“Dr. 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.
“I 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.
“Brown 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.
“Twenty 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.
“The 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 yards, you don’t find it, period.
Ted explained that bears know this country, it is their home. He is intensely respectful of them based on decades of experience. Mature ones know how to get away from humans; it is rather easy for them. They know to get in the water, enter swamps, backtrack, cover their tracks. They go over mountaintops like a set of stairs. They go down creeks, then come up again. They know to get into brush so impregnable that no man could follow except by crawling on his belly, and no man would want to do that. They are smart and they seem to know when they have done something that will cause people to come after them. They don’t need a compass; you can fly them a hundred miles from their home territory, and the next week they are right back.
This high-powered, most-qualified search party found a place where a killing had taken place among the young and mature spruce. Little, inch-wide saplings were growing in this area too, several of which had been snapped off in a straight line. Moose hair was on the leftover portions of the inch-wide saplings, with a few small spots of blood on some of them. In some spots in these woods you couldn’t see more than twenty, thirty feet, or even less. There were a few small muskeg openings. The bear had obviously been chasing the moose, probably grabbed it once and it got away, then the bear killed it.
Ted found the moose kill, completely covered with dirt and vegetation. You couldn’t even see the moose; it looked more like a big beaver lodge in the middle of the dark woods. The bear had cleared away a wide circle of vegetation and dirt to cover the dead moose. Ted said it was always surprising to see how bears dug up the country to cover a kill. It was not a sight one wanted to see on foot, the sight of one of the most dangerous spots on earth.
Dale Bagley and his truck in Soldotna. PHOTO BY PETER JENKINS
“We found a big pool of blood on the ground at the edge of the place where the bear had covered the moose. We found his glasses, kind of ground into the dirt, and his rifle lying there too. The pool of blood was about three times the size of your fist.” Ted’s tone was deliberate.
The search party didn’t expect to find the bear close by, although it would have been a relief. They split up into teams and walked in circles around the kill site. The State Troopers team was well trained; they would take a step, look, and listen, and the search was slow and methodical. They did finally find more bear blood, a faint trail that led them away from the kill site, away from the road.
“There was no real blood trail. Bears have thick, thick fur, a layer like an undercoat, and it tends to soak up their blood and so they tend not to bleed a great deal,” Ted told me.
When they did find some bear blood, they got down on their hands and knees and searched for more.
“The next day we had a helicopter out there flying in concentric circles, looking for a dead bear. They saw no bear. Then we had a Super Cub fly the area; they found nothing.” Ted was not surprised it had gotten away. He had not expected to find it.
“I have never found a wounded bear, ever; you just don’t find them if they are not within the first hundred yards. They are the ultimate predators, and I guess you could say the ultimate survivor, I cannot tell you how much respect I have for them.”
* * *
Dale recovered remarkably from his wounds, almost all of them to his head. He told me that every morning when he shaves, he sees the scars. He had over two hundred staples and stitches in his head and face, to minimize the scarring. On October 5, 1999, Dale ran in an election against the powerful incumbent Kenai borough mayor, Mike Navarre. Mike already represented the peninsula in the state house, he was well-connected in Juneau. Politicians running for borough mayor don’t run as a member of any party. To win the regular election Mike Navarre would have had to get at least 50 percent of the vote. He got 44 percent, and Dale Bagley got 30 percent. Three other candidates were in the race. In the runoff on October 26, 1999, Mike Navarre got 48 percent and Dale Bagley got 52 percent. Dale Bagley was now mayor.
3
At Home with “The Police Log”
It’s a lovely thing to feel at home. It doesn’t matter where; to me and most of my family, anywhere will do. I felt at home, quickly, in Seward, Alaska. The second time I drove by Espresso Simpatico, Darien knew I wanted an Americano, a bit of milk, no sugar. His coffee place is housed inside a large metal coffee cup, just big enough for two to stand in. The coffee cup sits in a large gravel parking lot with the Seward Bus Line
office. The Espresso Simpatico and the bus office are next to the graveyard.
The bus line office is in a small wooden building; Darien’s parents, Dan and Shirley Seavey, run it. In the summer the place is lined with the backpacks of travelers who have tired of hitchhiking. Alaska is one place there are still plenty of hitchhikers. The Seaveys are dog mushers; Darien’s brother, Mitch, has run the Iditarod six times, his best finish was fourth, in 1998. In 2001 Darien’s father, Mitch, and Mitch’s son, Danny, are all planning to run the Iditarod.
