14 Arctic Adventure

by Willard Price

  But not one person died. Vesuvius buried a whole city. That didn’t happen here because there was no city.

  The boys spent a day exploring the Valley. Even where steam was not spouting up, the ground was so hot that they could not sit on it. Every once in a while there was a rumble beneath that shook the earth. There were deep gullies that had to be crossed. To go down fifty feet and climb up on the other side, was exhausting. With every step their ankles sank into hot sand. At any moment their feet might start a burning avalanche that would carry them down with it. Nanook had less trouble. His clawed feet went down through the sand and clutched the rocks beneath. He climbed up the sliding slopes with ease. The boys found that the best way to get up was to hang on to Nanook.

  Walking over the flat places, they found the earth so hot it nearly burned through the soles of their caribou boots.

  They had brought along a can of food, but the food was cold. They attached a string to the can and let it down into a fumarole. After a few minutes it came up boiling hot. How convenient to have a stove waiting for you wherever you walked.

  And if they wanted a cold drink, they had only to place their bottle, which had been warmed by the sun, upon one of the glaciers which came down from the mountains. In a few moments the drink was as cold as if it had contained ice cubes.

  But this fascinating experience was not getting them an elk. The next morning they set out on a walk past Mount LaGorce to Hallo Bay. There they boarded a ferry which took them across Shelikof Strait to Afognak Island.

  There was a dense fog. Roger said, ‘The island has a good name — Afog. Is it always foggy here?’

  Hal said, ‘There’s a lot of fog along this coast.’

  They could see no elk. But suddenly they heard them. The orchestra of the elks —bugles, trumpets, trombones, saxophones, and the deep thunder of the tuba.

  Hal remembered what Theodore Roosevelt had said: ‘Heard at a little distance, it is one of the grandest and most beautiful sounds in nature.’

  He was right. The song of the elks was a sound never to be forgotten.

  Hal said, ‘Any zoo would be tickled to death to get an elk just for its music alone.’

  ‘Why did we have to come way down here to find elk?’ Roger asked.

  ‘There used to be plenty of them in Alaska, but the Indians killed them to get their two upper teeth.’

  ‘Why in the world did they want them?’ ‘They used the teeth as ornaments to adorn their clothes. These were supposed to be charms to keep off evil. One Indian chief thought himself well protected because he had fifty elk teeth sewn to his garments. Thousands of elk were killed just for their teeth, and their bodies were left to rot. This island was off by itself and hard to get to so the elk that were here thrived and multiplied.’

  Roger said, ‘Since there are so few still alive I hate to take one of them.’

  ‘But taking them is exactly what will keep them alive,’ said Hal. ‘Safe in a zoo, away from the charm hunters, they can raise their babies in peace, they can have medical treatment when they need it, and they will no longer be an endangered species. I mean they won’t die out like so many other fine animals that have disappeared from the earth.’

  Roger said, ‘I heard the pilot say these were Roosevelt elk. Why are they called that?’

  ‘Because Teddy Roosevelt took a great interest in them and in their fine music. These are the largest of all the world’s elks. In honour of a great president they were named Roosevelt elk.’

  The fog lifted a little and they could see the orchestra. It was a magnificent sight. More than a hundred of the great animals stood with their heads thrown back, pouring their music into the sky. Their splendid antlers almost touched their backs.

  A man appeared. He strode up to the two boys and demanded, ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Is that any business of yours?’ said Hal.

  ‘It certainly is my business. I’m here to guard these animals. We have no use for charm hunters.’

  ‘You’re making a mistake,’ said Hal. ‘We are not charm hunters. We don’t believe in charms to keep away the evil eye.’

  ‘That’s just so much talk,’ said the guard. ‘We’ve had a lot like you. You just want to murder an elk and cut out pieces of his hide and get his upper teeth and sell them to the Indians. I know your kind. Get off this island. There’ll be no killing here.’

  ‘Just what can we use to kill an elk? You can see that we have no rifles. I have a pocket knife—that’s all. My brother doesn’t even have that. I think he does have a toothpick. Do you think we could kill an elk with a toothpick?’

