Читать книгу A Shape in the Dark - Bjorn Dihle - Страница 13

Sorry as we are at the extermination of the California grizzly, its passing was an inevitable and necessary accompaniment of human occupancy of the land. Although none of us now can ever see the live animal, we take pride that the bear which was so much a part of our early history, carries on as the state’s emblematic representative.

—Tracy I. Storer and Lloyd P. Tevis Jr., California Grizzly

In 2010, while on a six-week trek across the Brooks Range, I followed the fresh tracks of a large grizzly up a box canyon not more than thirty yards wide. Except for a lost Nunamiut Eskimo man I’d found and walked with for a day and a half to the village of Anaktuvuk Pass, I’d been alone since I’d begun traveling west from the Dalton Highway two weeks prior. The wind was hard on my face, and heavy rain and the roar of a cascading stream muffled out all but my loudest warning calls. Hours wore on, and my nerves became increasingly frayed—at any moment I expected to run into the bear. Being stuck in a narrow gorge with any grizzly is dangerous, but my instinct, honed from solitude and numerous tense encounters with bears, told me this animal was particularly aggressive. The tracks of two wolves appeared. A short while later, strewn across the ground, lay a caribou calf they had killed that morning. The bear had claimed it from them. Blood and offal blackened the sand and gravel, but little flesh remained. I knelt, cupped the calf’s face with my hand, and studied the black scree mountain slopes rising into dark clouds.

I climbed out of the gorge, hoping to sidehill and avoid an encounter, but I quickly came to a crumbly cliff, so I sat in the pouring rain on a ledge and fought something akin to panic roiling inside of me. An hour later, I calmed down enough to continue. When the bear finally appeared, it looked like a gothic monster in the rain and mist. I let out a breath as it lumbered across the slope above, unaware I was watching, rolling over giant boulders in search of marmots. I hiked well past dark before camping near a mountain pass. The sound of caribou snorting and the clacking of their hooves and tendons woke me numerous times during the night.

The following day, I walked with thousands of caribou traveling down the April Creek valley. They had given birth to their calves on the Arctic’s coastal plain in June and were slowly migrating south to their wintering ground. I pushed through a wall of brush and came upon the carcass of a partly eaten bull caribou lying in a stagnant pool. The surrounding mud was beaten down with the tracks of a small grizzly. A moment later, a dark form rushed forward from the willows—an old female caribou, which stopped a few feet away and stared. Late that evening, I dropped my pack on a knoll and was about to make camp when I nearly stepped on the bloody quarter of a caribou that had been killed a few hours prior. Arctic grizzlies depend heavily on a vegetarian diet but supplement their intake with caribou, ground squirrels, and other sources of protein when they can. Bears often drag a dead animal into the brush and cover it with debris in what is called a cache. They’re especially dangerous when guarding a kill. The bear was probably just yards away with the rest of the animal. I pulled out my pistol, shouldered my pack, and hiked through the darkness as startled caribou ran circles around me until I was far away.

The population of grizzlies in the Brooks Range, especially in areas like Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, which is closed to hunting, is denser than many might believe. When I first ventured into the Arctic, I figured my chance of seeing a bear was almost zero. I didn’t bother bringing a gun and only threw in a pepper spray as an afterthought. That trip ended with me almost getting knocked down by a grizzly.

In the morning, a blond grizzly appeared beneath a black tor—a thirty-foot high protrusion of ancient granite rising from the tundra—and quickly walked in my direction. I backtracked and, hoping the bear had not seen me, deviated sharply from its trajectory. Soon the bear appeared and ran across the tundra toward me. It paused at seventy yards and paralleled my movement for twenty minutes across a big plateau until it lost interest and climbed a desolate ridge high into the mountains.

That night I sat cross-legged, watching the last of the day’s light pour through clouds onto the rolling mountains above the headwaters of the Alatna River. It’s near here that the Nunamiut believe their ancestors were given the gift of life. In The Nunamiut Eskimos, Nicholas Gubser relates that a benevolent giant named Aiyagomahala created the Nunamiut and then showed them how to hunt and trade. Aiyagomahala taught ethics, kindness, and love and warned about the dangers of anger. Before vanishing, Aiyagomahala stuck a mitten into the ground, and mountains—known as the Arrigetch Peaks—formed in its place to remind the Nunamiut of their creator. I felt there was something special about this place. The world appeared motionless; even the scattered bands of caribou seemed frozen.

IN 1826, THOUSANDS OF MILES TO THE SOUTH, JEDEDIAH SMITH LED A party of trappers across the Mojave Desert and the Sierra Nevada into the territory of California. Smith was looking for new beaver country and found a wilderness just as wild as the Brooks Range. Two years later he became the first American to leave a record of an encounter with the California grizzly, a now extinct subspecies of the brown bear known as Ursus arctos californicus. The California grizzly is said to have been similar in size to the giants of the Kodiak Archipelago—imagine a large male standing eight to ten feet on his hind legs and weighing up to 1,600 pounds.

