Hello from Afognak Island, Homer, where roams Ursus arctos middendorffi, the largest brown bear on earth, the Kodiak Grizzly. 

We are here to hunt elk and deer, just the two of us, my partner Jesse and I. I am nervous because I’ve never been hunting before and I do not know if I will like it and, also, I have a secret. I am afraid of grizzly bears.

I spend all summer photographing the habituated brown bears of Katmai National Park. Those bears don’t generally scare me, even when I’m party to their dominance displays, but in Katmai I’m always in the company of a group of people, a Beaver-load at least. I’m never sneaking, I’m never out there with just one other person and I’m not on a remote island in the habitat of an elk-hunting predator. On Afognak, Jesse and I are hunting for elk and deer, but are we also being hunted by the grizzly?

I’ve read extensively about Ursus arctos so I know that grizzlies don’t generally act as predators to humans. They attack people defensively. But the grizzlies of Kodiak are adapted to their environment and they know that a gunshot means a carcass or at least a gut pile to feast on soon after the sound. So how closely will they follow us, once they catch the scent of our guns? Might they jump out of the bushes around any bend? And what if we do successfully kill an elk? We gut it, skin it, carve it up and haul as much meat as we can to the nearest tree with branches taller than a bear can reach. But how far from the kill will that tree be? An elk can weigh more than a thousand pounds. We’ll have to shuttle loads. Some meat will have to be left unattended.

So, Jesse has a plan: We only hunt until midday. When we make a kill, we move the meat from the carcass and surround it with an electric fence. We shuttle loads to the tree hang until there is just enough light to see as we hike a hundred pounds each of the best cuts to the beach, where we blow up our packrafts and paddle back to our cabin in the dark. Steaks for dinner with the boxed wine we brought. The next day we shuttle the whole elk from the tree hang to the cabin. We are fit, he reminds me. We are strong.

It’s a good plan but relies on a precise synchronicity of weather, terrain, animal behavior and an unflinching human element. In other words, it could easily fail. And so, as we are hiking back to our cabin without a kill the first few days, seeing more and more fresh bear sign on our trail, my mind wanders to the worst case: What will be the disposition of the bear who may have claimed our meat while we were shuttling the rest? Will he have belligerently charged through the wires and be feasting on ribs and when we return will he attack us in defense? Will she have suffered an electric shock and so is angrily waiting just out of sight to charge in once we dismantle the fence? Or will we get lucky and only have to defend against the beasts in our own minds?

“Hey Bear,” we say as we hike.

The first day we see one bear way off on the beach as we paddle at dawn to the first potential hunting spot. We stash our packrafts in a mossy tree, follow deer sign through the wet, chest-high grass to the old logging roads, a branching maze connecting the clearings. One branch of road becomes so overgrown with alders that we cannot even hear each other’s “Hey Bear” over the crashing of the branches as we push our way through. It’s impossible to be stealthy on the Alder Road, but there’s lots of deer sign around, some elk sign too. Mostly though, we see evidence of bears, tracks as recent as last night’s rain, huge piles of scat full of fur and berries. The lupines that line the road are dug up and ravaged and as we’re making conjectures as to who was eating those roots, something startles in the brush just off the road. “Hey bear,” we say, spooked. Then we see a small doe. It scampers away.

On the second day we paddle further up the bay where we hope the walking will be easier than it was on the first. It is not. It is worse. There is no grass and no road, just a tangled mesh of salmonberry and devils club that’s 5-feet tall and hides a boneyard of jagged deadfall. We are following game trails through it, but these are not well-trodden trails. Whatever animal crashed through this web of spiny pioneer species, only did so once. The ground is obscured and every step is a guess as to whether we’ll punch through a branchy abyss, twist an ankle or be impaled by a spiky stick. We are stabbed and poked and slowed by the foliage. We are humbled. We don’t get very far.

On the third day, we find the perfect spot: two giant stumps above a decrepit old logging road that looks over a pond, a creek, good browse for elk between a field of nursery trees and a hillside of old growth spruce just beyond. Surely we’ll get lucky in this spot. The hike is a quiet stroll past the beary lagoon, a creek crossing, “Hey bear!” a slurpy, swampy, mucky bog and then the old road, just past a blind corner, “Hey bear!” where we perch on our stumps, camouflaged and quiet. No elk or deer. We leave at midday.