  ‘Then why did you come here?’

  ‘To hear the music. Also, we want to take one animal alive for a zoo. Our name is Hunt. Do you read the papers?’

  ‘Of course I read the papers. Do you think I’m a dummy? Guess I owe you an apology.’ He smiled for the first time. ‘So you are the young fellows we’ve been reading about? Still I don’t see how you are going to capture an elk with nothing but a toothpick.’

  ‘How many elk do you have on the island?’

  ‘Only three hundred. Every day we lose a few.’

  ‘What do you mean—how do you lose them?’

  ‘To charm hunters. And to these devilish wolves and wolverines and bears. They’d be much safer in a zoo. If you want one, take it —but I don’t know how you’re going to do it.’

  ‘We’ll find a way,’ said Hal.

  ‘Well, I must be getting on,’ said the guard. ‘Good luck to you.’

  The boys, now on their own, puzzled over the problem of what to do. Hal had a lasso, but a powerful elk would snap it as if it were a thread.

  ‘How about the sleep gun?’ said Roger.

  ‘The sleep gun would put an animal to sleep. Then how the dickens could we get him to the dock and on a boat? He’d just lie there until he woke up and we’d be no better off. We couldn’t carry him. One of these big bulls must weigh at least eight hundred pounds and he’s nine feet long.’

  ‘If we had a helicopter,’ Roger said, ‘it would pick him up and carry him across the water to the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes.’

  Hal felt in his pockets. ‘I have a handkerchief, and I have a little money, but, darn it, I don’t seem to have a helicopter.’

  Then the answer to their problem appeared. It was a ball of black fur from which stared two blazing red eyes.

  ‘A wolverine!’ exclaimed Hal.

  It leaped up on the back of a great stag and sank its claws into the animal’s flanks. A bad smell came from the shaggy little beast. It was a powerful musky odour. Roger held his nose.

  ‘That’s why they call it a ‘skunk bear’,’ said Hal.

  The skunk bear fixed his large red eyes upon the boys as if daring them to do anything they could.

  ‘He’ll kill the elk,’ said Hal. ‘The wolverine kills just for the fun of it.’

  The wolverine growled at the two humans and his growl developed into a roar that was louder than a bear’s. He was small, not more than three feet long, but his terrible strength and fierceness were known throughout Alaska. The boys felt very helpless as they watched this furious beast.

  But how about the lasso? It couldn’t be used on the elk but it might do nicely in the case of the skunk bear.

  Hal threw it over the wolverine’s neck. Both boys pulled with all the strength that was in them. The wolverine dug its claws more deeply into the suffering elk. The great bugler was not bugling now. He tried to scrape his enemy from his back with his horns but the wolverine had evidently taken that into account. He had positioned himself far enough back so that the horns did not reach him. When the elk grew weak with pain, his attacker would come forward and, clasping his sharp claws around the animal’s neck, would choke him to death.

  But this thing around his own neck — he didn’t like it and tried to scrape it off. The boys could not pull him loose. Another bull came up. Roger had an inspiration. He made a loop in the other end of the rope
and dropped it over the horns of the elk who had just arrived. Then he gave the animal a strong slap on the flank and the bull leaped away jerking the wolverine from the other bull’s back. Hal flipped the lasso free.

  The tortured elk was bleeding from the gashes made in his hide by the savage claws of the wolverine. Hal went into his pockets and found more than money and a handkerchief. He took out a tube of antiseptic salve and doctored the wounds of the injured elk. The intelligent animal stood still. He knew who his friends were. Besides, he was too weak to do any galloping.

  ‘Let’s start toward the dock and see if he follows,’ said Hal.

  The elk did follow, very slowly. He was trembling with pain. He kept looking from right to left, watching for other beasts that might do him harm. With these two humans who had saved his life, he would be safe.

  With them he went out on the dock and followed them as they boarded the ferry for the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes. The manager of Grosvenor Camp, being an animal lover, warmly received this four-legged guest and gave him a stall in the barn with plenty of fodder of the sort that he liked best. As soon as a cargo plane was available he would be shipped south.

