Looking for Alaska by Peter Jenkins Page A

hooks back into the mannequin in the same place the humans got them stuck.
    â€œDr. Steve Hileman came and took care of me, first. The Soldotna doctor decided my condition was more than should be handled there, so they had a jet fly down from Anchorage and I went there. Before I left, I talked to Fish and Game and told them where the attack occurred; they obviously could see what happened. There was now a very seriously wounded bear nearby. Ted Spraker and several guys went looking for the bear.
    â€œI was in the hospital ten days. I don’t do well in hospitals, don’t do pain medication normally, don’t take novocaine at the dentist. I don’t know how much I slept, and after five days I was trying to leave. They had me on morphine for two days.” The vast majority of people who are severely mauled, as Dale was, are treated at Providence Hospital.
    â€œBrown bears like to age their meat. That was what the bear that attacked me was doing with that moose, letting it age. But black bears, now, they will eat you right now.” I kept trying to force the image away of those huge white bear teeth tearing into my flesh, crushing my bones.
    It appeared that now Dale was back in the present. There was more color in his face.
    â€œTwenty days after it happened, my father and I went back to Funny River Road and found where I had been mauled. We followed the trail the bear took, found logs it crossed with blotches of blood on some of them. We found where it went into a swamp, and then we could not follow it any further.” Dale’s father is a respected man on the Kenai Peninsula. To say that Alaskans respect you is to have earned a high honor.
    â€œThe next year in that same general area I got my moose,” Dale said with no extra facial expression, no comment on the irony of it. Dale stood up from the sofa. I noticed that while he did not fill the room with his physicality, he filled the room with his spirit.
    He looked at a set of caribou antlers hanging on the wall. “You know, I don’t hold any ill feelings towards that bear or any bear. It’s awfully hard to survive here in Alaska. All it was doing was defending its food. And besides, I woke it up from a nap. All I was doing was defending my life. Thankfully my lifetime of outdoor experiences, my time in the marines, and some luck prepared me to fight back.” Dale climbed back into his truck, which had a political banner on it advertising his run for borough mayor.
    As we shook hands through the driver’s side window, he said one last thing: “Ted Spraker, Fish and Game, the state troopers elite tracking unit, they never found the bear, dead or alive.”
    That was true. Ted and about eight other men went to the site of Dale Bagley’s mauling off Funny River Road early the next morning. Already strong sentiment was building within the community about a killer bear on the loose; there was pressure to find it, dead, or find it and kill it. Ted wore jeans and hiking boots, and brought a Wildlife Enforcement trooper. The Alaska State Troopers sent their top tracking team, six of them, dressed from head to toe in camouflage. They wore earpieces, communication devices like those of the Secret Service, to talk with each other when they split up. Each one had an automatic rifle. They had assault knives attached to their chests. They were an Alaskan SWAT team about to track a living thing far superior in every way, even riddled with bullets, to any human criminal. With one bite this bear could bite the whole top of your skull off; it could smell you from far, far away; it could live in this wilderness understanding all it is, intimidated by none of it.
    From Dale’s description of the location they parked their vehicles and quickly pinpointed the birds that were on the kill. They walked slowly about a half mile into where it had all happened. Ted said that usually if you don’t find the dead bear within a hundred