Looking for Alaska Page 3
The home Rita and I live in now is just up the hill. A ranch house that used to be owned by Jess and Mary Lou Morton, we’ve added on to it. It is painted gray, but the paint is constantly peeling. Paint just does not seem to stick to it. Jess told me he always had the same problem.
Red and gray foxes come out at night; we sometimes see them in the fields when we’re coming home after dark. The coyotes often howl on the ridge behind us; five of them can sound like twenty, although, who knows, maybe there are twenty of them up there. As I listen to them, I wonder, do they howl to celebrate life or are they crying? I wish they would let me join them. Instead, I go to church to get my release. At the farm, for the first time in my life I can understand how someone could sit on a front porch in a rocking chair, just sit. I used to criticize people for that.
As much as I love that piece of land and my family, lately though, I’d become too sedate, too Buddha-like, too contented. Until now.
I rode over to Second Avenue and coasted down the hill toward the sea. I turned left, onto the bike path. When I got to the city’s skateboarding ramps, I went up and over one and glided back along Resurrection Bay. A couple local teens looked at me like “You’re too old to be doing that!” A gull glided to my right, hovering to see if two Steller’s sea lions would leave any scraps.
I got back to Phoenix Road and turned right. It was a hard, uphill pedal; I refused to get off and walk, even though I felt like it, even in the lowest gear. Two black ravens sat in the top of a swaying spruce and made odd clucking sounds. I thought again about how we would not be here in Alaska if it hadn’t been for true friends. But here we were.
I was riding past the orphanage, almost home, when I remembered a quote from T. E. Lawrence’s book Seven Pillars of Wisdom. It rushed to me now: All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did.
So far in life I’d dreamed and made my dreams live in the light. Each one brought to life far surpassed the dream. Right this minute a dream was coming to life, being lit by the almost constant daylight of an Alaskan summer.
When I got home, Rita wanted me to plant some flowers she’d bought over in Soldotna, shopping with our friend Linda. So I did.
2
Ted
A man I met named Ted Spraker probably sees about as much as any human can because of what he does for a living. What a life Ted has. When I was between nine and eighteen, I dreamed about being like him. You could say he is a type of referee in one of the wildest places in the world. Ted spends much of his time saving wild animals from themselves and each other, saving wild animals from humans, saving humans from wild animals. The most horrifying and, fortunately, rare part of his job is investigating the death of a human by the claws or teeth of an animal.
Ted Spraker has lived in Alaska since July 1973. As an Alaska Fish and Game area wildlife biologist he gets just as many calls for help at the office as he does at home. Doesn’t matter what’s going on at home—the phone rings, he must stop what he’s doing and take action. Ted must be prepared for everything a wild animal can do to people, their property, or themselves.
People call him needing help with two moose in a backyard pool, suicidal squirrels chewing through wires charged with electricity, brown bears killing chickens, bats flying too close to the TV screen, and wolves on the porch. They dial his number because of a quill-slinging porcupine or a bald eagle that’s got a fishing lure in its foot. They call because a wolverine tore up a shed, a caribou calf is lost or orphaned, or a coyote killed Julie’s cat. They call when a human has been killed by one of the wild animals on the Kenai Peninsula.
Ted earned his B.S. in wildlife management and his M.S. in range management from the University of Wyoming. He’s half dusty-dry westerner from Wyoming and half Cajun from near Houma, Louisiana. He’s got some of Clint Eastwood’s strong, quiet side, some of Jack Nicholson’s playful irony, and the nonjudgmental portion of your best friend’s personality wrapped up in his own unique self.
Ted says there have been no calls recently about field mice attacks, but then the winters have been mild lately, which leads to less drinking. Like so many who work unpredictable high-excitement/high-boredom jobs, Ted seems unexcitable. Similar to detectives and SWAT team members, the job with Fish and Game can be mundane almost to the point of comatose. But then some bear or wolf, wolverine or moose, does something upsetting to the public; perhaps it even kills something or someone. When a human is killed, there is the potential for the highest, most terrible drama. In the spring of 1998, Ted got one of those dreadful calls. A forty-year-old man working on a seismic crew was mauled by a brown bear and lost his life near Soldotna. Nothing can prepare Ted, and the rest of Alaska Fish and Game, for some of the scenarios they encounter.
