Never Say Die (5 page)

“Roughly twenty-five thousand.”

“Here's Aklavik! I was hoping to get there—it didn't work out. When was it first settled?”

“Early in the twentieth century during the rush for the white fur of the Arctic fox. Inuit from the coast and Indians from upriver began to settle around a new trading post. It became the biggest settlement in Canada's northwest Arctic. There were more than sixteen hundred people there in the 1950s when the government decided to shut it down. They built Inuvik to replace it.”

“How come?”

“Aklavik was prone to flooding. Where we're standing right now is well above the Mackenzie's floodplain. Inuvik was a modern miracle, but when the time to move came, half of the people in Aklavik said thanks but no thanks—we're staying put. What the government could never replace was their traditional subsistence way of life. That's where their motto comes from—‘Never Say Die.'”

“That goes in my article for sure. I take it the hunting and fishing were better over there?”

“Yes, and Aklavik's location allowed the Inuit to keep sealing and whaling on the coast.”

“I was hoping to visit their summer encampment at Shingle Point after my trip. Any chance of photographing a polar bear there?”

“Not likely—too many people. Half of Aklavik is there during July. Your chances of photographing barren-ground grizzlies during your Firth River trip are much greater. The grizzlies follow the caribou. Keep your eyes out for the hybrid of the two.”

“Come again, Dave? A hybrid? Hybrid bear?”

I had been following this conversation real close as it was, but now I was all ears.

“A polar bear and a grizzly have mated,” the park warden said. “The bear experts are stunned.”

“Has it ever happened before?”

“A couple of times, they're saying, in zoos. Canada's polar bear expert, Roger McKeon, is guessing that the changing climate is behind the appearance of this first one in the wild. We know that grizzlies have crossed on the sea ice to some of the islands in the high Arctic—why is anybody's guess. Personally, I think the two species mated up there. It took years for the hybrid cub to grow up and find its way down here. If it was born down here where there's a lot more hunters around, it would've been noticed before it got to be full-grown.”

“You said keep your eye out for the hybrid…. If it's alive, how are they so sure it's a cross between grizzly and polar bear?”

“They even know the gender of the parents—male grizzly, female polar bear. The DNA was from hair collected at the scene of a bear encounter that a hunter from Aklavik had on the western side of the delta last month.”

“Man, would I love to interview that hunter for my article. That must've been a strange-looking bear.”

“I hear the hunter was a teenager.”

“What is the hybrid bear being called? They must have given it a name.”

“The Canadian Wildlife Service has floated two possibilities. One is
nanulak
, the other is grolar bear.
Nanulak
is a combination of the Inuit names for the two different bears. Grolar bear, as you've already guessed, is a combination of
grizzly bear
and
polar bear
. Grolar bear is the one that seems to be catching on.”

“I vote for grolar bear,” I said as I stepped from behind the partition.

R
yan looked confused at first—he'd never even seen a picture of me. Real quick, he broke into a big smile and called my name. He was tall—more than six feet. He strode across the room and reached out his hand for mine. His eyes were greenish, flecked with brown.

Ryan introduced me—to the park warden's surprise—as his brother, Nick Powers.

“Nick Thrasher,” I corrected him.

“I didn't realize,” Ryan said, and explained to the park warden that I was from Aklavik and was going to run the Firth River with him.

I wanted to hear more about the bear. I asked the park warden, whose name was Dave Curry, how long he had known about the DNA test.

“We just heard about the results late yesterday,” Curry said. “They haven't been released to the press yet.”

“Say, Nick,” my brother said, “I wonder if you might know the teenager who had the encounter with the grolar bear. You would've heard about it. You know that kid?”

“I do,” I said. “It was me.”

You can imagine their faces, especially my brother's. “Could you tell it was a hybrid?”

“That looked pretty obvious.”

“Could you tell us about the encounter?”

I kept it short, told it pretty flat, and left out a lot. I could tell that my brother had no end of questions but he held back. So did the park warden. I'd already told the bear biologist who came to talk to me how crazy-aggressive the bear was.

Ryan asked if I'd had lunch and I told him I hadn't. We went to the Mackenzie Hotel's restaurant. I ordered a hamburger and fries with gravy. First thing, Ryan asked about my grandfather. I said, “He's hanging on one day at a time.”

“I'm sorry you're losing him, but I'm so glad you could come. Have you been in Ivvavik National Park before, over in the Yukon Territory?”

“Only on the coast, not in the mountains.”

He was hoping I'd say more. When I didn't, Ryan said, “Ivvavik's remoteness is half of the appeal. It's nothing like our national parks back home. When the park office is two hours away by airplane, that tells you a lot. As I understand it, there are no communities on the entire north slope of the Yukon Territory. Not a single person lives there year-round.”

Our food arrived. My hamburger beat the fast-food burgers I'd had in Inuvik after basketball games, but it didn't have the flavor of ground caribou. I went heavy on the ketchup.

My brother was a fish out of water, and didn't know where to start. At least he wasn't going to ask, “Do you hunt?”

He hesitated, then asked, “Your branch of the Inuit is called the Ee-noo-vee-al-oo-it, right?”

Close enough, I thought. I nodded my agreement as I dug into my fries.

“If I got this right, Inuit means ‘the People.' What does Inuvialuit mean?”

“It's hard to translate into English. ‘The Real People' is pretty close.”

“Do you speak the language?”

“A little. We take it at school.”

