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Kenai and Russian rivers, where they rest up before pushing onward and upward — all to sacrifice themselves for the posterity of their species, or, with any luck, a spot in my cooler.
    The confluence of the Russian and Kenai rivers is the mother lode of fishing holes known as The Sanctuary. This is ground zero for combat fishing, with anglers standing practically elbow to elbow along the banks during the most prized salmon runs. Although the fish we were after that day, sockeyes—or reds as we call them—are on a spawning mission and stop eating once they hit fresh water, they plow their way upriver with mouths open, closed, open, closed, forcing water through their gills. The only way to catch them, legally anyway, is to intercept them with fishing line at a mouth-open moment. As the current drags the line downriver, you hook them in the mouth. This is called flossing, and it isn’t as hard as it sounds when the runs are so thick it would be just as easy, it seems, to wade out into the river and pounce on them.
    A side effect of such great fishing is that, through the years, great fishing has drawn more and more fishermen, and more and more fishermen catching more and more fish means literally tons of guts and carcasses get left behind. That has drawn more and more bears. People like me come for the fillets. Bears come for the leftovers, the egg sacks and carcasses rich with brains and other delicacies that are winged back into the river after we’ve cleaned and filleted our catches. The US Forest Service, landlord of the Russian River Campground and its day-use parking lots, installed fish-cleaning stations to address, among other issues, the problem of fish being cleaned along riverbanks, which drew bears, and fish being cleaned at the campground, which drew bears. The cleaning stations were positioned so people could toss carcasses into the main current where they were more likely to disperse, providing nutrients for aquatic life rather than a buffet line for bears. Instead, carcasses piled up here and there, caught on snapped fishing line, on rocks, and in eddies—which drew bears.
    The way it’s been explained to me, anglers discarding an average of 114,000 pounds, or fifty-seven tons, of fish waste annually within what’s now called the Kenai-Russian River Complex (a five-mile radius from the confluence of the two) have lured bears to an area where they normally wouldn’t linger or congregate in such high numbers. It’s not that bears don’t fish. They do fish. But there are much better fishing spots for bears, including farther up the Russian River valley where the water is shallower, fish are easier to catch, and people are few. As one local biologist explained it, bears would normally fish later in the runs, at times much less appealing to fishermen, when salmon are closer to being spawned out and dying, and therefore easier to catch. So I’m not saying bears are lazy. I’m saying bears are smart.
    By the time I started fishing down there, the fabulous fishing and ensuing carcass pileup were putting bears and humans in the same place at the same time, both in ridiculous numbers, making confrontations inevitable. Bear cubs were growing up learning carcass-grazing as a legitimate means of making a living. A handful of brazen juveniles were losing their fear of humans, learning that all it took was a stroll along the riverbanks looking all badass to clear people out, leaving coolers, backpacks, and fish on stringers theirs for the taking, a no-good situation for either species since people can get hurt and bears can get shot.
    The situation at the Russian had been years in the making. “What we’ve done is create an artificial food source,” Alaska Department of Fish and Game bear biologist Sean Farley told the Anchorage Daily News after a grizzly sow was gut-shot at the Russian two years after my attack. “I know I’m going to get in trouble for saying that. It’s a very strange, bureaucratic,