A Man to Ride the River With - 05/28/14
Almost twenty years ago I wrote a piece of poetry about my son, Riley, and yesterday it came full circle. I was a bit older than most first-time fathers and the whole concept of a kid seemed to be a game waiting for them to be old enough to be fun.
But then the game seemed to turn to looking back at what was lost at each major stage in the kid's life. The hard part as he got older seemed to be staying out of the way so he could figure stuff out for himself with as little interference as possible.
And I had written:
You are my child to hold,
And I'll be yours when I grow old.
Overlook my faults, and forgive my errors
Remember my help through your nightly terrors
Keep and protect me the best you can
You make me proud, my Little Man!
Riley has done some things very well since then, but none so grand as yesterday...
Last year he managed to shoot a Kodiak brown bear, a caribou bull, and a bull moose while mixing in some ducks and geese and assorted other stuff. While he was doing all the shooting he was also working full-time, going to school at UAA (maintaining a 4.0) with a couple math and physics classes, and building a mini-boat.
With a friend he lofted his own boat and built it from the laptop screen to real life. It is aluminum, welded, and driven by a 60hp jet-ski motor and pump. It runs in less than an inch of water for great distances, jumps logs as needed, runs in a tear flowing through a boulder field, and simply amazes old-time jet boat runners.
So Riley and I ran up a local river to explore unreachable country that was "so close" to the "honeyholes" of my youth. My father left me on the bank of a small inlet stream while he climbed after a mountain goat.
I tended the signal flags until Dad killed a goat and then I went fishing. Brilliant blue skies and a tiny, crystalline creek, and a steelhead that knew I was there.
With a slung Remington 760 chambered in 35 Whelen I chased the steelhead up and down the pool, and up into the next.
Suddenly, things seemed "wrong" and I looked around a bit. In the head-high grass I suddenly realized the sound I had been hearing was a snoring brown bear boar whose snout was no farther away than the tip of my fly rod! And his body was between me and his snout.
I backed out as quickly and quietly as possible and never saw that bear again. But I have thought about him many, many times over the past five decades.
My father often said the goat he killed that day was the toughest hunt he ever did. And he was tough beyond words...
Things have changed a great deal since then and the tiny creek has been lost to the sand carried downstream.
So there we were checking out new territory in some of the oldest country I know.
But we were doing it in a whole new way... Zipping along at well over 20mph in almost no water and up tiny trickles that just did not seem enough to float on, let alone run on.
At one point on the run down the river we found a spruce, still complete with limbs laying across the river and up out of the water a bit. So Riley gunned it and we jumped the tree like almost nothing! The almost part was when the branches on my side unloaded and filled my face with a big bucket of glacial water.
Then there was the part where the limbs had just enough spring to deflect us right up onto the alders lining the river and left us nearly dry. I could not stop laughing for a bit as it was unexpected, and damn funny!
A quick tug on the chainsaw rope and a couple quick swipes and we were on our way again.
Down on the lower stretches we started to see some people, but that was after we saw miles of river few have seen. Suddenly, while driving the boat and trying to find enough water to run in Riley suddenly stopped the boat and grabbed a binocular.
In an avalanche chute up the mountainside he had spotted a brown bear grazing in the new grass growing along the snow remnants in the chute bottom. It looked very fluffy and golden in the smoke haze.
He quickly geared up and headed up the chute while I watched from the bottom to keep an eye on the bear. He had a swamp to cross and then the climb was very steep, but not really that far.
He kept expecting to see the bear sooner than he did and kept looking back for guidance, but the bear had not moved 50 yards the whole time.
Riley finally saw the bear's back but had no shot so he moved closer but the bear just would not come out of the ditch of the chute. Then the bear saw Riley and sat down like a big dog looking back over its shoulder leaving Riley nothing to shoot at. I could see the bear well and it was obvious something was about to happen, but I could not figure out why Riley was not shooting. He seemed to be aiming at the bear but not shooting.
Suddenly the bear spun around and it seemed it had gone two whole revolutions before the sound came echoing down the chute. It was biting at the right foreleg but then stopped and looked back at Riley before heading out hard right across the chute. Two more shots had filled in some time and I wondered why only two more. He should know by now the best bear is the one with the most holes.
The bear was holding up the right foreleg but made great speed across the snow and slide and up the far side and into the alders.
Riley immediately worked his way across the snow and went right to where the bear disappeared. At this point I am waving him off and trying to get his attention to just stop for a while! Then he disappeared into the alders, too.
A couple minutes later I could hear him hollering "Found it!"
He had gone straight to the edge of the alders rather than following the bears exact trail and when he got to the alders he found an enormous bloodtrail and knew the bear could not long survive that.
The little 80gr TTSX had gone through both legs down a little low and probably took out the heart, judging by the blood loss. It exited of course. The others did, too.
![[Linked Image]](http://s10.photobucket.com/user/24quarts/media/Rileys%20Kenai%20Brown%20Bear%2014/IMG_0911.jpg.html)
![[Linked Image]](http://s10.photobucket.com/user/24quarts/media/Rileys%20Kenai%20Brown%20Bear%2014/IMG_0908.jpg.html)
I loaded the pack with a game bag, knives, and camera and climbed the chute up to him. He had tried to start working on the bear but it was too steep. We moved the bear around a bit to take some photos and then started it rolling downhill.
The devil's club was thick and we were both bleeding almost immediately. Riley does not respond well to devil's club and had serious welts all over his hands. I had a pair of leather gloves for him.
We knocked many yards off the pack and got the bear down to slightly flatter ground. In a small hole in the alders we broke out the devil's club and started undressing the bear. We left the feet and head in to speed things up.
When Riley shouldered the pack we realized the hip belt had fallen off somewhere and Riley had to carry the pack without a hip strap in steep country down through alders and across the swamp. It was a mess.
All in all it was a pretty good day. Riley killed his second brown bear in 13 months and we had a great day! The GPS says we ran 27 miles and all of it was fun, even the spruce jumping. i am going to meet him this afternoon at F&G so he can get it sealed and decisions can be made about the hide which is salted and drying in the back yard.
)
