A FIGHT WITH A GRIZZLY BEAR
From the novel NORTH OF NEW YORK
copyright 2014 Edwin P. Cutler
Metoosin kneeling at the morning fire called to the tent, "With bad men on trail, we go while they sleep."
"Don't panic. I'm sure they want us alive and healthy so they can follow us to the secret valley." James climbed out into the new day and after rousing Marcette and her boy, sliced bacon in a pan.
"You say plane crash close?" Metoosin knocked the tent down.
"Metoosin, when I crawled out of the cave where I spent the winter and started hiking south, it was only a half day walk down to this beaver pond."
"I come by beaver pond and no see crashed plane. Where plane?"
"Come along, the cave is beyond the plane. Let's see if we can find it."
"You're going to show us where you fought the bear?" Marcette shouldered her pack and leading her boy was ready to follow.
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Almost noon, James led his caravan off a game trail and started up to what appeared an impassable steep mountain.
"Open ahead!" Metoosin pointed to a cleft that became a narrow pass.'
"There's the wrecked plane!" Marcette squealed.
"What's left of it," James said.
"How you live in wreck like that?" Metoosin asked.
"The cave is just beyond. Follow me and we'll have lunch inside and I'll tell you how I ended with my plane all broken and twisted and show you where I fought the grizzly bear."
"Cave!" the boy pointed and led them into a hole in the side of the mountain.
"Your mother's pictures?" Marcette asked.
"You make fire pit," Metoosin approved.
"Feed boy," the boy demanded and they sat in a circle around the fire pit to eat.
He looked into the faces of each of the people he loved, and could not resist the opportunity to tell them how he got into the fight with a grizzly bear.
He began his tale:
.
I had flown up out of my valley ahead of an arctic cold front. As soon as I was airborne I found myself lost in a witch's brew of weather, looking for mountains to avoid.
I narrowly missed one mountain peak and found the vague shapes of trees filling the scene ahead. When they became more distinct, I knew they must be tall trees on the steep face of a foggy mountain.
I pulled on the helm hoping to fly over the ridge where they grew.
No good, too steep! Flying straight up, I stalled and knew this was my end for I would tailspin down into some valley far below.
But, my plane bellied into the side of the mountain with the wings grabbing the trees and the prop chopping limbs and branches.
I was amazed when I came to rest. But then I saw tree trunks and rocks moving up and knew my plane was sliding backwards down the side of the mountain. Pontoons tore off and wings bent and broke until me and the plane came to rest a jumbled wreck deep in a rock strewn abyss.
I was alive and had only been bumped around in my first ever plane crash.
Watching nature lay a white blanket on the broken wings outside the crushed and twisted fuselage, I was amazed I was alive and well, but knew I would be buried in freezing snow until spring.
As I released my seat belt, the plane screeched and veered so suddenly I was thrown onto the passenger seat with my backpack.
When I unlatched the door, the wind grabbed it and slammed it open against the fuselage. I unbuckled my seat belt and carrying my pack, rifle and axe, climbed out onto a jumble of rubble and rocks that appeared to be the floor of a narrow pass between two steep mountains. What few stubbly trees were clinging to the walls of the pass were bending and moaning in the wind.
When the fuselage screeched and threatened to fall farther, I reached back inside through the torn off door and threw out boxes and bags, knowing that without salt I would die.
I realized I should have radioed a May Day and berating my negligence looked with despair at the crushed navigation instruments.
I stood with my few supplies scattered about and listened to the screams of icy wind whipped trees barely visible through the roiling clouds of winter.
When I heard a deep rumbling doomsday growl behind me, I turned and crouched. Not more than ten feet away a grizzly bear was glaring at me, a bear that reared up on its hind feet to stand seven feet tall and shook the world with his savage roar.
I grabbed my rifle and fired several shots into the air. The bear appeared puzzled at what to him might have sounded like thunder. Dropping to all fours he shook his massive head and turned his four hundred pounds to amble off into the falling snow.
I was exposed to a world of falling snow and freezing cold and the airplane was a disaster, so I decided to make camp in the shelter of a stand of winter spruce. As I drug my backpack to the grove of trees along the base of the rugged cliff, I felt the knife edge of the wind moderate.
The bed of pine needles was already being dusted with blown snow and I was trying to decide where to make my camp when a shadow at the base of the cliff caught my eye.
In the dim light of the cloud covered day there was a ledge of rock that hung out over the gaping mouth of an opening into the bowels of the earth.
A cave, I wondered and crawling around some rocks peered into a room with a ceiling ten feet high and a sandy floor fifteen feet wide. This was as good as the cave in my secret valley back home.
