This Side of Wild Read online

  And I was.

  About halfway through the afternoon of the second day with the heavy boring machine slamming me around, I felt a call from nature and I shut the machine down and went into the house to answer that call. I wasn’t gone fifteen or twenty minutes, but when I came out, I found I was not alone.

  The drilling rig had kicked up a pile of soft dirt next to the hole, and there, in that pile of soft dirt, was a single bear track that measured seven and a half inches wide by eleven and a half inches long.

  Grizzly.

  Easily twice the size of most black bears.

  It had been watching me.

  Every hair on the back of my neck stood up.

  It had stood there, back in the thick trees—not thirty or forty feet away—and watched me drilling holes. As soon as I’d gone into the house, it had come forward to see what I had been doing—to check out the hole—and I hadn’t seen or heard a thing.

  I’d had no clue.

  The next time, I thought, it could come up behind me while I was running the machine and simply bite my head off. (One of the bear attacks I had heard of ended in just that way—one bite, clean off. Like a guillotine.)

  Strangely, it was not the fear of an attack that bothered me as much as the fact that I was alone, some kind of strange dread of that dark band of spruce and that bears, or any other animal, could stand there and watch and I wouldn’t know it.

  I needed company. Somebody to watch my back. Somebody to give me at least a small warning.

  I needed, really, a dog. And all my sled dogs were gone, up on the glacier for the summer.

  And a gun.

  I needed a dog for company and a gun—which I did not have—for possible protection. It being so complicated to drive across Canada with firearms, I had left my weapons with my son in Minnesota.

  A gun was not a problem. Wasilla had several pawnshops. At one, I purchased a used Mossberg twelve-gauge pump, which held five rounds and had a slightly shortened barrel. I also bought a box of Magnum full-diameter slugs and another box with Magnum double-ought buckshot, fifteen thirty-caliber-round balls per shell, each ball a third of an inch in diameter. Either way, slugs or buckshot, pumping in one after the other, I could pretty much stop a charging Buick.

  False security, as we will find later.

  As for the dog, I always got my pets at animal shelters, so I called the Wasilla shelter and was told—perfect, really—that they had a three-legged border collie that needed a good home. He would make a great pet and work companion. I had, over the years, saved several border collies and found them to be something just a little better than wonderful—way smarter than me—and I planned for him to stay a house pet after the team came back from the glacier in Juneau.

  The rule was first come, first served, and there had been another call on the border collie. So I jumped in my truck and roared the forty miles to Wasilla, then on down near the town of Palmer, slid into the parking lot at the shelter . . .

  Just, as it turned out, seven minutes too late.

  The other people had come for the border collie. Which was fine—they would give it a good home. I asked the woman at the shelter if she had another dog that might be suitable.

  “Well . . . there is one that we just got and can’t afford to keep, since it will need a lot of medical and dental care and we don’t have any money. . . .”

  Oh, I thought. Good. Medical bills. “Well, I don’t know. I kind of need one pretty quick. . . .”

  “He was scheduled to be put down tomorrow if nobody showed for him.”

  Well. She was probably playing me, but that was all right; you do what you have to do to save a dog, and she was hitting the target perfectly. I could not stand to have a dog put down. In a moment of illogical compassion and perhaps some weakness, I said: “All right. Bring him out.”

  And so I met Corky. An eight-pound toy poodle covered with abscesses, mouth filled with rotten teeth, one ear and his butt packed with pus. He was probably ten or eleven years old, though the people who dumped him said in a form that he was only six. They also said that the reason they were leaving him was that he was “too rambunctious.”

  “What did he do?” I asked as they brought him out in the little kennel the people had left him in. “Rip the tires off the car?” How the hell could such a little thing be “too rambunctious”?

  There was no way, I thought, that this dog would be able to save me from grizzlies. . . . He’d be lucky to get home alive, judging by the way he looked.

  And yet.

  And yet there he was, looking at me through sickened, red eyes, wanting something, wanting me to sign, to acknowledge the contract, the age-old contract between a man and a dog, the contract that says simply, “I will be for you if you will be for me. . . .”