Smith’s journal entry is terse, telling how he snuck up and shot a bear and watched it run off wounded. The party of beaver trappers entered the Sacramento Valley and found it thick with grizzlies. They wounded several with their light rifles before killing a large male. A short while later, a trapper trailing a wounded bear was severely mauled. A few days after that, Smith was nearly torn up by a grizzly for the second time—he’d shot a bear, and while he and two men were approaching the dead animal, a different bear charged. Smith jumped into a creek, and the bear pivoted and fixated on another trapper. The man jammed his rifle’s bayonet into the animal’s neck and it ran off, crashing through the brush, leaving a crimson trail in its wake.

Early California stories tell of brown bears mauling Indigenous people on a regular basis. These incidents usually involved people accidentally crowding bears, triggering defensive attacks. Unlike the tribes of the north and Great Plains, it appears the peoples living in what is now California almost never hunted grizzlies. Authors Tracy Storer and Lloyd Tevis Jr. wrote in California Grizzly that bears had dominion over the land: “Early in the Spanish period of California, a sure way to earn the gratitude of the natives was to destroy grizzlies.” The bear was not only a threat to life but also a frightening spiritual presence. Bear men and women practiced dark magic and assumed the form of a bear to murder people. Storer and Tevis wrote that the Pomo people believed

the ghosts of the wicked Indians had to stay behind in the bodies of miserable and tormented grizzlies, forever roaming the wilderness to be hated and loathed by all who saw them. . . . The Chumash, living near the “Valley of Bears,” a land of long grassy swales studded with oaks, where grizzlies were unusually plentiful, evidently believed that all who died there became grizzlies.

John Bidwell, who in 1841 was one of the first emigrants on the California Trail and later served as a California senator, wrote that “the grizzly bear was looked upon by the valley Indians with superstitious awe, also by the coast Indians. They were said to be people, but very bad people, and I have known Indians to claim that some of the old men could go in the night and talk with bears.”

Spanish settlers first built a mission in California in 1769. Initially ravaged by disease and hunger, they were able to survive by eating brown bear meat until a resupply ship carrying livestock arrived. Horses, cattle, sheep, and goats were set free, and their numbers soon exploded. With a new and ample food source in the free-range livestock, the grizzly population grew rapidly too. Hunting bears became a favorite pastime of the vaqueros. These bloodthirsty men of remarkable courage hunted the bears on horseback using lariats. They would bait a bear with a slaughtered mare or cow, wait for the animal to come feed during the night, and then give chase. By working in groups—usually between four and a dozen men—they’d lasso a bear’s paws and hind feet, stretch the animal tight, and then dispatch it by strangling it with a lariat. Or the vaqueros might bind or cage the bear before transporting it to sell at a town or settlement. Often, after Sunday church services, Californians would gather for entertainment that included grizzly bear and Spanish bull fights. Bull and bear would be tethered together, and the bear would be harassed with spears and dogs. Often the bear would kill several bulls before being fatally gored. Despite human bloodlust, the grizzly population remained high during Spanish and later Mexican rule of California.

In 1848, at the end of the Mexican-American War, the United States claimed California. Gold was found in the Sierra, and a stampede of more than 300,000 prospectors journeyed to California by land and water. One of these men was a thirty-seven-year-old Massachusetts shoemaker named James Capen Adams. He invested all his savings—and likely his father’s too—in footwear to sell to prospectors, then left his wife and children to follow the stampede west. A cholera epidemic was ravaging St. Louis when he arrived. While he was arranging to transport his merchandise to California, a steamboat caught flame, and the city burned. All of Adams’s investment was lost. Soon after, he received word his father had killed himself. The cobbler wandered the charred ruins of St. Louis as wagons passed by carrying corpses—more than 5,000 died of cholera that summer. He was faced with a tough decision: go home ruined or go west to seek fortune. He packed what few belongings he had and began following the Santa Fe Trail west. He suffered hunger and cold, nearly dying twice from disease before arriving in Los Angeles sometime in the fall.

American settlers had come to California in droves and, being well armed and possessing zero tolerance for anything that contested their dominion over the land, set about systematically killing grizzlies. Adams made and lost fortunes prospecting, ranching, and leatherworking “until at last,” he said, “in the fall of 1852, disgusted with the world and dissatisfied with myself, I abandoned all my schemes for the accumulation of wealth, turned my back upon the society of my fellows, and took the road toward the wildest and most unfrequented parts of the Sierra Nevada, resolved thenceforth to make the wilderness my home and wild beasts my companions.”

Adams hadn’t always been a cobbler. He’d once worked as a hunter, trapper, and trainer of wild animals. His career ended when he made a near-fatal mistake by turning his back on a Bengal tiger he’d been training, leaving him scarred and with a permanent limp. In the Sierra, he reverted to skills he’d developed in his youth and set off on expeditions deep into the wilderness, sometimes going as far as what is today Washington State and the western edge of the Rocky Mountains. He hunted, trapped, and developed a deep affinity for grizzly bears. It’s unlikely that anyone in history has been mauled by bears more times than Adams—one encounter left him with a crushed skull and part of his brain exposed. After a short convalescence, he went back to the business of killing and capturing bears and whatever else walked on four legs.

