Sixty Degrees North (15 page)

Stepping off the gravel and on to the trail, it seemed a line was crossed. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that some kind of balance was overturned. A car park in Alaska is not everyone's idea of civilisation, and a signposted trail might not qualify as wilderness. But there was a change – a shift from one side of that scale to the other – and I felt the change inside me as fear.

One of the marks of civilisation, perhaps, is the uncontested place of human beings at the top of the food chain. Where competitors have not been entirely wiped out, as in Britain, they have at least been heavily suppressed, or banished to reserves and shrinking pockets of wild land. But in Alaska it is people who live in pockets, towns and villages connected by thin ribbons of road. Despite the steady encroachment of industry, particularly oil and tourism, the vast bulk of the state is completely undeveloped. Even the Kenai Peninsula, which attracts large numbers of visitors, is dominated by a national park, a national forest, a ‘state wilderness park', ‘wilderness areas' and the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, a two million acre protected region, established by Franklin Roosevelt in 1941. Step outside the town in Alaska – step off the road or away from the car park – and the rules of civilisation no longer apply.

As I took those first steps on the trail and into the forest, the fear rose quickly in my throat. Moving between thick, new-growth trees, with visibility down almost to zero, I could feel my heart beat harder. My fear was complicated and confusing, but as I walked the thump in my chest found its focus in one simple word: bear.

With fishing rod, tackle bag and waders in my hand, I felt clumsy and vulnerable, and I stopped almost immediately to rearrange my luggage. The pair of waders were flung over my shoulder together with the bag. In one hand I held the fishing rod, and in the other I gripped my fingers around a canister of bear spray just inside my jacket pocket. I checked that I could remove it easily and quickly; I set my index finger inside the looped safety catch; I focused my eyes and ears on the forest.

Pepper spray is pretty much the last resort when faced with a brown bear. Ineffective at a distance of more than a few metres, it is useful only when you are being charged. And if you are being charged by an animal that can be more
than eight feet tall when standing, 600kg in weight, and which can run as fast as a horse, it is important that the spray is successful. If it's not, your only possible chance of escape is to play dead and hope the bear loses interest. If you're lucky it might paw you for a moment, perhaps breaking your limbs in the process. If you're not lucky, you won't have to pretend to be dead very long. In the few weeks I spent in Alaska, two people were mauled by brown bears. Neither attack was fatal, fortunately, but both left the victims – in one case a workman up north, in the other a cyclist in Anchorage – in hospital.

The best way to avoid such an attack, I was told – other than to remain indoors at all times – is to be noisy. Bears become angry when they're surprised or threatened, and as a rule they will stay away from people, given the opportunity. Many hikers wear a bell to alert animals to their approach; others simply shout or sing as they go. Somehow it feels odd to confront your fears in this way, to let the danger know you are coming. I wanted to sneak through the trees unnoticed as well as unscathed, but I followed the advice I had been given, and I tried to sing.

As the trail rose into old-growth forest, and the sound of the highway was lost behind me, I could feel the presence of the bear, like a ghost among the trees. The space was haunted by it, as was I. Beneath the canopy of leaves, a whole array of spirits seemed to dwell. Invisible insects clouded my face and birds moved unseen above; even the trees themselves were somehow not unmoved by my steps. The whole forest seemed aware, and held me with an attention that was mirrored in my own vigilance.

The singing didn't last for long. Somehow no words felt right, and the sound of my voice was alien and intrusive. My mouth became dry and useless, and I took instead to humming, both random tunes and familiar melodies – some of them ludicrously out of place, yet still strangely comforting.
I imagined myself from the outside: a man alone, walking fearfully through an Alaskan forest, laden with fishing tackle, humming ‘Mr Tambourine Man' as loudly as he could manage. Surely a bear would be more likely to laugh than to attack.

After ten minutes or so of hiking, something made me pause and turn my head. I stood still and listened. My breath was loud and my heart thumping. But another sound, too, broke the forest's silence. A rhythmic pounding like feet or paws, running in my direction. I turned to where the noise came from, and looked out among the trees. It can have been a few seconds only between hearing the animal and seeing it coming towards me, but in that brief time I had imagined, in detail, what was to come. The beat of my pulse had fallen in time with the thud of the four approaching feet. The spray had been lifted from my pocket and gripped tightly around the top. I had steadied myself in anticipation and in regret. And then, there it was.

Had I been given a chance to identity this animal before it came into sight, I would have needed a great many tries before guessing correctly. A charging bear might well have been unlikely, but a big, bounding Labrador with its tongue hanging out seemed equally so. At that particular moment I was not capable of laughter, but if I had been I would have doubled up and fallen to my knees.

The dog had a name tag but no name, only a phone number scratched into one side of the metal label. I waited for it to leave, giving vague commands and gesturing back to where it had come from. But there was no one around and the dog stood looking at me, apparently urging me to go on. Having longed for a walking companion, I had accidentally found one, and so the pair of us turned and continued on the trail, he following, then running ahead, stopping every few metres to sniff at something – a tree or invisible marker at the trailside. Watching him run, then turn, then sniff, then
listen, then run again, I realised just how illiterate I was in that place. The forest is filled with signs, but I couldn't read them. There was a language there, a complex vocabulary of which I was barely even conscious, and which I couldn't hope to understand or translate. Clutching the spray can in my hand and humming like a fool, I was helpless: as stupid as a bear in a bookshop.

People who encounter animals in the wild often talk about glimpsing a kind of intelligence, an innate wisdom, in the eyes that return their stare. But that story can be turned around; those eyes can be mirrors. For what we recognise in that strange gaze, I think, is our own stupidity. Faced with a creature that knows itself and its place so completely, that understands its own purpose and needs without the burden of doubt, we see in an instant just how ignorant we are. Both animal and human will be filled with questions during such an encounter, but only the animal will find satisfactory answers.