Working as best as I could in a day that was darkened prematurely by the storm, I shuffled back and forth searching for my meager supplies in the accumulating snow and carried what I found into the refuge that nature had gratefully provided.
With what I hoped was all of my gear, I sagged on the sandy floor and being out of the wind felt a false sense of warmth which was to me a luxury. But when I dug out a thermometer I discovered it was already ten below!
Looking deeper into the cave I saw a bed of shed hair mixed with needles of the spruce.
Metoosin told me that bears consume pine needles to line their stomachs when they hibernate. The bear that had confronted me outside was ready to hibernate.
I spilled the contents of my backpack out on the sandy floor and took stock. Besides my rifle and sharp axe, my outfit consisted of a hunting knife, a large number of cartridges for my rifle, a tin plate, a cup, and a fork and spoon. To eat I had a quantity of dried beef and dried fruits and several small canvas bags containing tea, sugar, salt, and pepper. A bag filled with cans of Pork and Beans surprised me.
Looking around, I knew I had to cut some wood to keep from freezing, and grabbed my axe and was grateful when I found the limbs of a Larch which I knew would make a smokeless fire.
With matches from a sealed tube I soon had a small fire burning.
White men build big fire cut wood to keep warm, Indian build little fire and sit by it to keep warm, Metoosin had told me.
Unpacking the lunch my mother had fixed, I began to eat thinking how lucky I was, and, foolishly complacent, let my mind wander to thoughts of Marcette.
It slowly dawned on me that everyone must think I am someplace else: Mom and Dad think I'm at Swan Lake, Marcette in Swan Lake thinks I'm still in my valley, Gem doesn't care where I am, I sighed.
I saw the temperature dropping lower and worried I might freeze, I cheered when I discovered my father's sleeping bag, a bag with tubes of supporting ribs that can be blown up to form a long low one-man tent with insulating air pocket and panels.
Dad said this was invented by an architect in New York for hiking in the winter months. I blew up the tangle of tubes and hugged a ground pad which, when placed under the sleeping bag, would insulate me from the cold sand floor of the cave.
That morning when I left my valley, the day had dawned with vaporous clouds that portend a cold front, a warning I should have taken into account. For no sooner than I was aloft the world darkened and the wind strengthened and blew me through the mountains and valleys like a kite with a broken string.
The men on their trap lines must have paused in amazement. I had heard stories of how, before they could retreat or turn back to safety, or build themselves shelters, the surprise storms bore down upon them and the temperature dropped to 70 below.
I had experienced such storms in my youth. Standing outside the cabin as a child I had heard the sky moaning as if in pain, something in the sound that seemed like the lowest note on God's enormous pipe organ -- a knell of impending doom.
During the night the storm that had blown me through the mountains, roared mercilessly over the ridges and through the passes.
But asleep in this cave, I was deaf to the tempest that challenged the right of the forest trees to lift their limbs to the sky; the tempest that bent the sturdy trunks until their roots clutched at the mountain side in fear of falling into looming valleys far below.
I woke to a sense of faint light as if the morning was hesitating between dawn and daylight. When I staggered to the entrance to look out, the wind was still raging and in my narrow passage between the steep rocky sides no living creature could stand on its feet. The animals had buried themselves deep in the drifts for shelter, for with the storm had come an intense cold, and all the mountains were smothered by blankets of blowing, drifting snow.
I glanced at the thermometer and whistled, for now it was fifteen below!
To set my cave in order, I turned to my supplies; some covered with a dusting of the brazen snow, and began carefully opening the packages I had saved from the crash, supplies that I would certainly need to survive.
I settled down to a regimen of survival. The only thing that changed as the day passed was the date on my watch. After three days in the cave, I began to contemplate my predicament: I had a fire and was eating okay, with the blow-up sleeping bag I was sleeping okay even though it was below freezing in the cave.
Without snowshoes, there was no place to go, so I sat on the soft sand and looked at my mother's paintings and admired how they blended into the decor of my mountain retreat.
Then I pulled Marcette's letter from my wallet. Like one in a dream I opened the torn envelope and reread her confession of affection. The curl of her hair and the tiny cluster of violets carried me away to Swan Lake where I wished that I could hold her in my arms.
Bringing my wandering heart back to the problem of surviving, I decided to build a decent fire pit so cut more firewood and began selecting rocks from around the cave to place in a small circle well inside the entrance.
Pleased with my work, I moved my fire into the stone circle and was cooking some beans in a little pan when I heard a growling sound outside. When I looked to the snow covered fallen trees that blocked the entrance I froze. The bear I had scared away was pushing in, all four hundred pounds.
