North of Hope

by Shannon Polson

  In a story about the opposite end of the earth, Jorge Luis Borges notes that the landscape “is on the verge of saying something. It never says it, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or perhaps we understand it and it is as untranslatable as music.”

  The story that this landscape held, I knew in pieces.

  Part of what I knew came from Jim. He was the last person to talk to Dad and Kathy. Jim and his wife, Carol, are owners and guides of Arctic Treks, one of the oldest Arctic river rafting companies. On June 23, 2005, he and an assistant guide, Cin, were rafting the Hulahula with three couples from Washington state. They had been on the river for a week. The water was running low, colder than normal temperatures slowing the typical freeze-melt cycle. It flowed thinly over gravel bars, a perfect blue, not muddied by the gray of upriver glaciers. But the raft was heavy, and the group had to get out frequently to pull it over gravel bars. Still, the eight rafters felt a sense of magic in the air and in the splendor of the Arctic landscape.

  There were few other people on the river so early in the summer. The group had seen only two other people, traveling together in inflatable kayaks. Because the wind whipped most strongly in the late morning and early afternoon, the rafting group started late that day to miss the winds and ended their day late as well.

  It really didn’t matter, because the sun never sets. It’s called Arctic time, this quiet shifting of schedules. There is light for your journey any time of day or night. This endless daylight lends a sense of well-being, a blissful detachment concealing the dangers of wilderness.

  The couple in the inflatable kayaks were on the opposite schedule. They rose early in the morning to get on the river, stopping to camp before the winds picked up. Jim’s group and the couple leapfrogged each other down the river through the Romanzof Mountains and the foothills leading out to the coastal plain. The rafting group noticed an impeccably kept camp, boots lined up neatly outside of the tent, boats pulled up well clear of the water. The night of June 23rd, when Jim’s rafting group passed the kayakers’ camp, the couple had not yet retired. They sat at their tent, preparing for bed. A cold northeast wind blew, but the couple had pitched their tent below a small bluff and a copse of willows to their east to shelter them from the elements. The man noticed the rafts coming and walked down to the shore.

  The man and the rafters exchanged a few words of greeting. “There was something special about that night,” one of the rafters later recalled. “There was magic, love in the air. Both of their faces shone with happiness—they loved being out there with each other. When we got into camp, we talked all night about what a special night it was, and how the couple we passed just radiated joy.” Each of the couples recounting the story does so with tears glistening in their eyes, betrayed by that magic of Arctic light.

  Like most stories, this one started even earlier than that. In the fall of 1997, I returned from Bosnia. I had led my second flight platoon, and we had flown the valleys of Multi-National Division North from our camp in Tuzla West in support of the Dayton Peace Accords.

  As I was coming home from Bosnia, looking forward to going home, somewhere in the Arctic the Inupiat caught their September whales. Millions of migratory birds set out toward southern climes, and silence settled over the tundra. Somewhere in that wilderness, a sow grizzly, impregnated in the spring by a male and well fed by the summer’s bounty, wandered to the south slope of a mountain and used her long claws to excavate a den. She crawled in, escaping the swirling snow and icy wind and scarce nutrition outside. Her heart rate dropped to a few beats a minute. She slept. During that sleep, one or two cubs were born, tiny, hairless, and blind. The sow licked the mucus from their bodies, licked them alive, and they suckled in the new womb of the den.

  One spring day in 1998, the sow brought her cubs out onto the tundra. One of these cubs—or maybe he was the only cub—will one day kill my dad and Kathy. He has never seen a human, but he will taste human flesh, only a day or maybe two before he tastes his own blood as he stumbles and falls for the last time.

  It is possible that Dad and Kathy slept in their last day. It was cold outside, and they were tired. They were not in a hurry. The next day was their sixteenth anniversary. Each had brought a card for the other, protected in Ziploc bags.

  Dad and Kathy were in the wilderness. They had always loved the wilderness, and with kids gone, they could take the time to enjoy it together. For all who escape to true wilderness, one of the reasons to go is that there is not another soul anywhere around you. You go to be engulfed in and connected to the majesty of creation. You go to forget yourself. There is no unnatural noise, no kids yelling, tires screeching, bosses nagging. There is also no one to hear you scream.