Sometimes the calls to Fish and Game are framed in the hardwood of sheer terror. One damp, foggy night a longtime Alaska resident called. She seemed close to losing control. It was during the short dark time of an Alaskan summer night, at 2:57 A.M. Ted remembers some late-late-night calls and even what time some of them woke him. He can still see the numbers that tell the time glowing obnoxiously large and red on his alarm clock that night.
The first sound he heard on the phone, drowning out the caller, was a chilling roaring that could only be a brown bear. His first thought, based on the intensity and volume of the roaring, was that a bear had either gotten in the house and the callers were being attacked, or that someone was calling on a cell phone while their dome tent was being invaded.
The woman’s voice was so charged, so altered by terror, that though Ted knew her, he did not recognize her at first, not until she said her name. She and her husband were friends of his; in fact, they’d had a problem with a sow and her two cubs a few days before. These brown bears had come to their yard and destroyed their chicken house and most of their chickens. They came back a couple days later to see what else they could eat and tear up. Ted and his associates had set three supposedly close-to-indestructible culvert traps in their yard.
It was difficult carrying on a conversation because, although the woman was inside her well-built and well-insulated home, the roaring of the mother bear outside was so loud. Every few minutes Ted heard what sounded loud enough to be the bear tearing down their house. Actually, it sounded more like the bear was tearing apart their car, because it was the sound of metal being destroyed.
Turned out both cubs had gotten trapped, and the sow was literally trying to rip apart the metal traps, rolling them over, smashing them with her paws, biting—whatever she could, all the while filling up the woods and this home with her desperate roaring and sounds of destruction. While telling me this story, Ted repeated a few times that he could not believe the mother bear’s sounds were that loud inside the house. The sow did turn over one trap, somehow tore open the door, and released one of her cubs. They were gone before Ted got there. Ted and his associates retrieved the one cub still in a trap and moved it far away.
“I would not want to imagine what would happen if I got between that mother bear and her cubs. Just call the funeral director, and he better be expert at restoring the head area because that’s what they go for first,” Ted told me.
One night, at 12:32 A.M., in the fall, the caller was a new Alaskan, the real tenderfoot type, just moved up from Massachusetts. He was trying the wilderness thing, back to Walden Pond, except Walden Pond, Alaska, has radically different creatures and much more severe challenges. Walden Pond, Massachusetts, has more in common with Club Med than Alaska. Ted explained that usually a city- or suburban-bred tenderfoot from outside Alaska only lasts about a year and a half. Sometimes they don’t make it through one winter.
It was late fall. There had been a small salmon return, and the bears were looking in places other than the spawning streams for sustenance. This guy was doing the mus
hing thing, thought he’d have some sled dogs, he’d read Jack London’s books. He also had a Dalmatian that ran outside in nice weather and lived inside with him at night and when it rained.
In a frantic voice, punctuated by hyper breathing, the tenderfoot said that something big and black, maybe dark brown and hairy, was chasing his Dalmatian around the outside of the house. The dog would try to leap high and crash through the door. The newly arrived pioneer didn’t have a gun, didn’t believe he needed one. If he needed help, as he did now, he would just call somebody. Often in Alaska there is no one to call, or by the time help arrives, it’s too late. In some villages the nearest law, an Alaska state trooper, is more than a hundred miles away and must fly in on a bush plane when summoned. He wanted Ted to come over, catch his dog, and bring it inside, then “shoo off” the hairy thing. Ted told the man to open the door just a bit, turn on all the lights, and call for his dog. He followed Ted’s instructions with Ted talking him through it as if he had been about to jump off a bridge. In a minute or two Ted heard the dog crash into the man, then a noise like something getting knocked over, and then the guy hung up. The man called back a bit later, thanking Ted, saying everything was fine.