The behemoth stopped, shook himself and, like a shaggy dog, sprayed snow over the sandy floor. Then he dipped his nose and sniffed at my fire. I could tell he didn't like it.
When he backed away then turned his head to look around, I realized he had come back to sleep away the cold winter months in his bed.
He looked in my direction, but I hadn't moved, so I don't think he realized I was there. He started toward the back of the cave for his winter bed and I wondered if he would go to sleep and let me share his space. But his huge paws tripped on my sleeping bag. With an outraged roar, he stomped on it and one of the inflated tubes popped like a small gun.
Whether it frightened him or perhaps he just enjoyed it, he kept stomping and popping and ripping the tubes.
My reaction was not too bright. I would freeze so I yelled, "Hey! Stop that!"
At the sound of my voice, he turned and stared at me with his red eyes.
When he started around the fire to get at me, I went the other way. For a few daring moments we danced back and forth, this way and that.
As I passed where my rifle lay against my backpack, I picked it up and still moving to keep the fire between myself and certain death I aimed the gun at the roof and pulled the trigger.
The boom of the gun did not frighten him. Instead he roared a reply that filled the cave with thunder and stormed through the fire reaching for me with razor claws.
In those moments when death knocks at your door and you think a panorama of your past, I gasped, "My God! I'm going to be killed by a bear!"
As his gapping maw of razor sharp teeth opened before my eyes, I aimed my rifle into his mouth and pulled the trigger.
Even as the cave filled with the mixed roars of gun and bear, a huge paw of razor sharp claws swiped my thigh and tore my pants and my world went black.
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It was some time before I realized that I was alive and found myself thinking that dying was like going to sleep forever.
As I roused, I had a sensation of being covered by a wonderfully warm blanket. When I tried to move, the warm blanket was too heavy to throw off.
Twisting around I discovered it was the bear, and the razor sharp teeth of its open mouth were gripping my sleeve. The bullet I had fired into his open mouth had blown the back of his head out and he had died trying to bite my arm off.
I freed myself by sliding sideways from under him, thinking how lucky can one be.
But never be too optimistic, for I felt warmth on my left thigh. Opening a rip in my pants, I saw a dark run of blood -- the bear had slashed me with his mighty claw before he mercifully died without eating me.
I opened my waterproof backpack and pulled out an undershirt which I used to sop up some of the blood. There were three cuts with the middle one as long as my hand and maybe an inch deep.
I was sure I could never hike out of there with a muscle cut nearly in half. Looking out the mouth of the cave to wind-torn trees, I told myself, I better survive first, and reached in the backpack for a first aid kit.
Dad always said to pack codeine in case you broke an arm or had an emergency in the backwoods, and this was an emergency. I opened a small bottle and popped a pill.
I knew the cuts on my leg had to be sterilized and closed, so I poured a washing dash of water and some alcohol on the damaged area. Then I carefully sterilized a needle from the backpack sewing kit and threaded it with the toughest thread I could find.
With the first push of the needle through my skin, I screamed.
When the echoes of my anguish faded to hollow whimpers in the cave, I cried and punched a hole across the cut and tugged the two sides together.
For what seemed an eternity I threaded stitch after stitch across the slice the bear had carved in my leg. I had to keep wiping tears from my eyes to see if I was making any progress. After what seemed like hours, I looked at my handiwork; a haphazrd lacing of black thread held the big cut shut.
To protect the stitches, I poured a drabble of alcohol into each of the wounds then dug out some butterfly stitches and stuck them across the smaller outside cuts, hoping to also hold them closed.
Finally, I pasted some Savlon antiseptic cream over the whole mess and began wrapping my thigh with a two inch wide Ace bandage used by mountain climbers for sprains.
"Operation a success, patients still alive, Dr. Cook," I announced, trying to sound cheerful, but clenched my teeth hoping the codeine would kick in soon.
I had been in tough situations as a bush pilot, but this was the worst I could recall: I was wounded, I was exposed to a world of freezing cold, I was poorly dressed and I was exhausted.
Accepting my destiny, I admitted I was going to be here awhile, and popped another pain pill.
When I looked around the cave I saw the torn up sleeping bag. With twenty below on the thermometer I knew I was going to freeze if I didn't keep a fire going.
I had been lucky to find the bear's cave and even luckier to kill the beast, now I had to survive.
The bear! I growled and using my rifle as a crutch managed to get up onto my good leg.
Warm. I felt the carcass and drew my hunting knife.
I had gutted a moose in the far north and slept in his carcass during a blizzard, so I slit the bear's underside from his neck down past his belly, I pulled, tugged, and trimmed lungs, heart, stomach and intestines until I had eviscerated the beast.
