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Byzantine mess.”
    Looking after one of the state’s most heavily fishedsalmon streams, while at the same time protecting bears from the artillery-packing angling public, no doubt made for some management challenges for the various state and federal agencies overseeing the river, its banks, the campground, and the wild lands beyond. But it seemed to me that if the carcass problem could have been solved, over time the bears would have returned to behaving more like wild bears, much like the garbage bears of Yellowstone National Park did when the last of the dumps was shut down in 1970. They would do as their ancestors had done; they would go out of their way to avoid humans, leaving The Sanctuary and other hot spots to the possessed fishing hordes.
    Nearly every plan for managing the convergence of the fish, bears, people, river, and land came with a downside, it seemed. The cleaning stations becoming bear magnets was one of them. Bank restoration was another. The thousands of anglers descending upon these rivers between May and September each year were trampling the riverbanks to death, prompting a huge and spendy restoration project. Boardwalks were built, gravel trails established, steps constructed, and fences erected. As a result, tall, lush grasses, and other thick vegetation once again thrived. Wonderful, particularly for the fish since unfettered trampling of riverbanks impacts habitat. Only one problem. All that lushness made it harder for bears to see fishermen and fishermen to see bears, and that could lead to nothing but trouble.
    The already worrisome bear situation was even more so in July, 2003. Earlier that summer, the first of two annual red salmon runs had been weak. The second run in July, the one I was going for that day, was stronger, but salmon bound for the Russian were still holed up at The Sanctuary, resting before continuing on to spawning grounds upriver.Maybe it was just a fluke, but for whatever reason, black bears and grizzly sows with cubs were pacing up and down the riverbanks in even higher than the usual high numbers. Grizzly boars, which normally keep to the high country, were wandering down in search of food, which put sows on edge, since males will sometimes kill cubs.
    In early July, a sow with cubs charged through a riverside fence trying to get at a fisherman, who shot and wounded her in self-defense. Two days later three cubs were reported up a tree at the Russian River Campground. Their mother’s carcass was found nearby. Biologists captured the fifty-pound cubs, then made the difficult decision to euthanize them when no wildlife facility or zoo could take them.
    Two days before he would play a role in my rescue, fisherman Tom Swiech witnessed a terrifying encounter at The Sanctuary between a young couple and a sow with three cubs. They hadn’t seen the bears, and were crossing the river more or less between them when the sow came huffing and splashing across the river straight at them.
    “Behind you, behind you! Watch out! Don’t move! Hold your ground!”
    They dropped their poles, grabbed a hold of each other, and froze. Swiech held his breath. The bear charged. I’m going to see these kids get eaten right in front of me , he thought. The bear stopped no less than twenty feet away, slapped the water with a front paw, clacked its jaw, turned, and huffed off.
    Swiech was visiting from Pennsylvania at the time, but had fished the Russian for four summers while stationed at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage. Of all the previous trips he’d made to the Kenai and Russian rivers, he’d seen only one bear—a black one. This trip, fishing six days over the course of two weeks, he’d seen thirteen grizzlies, or brown bears as they’re called in these parts.
    The bear situation I was heading into that day was what some might consider off the charts. According to news accounts at the time, no one in the previous twenty-five years remembered seeing so many bears at one time near