Read Beyond the Bear for Free Online

classmate’s got shredded to the point we had to divvy up his load among us.Wefinally ditched the bears after our fifth day under siege.
    Of the hundreds of miles I’d hiked and climbed and biked and boated in bear country, I’d only been charged once and it wasn’t by a bear. It happened when two friends and I and our three respective dogs were backpacking near Boulder, Colorado, and made camp in a clearing in the Ponderosa pines. This was not only black bear country, we’d been warned of mountain lions in the area. Late that night as we stared into a campfire our dogs suddenly went ballistic, barking, snapping, and lunging, with the one named Gimli dragging the backpack he was tethered to behind him. I leapt to my feet, spun around, and saw a large, shadowy figure at the edge of the flickering campfire light.
    What the . . . ? Heart revving, I reached down and grabbed a flaming log poking partway out of the campfireto wield as a club. As I wound up to swing, with the creature now illuminated by the campfire, I found myself staring into the most menacing eyes I’d ever seen.
    Normally when confronted with danger, a porcupine will pull an about-face, warn off its enemy by flashing a tail-load of quills, then hightail it out of there with a determined waddle. Instead, this thing charged. Having no idea porcupines were capable of such locomotion, I staggered backward, took a swing with my flaming club, then launched the whole log right at it and took off running. Ahhhhhhh! The campsite, only moments before as peaceful as a quilting bee, turned madhouse with three guys darting around chasing the three dogs that were chasing the porcupine that was chasing me. Realizing it was outnumbered, maybe, the porcupine finally slipped back into the shadows and scurried off into the woods.
    Since coming to Alaska, the first time to work on an independent study project in the summer of 2001, I had crossed paths with several bears, both blacks and grizzlies. Alaska’s bears are generally wilder than Lower-48 bears, especially compared to black bears in areas as heavily traveled as the Sierra Nevada, and are therefore much less inclined to associate people with food. By mid-July, 2003, I had fished Alaska rivers the better part of three summers, enough to know bears could pop out of the brush anytime, anywhere, especially in places I most loved to fish.
    While remote fly-in fishing is the quintessential Alaska experience, it can make the price per pound comparable to precious metal. The Kenai and Russian rivers on the Kenai Peninsula are prolific, world-class rivers accessible by road in a state where roads are rare, offering between the two of them trophy-size Dolly Varden and rainbow trout, and runs of four species of Pacific salmon—Chinook, sockeye, coho, and humpback. I was partial to the Russian, the narrower and shallower of the two rivers,with its water running clear, as opposed to the cyan-tinted Kenai, a liquid conveyor belt of glacial silt. The Kenai can be excellent salmon fishing, but the Russian can be phenomenal. To me, the Russian River was the fisherman’s equivalent of a neighborhood bar. When the salmon were running, I’d be down there after work and on my days off three times a week, not giving the 140-mile round-trip drive from Girdwood a second thought, especially considering how hard the salmon work to get there.
    Theirs is a pilgrimage of epic proportions, which increased my reverence and gratitude whenever one intercepted the business end of my fishing pole. After surviving the freshwater phase of their formative years, they go to sea, spending two to seven years, depending on the species, dodging whales, salmon sharks, and other ocean-dwelling predators, and evading commercial fishing nets, before returning to Cook Inlet, then the mouth of the Kenai River. Then they basically run a marathon while on a hunger strike as they bulldoze their way against the current more than seventymiles to the confluence of the