  The yellow nylon of the tent flapped in the wind curling over the tundra bluff and copse of willows on the eastern banks of the Hulahula River. The flapping of a nylon tent can lull you to sleep, or in harsher winds keep you up all night. The continuous snap! snap! snap! of nylon and metal grommets can make you crazy.

  Sometime in the morning, Dad, with pepper-and-salt hair disheveled from his week in the wild, sat up in his sleeping bag and unzipped the tent while Kathy remained in her bag. Maybe he got up to go to the bathroom, or maybe he had heard something. The tent zipper opened the cocoon of a tent onto a sandy beach and turquoise river water, just upstream from a small rapid.

  The man drowsily unzipping his tent does not see just the river. The massive bulk of a grizzly fills his view. His heart jumps; his blood pressure skyrockets.

  Gerald May describes the first time a bear comes into his campsite: “The bear is right next to me, its side brushing the tent canvas, its growl deep, resonant, slow…. It’s like some kind of fierce embrace … another deeper voice … whispering ‘Be frightened. Just be frightened.’ … My heart is beating so loudly I’m sure the bear must hear it. And I have never felt so alive.”9

  John Haines imagines an encounter with a bear: “The bear suddenly lunged from its hiding place with a terrible, bubbling roar and struck me down. In that instant of confusion and shock I was joined to the hot blood and rank fur at last. All my boyhood dreams of life in the woods, of courage and adventure, had come to the final and terrifying intimacy.”10

  And Mary Oliver’s words:

  … But not one of them told

  what happened next—I mean, before whatever happens—

  how the distances light up, how the clouds

  are the most lovely shapes you have ever seen, how

  the wild flowers at your feet begin distilling a fragrance

  different, and sweeter than any you ever stood upon before—how

  every leaf on the whole mountain is aflutter.11

  Later I talked to a Gwich’in elder, Hannah Alexie. What did her people think when someone is killed, I wanted to know.

  “An animal can get scared and need to protect itself,” she said. “It just happens sometimes.”

  I wanted an answer. What did she think, two people in a tent, killed by shih?

  “Maybe that animal was hungry,” Hannah said. “Maybe it saw a tent, and it didn’t know there were people. This can happen.”

  Maybe.

  Did Dad see the sparkle of the river in slow motion, each drop of water moving past in slow seconds, trembling drop by trembling drop, against the calligraphic line of the opposite bank? Did he smell Galway Kinnell’s “chilly, enduring odor of the bear”?

  Dad reaches back to grab the rifle. He actions the lever. The huge beast collapses the tent with a swipe of its powerful foreleg and razorlike claws—or maybe Dad is alerted by the sound of unexpected commotion. He unzips the tent, to clear his shot at the bear and to facilitate their escape. But three hundred pounds of force behind that daggered paw swipes across his head, and whether his heart fails or it is the swipe of the bear, it is over. Kathy’s screams divert the bear, and in less than a minute, the bear is the only actor in that space. The yellow cocoon of the tent becomes a shroud.<
br />
  “A rupture of the earth,” says the poet. This thing has happened, and nobody in the world knows. The distances light up. Ferocious intimacy. Final intimacy. Stolen intimacy. Intimacy forever lost.

  In one of my many calls with Officer Holschen, he explained that a grizzly kills its prey by delivering a fatal blow to the head, strong enough that in some cases it decapitates its prey. Then it bites the neck, securing its kill. “Nineteen seconds,” Kathy had told me, several months after she died, as I slept. “It lasted only nineteen seconds.”

  The bear ripped through the rest of the camp. Long claws engineered for digging for ground squirrels and tearing flesh collapsed the inflatable boats. Teeth and claws shredded gear. Food in bear canisters stored away from the sleeping area was left untouched. Powerful jaws and sharp teeth dragged Dad’s and Kathy’s bodies off toward the tundra, as bears do with their prey, to partially bury them as they were consumed.

