Al Hasselborg Knows Bears

Fifty yards, forty yards—thirty; straight toward the camera-laden trio came the grizzly, snarling as he rushed. Film buzzed through the cameras in our hands. Our guide brought his gun to his shoulder for action. He barked a sharp command. "Stop that, boy! Stop it! Stop it quick!" If his words had been bullets, they could not have been more effective. Slithering and sliding on the beach, the huge animal brought up short, shaking his head in surprise. And there we were, across ninety feet of mud and mussels, in the gathering dusk, three humans and one thousand pounds of disconcerted grizzly staring at each other.

A few feet to seaward, teeming salmon were splashing in the shallows; to landward a chill wind that drove a fine rain before it was moaning through the forest, where scudding clouds came down to meet the trees. Suddenly, the spurt of courage that had inspired his charge deserted the bear. He turned tail and ran a few yards, then stopped to gaze sulkily back at the trio, as if debating his course. Then he slowly walked toward the shore, punctuating his retreat with glowering looks at his conquerors. At a safe distance, he paused to scratch himself nonchalantly—as if to show he wasn't afraid, then continued his lumbering gait to the edge of the beach. There he sat down, dog-like, to watch. Only then did Hasselborg give the command to march.

Slowly the three walked to their canoe, stranded on the beach, and began to push it down the shallow channel toward home. As they moved away, they could still see the grizzly, blurred in the rain and dusk, sulking on the beach like a whipped child. Only when he had disappeared in the gathering darkness did any one speak. "Whew!" I murmured. "Let's give thanks for His Master's Voice." We who had come to Admiralty Island—a day's run by gas boat from Juneau—to camera-hunt the Alaskan bears, had many opportunities to give thanks for that voice, and its owner, before our days of adventure were over and our little yacht Westward, laden with thousands of feet of motion picture film, turned its nose south toward Seattle.

Thank God our guide knew bears. The year around he lives in a little two-room cabin built with his own hands near the mouth of Mole Creek. He guides hunters and otherwise lives the ordered life of a lone bachelor. And sometimes at dusk of a summer day the bears come to fish near the cabin, while he sits there, smoking and watching—because our guide would rather watch and photograph a bear than shoot him. This wise, rugged, weatherbeaten old guide with the full long beard is worth a story in himself; and he is an essential part of this tale, too, for without his aid the experiences we had and the pictures of bears we took could never have been. And without him, too, some of us might not have returned.