Just when Ted thinks he has heard it all, an animal does something creative. There was the time a mother moose and her twin calves walked into someone’s swimming pool, the kind with slick rubber sides. They could have been thirsty; maybe they just love water. The mama moose easily walked out, but the calves were stuck, almost drowned by the time Ted and his colleagues were alerted. The sides were too slick for their tiny hooves; they slipped every time they tried to walk out like their mother did. Ted pulled his truck up close to the edge of the pool, but when he’d try to get out of his truck, the mother would charge him. She’d lay back her long ears, the hair on the back of her neck would stand straight up, and she would attack, making a combination blowing, growling sound. A charging moose will run right over the top of you; Ted’s seen one do it to a brown bear. And they strike with their potentially lethal front hooves, probably their most deadly weapon. Finally one of the other Fish and Game guys distracted her while Ted and another man put an old piece of carpet on the side of the pool, which the calves could climb up without slipping. They herded the calves toward the carpet; they got out, weak and hungry, but they lived.
“We get a bunch of terrified people calling in on those situations,” Ted said.
And there are the ever-present waddling porcupines filling people’s dogs with quills, using their awful darts to terrorize bear cubs who think the porcupines are so tempting, a free lunch. One time Ted had to rescue a pathetic black bear cub that had gone for such a slow-moving porcupine and filled his paws, lips, tongue, and nose with the barbed quills. Ted has been impressed with some creatures that in desperation come to human settlements, seemingly for help. This bear cub, who could have been helped by nothing else, even its mother, came and crawled under a car at the Ford dealer in Soldotna and would not leave. Ted sedated it, pulled out the quills, and released it to find its mother.
Ted must determine whether a call requires an instant response. There are plenty of calls where a bull moose in the rut has “attacked” someone’s swing set and is completely tangled up in it. Apparently swing sets are attractive. The moose is now headed down the road with the whole swing set in its sixty-inch antlers, getting more tangled by the minute. Can you imagine driving home in the dark down a narrow, fog-coated back road in Alaska and seeing a swing set coming toward you? Then there are two glowing eyes in the middle of it, then horns five feet wide, then long, dark brown legs, and then huge ears. Then the moose gets frightened by the oncoming car and tries running through the tangled, jumbled, stunted spruce woods, the trees two or three feet apart. What a mess. Well, that kind of mess is the kind Ted and the others at Fish and Game get to handle.
When Ted gets a call at home, he has to get dressed, get his dart gun, and try to find the lovelorn bull moose. Fortunately many of the new swing sets are built cheap, so with each smack by the moose they lose another piece. It’s the older swing sets built with better metal that really tangle them up, or the ones custom-built with stronger chain. One time Ted had to rescue a moose that had tangled with a swing set, then run for the middle of a marshy lake. Normally moose run into the middle of a lake when a major predator is chasing them, a pack of wolves or a brown bear. The swing set almost drowned the moose. By the time Ted got there with his boat, the moose was too weak to swim. Just his head and a bit of the swing set were sticking barely out of the water. Ted and his wife, feisty and blond Elaina, shot it with a dart, then had to hold its head above water and cut off the swing set. Elaina climbed into the water with it to get a better grip on its head. They were with that moose for over five hours, and finally it got strong enough to hold its head up by itself without fear of drowning, and they were able to leave.
Once a cross-country skier found a golden eagle that had lost its front talons on its right foot. It was so weak it could not take off from the small, dead tree it sat in. The skier caught it, wrapped it in a coat, risking freezing herself, and brought it to town. Ted met her and put the eagle in the truck with him. Ted shoots a moose every year, like many Alaskans; it is a large part of the meat he eats every year. The moose meat goes along with the salmon he and the family catch, the clams they dig, the halibut they haul in, and some caribou too. Well, that winter Ted fed a surprising amount of that moose to that recovering golden eagle that lived in his garage on the bad days and on the bright and sunny winter days in a perch in his backyard. He released her that spring as healthy as a golden eagle could be. She had gained so much weight eating at least 125 pounds of moose meat over that winter of recovery that she was a real armful, even for a strong man like Ted, who is six feet tall, 195 pounds.
