Looking for Alaska (9 page)

“How could anything be shot six times and run off, but it did. I had a speed loader, I put in another six rounds. I had now shot it once with the 30/06 and five times with the .44.”

I was wearing a dark brown shirt and I noticed Dale was now staring at me. He told me the bear was about the color of my shirt.

“Blood, lots of blood, was flowing out from all over my head. My glasses were knocked off, one of my eyes wasn't working, the bear's tooth had punctured the back of my right eye socket, went right through. I just knew I was going to die, but I remember thinking I did not want to be eaten. I put my cap on, thinking that would slow the bleeding, and to tell you the truth, I wasn't sure, maybe there was some exposed brain.” Dale was squeezing the couch's armrest. He has big hands.

“I remember thinking I wasn't too happy with my rifle. I tried to keep the sun at my back. If I could, I figured I would hit the road where my truck was. I could barely see, everything was blurred. I had no idea where the bear was; they are extremely dangerous when wounded.” Dale spoke this quickly, as if by reliving it his metabolism had sped up.

I wondered how it must have felt knowing that the bear was somewhere close. How would all that adrenaline feel, how would it alter your behavior?

“My jaw was badly broken, all the skin was off my right ear, one of my cheekbones was broken, my temple was punctured. I now have metal plate in my forehead. I knew it had to have been a big bear because otherwise my head wouldn't have fit in its jaws. The most serious injury I'd ever had before this was a broken leg when I was fifteen.” Dale took off his glasses to clean them; he explained that without his glasses that day he couldn't have seen much at all.

“I felt like if I could walk three-quarters of a mile, I would hit the road. Turns out I went over a mile and a half, got lost somehow.” With his skull punctured, flesh torn off his face and ear, bones in his face crushed, how could he have gotten up and kept going? The will to survive must be strong in Dale Bagley.

“Finally, I hit the road and backtracked to my truck. I lost all track of time. The bleeding had slowed down some, though I was soaked in blood from the top of my head to below my chest. I'm Red Cross certified, but couldn't see myself. I got in my truck, couldn't really see, just tried to drive down the middle of the road.” The surgeons must have done an outstanding job on Dale because the radical extent of the wounds he had just told me about were not evident, even when the sun shone directly on his face.

“After a couple miles—I have no idea how I drove that far—I was in the middle of the road, I saw another truck or some kind of vehicle, coming the other way. It is hard to say what the other driver thought when they saw the way I must have been driving. I wouldn't, I couldn't, let them by me. I stopped and got out and flagged the man over. I couldn't really talk the way my jaw and all was crushed and mangled. I asked him, it took almost all I had, to take me to the hospital.” What would someone have thought seeing Dale so damaged, so soaked in blood, his face so misshapen, his voice gurgling or whatever it was doing, barely able to speak?

“This man, his name was Jerry, he had been out there looking at property. I am fortunate he was there, and he was an Alaskan.” Dale comes across serious, sincere, and deliberate, under control.

“I don't remember much about getting to the hospital. Jerry was trying to ask me a lot of questions, but it was too painful to talk. He pulled up to the front door of the hospital in Soldotna and let me out. I told the young gal, the first one I saw at some desk or something, that I had been mauled by a bear. She ran away from me, didn't say anything. Everyone around me ran off. I thought, where did everyone go?” Surely Dale must have looked worse than anything they'd ever seen there. It turned out they went to get help.

Dale mentioned that he did remember seeing the infamous human mannequin at the hospital, the one where they hang all the fishing lures that the doctors have pulled out of the salmon and trout fishermen who have come to the Kenai for the world-famous fishing. They put the lures and hooks back into the mannequin in the same place the humans got them stuck.

“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.
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HOTO BY
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ETER
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ENKINS

“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.