Ryan eased off on his questions and finished his sandwich. Soon as he paid the bill, we got into his pickup to go shopping. Ryan had a big cooler and three metal boxes he called “ammo cans” in the bed of the truck, all of them empty. We were going to spend the rest of the afternoon shopping for the fresh food and other stuff to fill them up.

Ryan drove us to the Northmart. It was a hot day with hardly any wind and the mosquitoes were pretty bad. It was good to get inside. We started in the clothing section. My brother bought that bug shirt for me. Next stop was sporting goods. Ryan was asking if I'd brought along a fishing pole. I said no, and he picked out a rod and reel for me, and some lures. He'd gotten himself a fishing license at the park office and figured I didn't need one, being Native. I told him he was right.

Ryan asked what else I could use. “Nothing I can think of,” I said. I helped him find things as he checked off his list. Back at his pickup in the hotel's parking lot, we packed the food into his cooler and metal boxes. We had supper down the street at the Eskimo Inn.

After that we went back to the hotel so Ryan could look over my stuff. As we entered my room, Ryan's eyes went from my duffel bag and small backpack on the bed to the hard plastic rifle case standing in the far corner by the closet. “That doesn't look like a guitar case,” he said.

“That's a rifle case. I brought my rifle.”

“Hmmm …,” he said.

I asked if that was a problem.

“Let's talk about it later,” he said, looking away. “We better keep on task while the stores are still open.”

We'd been doing so well, but now I wasn't so sure.

Ryan had me spread my stuff all over the bed and around the floor. As he checked out the clothes, he started making a list. There was only one thing I could think about, and that was my rifle. When I came out and asked again if he had a problem with it, he said, “Firearms aren't allowed in Ivvavik National Park. I've got all the info from the park in my room if you want to see it.”

“Hey, it's okay,” I said with a smile. “I can have a rifle even if you can't. The park was only created with our agreement. The Inuvialuit said it was okay as long as we got to have the exclusive hunting rights. You can ask at the office. That's the way it is, so it's no worries.”

“I didn't know that, but I don't doubt it.”

That should have settled it about my rifle. Still, Ryan looked unhappy. He wasn't saying why.

“Hey, Ryan,” I said with a grin, “you said the fresh food, like the meat, was only for the first week or ten days. I could get us a caribou later on. You should take advantage of me being indigenous.”

“I've got canned meat for later.”

Trying to keep it light didn't seem to be working. “Are you against hunting?”

“Not at all. I just didn't grow up with it.”

“So, what's the problem?”

“The bears.”

This made no sense at all. “The bears? The bears are the main reason I brought my rifle. Believe me, we need a rifle for protection.”

“I've brought along plenty of protection—pepper spray, bear bangers, and an air horn.”

“What are bear bangers?”

“They imitate the sound of a gun.”

“A real gun would scare them better.”

Again, he hesitated. “Statistically, traveling in grizzly country isn't nearly as dangerous as people think, especially if you take every precaution and know how to behave if you get charged. You're more likely to get hit by lightning than attacked by a bear.”

“Not up here. Your chances of getting hit by lightning are about zip.”

“I know … lightning was unknown in the Arctic, but now it's even starting fires.”

“Like where?”

“North slope of Alaska, just last summer. The swath of tundra that burned was twenty miles wide and forty miles long. The frozen ground underneath melted and is releasing huge quantities of methane gas into the atmosphere. As the Arctic warms, you'll see more lightning, and wildfires over here, too.”

“Maybe so, but we were talking about bears, and my rifle. What if a grizzly charges you, and all you've got is pepper spray?”

“Pepper spray will disable a bear just fine, without harming it. Nine times out of ten, the experts all agree, it's only a bluff charge. They'll stop ten or fifteen feet short of you. A man with a rifle will shoot before they get that close.”

“Of course he would. If it's not a bluff, it would take the bear about half a second to cover those last ten or fifteen feet.”

“Everything I've read says the man with the rifle who shoots a charging bear seldom kills it outright. Usually he only wounds it. And a wounded bear is going to retaliate—maul you and maybe kill you. Shooting it actually makes you less safe.”

“I wouldn't injure the bear. I'm a really good shot.”

“But would you wait until the last second?”

“No way.”

“That's what I'm afraid of—killing a bear that was only bluffing.”

“Have you ever been charged by a grizzly bear, Ryan?”

“No, but I've been around them in Wyoming and Montana, in Alaska, and last summer in the barren lands east of here.”

I didn't say anything. It was irritating to hear him call the tundra “the barren lands.” People who aren't from here came up with that. Just because the tundra doesn't have trees on it doesn't mean it's barren. Tundra is a living carpet of hundreds of tiny plants, not barren at all. Barren-ground grizzlies, to my way of thinking, should rightly be called tundra grizzlies.

Ryan broke the silence. “I like our chances without a gun, Nick. Listen to this. For the last twenty-plus years, the Arctic River Company out of Whitehorse has been taking people down the Firth, three trips every summer. They've never had a firearm along—they take the same protection I'm talking about—and they've never had a bear injury. The same goes for the few private parties that raft the Firth every summer. There's never been a mauling on the Firth River.”

“There's a first time for everything,” I countered. “We never go out on the land—or the ice—without a rifle.”

“Hey, Nick, I hear what you're saying and I respect that. My father—our father—felt the same way I do when he kayaked the Northwest Passage. He had a number of encounters with barren-ground grizzlies and one with a polar bear. He didn't take a rifle along for the same reason I don't. If it came down to it, he wasn't willing to kill a bear, and neither am I.”