  In the meantime he began to bugle, weakly at first, but soon he was trumpeting what Roosevelt had called, ‘one of the grandest and most beautiful sounds in nature’.

  Chapter 32

  The Horrible Grizzly

  ‘In latin it is called Ursus horribilis,’ Hal said. ‘Ursus means bear and horribilis, of course, means horrible. And we have to get one.’

  They were hunting by helicopter. Ben Bolt had consented to fly the boys and their Nanook to Kodiak Island and stay with them until they captured a grizzly.

  ‘It sure is a new way to hunt,’ said Ben. ‘But it has its good points. It might take you weeks if you walked. Flying, we may come on one in a day or so. They say Grayback Mountain is the best place to find them. We’ll just fly round and round Grayback, up and down, until we spot one. Then we’ll land and grab him.’

  It was not going to be quite that easy. They circled the mountain all day and saw nothing. At dusk they landed on the summit and put up their tent.

  ‘Better luck tomorrow,’ said Ben.

  They had their ‘better luck’ sooner than that. A little past midnight Roger heard a snorting and snuffling just outside the tent. He nudged Hal. ‘Wake up! There’s your grizzly.’

  Hal leaped up, grabbed his trousers, and was in such a hurry that he put both his legs into the same leg. He hopped out of the tent and fell over the grizzly who was so astonished that he ran away as fast as his legs could carry him.

  Ben woke up. ‘What’s going on?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing much,’ said Hal. ‘Just taking a little exercise.’

  ‘At midnight?’ Ben turned on his torch. ‘My word! A bear got one of your legs.’

  Roger began to laugh and Hal joined in as he pulled his legs free and got back into his sleeping bag. Ben, going to sleep again, dreamed that his friend Hal was going about on crutches with one leg missing.

  At breakfast, Hal had nothing to say about his somersault over the Ursus horribilis.

  Ben talked about grizzlies.

  ‘If you come anywhere near one, he’ll kill you. Grizzlies have terrible tempers. There’s only one bear more fierce, and that’s the Kodiak bear. Your father wanted a white grizzly. There are very few of them left but some may be found here. The grizzly is humpbacked. He has a pushed-in face. Alaska has perhaps ten thousand grizzlies left but few of them are white. The cubs are very much like boys. They do not reach a good size until they are ten years old. A male grizzly can weigh as much as eight hundred pounds. A lot more than the black bear, which weighs about four hundred. Of course your dad doesn’t want a black bear because there are plenty of them down south. A black bear can do something that a grizzly can’t do. He can climb a tree. The grizzly is too heavy to do anything like that.’

  ‘What does a grizzly eat?’ asked Roger.

  ‘He eats you, if he can get you. If he can’t, he dines on chipmunks, mice, marmots, gophers and ground squirrels.’

  ‘Can he run fast?’

  ‘Twenty-five miles an hour. Then he gets tired.’

  They spent the morning flying about Grayback. They saw squirrels and woodchucks, but no grizzly. It was almost noon before they spotted a big white rock. At least it looked like a rock. Ben was suspicious. He brought the helicopter to a halt fifty feet above the ‘rock’. The rock got up on all four feet and turned his pushed-in face up so that he could look at this strange bird above him.

  ‘That’s our boy,’ said Ben. ‘His face is ugly but his snow-white body is a beautiful thing to see.’

  ‘But how are we going to get him?’ Roger asked.

  ‘I’ll let down a net,’ said Ben. ‘It will lie flat on the ground. Perhaps he will walk into it. Then we’ll pull him up.’

  ‘How can you pull up eight hundred pounds?’ asked Hal.

  ‘Not by hand,’ said Ben. ‘By machine. We have a hoist.’

  The grizzly showed no desire to walk into the net. They waited patiently for a long time but it was no use.

  ‘Someone will have to go down and attract him into the net,’ said Ben. ‘I have to stick by the helicopter. It’s up to one of you two.’

  Roger spoke up before Hal could. It would be an adventure, and Roger thirsted for adventure.