  I don’t know what this was like. I don’t know the terror, the sounds, the smells, the screams. Here is what Beryl Markham says about being attacked by a lion: “What I remember most clearly of the moments that followed are … a scream that was barely a whisper, a blow that struck me to the ground…. I closed my eyes and tried not to be. It was not so much the pain as it was the sound. The sound of [the] roar in my ears will only be duplicated, I think, when the doors of hell slip their wobbly hinges … it was an immense roar that encompassed the world and dissolved me in it.”12

  That is the best I can surmise. A roar that swallows the world and two lives.

  Part of what I knew came from the newspapers. In the story relayed by the Los Angeles Times, many hours later, Robert Thompson, an Inupiat guide from Kaktovik guiding professor Kalin Grigg and his wife, Jennifer Stark, from Colorado, rounded a bend in the river and saw a grizzly on the north end of a sandy beach, pacing.

  “Wow, look at that!” The clients were excited. Their cameras clicked away.

  But as they neared the bear, Robert noticed the remains of a camp strewn across the beach. He hoped that whoever belonged to this camp was out hiking, but he had a sick feeling in his stomach. He pulled their raft over on the opposite side of the river. Robert pulled out the sat phone and called Walt Audi at Waldo Arms.

  “Walt,” he said, “this looks like a bad situation. We have a bear in camp with what looks like three smashed-up tents and we can’t see anybody. We don’t know where the people are. I think it would be a good idea if you got Search and Rescue up here quick.”

  Concerned about the grizzly, the rafters put back into the water to head downstream. Passing the beach, they watched the bear in the copse of willows behind the camp. Then, strangely, the bear lumbered down to the bank of the river and crossed it. When it disappeared behind a small knoll, they pulled over to observe. Kalin tried to keep his eyes on the area where the bear had disappeared. Robert was worried. For a bear to follow a raft was highly unusual. By now the rafters understood that there was cause for concern.

  Kalin jumped up onto a boulder to watch the bear through binoculars. It rolled in the snow, appearing to play. It moved inland, and then came back toward the river, crabbing back and forth as though it were stalking. Jennifer pulled the raft back into the river and held it in the current. Robert yelled, “Let’s get out of here!” The three jumped into the raft.

  “Keep it in the current!” Robert yelled. He cocked his pistol, fully expecting to use it. He watched the bear. Kalin and Jennifer strained at the oars.

  The grizzly followed them into the river, swimming toward them, then crossed the river and ran up the opposite bank. He charged downstream, almost next to the raft. The main current followed the bank exactly, and the bear was positioned perfectly to jump into the raft when it got close enough.

  “Keep it away from the bank!” Robert shouted.

  “But that’s where the current is!” Jennifer cried.

  Robert had never seen a bear do anything like this.

  The bear dropped into the river just behind the raft. They could hear its paws slapping the water. Robert aimed his revolver at the bear, ready to shoot. The bear began closing on them, to within twenty feet.

  Fortunately, Kalin and Jennifer were experienced in running rivers. Jennifer noticed a sleeper in the river, a large rock just below the surface of the water. “Let’s shave it!” she yelled. “Paddle, now! Now!” They strained to paddle close to the side of the boulder, just skimming it. Moments later, the bear thudded against the rock. It scrambled to claw itself out of the water, and then stood on the rock, watching them pull away, water coursing off its brown fur, glistening in the sun.

  Forty-five minutes later, Robert pulled the raft over and made a call to Walt Audi, giving the coordinates of the camp. “Walt, this is really serious. You’ve got to get somebody up there,” he said. Walt called Barrow Search and Rescue.

  Late that evening, close to midnight, a Bell 412 search and rescue helicopter navigated the ubiquitous coastal fog of the Arctic all the way from Barrow along Alaska’s northern coast to the coordinates Walt had given. The pilots were Randy Crosby and Robert Mercier. Arriving at the coordinates, the pilots saw the gear ripped and strewn across the beach, the bear, and what appeared to be two bodies. It was not a rescue mission; it was recovery. They needed to fly back to Kaktovik to get the police.

