Walking Home—exclusive extract

Extract from Walking Home by Lynn Schooler
Original full-length version ­published by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc., London
Condensed version © Reader’s Digest (Australia) Pty Ltd

Wilderness guide and wildlife photographer Lynn Schooler was facing the loss of a dear friend and a failing marriage. When he set out along the Alaskan coastline to clear his head, he was ready for tough challenges, both in his kayak and ashore, but he could not predict that on this lonely expedition he would be battered by the elements, and, for several harrowing hours, become the unarmed quarry of a grizzly bear. Here’s just the beginning of the ordeal …

I was walking head down, trying to avoid the pellets of rain being flung at my face by the south-west wind when I looked up and saw a bear standing at the edge of the forest seventy-five yards away.

 

I knew there was something wrong as soon as I saw the bear. It was facing the sea and standing so still that for a long moment I wondered if I was mistaken, if the dark shape might be a root wad or a boulder. The wind stirred the branches behind it and waves broke on the beach in front of it but the bear was completely motionless.

I tilted my hat back and leaned on the hiking poles. The bear did not glance in my direction or assume any postures that are signs of stress or aggression. But in spite of its stillness it did not seem to be resting. A resting grizzly may sprawl on its back, curl up on its side, or flop down on its belly and nestle its head on its paws, but even a sleeping bear remains to some degree in motion; ears swivel and noses twitch as some part of the animal’s brain continues to sieve the atmosphere for information. All this one did was stare at the swells rolling in from the horizon.

A worm of unease crawled into my belly. During the forty years I have lived in Alaska every one of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of black and grizzly bears I have seen was either feeding, searching for food, walking, running, fighting, or mating. I had never seen one do absolutely nothing. And something about the stillness of this bear seemed to radiate tension the way a deranged, glaring stranger gives off a dark energy you cross the street to avoid.

I shuffled, unsure what to do. A majority of the grizzlies I had seen had run at the sight of me—most had probably never seen a human before—and I started trying to convince myself that it simply hadn’t noticed me yet because the wind was blowing towards me. If I walked a bit closer or made some noise it would bolt like all the others. But the longer I watched, the louder the alarm inside my head rang. The bear was too still and its stillness was too strange. It had not shifted a milli- metre since I spotted it.

I had just made up my mind to back away quietly and give it time to come out of its paralytic state and wander off. Whether it was an unconscious motion generated by my wavering or an eddy of wind that carried the odour of a man to the bear I cannot know, but the response was instantaneous.

The grizzly came to life as if a switch were thrown. Its head jerked upright and it turned to look at me. Then it started walking quickly towards me. It was not charging, but it was not the comfortable, ambling pace of a bear motivated by simple curiosity either, and the suddenness from utter stillness to a rapid, intent gait unnerved me; a normal bear would have reacted by sniffing the air for a better scent, glancing around for other dangers, or choosing an escape avenue. A bear may stand upright on its hind legs, but not, as popular lore would have it, in preparation to rush forward and grab a victim in a ‘bear hug’, but simply as a way of getting a better view. Bears like to think things over before they act.

Not this one. Everything about it gave me the creeps. I know for this to be a proper bear tale I should say it was a thousand-pound monster with gnashing teeth and slashing claws, but it wasn’t. As grizzlies go it was rather small, perhaps three hundred pounds, maybe less, and I could see it lacked the bulging musculature common to its species. Dreadlocks of matted hair hung from abnormally lean forelegs and I noted a peculiarity in its gait, as if its hindquarters were trying to outrun its forelegs by swinging out to one side.
Nothing about this bear was normal.

The alarm in my head escalated to a siren and I had to will my feet not to run as I fumbled for the bear spray. Pepper spray has been proven relatively effective in deterring aggression, but ‘relatively effective’ is a disturbingly weak endorsement when a fist-sized can is all that stands between you and a strangely behaving grizzly getting closer by the second. The two or three heartbeats it took to release the canister from its holster and raise it was also long enough for my shrieking brain to remind me that the effective range of the spray is no more than thirty feet, pick a spot I estimated to be that distance away, and brace myself to fire when the bear reached it. In the next instant I had to abandon the plan because the moment I thumbed off the plastic trigger lock a gust of wind hit my face. If I fired, the caustic spray would blow back into my eyes.

The bear broke into a loose-footed lope, closing the distance between us so rapidly that I had no time to decide whether to try to circle upwind to use the spray or make a dash for the trees. Before I could do either it was on me. Without thinking, I snatched off my wide-brimmed hat and held it over my head, yelling ‘Stop!’ in the loudest voice I could muster. In grizzly society size matters and stretching upright was the only way I had to look bigger.

The bear slowed to a walk but kept coming. It stopped no more than thirty feet away. Then its head dropped and it sniffed at the ground. When it looked up again there was something primitive and terrible in the way it stretched out its neck to peer at me. I felt like a rodent being considered by a snake.

Streaks of rain runneled its forehead and muzzle. Its nose was a dark fist pierced by two nostrils. I can still see its eyes, like flat black dimes. More disturbing was the way the black lip swung beneath its lower jaw. There was something obscene in the way the fleshy pendulum moved out of synch with the bear’s stride as it started moving again towards me.

I yelled louder, fighting to keep my voice from rising to a tremolo. The ‘fight or flight’ response was kicking in and flight was winning. But I knew if I turned to run or backed up it might trigger an immediate predator-prey response.

The bear stopped a few yards away. I could see the red glint of a deep cut over one eye and when it gave an odd shake of its head the wound seemed to wink at me. I forced myself to step forward, to show I felt no fear.

