You can tell a male black bear by the shape – big, humped up shoulders and a square, craggy head that looks chiseled out of stone.
We crouch behind a skeletal beached spruce tree – my father, my brother, my best friend, and me. The sun looms behind us, an hour from the horizon, and it casts our shadows up the pebbled beach. In whispers over the rustling of tall stands of beach wildrye, we sketch a rough plan, motioning in angles and curves, guessing distance.
The bear, we think, is around 200 yards from us, eating beach grass around the curve of a small creek. In turns, we peer between the bony branches of the spruce to confirm. I’ll close the remaining distance, find cover behind a small rise, and take the shot. It’ll be 70 yards.
The bear we’ve been stalking for the better part of an hour is a young male. He took his first mewling breath two or three years ago in a dark, cramped den, dug by his mother somewhere in the expanse of Alaskan coastal woods behind him. Since then, he’s grown rippling and muscular on grass, salmon, moose carcasses, and anything else he can find to gorge on. An opportunist, is the bear. He can’t see with any real clarity – like me, he lives a nearsighted life. He makes up for it with a keen nose and sharp hearing.
The wind isn’t in my favor. I want a northeasterly breeze, blowing from the bear towards me, but it’s gently gusting from the south. My scent wafts roughly parallel between the bear and I, and I’m sure he can sense the presence of a man. But I can’t do anything about it, and to wait means losing daylight, so I creep from behind the spruce out into the open.
My gun is old, a relic of a time before the New Deal and nuclear warfare. The action is worn and varnished with age, and the stock is scuffed with a hundred hunting trips, but the .30-06 bullet slips into the chamber as it did on the day it rolled off the factory line. I’m walking hot, carrying death in both hands.
Choosing each footstep with care, avoiding noisy patches of gravel, I head for the rise. The bear’s feeding on the southern edge of a small lagoon, and the tide is out, leaving vast swaths of wine-dark silty mud that sucks my boots in with wet slurps. It smells thick and rich with seaweed and life. Everything here is living vivaciously, in pursuit of some higher, druidic goal. The half-life of the modern world has not yet reached this bay, and I hope it never will.
I move, trying to conceal myself behind the grassy rise, formed by a small creek feeding into the lagoon. When I reach it, I drop down low to the ground, and shimmy up the hill to its peak, where I can get a clear view.
Through the scope of my rifle, he’s achingly beautiful in movement, in the way only a wild animal can be. His presence speaks to something that melts into the woods like a myth, that walks mountain peaks and low valleys, that forages and fights and kills to survive. For him, the only border is territory – what he can protect, with teeth that crack bone and claws that split flesh. A figure, an archetype, a race memory, a shape that inspired cave paintings and myths about monsters. Something that walked the woods long before man.
This beach is his. I’m intruding, and I know it.
I look back, and I’m alone.
Consciously, I know I’ve got a set of binoculars trained on me, my hunting partners watching from the beach, but in the most meaningful sense of the word, I’m alone. That’s freeing. I have the power to end this bear’s life. I kneel in mud to bring forth death. My footsteps trace a path tread long before my lifetime.
He could close the distance between us quicker than thought and kill me, if he decided, with claws like razors and teeth like iron.
But he’s turned away, chewing clumps of beach grass. I suck my teeth and pray for him to turn broadside, with ribs and heart and spine facing me. I won’t take the quartering shot otherwise – it’d be a painful wound, and he’d run into the forest to die slowly. A wounded bear is dangerous, and tracking one through the thick woods in fading light is a grueling job.
This needs to be clean – one shot.
My family has been touched by unclean death, felt its cold, rotten embrace in chemotherapy drugs and a loaded pistol and a crumpled sachet of aluminum foil loaded with fentanyl. It springs on you out of nowhere, with cars in a driveway and a phone call at night as its messengers. You lose all agency when confronted with the end.
To take control over death is to take that power back. You become intimate with true, meaningful death – not disheveled, hospital bed, bedpan, chunks of hair death. Not end of the road, gun in hand death. Not the kind of death that catches up to you in the bathroom of a rehab center, passed from hand to junkie hand.
The kind of death that’s clean and meaningful and pure – a man and an animal. We walk through life in lockstep with death. Some fear it. Some court it. Some welcome it.
I know this bear. I understand him. I’ve bridged the distance with glass and stared into his eyes and watched him move. I know what his death will mean, and in that moment, I will have complete control.
I live in a world that feels fragmented and detached from reality. Everything is filtered through layers of subtext and white noise. Everything is staticy, radio tuned to a dead station. Modern life takes the beam of human experience and refracts it through a million greasy prisms until there’s nothing left to grasp but sometimes – sometimes, you get a moment where everything crystallizes into one perfect, clear experience, where you can see the world for what it truly is.
The bear turns side-on to me, and I could swear he sees me. He hears my heartbeat dropping, my shallow breaths, my muscles tensing – smells the sweat beaded on my neck. His ears twitch, questioningly.
The grass rustles and I fire.
A trigger squeeze separates the living from the dead. The bullet, 180 grains of lead, leaves the barrel with a crack of gunpowder and a flash of flame, bridging the distance to the bear quicker than blinking.
It enters the bear right above his front shoulder, shattering his spine, paralyzing him. He drops where he stands, clawing at the lagoon mud. Within a minute, he will be dead. It’s a clean shot.
The sound of gunfire echoes off the mountains and across the lagoon in a victory cry as I sprint over, hurdling the creek and pumping another round into my gun, in case my first shot wasn’t lethal.
But my aim was true, and the bear lies dying in the tidal grass, a stream of blood trickling from the entrance wound, slowing with the last spasms of his heartbeat. Even in death, his shape prickles my spine and dries the saliva in my mouth. Wooden spear and stone arrowhead killed these – now we have powder and lead.
I touch his furry flank, still warm. I dip my finger into the pool of heart’s blood, tasting it, fulfilling a prehistoric requirement between the killed and the killer. It’s warm like magma, and ocean-salty.
Behind me, I can hear primal shouts as my hunting partners run over to examine my kill and begin the butchering process, but for now, I block them out. It’s me and the bear, cooling in the long shadows of the setting sun. Death comes to us suddenly, quickly in the night, and that’s unchangeable – but in this moment, kneeling on an Alaska beach, I’ve dictated the terms and set the time, become intimate with the process, all through the scope of my gun.
And in this way, I love the bear.
— Jacob Hersh has written rude works of political journalism and reviews of local musicians for the Alaska Landmine and other, smaller things for other, smaller publications. He attends law school, in the hopes of eventually making enough to finance his lifestyle. He can be found on Twitter at @youngjakeinc.