  The helicopter arrived slowly back in Kaktovik and landed in dense fog. Some Inuit believe that malicious spirits appear only in fog and darkness, angry about a taboo that has been broken. One pilot stepped slowly out of the helicopter, his face a mask of sorrow, shock, and horror. His voice was low, almost inaudible. This is what I had seen on the videotape.

  The recovery effort was turned over to the police. Officer Holschen was approaching the end of his assignment in the Arctic. He and his wife and four children had loved their time with the people of Kaktovik, even adopting an Inupiat child into their family. Holschen was the officer who had to deal with bear problems in the tiny village, chasing away the polar bears that came into the village, and brown and black bears as well. And yet in his years of doing this, he had never had to kill a bear.

  He needed help for this recovery, but help is in short supply in a tiny village off the northern edge of the continent. He asked two German photographers to join him. The helicopter pilots waited for the fog to lift, then headed back out across the coastal plain.

  At the campsite, the helicopter flared and landed, and the bear, startled by the rotors, ran off. But as the team worked at recovering the bodies, one pilot noticed the bear crabbing back toward the beach. Wild animals are frightened by the loud sounds and smells of a helicopter and usually leave the scene when a helicopter approaches. They rarely return.

  The pilots took off again, flying toward the bear. With his shotgun and a few slugs, one pilot dropped the bear on the tundra. Now all of the actors on the scene were involved in recovery; the bear’s carcass would need to be recovered as well.

  Holschen called the Anchorage Police Department to notify the Huffman household. It was a Sunday morning. The Anchorage police rang the bell at our home off quiet Grover Drive on the Hillside in Anchorage, but the house stood silent. As the police walked down the driveway, they saw a neighbor out for a walk and inquired about Dad. It happened that the neighbor knew one of Dad’s law partners, and the police called Don. Don came into the office late Sunday morning. He had worked with Dad for more than twenty-five years. I knew him to be mild mannered, bright, and kind. Instead of wilderness trips, he and his wife preferred golf. He didn’t know where family phone numbers were, although he knew the general locations of us kids and that Dad sometimes paid his bills in the office. He found Dad’s cell phone bills in the safe and gave the most frequently called Seattle number to the police. They called me.

  I walked back to the beach. My boots sank and slipped in the sand. The river sang softly behind me. I knelt in the soft, gritty sand; warm tears stung my face. I recited the Lord’s Prayer and the Twenty-Third Psalm. I’d forgott
en my prayer book, and yet somehow the words of the Eucharistic liturgy flowed out of me. “On the last day …”

  The last day. My prayers, halting before, came easily. On this beach, I knelt with the Good Friday God, the suffering God who had wept and bled, cried out and died. The Easter God—that was who I’d been trying to talk to, but I wasn’t ready. It wasn’t time. First I had to pray to the Good Friday God, the one who suffered, before I could understand any part of resurrection. This was the gift of my faith.

  “We believe,” our priest had said, “that when we come together at communion, it is the indwelling of God, the communion of saints.” The Reverend John Polkinghorne, both physicist and priest, says of the sacraments that they are “inklings of God’s new creation, the redemption of the world beyond its death.”

  My hands shook; they felt hot in the sun. I opened the plastic bag I had carried with me from Seattle. In it were small wafers, blessed by my priest. My tongue was dry, and the wafers stuck to my tongue and the roof of my mouth. I opened the small plastic water bottle I’d brought with the bag. The wine was syrupy and warm. I felt it roll over my tongue thickly, then down my throat. In the heat of the sun came the inkling of indwelling, of communion not bound by matters as small as breath.

  I stood up slowly and paced the middle of the beach, where Dad and Kathy had likely pitched their tent. The river had risen and fallen again since their trip. The sand was firm at the far edge by the willows. A cataclysm cleansed. The earth moved. The waters came. My eye was drawn, then, to a rock partly buried in the sand, out of place on the sandy beach. I looked around and saw another, and another. Five rocks, evenly spaced like the points of a pentagram, all partly buried. This was where their tent had been. They had used rocks to secure the corners on the sand. This was the place they’d died. Violence had been done here. Life had been lost here. This was the place where, even before I knew it, I had lost them forever.