Bear Hunters

Rachel Weaver

Anna and I are collecting bear hair. It will be shipped from Alaska to Minnesota to be analyzed for DNA. The question is how many bears fish each river on this uninhabited island in southeast Alaska. The bigger question is how many bears can be hunted without destroying the population. The real question is should I stay in the game.

Throughout the summer we’ve built tree stands, changed a lot of tires, been stranded on the wrong side of streams, talked a lot about men in the absence of any, caught a hundred salmon, sprayed a bear in the face with bear spray, and hiked with packs full of bacon to hang 250 tetracycline baits across a densely forested, mountainous island. Every day, a new game of roulette, the ball spinning past wild-eyed female bears with cubs, ocean and mountain peaks for miles, a misstep into quicksand mud, loose ground at the edge of a sheer cliff, wolves chorused at midnight, aurora borealis like a message from beyond, a Cessna ride through mountain passes in fog so thick the wings disappeared into it, an untrampled beach all to ourselves, a loss of balance on a fallen-down log over a raging river. Every day, our chips stacked on red or black, a corner or street bet, according to our best guess.

Anna and I work for Fish and Game and the Forest Service, respectively. For this interagency bear population study, bear hunters will be asked to turn in a toe bone to be checked for the presence of tetracycline. After a year, the number of those marked and unmarked will be plugged into a formula to find the population size, which will be compared to what Anna and I find collecting bear hair.

On this particular day we’ve followed the west side of the river from the abandoned logging road to the wide mouth at the sea. We started at 6:00 a.m., and it’s now 11:30 a.m. We are collecting hair snagged from the backs of bears on barbed wire we strung a few days before along the bear trail that follows the river. It’s the height of the salmon run, and the smell of wet fur is in the air. We both carry rifles.

I have stepped off the path of commuting, committing, buying a couch, into this solo life of small planes, small skiffs, zipped-up weather, crushing glaciers, and sheer mountain peaks. Except this year, as thirty looms, the hum of volatility has become especially loud in my head. I am beginning to wonder if it’s sustainable to get the scalp-tingling, I’m-about-to-die feeling a couple times a week. I’m beginning to suspect there is such a thing as too much risk. But the alternative seems dull, the payoffs slight. I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve used up my percentage of wins. 

The dense evergreens stop abruptly at the wide-open plain of swaying beach grass that is higher than either of our heads. A quarter mile off is the gray, choppy ocean. We’ll find a place to wade across the deep, fast-moving river, and then hike up the other side where we’ve also set strips of barbed wire. We’ve had to cross twice so far to get around sheer cliffs. Anna lost her footing the first time due to a swift undercurrent, and I lost mine the second due to a swarm of salmon swimming into my legs and under my feet.

As we step into the tall grass and weave toward the river, Anna is explaining to me that in the final throes of her last relationship several months earlier, her boyfriend told her she “wasn’t outdoorsy enough.” She turns to me, .275 slung over her shoulder, chest waders soaked, her hair a tangled disaster, a swollen red mosquito bite in the very center of her forehead. “What the fuck?” she says, and we both crack up.

In between long reeds of beach grass, something catches my eye. Movement over by the Forest Service cabin that bear hunters can rent and fly into at the mouth of the river. “Do you see that?” I ask Anna.

She squints, peers through the grass, sees it too. “Shit.”

Part of our job is public relations; when we run into a group of bear hunters, we are to introduce ourselves, stay on our best behavior, and convince them to turn in a toe bone for our study.

We’ve only run into two bear hunters all summer; the first, an old guy with a beer belly from Nebraska who had just shot a hole in the bottom of his skiff while illegally dumping bear meat in the bay, and the second another old guy with a beer belly who had his rifle trained on my face. “I was aiming at the bear behind you,” he said later.  

I climb up on a nearby boulder. It’s best to know what you’re walking into. Through binoculars I see several dark man-sized shadows moving behind the window of the cabin. “There’s at least four of them. Worth it?” I ask.

Anna screws up her face so that the freckles on her nose smush together. “Our first strip of barbed wire is pretty close to the cabin. They’ll probably hear us, may take a potshot at the rustling in the tall grass.”

“Good point.” I mess with the roll-y thing on the binoculars, but it’s only a bit more blurry one way and a bit less blurry the other way. They are waterlogged along with the sandwich I’d packed for lunch and everything else. I toss the binoculars back in my pack. “Let’s make a lot of noise.” 

We find a spot to cross the river, unlatch our packs from our waists in case we get swept away, and make it to the other side, well downstream from the cabin. We cut into the woods and then back out into the grass that is higher than our heads, where both the cabin and our first barbed wire to check for bear hair are.

As we approach the cabin, we holler, so as not to scare them, but they don’t hear us. The wind is blowing the wrong way. On its edges, I catch the deep voices of men and rub at my hairline. We are a six-hour walk from our truck, and from there, an hour drive to where our radios will pick up a signal. I am aware of how strong I am, how it still doesn’t match up against a man. I am aware that no one knows exactly where Anna and I are.

I stall out for a minute, take stock, let Anna catch up. I can’t see anything. She steps up next to me, her eyes reflect back to me what this landscape has already taught me, but I have yet to understand how it applies to all of life: the ball drops where it drops and you just figure out your next move from there. “Ready?” she asks.

“Yep.” 

We bet a split, step through the tall grass shoulder-to-shoulder into the clearing where the cabin stands and wait for the ball to drop.

A man in his twenties with shaggy hair and no shirt turns from a cookstove set up on a cooler a few feet from the cabin, spatula in hand, a mix of surprise and terror on his face. There is the smell of bacon and eggs. The man freezes, turns his head slightly toward the cabin without taking his eyes off us and yells, “Couple’a girls with guns!”

Four men, all about our age, tumble out the door in all sorts of disheveled sexy man morning-ness. It’s noon by now, there is a keg on the porch and a row of fly rods. They stare down at us. One of them grins, finishes pulling his shirt over his head and clears his throat. “You ladies like some breakfast?”

Anna shoots me the I can’t believe it bug-eyed look of winners everywhere.

After breakfast at the edge of the river, the heavy clouds will blow out, the boys will spread out along the banks, their lines whipping overhead, sparking in the sunlight as Anna and I weave up the creek between them checking our barbed wire. I will turn thirty, then forty, then fifty. Life will morph into things duller on the surface, but no less frightening to the heart: marriage, kids, a chronic health issue. I will realize it was never about playing or not playing. It was always about the satisfying click of the chips, all the possibilities in the drop.

Rachel Weaver is the author of the novel Point of Direction, which Oprah Magazine named a Top Ten Book to Pick Up Now. Point of Direction was chosen by the American Booksellers Association as a Top Ten Debut for Spring 2014 and won the 2015 Willa Cather Award for Fiction. She is on faculty at Wilke’s University’s low-residency MFA program, and at Lighthouse Writers Workshop where she won the Beacon Award for Teaching Excellence in 2018. Her work has appeared in The Sun, Gettysburg Review, Blue Mesa Review, River Teeth, Alaska Women Speak and Fly Fishing New England.