Living in Alaska means you are far away from big bunches of stuff that are usually instantly available. If you want to stay in Alaska, you figure out how to get the stuff you need whether it be the stuff to survive, stuff to entertain yourself, or stuff to feed your pet eel. Seward has some stores: a True Value; a couple auto parts stores; a couple places to get groceries, Eagle and Big Bear. There’s a guy who sells some computer stuff; there are a few places to get gas. There’s Terry, who does tires. When there is road construction, as now, the sharp shale rocks cut up your tires almost as bad as malicious slashers. There are several restaurants, the ones that are open for the tourist season and the ones that stay open year-round. Red’s, in an old school bus, serves the best burgers in town; he opens in time for the tourists, although he’s one of the locals’ favorites.
In Alaska the top of the stuff chain is Anchorage, and Seward is only 125 miles from it—just around the block, as Alaska goes. We have to drive through Moose Pass to get there. Moose Pass is stuff-needy, and that’s how most Moose Passians like it. They didn’t move to “the Pass” to shop. There is one person in Moose Pass—other than the little general store—who has some things for sale. On nice days she puts a stuffed bear in her yard. The thing that elevates Moose Pass far above Tshayagagamut or Hydaburg or Adak or Deering on the stuff chain is that residents can drive from Moose Pass someplace bigger to buy things. Being able to drive somewhere else is a really big deal in Alaska. Many Alaskans cannot drive away from where they live. It’s impossible. How shocking this must be to millions of Americans who stay in their cars to eat, bank, read, conduct business, have family time, apply makeup, find peace and quiet.
To keep from driving the 250-mile round-trip to Anchorage for necessities, there is the Seward Bus Line. If you need a rebuilt starter for your 1992, F-150, six-cylinder Ford pickup and can’t find it in Seward, you can pay the bus driver a small fee, $10 for anything under ten pounds, and he will pick it up for you in Anchorage on that day’s trip. Call by 1 P.M. and Shirley Seavey can call the driver and what you need can be back in Seward by 5 P.M. For most of the rest of Alaska, that kind of convenience would be considered living life easy. (If you need a tuxedo for Seward’s high school prom, call Shirley, they pick up bunches of tuxedos.)
Need a difficult prescription, but it snowed eighteen inches last night and there are avalanche worries? Call Shirley. Maybe the bus will get through. Need a couple rare bolts without which the motor for your halibut fishing boat will not run and you must be fishing tomorrow? Call Shirley. Need a new washer and dryer, a set of studded tires? Call 224-3608. It rings at the bus lines’ office, and at their home too. Alaskans are informal. You might hear the Seavey grandchildren in the background, or the phone may slide off the kitchen table and disconnect. Just call back. One guy in town had them pick up goldfish every week to feed his huge pet eel. If that hard-to-find toy just arrived at Toys “R” Us in Anchorage three days before Christmas, and your son Travis has to have it, no problem. Call Santa Seavey.
Like every other place, there is the public Seward and the private Seward. Small-town people know so much more about each other than in cities. One big difference in small-town Seward is you get to read about the private Seward in the paper every week. It’s called “The Police Log.” Walk down the snow-covered street naked, beat up your boyfriend, steal a bowling ball and bowl for pedestrians down a city sidewalk and someone calls the police for help, it’s in the paper. Steal $1.57 in gas from the gas station and the thin, dirty-blond attendant, originally from Maine, calls the police, you are nailed. Seward is the kind of place that takes stealing less than $2 seriously. How wonderful. Become obsessed with your neighbor’s barking dogs, especially in the winter when the speck in your eye can become a mountain range, and call the police, boom, you and your neighbor have gone public. You and your two friends lift up your blouses to expose your own little mountain range on the main bridge coming into town and someone calls, you’re in “The Police Log.” Call 911 about a bear in your unprotected garbage (bad, bad, bad) and it will be in the log, too, your name included.
Sometimes “The Police Log” says, “Journal page missing.” There is endless speculation about this. Did one of the policemen do something? Did one of the town’s brightest stars get pulled over for the D-thing? Fortunately, for those of us who love to read it—until we’re in it, of course—there aren’t many “Journal page missing” entries. My appearance certainly did not come up missing.
