Читать книгу One With the Tiger - Steven Church - Страница 19

BEAR CONFESSION

Here is what I wouldn’t admit to the student reporters: We never did encounter a grizzly in the wilds of Montana or Alaska. We saw plenty of grizzlies from the backpacker’s bus that we rode into Denali, and spotted other bears along the side of a road that snaked around a lake in the Yukon Territory. But the only personal experience I could really draw upon to get close to what Stephen Haas witnessed during his encounter was a brief run-in with a black bear, not a grizzly.

We’d been backpacking over Eagle Pass, just outside of Anchorage, and seen plenty of evidence that grizzlies were around. There were spots along the trail at the higher elevations where grizzlies thrived, and it was clear bears had bedded down in the brush, perhaps just taking a nap and waiting for their next meal to wander along. We found their tracks everywhere, along with piles of berry-laden scat.

Obeying the guidebooks, each time I came across a pile of poo, I bent down and put my hand close to the pile, feeling if there was still heat radiating off of it. If the scat was warm and steamy, that meant the bear wasn’t far away. That meant the heat from the bear’s intestines still lingered long enough for me to feel it fog my palm.

The trail wound through alder thickets that were tall and dense enough that you couldn’t see around the next bend in the trail, and we kept seeing more and more grizzly tracks. The hike seemed to take forever; and while I put my hand close to a lot of poop, we never saw a bear.

We eventually made it through, but not without some tension and creeping fear, some real worry about what might happen if we did encounter a grizzly. Burdened with our packs, there was no way we could run or even move quickly. And the next day, as we descended into the valley, we started seeing black bears. Lots of them. We were trudging along a trail that followed a bend in the Eagle River, when one bear who must have weighed 200–300 pounds swam across the river, climbed the bank, and started running down the trail toward us.