This is the root of my fear: this educated ignorance, this absence of understanding. Bombarded with information that I couldn't interpret, I felt anxious and overwhelmed. My eyes were of limited help in the shadows of the forest; my hearing is undeveloped and my nose almost useless. With such inadequate senses I was at risk, always, of being surprised. And as my new-found friend had proved, even a creature that wanted to get noticed could catch me unawares. What I had to rely on were my thoughts – which in a place such as that were more crippling than comforting – and my instincts.

Carl Jung believed that, in our contact with the natural world, it is our reliance on language that puts us most at a disadvantage. ‘Man's advance towards the Logos was a great achievement,' he wrote, ‘but he must pay for it with a loss of instinct and loss of reality.' The result of ‘our submission to the tyranny of words' is that ‘the conscious mind becomes
more and more the victim of its own discriminating activity'. Faced with the unfamiliar, we struggle to understand. Our map through the world – language – can no longer guide us. Instead it creates a distance between ourselves and that which we observe, as well as that which observes us. Like the bright, sweet apple upon the Tree of Knowledge, word divides us from world. It is not Paradise that is lost, it is us. I felt fear, then, and I hated it. I hated it for everything it said about me. There in the forest a deep conflict emerged, between my desire to flee from human places and my desire – increasingly acute – to flee from that place. I was drawn in and repelled at once; I was fascinated and afraid. The wilderness was as much within me as I was within it.

Eventually the nameless dog and I reached the lake, which emerged from the forest like an afterthought, or a clarification of something previously said. It had taken much longer than I'd expected to reach the end of the trail – perhaps 35 minutes or more, though it was hard to keep track of time – but I was relieved to see the water, and relieved to be able to stop. There was a good breeze coming down the lake and rain was falling steadily, dimpling the surface. Trees crowded almost to the water's edge, and through the fog bruised clouds bumbled down from the mountains above. The air was like gauze, greyed by rain.

I set up the rod and tied on a small, dark fly, rubbing grease into its feathers to make it float. I had no particular idea what a grayling might like, but that one seemed worth a shot. I waded in up to my middle and began to cast, watching the fly as it perched on the water. I put to the back of my mind the list of dispiriting comments I'd read in the visitors' book. I persevered. After fifteen minutes or so, when the fly had begun to sink, there was a twitch on the line, then another twitch on the next cast. Then nothing. I stepped out and walked a few metres further up the bank, then cast again, moving back over the same water. The rain
was steady, but I no longer noticed it. A cast. Another cast. Then a hesitation. The line tripped as I tried to retrieve. A stop. I pulled again. Once. Twice. On the second pull the line pulled back. I lifted the rod and there was the fish. It splashed against the surface, the silver back and tall dorsal fin appeared. My first ever grayling.

Twenty minutes later there was another stop. A tug. I retrieved again and the fish was on, bigger this time. It put up a stronger fight. The line shook, jerked and wrenched in staccato shivers. A jagging in the water, a burst to one side and a deeper pull. Then a splash that tore through the silence like a gunshot, and that beautiful, perfect dorsal fin in the air. I killed this one, then gutted it. I held the fish in my right hand and the knife in my left, slicing first across the neck, then drawing the blade up through the belly, pulling the insides out and letting them slip back into the water. I cut the head and tail off and dropped them, watched them sink, then wrapped the fish up and put it away. I washed my hands in the lake.

With that smell on my fingers and the fish in my bag I felt nervous again, and decided to go. I'd done what I came to do and was happy to leave the place behind. I packed my things away and arranged the waders over my shoulder so I could walk comfortably with the spray in my right hand, and I set off. Then I stopped. Just a few metres from where I'd been standing was something I'd not noticed before, something I didn't see when I first arrived. On the ground, almost hidden among thick bushes, was a kind of hollow, a space where the plants had all been flattened and crushed. Twigs were broken, and tufts of brown fur lay all around. There was an odd smell, too: thick and oily, like lanolin. Something had been lying here very recently.

In hindsight I wish I'd bent down to pick up a tuft of fur and bring it back with me, to be sure: was it a bear or was it a moose? But I didn't even think of it. Panic surged through
me and I straightened, grabbed my things and went, without looking back. The dog with no name had long since abandoned me, and I walked to the car alone, wanting but not wanting to run, wishing for the trail to be over. It seemed to take hours, and that fear, that stupid, ignorant fear, never left me until I'd reached the car park and signed out. And there, in the visitor's book, I saw something else I had not noticed before. Three days earlier, someone had written the following words: ‘Saw a large brown bear by the lake'. Had I seen those words when I first arrived I would never have set off. I am glad that I didn't see them.

That night, I took the fish from my bag, sliced the flesh, and rubbed salt and pepper into it. I fried it in butter, the skin crackling and tightening against the heat. Then I tasted the lake again.

I spent much of my time in Alaska driving. In an old red pickup I'd borrowed from Jeff, I roamed the Kenai Peninsula, following the highway from Anchorage to Seward to Homer and back again. With my rucksack, tent and sleeping bag piled up on the back seat, I felt a kind of freedom that pulled me onward down those winding roads. I followed mobile homes or ‘recreational vehicles' (RVs) the size of coaches, overtaking no one. Once, on my brother's birthday, I drove nearly two hours out of my way in search of a payphone to call him, then drove back again, enjoying each of those extra miles. Mountains gathered around me like spectators, looming over the road. Here was a place where it was easy to feel small.