Читать книгу A Shape in the Dark - Bjorn Dihle - Страница 8

In August of 2004, I borrowed my friend Forest Wagner’s ancient pickup truck in Fairbanks and headed north. I had a couple weeks before my classes would begin at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and I hoped to climb Mount Doonerak in the central Brooks Range. As I drove through graveyards of charred, spindly black spruce rising in the smoke from forest fires, the Alaska pipeline appeared every so often in the gray. The silhouette of the Brooks Range shone hazy in the smoke. I hid Forest’s truck in a willow thicket ten miles south of the Continental Divide, shouldered my backpack, and began hiking up an ember-tinted valley. The muddy creek banks were lined with grizzly tracks and caribou bones. I traveled into the mountains, past herds of Dall sheep that watched me warily. At my second camp, I woke to a gray wolf howling from a nearby knoll. Two dark wolves, the wild amber of their eyes electrifying the soft glow of the early morning, walked by within yards of my tent.

I wandered deeper into the country, following caribou trails past antler sheds lying on the tundra—a mute testament to life in the heavy silence. Two wolves halfheartedly stalked a large Dall sheep ram as I watched in the distance. When I tried to climb Doonerak, I was thwarted by a series of steep, crumbly ridges and cliffs. On my second attempt, I followed a ridge that became too exposed and technical. September came. I was going to be late for classes, but still I made one last attempt on Doonerak. I found a route that, though it crossed some dangerously steep scree slopes, got me to the base of the summit. The top was an hour away and appeared to be a relatively easy rock scramble, but black clouds blew in and snow began to fall.

Hours later, as the storm broke and temperatures skyrocketed back close to seventy degrees, I sat outside my tent wishing I hadn’t turned back. I didn’t want to return to Fairbanks, but I was out of food. A porcupine waddled by, and I leapt to my feet and grabbed a large rock. I crept up behind the animal, raised the rock over my head, and then, hesitated. Rugged mountains rose indifferently into the pale blue sky as I watched the porcupine continue until it disappeared into the tundra. I broke camp and began the trek out.

Late that night the temperature plummeted, the wind picked up, and snow began to fall. By morning, a full storm battered my tent. I unzipped the door a crack and peered out to see a herd of several dozen sheep bedded nearby in the lee of the blizzard. In the early afternoon I broke camp and trudged through a four-inch blanket of snow. In a low valley, I watched a grizzly grazing on the last of the year’s blueberries. It was smaller than the coastal brown bears I was familiar with, brutally muscled, and unaware of my presence. I edged past into thick willows with wind hard on my face. Once I was several hundred yards away, since I was traveling through brush with a lot of bear sign, I began singing 1980s power ballads to warn other animals. An hour later, while taking a few minutes’ break from making noise, I emerged into a small clearing and nearly stepped on a grizzly.

For a second, before I remembered to be afraid, I was overcome by its sheer presence. Dark brown with silver forelegs, incredibly muscled and poised, it appeared too real to be real. A moment later, our eyes met. Fear and rage flashed in its small brown eyes. It closed the distance separating us in one stride as I reached for my bear spray attached to my pack strap. There wasn’t time to unclip it. There wasn’t even time to realize the bear was about to knock me down and what that might mean. But instead of smashing me, the bear stopped short—at what felt like only inches away—and recoiled to the side. I took a step back and was fumbling with my pepper spray when the bear came again and, just before contact seemed inevitable, bounded away. For the longest seconds of my life, we engaged in a strange and violent dance until the bear crashed off into the willows. It was only then that I had the pepper spray in my hand and ready. During the rest of the hike out, every set of grizzly tracks I came across seemed to radiate with the promise of death. At any moment, I expected a bear to emerge from the mountains and come for me.

At Coldfoot, the one gas station between Fairbanks and Prudhoe Bay, I picked up two Japanese hitchhikers who’d come to Fairbanks in search of the northern lights. In most of the Interior that summer, visibility was limited to a couple hundred yards due to smoke from forest fires. Instead of leaving defeated, they’d hitchhiked north a few hundred miles, far enough from the fires to where they made out a faint green glimmer in the sky one night.

“We see aurora borealis. Then we wait on the side of the road for three days! No one would pick us up. So cold! Now we know why they call it Coldfoot!” the younger of the two said. He was close to my age. Much to his parents’ disapproval, he’d decided to travel for a year before finishing a college degree in economics.

“I don’t want to go back to Japan,” he said. “My family wants me to go to school, get married, and work, work, work.”

The other man was older and possessed a calm intensity. His English wasn’t good, but I learned that he’d been traveling for more than a decade.

“I never go back Japan,” he said. “I just go.”

We rode through thick smoke and smoldering black spruce without seeing another vehicle for over an hour. At one point small fires burned along both sides of the road, and I began to worry I might get us killed. When I mentioned that I was thinking about turning back to Coldfoot, they encouraged me to keep driving south. I dropped them off in downtown Fairbanks at a hostel.

At the university I fumbled through the proper motions, stared at the eastern Alaska mountain range, and felt lost. Instead of renting a cabin or room, I pitched my tent in the woods a few miles from campus. October came. With the first snow, the fires and smoke vanished, revealing blue sky, stars, and the occasional display of northern lights. At night I listened to small forest animals, or silence, or the panting and grunting of a rutting bull moose, or the soft hissing of falling snow, or the screeching of a lynx, and I thought of the bear.

I thought of how close it had come to maiming, even killing, me. I thought of how the threat of death made me realize how deeply in love with life I was. I woke at the smallest changes in the forest and wondered if the bear had traveled three hundred miles south to find me. In the morning I watched my “pet” mouse raiding the food bag and wondered what the bear was doing at that exact moment. What was it thinking? What was it feeling? Did it remember me? Was it in its winter den yet? I tried to apply myself to my studies, but there seemed little of truth or worth to be found. I missed the wild expanse where words, concepts, and beliefs meant nothing. I missed the wind and open horizon. I missed the mountains and the tundra. Most of all, I missed the bear.