It’s bear season so I’m once again packing a gun everywhere I go and seeing bears behind every tree–thankfully, so far they always turn out to be figments of my imagination. Sort of like the bear mentioned in the “Grizzly Country” section of Bjorn Dihle’s book, NEVER CRY HALIBUT.
Excerpt:
Brown bears bring out no shortage of strangeness in people. For the last six years, I’ve guided folks and a few film crews who wanted to look at or film brown bears….[One] summer I was offered the chance to become a Hollywood star.
“Hi, sport,” a reality television producer said over the phone. “Are you interested in being part of a team that tries to track down the biggest brown bear in the world? Some say it’s not even a bear! They say it’s, like, fourteen feet tall!”
“Where’s this ‘bear’ supposed to live?” I asked, beginning to shake with excitement. Maybe a brown bear had successfully mated with a tiger, creating a “tigear” or “beager,” and I was about to be offered a ticket to the Kamchatka Peninsula.
“On the island of Angoon,” the producer said.
“You mean the village of Angoon on Admiralty Island?” I said.
“What? Yeah. The village of Angoon,” he said.
“Who gave you this exciting information?” I asked.
“The Langat People.”
“I never heard of the Langat people. Do you mean Tlingit?” I asked. The conversation grew increasingly strained. The producer said something about isolated DNA and there being some sort of super bear near Angoon….
My life dream is to be cast as the villain in a James Bond movie, but I was tired of all the nonsense being perpetuated about bears. It’s like when Allen Hasselborg, the bear man of Admiralty Island, said about so many people’s apparent need to dress up bear stories–the truth is plenty interesting already. Still, a small part of me died when I declined to be on the show.
End of Excerpt.
In the book, Bjorn tells stories not just of his close encounters with bears, some of them frightening enough for me to sleep with a light on all night after reading them, but he also describes some of the strange people he’s met deep in bear country. Before I read his book I was, it turns out, considerably naive about the varied reactions people can have to meeting their first brown bear.
One of the funniest parts of the entire book is where Bjorn details his interactions with various TV producers and clients he guides into the wilderness. If you want to know what not to do in the wilderness, this section is a great primer.
At any rate, I wanted to put a reminder out there that Bjorn’s book of Alaskan hunting and fishing tales is currently available both in Kindle and print formats. Here’s a link to Amazon’s page for NEVER CRY HALIBUT:
Now I better strap on my gun, pocket my pepper spray, take my handheld VHF with me, and head into the woods and over to the beach with the good Internet signal to post this. Here’s hoping I don’t meet any bears or reality TV producers in the process….
Note: All Photos except the top one courtesy of Bjorn Dihle.
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