And then it rains. It pummels the tin roof of our cabin; our morning routine drags. I want to be warm and dry and write about hunting, not go hunting today. I don’t even like hunting; hunting is bushwacking, hunting is cold, hunting is killing, is trying not to surprise a bear while sneaking up on everything else. Hunting is hard! And this fire in the woodstove is so warm and sitting here is so easy and so maybe we just stay inside today?

Jesse looks at me like, Really? Is that really what you want? He knows I’m bluffing, that I’m just being lazy, that a whole day in the cabin will drive us both crazy. So I don my Grundens, my XTRATUFs, my external frame pack, lay the bear booby trap and step outside. It smells and sounds like a rainforest paradise. It is warm and under all my rubber I am dry. Rain is never as bad as it seems from inside.

We inflate our boats and paddle out into the gray bay amidst a macabre kaleidoscope of expanding circles of rain. The gothic beauty of this sunken sky makes me beyond glad to be out in the weather. It’s always better out here.

Suddenly two human skulls surface from the deep. Jesse and I both see the nightmare at once. My fear of bears is usurped by this much more immediate threat of a watery zombie apocalypse. We are paralyzed by the horror until both skulls exhale a quick snort and we realize they are just harbor seals. Their angular faces and cavernous black eyes disappear under the surface but the soggy morning only gets spookier when we see a female grizzly and her cub patrolling the lagoon through which our trail wends. We take a path through the witchy wood instead. Shaggy moss adorns the branches of these centuries-old trees. 

We are practically intoxicated by the aromas of mycelium. Very little precipitation filters down to us. We are saying “Hey bear” frequently, but when we stop to listen, the rainforest sounds somehow both hollow and crowded with microscopic life. We emerge to cross the creek and the mucky bog, to traverse that old logging road. We arrive at our sit spot where we sit. We wait. No game today.

Time passes extra-dimensionally on Afognak. It moves both faster and slower than it does back home. Every day is only a weather or animal variation on the same. Fire, coffee, breakfast, outhouse, booby trap, pack raft, bear on the beach. “Hey bear.” Climb tree, stash boats, mossy forest, cross the creek, “Hey bear!” Sucky bog, logging road, there’s a deer; now it’s gone. Sit, watch, listen, lunch, a fox! “Hey bear.” No luck. Paddle to a different spot to hunt for bucks. “Hey bear.” No luck. Maybe we’re too loud and scaring away all the animals. Back at the cabin we eat smoked salmon on sourdough toast. Maybe we haven’t gotten any game because we’re not hungry enough.

On day six we are sitting in the Perfect Spot, Jesse in camo with rifle ready and me in my rain gear, reading a book. We are silent, intermittently watching for elk. That’s when the bear appears. A huge male grizzly. He turns the blind corner strolling towards us unaware of our presence when I see him and say low and loud, “There’s a bear.” At the sound of my voice, he locks eyes with mine. He stops at 20 yards, stares, then utters the longest, most exaggerated exhale I’ve ever heard a bear sigh. Like he’s annoyed at us for being there. And can you blame him? He is hunted on Afognak. We are hunters. He turns back the way he came.

After that, I change my mind. I decide I’m not afraid of the grizzly anymore. He doesn’t want to sneak up on us or attack us. He is just a bear like any bear, no less predictable, no more scary. If we surprise him, we’ve got bear spray. We are as safe as two people can be in grizzly country and it’s long past time we got quiet and got some meat.

No more “Hey Bear” calls except near the rushing creek. We refine our stalking technique. We are near-silent now as we creep, toe-first, roll our arches, walk bow-legged, look everywhere at once. We slow down, listen more and speak less — we know each other so well by now, there’s nothing we can say that’ll mean more than our body language conveys.

On the last day, having seen not but one miles-away elk, our silence finally pays off. We harvest two deer. Jesse kills one and then I shoot the other in quick succession. A clean kill. It turns out, I do like hunting. We field dress the bucks and leave the guts as offering to the bears. We hike out the meat in one load, fly off the island successful, tired, and safe. The perfect spot wasn’t perfect, but we are wiser now, more savvy of the locals. Next time we’ll get a better shot at an elk. Next time we won’t be so scared of bears. We’ll be back, Afognak.

Got leads for other outdoor stories? You can contact the author through her website: libbybbushell.com.

Libby B Bushell is a local author and wildlife guide. She spends summers in Katmai with the bears, and winters (the austral summer) in Antarctica with the emperor penguins. She is the founder of HoWL and is passionate about helping people get outside. It’s better out there!