* * *
In Alaska, more than most places on earth, the animals of the wild live out their dramatic daily existence haunted by the possibility of death. A bear or a wolverine, a lynx or a wolf, may find a dead moose. What a huge and thrilling pile of meat, but they may lose their life defending it. Every other predator wants it too. They may be crippled or have to kill something else to keep it. The wolves want the moose meat; the sly, shadowlike coyote wants it. So do the wolverines, the lynx, the eagles, and the black bears. The brown bears may want it the most—they have the largest need for it.
There is an order of dominance among bears; one brown bear may fight off every other predator only to be killed by a dominant member of its species. An orphaned set of twins might find the moose, the two cubs on the verge of starving, vicious to live, a gnawing in their stomachs so severe as to risk all for their prize. One big boar, though, can smell death from miles off if the wind is right and come to it. The orphans might growl a bit, the hair on their backs might stand up, but if they even attempt to fight the boar, they can easily be killed by just the physical force of the dominant male’s nine-and-a-half-inch paws, his claws not even necessary.
Every minute of the day and night in Alaska these plays are acted out on the red- and blueberry-speckled tundra, in the rock- and snow-covered mountain passes, in the shadowed spruce woods, on top of the frozen lakes, up and down a once-gentle creek. Rarely do the few Alaskan humans see anything. But Ted has seen much as he has flown over the land that is home to the creatures he is charged to care for. Sometimes, Ted and his staff fly over the land looking to dart wolves; they give them shots to kill the horrible lice infestations they have gotten from dogs. In 1961, only one wolf was spotted on the 8,400 square miles of the Kenai Peninsula, where Ted is the state biologist. Today, twenty packs of wolves live on the peninsula.
Ted has a front-row seat, he and the hired bush pilot, to dramas where supreme predators lose their fight, their blood, their breath, their consciousness, to another, one more powerful, faster. He has seen the proof in the snow, a lengthy, drawn-out diagram that can easily be understood by those with his education, who can read the distance between tracks, the final body
language of circling and confrontation.
He says that when they tranquilize the wolves to give them shots of Ivermectin to kill the destructive lice, it is amazing the severe injuries that they can see on almost every wolf, wounds that have mended. They’ve been kicked by moose before they’ve learned how to efficiently dodge and kill, bitten by members of their own pack, slashed with the claws of bears, embedded with porcupine quills, even scratched by ground squirrels that fight back.
THE NIGHTMARE BEGAN AT 2:30 A.M.
Tension-filled calls come during regular business hours at the office, which is in a metal-sided building off Kalifornsky Road in Soldotna. Alaska Fish and Game occupies the upstairs; Doors and Windows Unlimited is downstairs. Ted knows the various situations are of utmost importance to the caller, but sometimes it’s all he can do to maintain his professional demeanor. He took one such call yesterday.
Yesterday’s call was all about a building invasion by squirrels. First they got into the attic of the Woman’s Resource and Crisis Center in Soldotna, and then they ate through the dryer vent. Once they got into the main living area, the rampaging squirrels took to running through the building at will. They chewed through electric lines; one electrocuted itself. The director was afraid there would be an electrical short and the place would burn to the ground. Ted came to the rescue; those little gray monsters were much harder to catch than the moose wrapped in the swing set in the middle of the lake.
Today’s call was a different story. For the next call, when it came, was much more serious. It was June 16, 1999; it had not been dark for more than a couple of hours on the Kenai Peninsula when Ted was first called at home at 4:35 A.M. It was his coworker Larry Lewis on the line. Larry and a state trooper had responded at about 3:30 A.M. to a 911 call, “a defense of life and property shooting.” It had been too dark to do any searching when Larry and the trooper had gone out there, especially once they learned from the callers that they were looking for marauding brown bears. Now it was later in the morning, and Ted had invited me along to answer the call in the light of day.