There are other, mostly forgotten, bear men who fill the history of the West. Two things set Adams apart from his peers. First, Adams would capture cubs after he killed their mothers, and with a firm hand and deep knowledge of animal psychology, he turned several of these orphans into servants and even friends. He’d use the bears as pack animals to carry hides of other animals, often grizzlies. He’d hunt with them—at one point a bear he’d named Benjamin Franklin saved him by fighting off a mother grizzly he had wounded. After a few years of roaming, as civilization turned places like San Francisco from camps into bustling cities, he took on the moniker Grizzly Adams and cashed in on the menagerie business with his captive grizzlies as the star attractions.

Second, in 1859 Theodore H. Hittell, a San Francisco journalist fascinated by Adams, spent an extensive amount of time interviewing the mountain/circus man and writing a book about his adventures. That same year, Adams—sensing he was dying and perhaps missing his family—loaded a ship full of his grizzlies and other beasts and, like a modern Noah, set sail for the East Coast. When he arrived in New York City, he was greeted by thousands of curious spectators. He rode a brown bear through the streets. Following behind him, horses pulled wagons of dozens of caged grizzlies and other wild animals from the West. He dismounted in front of a giant canvas tent that P. T. Barnum, “the greatest showman that ever lived,” had set up in advance. For the price of an admission ticket, any New Yorker could look into the eyes of a brown bear, hear stories of the West, and watch Adams wrestle his bears.

For the short remainder of his life, Adams toured New York and New England as part of Barnum’s circus. Legend has it that his already ill health went into full decline after a monkey he was training bit the exposed tissue of his brain. A serious infection spread, but Adams refused to retire. He was bent on getting the full salary and bonus that Barnum had promised him if he finished his contract. So, night after night, the dying man pantomimed adventures of the Wild West and pretended to fight grizzly bears. He fulfilled his contract, gave his wife his money, and five days later at his home in Massachusetts, died in a bed he hadn’t slept in for twelve years.

In the decades after Adams was laid to rest, more and more white settlers flooded California, and the grizzly receded deeper into the mountains. Most bears were shot on sight by miners and ranchers. Professional hunters pursued warier animals with hounds, traps, and poison. Most sources agree the last California grizzly was killed in 1922, after a rancher discovered some of his calves had been attacked by a bear. A trap was set—for grizzlies’ remarkable intelligence, they are generally surprisingly easy to trap—and a few days later the bear was found with its forepaw pinched between steel jaws. The Visalia Daily Times reported: “Smarting with pain caused by the jaws of the trap, the animal was furious and presented a sinister front to the approaching hunters, but a well-directed shot from a heavy rifle ended his calfstealing propensities.”

MY PARENTS GREW UP IN THE SACRAMENTO VALLEY; THEIR SUBURBAN homes were built over the bones of bears. In 1953, when my dad was four, California designated its extinct grizzly as its official state animal. The bear already had the honor of cresting the state flag and seal. When my parents were in their early twenties, they moved to Alaska for the same reason Jedediah Smith and James Capen Adams had gone to California: they wanted adventure, wildness, and economic opportunities. When I was a kid and we navigated the suburban sprawl, interstates, and smog to visit my grandparents in the Sacramento Valley, my dad would talk about what California used to be. It was a paradise lost for my dad but the fulfillment of the American Dream for others. There are still pockets in Northern California, he would say, that are good country.

During one of my last visits to California, I went to see my mom’s father, who’d lost his wife a few years prior. They had spent much of their marriage arguing, but now that she was absent, my grandfather missed her terribly. He didn’t remember a single fight and spoke of her like she was more angel than woman. Both my dad’s folks, whom my grandfather had been friends with, were gone too. My grandpa, normally a restless, fiery man, seemed calmly resigned. He loved animals and nature, so we took short walks along the bike paths above the Sacramento River and near Folsom Lake. This was the wilderness Jedediah Smith and Grizzly Adams had once wandered. Now it was covered in concrete and homes with barely enough space for a few jackrabbits. In the evenings we sat on his back patio reading and listening to music. Occasionally he’d talk about how he’d migrated to California from New Jersey, where there was no nature, so his three children could have better opportunities.

When I was a kid I believed that, despite the urbanization of the rest of the country, Alaska would somehow always stay wild. Now, as I watch my parents age and Alaska become more encroached upon, I’m left wondering about the future. There’s pressure from Alaska’s political leaders and mining interests to build a 220-mile road across the southern flanks of the Brooks Range. Those same leaders and the Forest Service want to clear-cut most of the last stands of Tongass oldgrowth forest. The Pebble Mine project is on the eve of being permitted and putting the entire Bristol Bay region and the world’s biggest run of sockeye salmon at risk. I keep thinking how not so long ago, California was just as wild as the Brooks Range—and how once it’s gone, it’s gone forever.