You may have saved my life, I heard myself telling my would-be assassin. Without you I would surely freeze tonight. I grabbed the bear's ears and with lurches and groans dragged and rolled the eviscerated carcass into the nest the animal had prepared for his winter bed.
You and I will hibernate tonight, I chuckled and gathering the fire he had scattered I opened another can of pork and beans.
Darkness invaded the cave and with the darkness came more cold. When I saw twenty five below on the thermometer, I finally shrugged to the disagreeable bed that might save my life. I popped another codeine pill and wrapped myself in a camping blanket. Lifting a huge, hairy arm I crawled into the disemboweled carcass.
I tugged the bear's arms and legs to make the animal hug me, hoping to conserve the heat of our bodies.
I worried a mamma bear might come in during the night and try to crawl into bed with papa bear, but being drugged and exhausted, I soon dozed off and slept like a baby in the arms of the bear that had threatened my life then saved it.
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In the morning, I looked at the bear lying in his bed and realized he might do more to save me if I could skin him and use his hide as a blanket.
As I unsheathed my knife, I wished Metoosin was here to help me skin the beast and tan the hide to use as a blanket. But first realized I should cut out some steaks before the carcass froze.
To improve my fire pit, I popped more codeine to tolerate the pain in the bear-claw cuts, and limped about and cut sap-filled limbs from the fallen spruce trees that blocked the entrance to my cave. I drove a Y-shaped stick on each side of my new fire pit and, after passing a sturdy stick through a bear steak, hung the meat laden stick in the two Y-shaped sticks. As the meat warmed I turned it slowly and watched the dripping grease spurt and flame.
I reminded myself that without salt the electrolytes in the blood stream are used up and the muscles fail to respond to nerve signals. Especially dangerous are the heart muscles. A man can't live through a winter without some salt.
Chewing on the salted steak, I mumbled, I have said I like winter in the Rockies, but those words were uttered in the shelter of a cabin or in the bookstore in New York. I looked outside and knew I am where the challenges must be met in the raw.
Starvation postponed I drew my knife and began skinning the bear, hoping to use the hide as a blanket.
I finally heard the wind relax and looked out to a world that was no longer the green world I had flown over. The north country, like the snowshoe rabbit, had put on its winter dress of lacy white and the snow has silenced things as if the world were soundproofed.
Like a sailor who sits at a bar and brags on the sea, I've been either sitting at the Chelsea or had my feet propped up by the stove in the cabin in the valley. I doubted if I'm as tough as I claimed to be.
Pushing enough snow aside to see better, I saw that my notch was completely blocked with snow. No one could see my plane even if they thought to look down from the sky.
Outside, I thrust a boot into the snow and tried to break a path. But the snow was waist high and impossible to wade through. In frustration I turned around and hobbled back to the fire where I had eaten bear steaks and pork and beans until I thought I would upchuck.
Sure wish I had brought some snowshoes. I looked around at the forlorn beauty of my cave and huddled like a prisoner in solitary confinement.
Once again I looked outside and marveled at the white world, but stiffened when I saw a young buck deer coming through the pass by making plunging leaps in the deep snow. Picking up my rifle, I took a position amongst the snow laden limbs of the deadfall at the mouth of his cave.
I bit my lip and remembering in this land, survival is survival, I let some air out to steady the gun and slowly squeezed the trigger.
When the deer went down, I limped out to retrieve my catch where I found it is hell to drag a crippled leg in deep snow.
Shouldering the carcass and limping to favor my wounds I carried it back through the path I had broken. As I dropped the deer in the snow outside the cave, I remembered Metoosin had made his own snowshoes using the leg tendons of a deer.
Brandishing my knife I cut the jugular to bleed the meat and gutted the carcass. With the messy part done, I drug the deer inside. In hopes of making a coat that would be lighter than the bear skin but heavy enough to keep me warm on the trail, I painstakingly skinned it and stretched the hide alongside the pegged down bear hide.
When appetite caught my attention, I cut out some venison steaks and treated myself to a change in menu.
To start my snowshoes, I carefully cut tendons from the deer's hamstrings. Bending some boughs of the tree by my door into a shape I hoped would mimic the snowshoes I watched Metoosin make long ago, I began making my own.
I tied the first of the hamstrings to the saplings. But threading the strings was tedious work and when I became bored with the strings, I put some wood on the fire and worked to tan the two skins until I was bored again. The patience required left me with admiration for the natives who worked such primitive materials into useful garments.