  I reached out and took him in my arms, and he screamed in pain, screamed all the way to the truck, then curled up in my lap, whimpering, as I took him to the vet, where he screamed as I carried him into her office and left him.

  For three days.

  After which, having gone through many procedures for draining abscesses, cleaning out infections, pulling rotten teeth, and going through dental surgery (he wound up with only three teeth, the two forward grippers on the bottom and one—right—canine on top), and after I paid a walloping $1,207.94, I had a “free” watch poodle from the pound.

  It just couldn’t be that he would work out. Eight stomping pounds of pure poodle—any big bird could carry him off. He will, I thought, turn out to be a live table ornament, something for the cat (named Hero) to bat around and play with. A toy—and indeed, they called them toy poodles.

  However, not only was I wrong, completely wrong—damn near dead wrong—but Corky turned out to be perfect, absolutely perfect for the job.

  The thing is, in some way he knew—he knew—what it was all about. I brought him home and decided that except for letting him go outside for the bathroom, I would keep him in the house. The truth is there were great risks for him outdoors. Bald eagles were always about—sometimes as many as four sitting in trees around the house. There were truly enormous owls—one of which nailed a friend’s Pomeranian, carried it off never to be seen again. There were also wolves (I lived on the edge of the famed Talkeetna pack’s territory—in reality a series of smaller roaming packs all stemming from the core pack and covering an area as big as some eastern states), fox, and (I think) coyotes, or something near it. All of them would grab a cat or a poodle—the wolves sometimes taking pets as large as Labs and collies, not to mention livestock and now and then a human.

  So when I brought him home, I put him in the house and that first morning went into the cleared area, leaned the shotgun against a big rock, fired up the hole digger, and went to work, thinking, if not a good watch dog, he was still a good friend, and I had, if needed, the shotgun.

  Strangely, as noisy and as powerful as the beast of a machine was—it dug an eight-inch-by-four-foot-deep hole in virtually no time at all, kicking my tail all the time—it seemed to be breaking down.

  There was a new sound coming from it—a high-pitched, keening whine from a bearing (I thought). I swore. Part of the agreement was that though it was a rental, I was responsible for anything that happened to it while I had possession. When it comes to fixing mechanical things, I fell somewhere into the Complete Idiot level. I stopped the machine, thinking I could at least check the oil (which was my limit of repair).

  The whining didn’t stop with the engine and seemed to be coming from somewhere behind me.

  I turned to face the house, and there, in the big window on the ground floor—the sill three feet above the floor—was Corky.

  He had somehow jumped up to the sill and was on his back legs on the ledge, clawing at the window with his front feet, screaming in that high-pitched ruined- bearing sound I thought had come from the posthole digger machine.

  I smiled and thought how sweet it was; he wanted to be outside with me.

  I then noticed somethin
g I had not seen initially. He was clawing at the window with a true kind of madness; if it were only affection, I thought, he must really love me, way more than he’d indicated when I’d brought him home from the pound.

  The second thing hit me at the same moment. He wasn’t looking at me. Instead he was looking off to my right, toward the northwest corner of the cleared area. I turned to see a full-on male grizzly standing just at the edge of the blue spruce, studying me (I thought) like I was a side of beef. I had no idea how long he’d been there—probably as long as the high-pitched whining had been sounding over the bellow of the engine—certainly minutes. Several minutes. And Corky had been trying to warn me.

  I knew then very little of bears. I’d heard all the horror stories—many of them true—but I also knew that my neighbor had thrown rocks at a grizzly that was in her garden and it had run off.

  I wasn’t about to throw a rock at this guy; he was at least eight hundred pounds and taller than me and would probably take the extra time while killing me to insert the rock . . .