  ‘I’ll go down the rope,’ he said.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Ben. He moved the helicopter twenty or thirty feet away so that Roger could descend directly upon the bear.

  Roger went down the rope hand over hand. As he reached the ground the grizzly welcomed him with a savage growl. Roger placed himself so that the net would be between him and the bear. He still hung on to the rope so he could climb it at any moment.

  The grizzly moved toward him, growling softly. He was hungry, and here was his dinner waiting for him. Now the grizzly was in the middle of the net.

  Roger, who had had plenty of experience in climbing a rope, went up about fifteen feet. ‘All right,’ he yelled, ‘haul away.’ Then the net tightened around the bear and he began to go up toward the helicopter.

  Roger got there first. Ben shut off the hoist. He had no intention of sharing the cockpit with the horrible grizzly.

  He changed the pitch of the rotor and the helicopter approached the airport. The net in which the bear was cradled swung about twenty feet below the aircraft.

  Arriving over the airfield, Ben looked for a cargo van with an open hatch on top. When he found one he stopped the helicopter in mid-air directly above the hatch and let the net with the bear in it down into the van. The bear scrambled out of the net and the net was drawn up into the helicopter.

  Mission accomplished.

  The aircraft came to earth and Hal went to the office to arrange shipment of the van, locked upon the flatbed of a cargo plane, across Canada and the United States to a certain farm, where the Ursus horribilis would receive a hearty welcome from John Hunt.

  Chapter 33

  Biggest Bear on Earth

  ‘Now we just have to get a Kodiak bear and we’re finished,’ Hal said. He was talking to a captain at the Kodiak Naval Station.

  The captain replied, ‘You’ll be finished all right if you tackle a Kodiak bear. He’s a quiet fellow if you leave him alone. But if you interfere with him, you’ll be sorry. Or, rather, you won’t. You’ll be too dead to be sorry.’

  ‘I’m afraid we have no choice,’ said Hal. ‘Our father is a collector of wild animals for zoos. He has asked us to get a Kodiak bear. We’ve never failed to get him what he asked for.’

  ‘Yes, but you’ve never tried to take the biggest bear in the world.’

  ‘Really the biggest?’

  ‘Really. Let me tell you about Alaskan bears. The male blue bear weighs 200 pounds. The black bear, 400. The grizzly, 800. The polar bear, 1,000. The Kodiak bear, 2,000. That’s an average figure. Some weigh 1,500, some weigh 3,000. But the average is 2,000
pounds — twice the weight of any other bear on earth. He’s not only the biggest in the world, he’s almighty strong.’

  ‘But you say he’s quiet.’

  ‘When he’s let be. But there’s one on that hill just behind the Naval Station that is mad enough to chew your head off.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘A hunter shot his mate. Then somebody stole his two cubs. The big fellow went berserk. He’s ready to eat anyone who comes near him. He was very fond of his mate and his young ones. Now he’s just a big ball of wild, slashing fury. He’s killing every person he can get his teeth into.’

  A young fellow not in uniform, who had been listening, broke in with, ‘Oh boy! What he needs is a bullet from this new gun of mine. Can I go with you?’

  ‘No thanks,’ Hal said.

  ‘But you can’t stop me.’

  ‘No, I can’t stop you. But if you get killed don’t expect me to bury you.’

  At the foot of the mountain the road split into two

  branches. Which should they take? Hal rapped at the

  door of a farmhouse. The door was opened by a surly

  fellow who said sharply:

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Which road do we take to get to the top of the mountain?’

  ‘The one on the left,’ snapped the farmer. ‘But don’t go up there.’

  Hal said, ‘We know about the bear who has lost his mate and his cubs. Has he done any damage here?’

  ‘Killed twenty of my cattle,’ said the farmer roughly.

  ‘Have you any idea who stole his cubs?’

  The farmer’s face flushed. ‘How the devil would I know anything about that? I live here alone. I don’t get any news and that’s the way I like it. I can’t stand here wasting time on three kids. I told you which road to take. Now, get along. I’m busy.’

  Just before the door slammed shut, the boys heard a small sound from inside.