Even with my devoted efforts it took several days to thread and lace the tendons into the snowshoes; back and forth and up and down, weaving and warping. But finally on the last day of January I carried them outside.
By clinging to the lower limbs of a spruce tree I managed to get up onto them and stood on top of the deep snow.
In the two months I had spent recuperating my stitches healed and I felt I was ready. So I tidied up the cave, propped my mother's pictures along a wall and packed only the essentials for hiking in my backpack.
I arranged the bear's bones in his nest and wrapped myself in his hide for a last night in his cave.
In the morning, after a last breakfast by my stone-lined fire pit, I strapped my axe to my pack and humped the load onto my back. Then I slung my rifle strap over a shoulder.
With my boots laced to the snowshoes and my walking sticks in hand, I took a last look at my winter home, smiled at my mother's paintings, and stepped out into a day not yet awake.
It was twenty below which is not unusual for this country and the sun would not be up this far north until mid-morning.
After surveying the wreck of my plane, I looked at the fallen trees, the drifts of snow, and headed out of the gulch.
When I looked back the plane and my cave were not visible, all I could see was the uneven tracks of my snowshoes.
As I plodded along, I wondered if I would ever get rid of this limp, but I followed one step with another pleased that I could walk on the snow.
A little after noon that first day out, I descended into a small valley and discovered a large beaver dam.
I was gazing at the numerous lodges scattered out over the snow on the pond, when the lace holding the snowshoe to my left boot parted.
I sprawled with arms flailing and the backpack pushed my face down in the snow. Laughing at my misadventure I decided to make camp and repair the break.
I made a crude shelter and soon had a little fire burning. Sitting just inside, with the snowshoe across my lap, I pondered a possible repair.
Relaxed for the moment, I looked out over the pond the beavers had built. It was as big as a football field and the dam was an engineering marvel. Out on the ice, or in the ice, the beaver's lodges looked like a village of snow covered igloos and I knew from experience that the workers were cuddled inside chewing on bark they had stored during the summer.
I wove my spare babeesh cords into the main web to replace the loop for my boot and glanced out over the pond wondering if the beavers were swimming under the ice from lodge to lodge, visiting their neighbors.
After a filling lunch, I drifted off to sleep and lay daydreaming of my life as a youth in my secret valley.
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Underway in another dawn, with working snowshoes, but still limping, I wondered how long it had been since other men had been in this forest and camped or hunted by this lake.
At noon the clouds turned grey and I knew there was a blizzard brewing. As the afternoon passed I realized I would need shelter.
Piled up against a mass of rock I found a huge snow drift. The drift was as long as the hull of a ship. The outer shell was blistered and battered to a brittle hardness by wind and freezing sleet.
I cut a small opening through the shell with my axe, and dug out the soft snow from inside until I had a stateroom I could stretch out in. It was so snug and warm that with my body heat and a candle for light, I could throw off the thick bear coat.
In the first night of the storm, it seemed as though all the people in the world were pleading and wailing and sobbing in the blackness outside. The storm did not frighten me; it filled me with an odd sense of security and comfort. The wind shrieked and lashed itself about my snow-dune, but it could not get at me. Its mightiest efforts to destroy only beat more snow onto the hull of my ship, and made me safer and warmer. In a way, there was something of humor as well as tragedy in its wild frenzy, and I heard myself laugh.
Most of these blizzards rage for three days. In storms out on the ocean, sea captains expect strong winds and big waves for several days.
Snug in my snow cave, I contented myself with reading Marcette's letter and after a satisfying examination of my stitches I thanked the deity that I was as well off as I was.
When the blizzard had exhausted itself the air was left clear and beautiful, so I dug myself out and resumed my homeward trek.
The season was more advanced now, but there was still a bitter cold in the west wind that was driving white clouds across the sky with their shadows racing beneath them over the snow and through the forests. I took great gulps of the life-giving wind and, feeling it reach right though my clothes and caress my skin, I gave a sudden shout of triumph.
Out in this wilderness I shouted when I wanted to, and as I pressed a long trace of snowshoe patterns I began to feel health pouring back into my strengthening body. Looking ahead I was ready to traipse the hills on legs that were healed and swift.
And if this joy was only fleeting, what of it? I would live in the moment, as the little foxes did, and shout as they did for the joy of the sun.
It seemed to me that these hundreds of valleys would never grow old; that I could wander on for all time, passing from one into another, and that each would possess its own charm, its own secret to be discovered, its own story to be told. To me they were largely inscrutable; as enigmatic as life itself, hiding their treasure as they droned through the centuries.
I skipped along, daydreaming through eons of time, until I heard a voice calling my name in the forest ahead.