  But I didn’t have to worry, I thought. I had the shotgun. The gun made me superior to almost all living things in North America. It was a massive twelve-gauge Magnum. The gun would solve the problem. I would shoot once in the air—which everybody said to do—and the bear would leave. I would jack another shell into it just in case he decided to come at me. Simple, really. I had done the army. I knew how to shoot very well—as well as an expert. There was no real problem.

  Here is what I would have liked to have happened. I would swing gracefully, even deftly, one hand swiping the shotgun from the rock, pumping the action with a practiced one-hand motion—the way they show off in movies—and putting a slug in the chamber while clicking the safety off in the same motion. Then I’d swoop the barrel up over the bear, squeeze the trigger . . .

  And the truth is it might have been something like that except . . .

  First the bear moved. I think he was off balance standing upright. He dropped to all fours and then stood again to gain a new balance. He didn’t come toward me at all, but the sudden motion startled me—I might say frightened me—so that I turned too fast and fell flat on my face, my hand outstretched for the shotgun, which I accidently knocked off the rock out of reach.

  I scrabbled to my hands and knees—and “scrabbled” is the right word, like a great crab. Somehow I got to the shotgun, and with something between groping and grasping, I managed to get the thing pointed in the general direction of the bear, but way high—I didn’t want to hit him. I worked the pump frantically, so that two rounds ejected out and onto the ground unfired. I aimed still higher and squeezed the trigger.

  Click.

  An awful sound. I double-checked the safety. It was off. I worked the pump again, recocked the piece, calmer now, the bear looking at me with more interest, aimed off to the right of the bear with more care now and squeezed the trigger.

  Click.

  I felt this wave of soft nausea pass over me. I wasn’t really terrified. The bear still stood there; it wasn’t charging. Corky was still clawing at the window. In fact, I was relatively calm, although, as I’ve had happen before in life, several of the glands in my body were beginning to send more and more urgent signals; there was a copper taste in my mouth and definite poop-and-flee information going from my brain to my bottom.

  I stood slowly and without making eye contact—not a problem as the bear was still almost fifty yards away—and moved slowly toward the back door of the house.

  The bear dropped to all fours—stopping my breath momentarily and nearly stopping my heart—made a loud “whuffing” sound, then turned and disappeared into the woods.

  Rule one, I thought. The temperature was cool, but I was covered in sweat, my hands shaking. Rule one: Always test fire a new weapon, no matter how proficient you might think you are.

  And rule two: Listen to the poodle.

  I went into the house, where Corky greeted me, still in that wonderful high-pitched scream, and we sat for a time in a big chair, Corky in my lap, me petting him and telling him that even with me spending more than a thousand dollars on him, he had been a wonderful buy.

  And again he knew. He knew what he had done and what his job was, and with each day his work evolved more and more.

  From that day forward, for the rest of the summer, we were inseparable. I would awaken at four in the morning, have a bowl of oatmeal, and give Corky his breakfast of raw meat (I had learned years earlier that the best dog food in the world was plain, raw hamburger, no matter the breed), and we would go to work. I bought a new shotgun, which I always kept at hand, and the Walmart in Wasilla started carrying an anti-bear spray that was very effective, which I carried in a holster on my belt.

  Corky sat at my side, no matter where I worked, watching the surrounding spruce forest, and if anything moved—anything, a branch, a leaf, a limb—he started the keening sound and I would stop what I was doing and investigate where he looked and always, always there was something.

  A breeze, a squirrel, a fox, a grouse with chicks, a wolf, a moose, another squirrel, dozens of squirrels, a marten, a porcupine, several bears, more moose, once a wolverine . . . always something.

  He was like an early-warning radar, always on guard, always alert, and if that was all he did—watch the forest when I was outside—it would have been enough. With practice, I quickly came to believe him, to trust him and his judgment.

  But he expanded his duties constantly. At first he was a guard dog—all eight pounds, well, nine and finally ten when the raw meat kicked in—and then he began to make judgment calls as well. A grouse would take a softer sound than, say, a bear, and in the end a squirrel would be only a whimper while a moose or bear would be an outright bark, with a grizzly bear bringing the loudest bark/scream/whine of all.

