Bear'ly Friends - Alaska

One day I was reading in the Anchorage Daily News about a man who was walking his dog near the military base that bumps up to the city limits of Anchorage. It was not the wilderness by any means.

All of a sudden a big Brown bear jumped out onto the wooded path.  He (the man walking the dog not the bear) immediately pulled out his .357 magnum and several shots later the bear lay dead.  Several things came to my mind after reading the article.  I had seen moose walk along the side of the road in Anchorage proper, a friend of mine said she could not keep a garden in the suburbs because moose would eat up her planting, and I could not remember the last time I walked a dog and carried a gun.(of course many do that today in Arizona and several other states all the time I hear.)

There were no bears in Hooper Bay.  There were bears in Pitka's Point and Noatak.  I use to ask the villagers how they protected themselves against the bears when they would go out berry picking.  They told me they didn't worry about it and if they did come across a bear they just left it alone.

Some of my students at Pitka's Point told me that one night a bear did come into the village and wondered around.  They had been outside playing and to keep out of the Bear's way they took refuge in an abandoned house and waited for the bear to go away.

I have a phobia about being eaten by a bear so that hindered my exploring the country side.  I am sure I missed out on a lot of things by not communing with nature but a bear is a bear and I know I could not out run one even if my legs became unfrozen after I stumbled onto one.

In Pitks's Point it was about 100 yards from my front door to the school's main entrance.  I seldom ventured out after the sun went down and when I did I was cautious.  Call me silly and you can tell me about the probability of not being eaten by a bear all you want, but it is like people who buy lottery tickets weekly.  The odds of winning are stacked against  them but try telling that to the guy who won last week.  It is the same as the chances of being eaten by a bear or a shark for that matter (I never swim in anything I cannot see the bottom of ), someone always wins and I would just as soon it not be the bear.

So how do the villagers manage their fear?  Do they fear an attack at all?  It does happen you know, at least enough to make the paper or Internet.

I decided to ask one of the elders if he was afraid or did he just "leave them alone."  He was wise, most elders are.  He said you have to respect the bear.  "The bear has a spirit and there are good spirits and there are bad ones.  If you respect the bear and understand that we are all bears, ravens, moose, rabbits, and salmon, we all just have different skins.  We leave each other alone and the spirits we have blend and we become one. We all have animal spirits and all the animals have human spirits."  "At last," I thought to myself, I should have talked to this guy many months ago.

He then said one more thing that brought everything in to perspective and focus and provided me with a touch of Eskimo wisdom that I shall carry with me for the rest of my day. 

"It also helps," he said, "that when you are walking across our great land, enjoying what the great Eagle and Raven have made, that you walk with a friend, a close friend, a friend that you have known for many years, a friend you know that you can run faster than."