Citizens read and sometimes fret over typical small-town newspaper headlines in the Seward Phoenix Log: “Local Property Taxes Up.” “Sewardites Divided between Burners, Preservers.” “Smith Skis Her Way to World Junior Championship, U.S. Ski Team.” There are ads too, of course. “Shoreside Petroleum, Inc. Serving you with Heating Fuels. Marine Fuels. Propane Gas. Welding Gases. Serving Seward, Whittier and Valdez.” There are notices of public hearings, such as one last winter that said, “Changes in Documentation in Order to Receive a Housing Preference from Domestic Violence.”
If every town and city ran a police log, it would be a great way to learn about what really goes on, in case you were thinking of moving in or sending your son to college there. What if the Washington Post had its own police log, a composite of all calls and action taken by law enforcement? What if one section of this log was just for politicians, lawyers, lobbyists, and their family members? There would be so many “Journal page missing” entries there would be almost nothing printed. Imagine if New Orleans had “The Police Log”; or New York City; Selawik, Alaska; Westerville, Ohio; Austin, Texas. But they don’t, and Seward does.
“The Police Log” begins with an editor’s note: “All charges brought against individuals listed below will be argued before a judge or magistrate. Individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in court proceedings. Entries are unverified police reports as they are written in the dispatcher’s journals.” You get your Seward community character details with entries like these, “1:55 P.M. Report of loud music on Alder Street; advised to turn it down.” Notice that was P.M., not A.M. Seward is a community where many people value their personal sound-zone and where you can get something done about the invasion of it. “6:55 A.M. Caller dialed 911 and was asked to call back on the business line to report he had ridden in a taxi that had no seat belts in the back. He did not wish to make a formal complaint.” Seward cabs have less need for seat belts than taxis in New York City.
The good humans of Seward have an abundance of wild animals as neighbors. “9:13 A.M. Report of a baby moose shaking and shivering on a river sandbar about 2.3 miles past blacktop on Exit Glacier Road. Fish/Wildlife Protection Officer advised.” This call is just one example of the many observant and compassionate Seward animal lovers. After all, if the mother moose was gone, that baby moose could be killed by brown bears right in town. A local man was mauled by a brown bear at the edge of town, across from the infamous Pit Bar, in 1998. “10:51 A.M. Caller advised a black bear climbed onto his deck and was trying to push on the window to get in. Bear gone on officer’s arrival.” Proof that Seward’s got black bears who know enough to split when the cops are coming.
“7:31 P.M. 911 call that two people on Mount Marathon [the mountain behind Seward where the famous up-and-down-the-mountain race takes place] were being chased by a bear; ambulance put on standby. Trooper found the people were hiking with a black dog.” A tourist probably made that 911 call. “2:31 P.M. Horse running loose on the airport runway.”
Local pilots have dodged bigger obstacles in the runway than horses, such as bull moose in the rut, which are stupid like all males ready to breed. Fortunately there are not many horses in Seward. “5:01 P.M. Advised a porcupine in a tree the past couple of days; it tangled with dog who now owns some of the quills. Requested advice on how to get porcupine out of their yard.” Police dispatchers in Seward become experts on porcupine behavior. “8:28 P.M. Advised there was a Steller’s sea lion on B-float dock that looks sick; Sea Life Center will send someone to check.” Most Seward people are concerned about the health of their nonhuman neighbors, unless they can be eaten. And then they are still concerned about them until the moment they can be harvested. You cannot eat Steller’s sea lions; they are on the endangered species list. “8:32 P.M. Advised a sea otter at the culvert with a yellow tag on its flipper was sick and you could see its ribs; FWP officer contacted.” Sea otters are on the list too. “9:29 P.M. Report of a fat porcupine on the front porch shooting quills at the door.” Seward may have some overweight porcupines; Seward porcupines do not, however, shoot quills at your door. Caller may have been prone to exaggerate or just close to prone.
Seward has eight churches and one small hospital. Surely this man was not a local pastor or one of our beloved doctors: “7:45 A.M. Advised of a man in green surgical scrubs, surgical gloves, staggering along the road by Napa, carrying the Bible.”
The area around Seward can be dangerous. “2:08 A.M. Earthquake, magnitude 6.8, near New Britain. No tsunami or damages reported. May be some sea level fluctuations.” It shook so hard it woke us up. In 1964, Seward was almost wiped off the face of the earth by a severe earthquake and the resulting tsunami. I wonder what the man carrying the Bible thought of the earthquake?
Looking for Alaska Page 7