer out of the deal. “Thanks, guys!” John slid the empty one into the top pocket of my pack, popped the other, took a swig, and passed it to me . We walked on.
    Three minutes.
    We reached the intersection where the riverside Angler Trail meets the path leading to the stairs and turned the corner. There, moments from the safety of the car, Maya glued herself to my side and let out a low, eerie growl.

CHAPTER 4
    This Can’t Be Happening
    A bear.
    We hit the brakes. Blocking the trail thirty feet ahead, just below the stairs to the Grayling parking lot, was the hind end of a grizzly. It glanced over its shoulder, then whipped around to face us in the midsummer twilight. I slowly reached down and grabbed Maya by the scruff of her neck. John took a couple of steps backward so we’d be standing side by side, making us look bigger, nothing to mess with.
    “What do you want to do here?” I whispered without taking my eyes off the bear.
    “Let’s give it a second.”
    “I don’t know, I don’t like this.”
    Between the two of us, we’d encountered a lot of bears through the years. This one wasn’t like any of the others. Instead of the typical bear behavior—the take-note-of-humans-and-trundle-along routine, or better yet, take note and run for the hills—this one held its ground, hackles raised. Then it began huffing and woofing and bouncing to and fro on its front paws. We needed to get out of there. Now.
    We backpedaled slowly, calmly, keeping an eye on the bear while negotiating a right-hand turn in reverse at the corner where the path to the stairs intercepted the trail paralleling the river. We would continue upriver, we’d decided, and take a roundabout way to the car, giving that bear plenty of space. Once we made the corner, we were out of sight. We continued up the trail a ways, and I let go of Maya. She shook herself, then scampered on ahead. John and I relaxed our shoulders and picked up our pace.
    “Whoa, that was kind of crazy,” I said. “Somethingmust have really pissed that thing off. I wonder if those guys we just passed . . . Oh