  I came to depend even more on his knowledge and judgment, to the point that he was no longer my dog, my pet, but we were equals, and finally, as it had been with Josh and the mare, we were not equals any longer but he was above me in some way, able to see what I could not, hear what I could not. We would start out in the morning and I would hesitate at the door, let him out first to look around the yard for a moment, pee on the porch post, declaim the day as useful and safe, and then we would move into it.

  And still it grew.

  I was sitting at the table one day, having a cup of tea with a friend, Corky sleeping in my lap. The friend had left something he wanted to show me out in his truck and he suddenly stood to walk around me to the door to bring it in. As he moved behind me, Corky awakened, stood on my lap, bared his two lower and one upper-right tooth (a god-awful grotesque look, as if trying to do an Elvis Presley impersonation), and uttered what, for Corky, was a very threatening growl. Considering that Corky knew this friend, loved this friend, had earlier been asleep in this friend’s own lap, the growl was surprising, to say the least.

  “It’s your back,” he said. “He doesn’t want anybody behind you. . . .”

  And that was it. A new criteria to his job—“watch my six,” as fighter pilots would put it. Nobody could be behind me without a warning. Not even a friend.

  “Thank God he doesn’t have opposing thumbs,” my friend said. “He’d get a gun and God knows how many people he’d shoot just for walking behind you. . . .”

  The thing is, he’s not an angry or yappy dog. He loves people, greets them with all the tail wags possible, licks their faces. Absolutely adores children. He’s just a loving and sweet dog.

  But he’s got these rules. His own rules for guarding me, handling me, taking care of me. We are friends. We love each other. He sleeps in bed with me in the crook of my knees, but I am more as well. I am the job.

  Two more bits of information on Corky. Studies have been done on mirrors and animals, and it has been decided that only primates understand the concept of reflection in a mirror. Even other monkeys don’t realize that they’re looking at themselves in the reflection.

  We have an old 19
96 Ford dog truck, which we use for hauling sled dogs. The box in back makes it impossible to see out the back window. But there are large side rearview mirrors, and Corky watches in the mirrors. When somebody comes up from the rear to pass us, he growls. They’re on our six. He reads the mirrors. And nobody, but nobody, gets on our six without a warning, because he is, and knows he is, after all, the Corkinator. . . .

  One further note: The sled dogs came back from the glacier in late September, still before snow, and moved in and peed in their circles and in a wonderful way changed the dynamic of everything. There was glad noise, songs, snarls, and joy, and Corky decided he did not need to patrol the yard from the windows in the house as much as he had. Also, the pandemonium of the kennel scared away the eagles (only for a short time and then they came back with a vengeance, along with thirty ravens—more on this in later chapters), so we could let Corky out in the yard by the house without worrying about air attacks except from owls, which usually hit only at night.

  Because of the clamor, he would stay away from the sled dogs. . . .

  Or so we thought.

  And for a couple of weeks it seemed to be working that way. Because there was no snow, we pulled a four-wheeler with three sixteen-dog teams, strengthening them and training leaders, Corky watching from the windows as we ripped out of the kennel and into the trail system.

  Everything seemed to have settled in. There was a bit of extra noise when the sled dogs saw me let Corky out for a few minutes to (I thought) mark the porch posts. I left him there on the front porch in the dark as I went in and started coffee and some bacon for sandwiches, and when I came back to the door, Corky would be sitting there waiting, would come into the house to sit on the windowsill, watch us harness and leave.

  The perfect house dog.

  Then we got a new inch of snow and I could see tracks, and I found that Corky had hidden issues.

  I thought he was peeing on and marking the porch. Dead wrong. His ego was much too substantial for such limited territory. His little poodle tracks—remember, he weighed between eight and ten pounds and most of the sled dogs clocked in at fifty or so—trotted past the porch posts, out around the house directly up to the lead dog position in the kennel (there were two female leaders and one male), and he claimed them, peeing on the edges of their circles, which lit them up, set them to lunging and snarling at him.