In this case, the ‘courteous’ approach I normally use with bears would have been as pointless as trying to charm my way past a drunken bar bully who was advancing on me with an upraised pool cue. Instead, I launched into a scold like a pet owner giving a miscreant dog an angry talking-to, ordering the bear to ‘Back up! Go away!’

The bear stood stock-still and stared at me, then shifted its weight from side to side and stared some more. The wind flapped the hood of my raincoat. It is odd how the mind works at such moments but I remember noticing that the tide was turning; the surf was starting to run further up the shore. Gulls rose and fell outside the breaking waves. The bear lowered its nose to the ground and sniffed, blowing like a horse.

Now there is a tableau in my mind of the bear with its nose to the ground and myself poised with my hat extended like a flimsy shield. I have no idea how long the pause lasted; there is a record-skip quality to the memory and the bear and I were both still and silent. The only thing I had resembling a weapon was the plastic flare gun stuffed into a pocket of my pack and I did not dare take off the pack to reach it.

Then suddenly it seemed the whole thing was over. The bear looked over his shoulder as if he had forgotten something, then started walking away. I could hear the gulls and feel a sprinkle of cold rain against my face. Without thinking, I put my hat on my head, and keeping my eyes on the bear, bent to pick up the hiking poles.

This was a mistake.

The bear stopped and turned towards me, stared a moment and looked away. For a long minute it looked left, then right, as if trying to decide something. Then it started coming back for me.

Fear took over and I started moving at an oblique angle to the bear’s approach, trying to edge upwind. I stumbled on a loose rock and felt the pack shift. Juggling the pepper spray and hiking poles into one hand, I stooped to pick up the rock and reared back, yelling ‘I’ll knock your brains out!’

The squeals of a weakling. My antics had no effect on the bear except to turn it to the side, where it circled to cut off my retreat. I changed direction and the bear circled the other way. My back was to the surf. The next move would be checkmate.

The notion of sprinting into the water slipped through my mind but I immediately rejected it as the vision of a wave hurling me back on shore followed; it could snatch me up like a stranded salmon. In any case, the potency of pepper spray can be greatly reduced if used against a soaking wet bear; using it in breaking surf would be pointless.

A better plan would be to throw myself face down on the sand and hope the bear would begin by biting at my pack instead of my limbs. I could cover my head and neck with one arm and fire the spray over my shoulder with the other, while trying to hold my breath and keep my eyes closed; if I survived the mauling, capsicum burns to my eyes and lungs would compound my problems.
I had no illusions about my chances of surviving. Prolonged circling, closing in like a shark, and refusing to be driven off, as this bear was doing, is textbook predatory behaviour. This bear meant to eat me. And I was under no illusion how it would happen. Most predators kill fairly quickly; big cats like the leopard go directly for the head, killing with a single bite; crocodiles seize their prey and drag it into deep water, spinning over and over to kill by trauma and drowning. Even in the extremely rare case of an anaconda or python hunting a human the victim dies relatively quickly of cardiac arrest as blood flow is interrupted by the crushing pressure of the serpent’s coils.

Not so with bears. A bear simply rushes in like a locomotive and knocks its prey to the ground, pins it with its paws and starts feeding. The worst of it is that a bear may not hurry, but may take its time as it tears random mouthfuls from back, legs, buttocks, and shoulders, or goes in through the stomach for the organs. It does not care if you scream or for how long. It may feed for a while, then wander away and come back later for another round.

I threw the rock, hitting the sand beside the bear, who seemed not to notice. I bent to grab another rock, and the bulk of the pack prevented me from getting much arm in the throw, but the stone glanced off the bear’s back and it went airborne, jerking around with incredible speed, landing on its feet, tail tucked and backing away as it looked around for the offending hand that had touched it.
I bent and groped for another rock. The throw struck the knob of its hip bone with a satisfying thunk and the bear bolted, running for the woods so fast that it smashed into a stand of alder at full speed and disappeared into the crackling underbrush.

I lost no time grabbing my hiking poles and holstering the spray as I hurried away, as fast as I could through soft sand studded with boulders. I hugged the surf line to stay as far from the edge of the forest as possible, imagining the bear pacing me among the shadows.

I probably covered less than a mile over the next half hour, but it was enough to bring my pulse down and stop looking behind me every few seconds while I catalogued what I had learned; that the bear was injured in some way (the cut over its eye and its odd gait) and it might be starving (it was so lean its hips were visible.) I was also unfathomably grateful to know that a hurled rock was apparently outside its experience or understanding; in the bear’s mind, the impact it felt was an ‘unknown’ to be fled. So it ran and I escaped.

But my fear flipped over into a foot-stomping anger that I had become so cocksure from my previously harmless experiences with bears that I had readily accepted that the odds against an incident were heavily on my side. I kept kicking myself for my careless bravado when a friend had offered me a .44 magnum pistol and I declined, saying it was unnecessary, the extra weight would be too much for the trek.

Four pounds. Maybe five with extra ammo. I slackened my pace. My legs were trembling. My knees and shoulders ached from the jarring of the heavy pack. I was safe, I thought, and I needed water and a couple of aspirins.

A drift log made a handy bench to sit on, and I unbuckled the pack. I lowered it to the ground, unstrapping the top and digging for the small waterproof bag that held my small bottle of aspirins. I was into the pack up to my elbow when I glanced back along the beach.
The bear was perhaps two hundred yards away, nose to the ground, snuffling towards me. I stared as it circled a rib of rock and came on, working along my trail with the unwavering intensity of a bird dog.