The Bears of Brooks Falls by Michael Fitz

Author:Michael Fitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Countryman Press
Published: 2021-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

* The US Fish and Wildlife Service maintained a weir at the head of Brooks River from the 1940s to the early 1960s. Counts of salmon passing through the weir averaged about 20 percent of the overall Naknek escapement. This is the number I use to estimate the number of salmon entering Brooks River each year.

CHAPTER 13

DEATH

By late October, with the transition to winter well underway, the riverscape has appropriated an earth-toned palette. Birch and poplar trees stand bare, revealing their respective reddish and gray-colored twigs. Fallen deciduous leaves rest half frozen to the ground. Browned grass sags earthward, trampled by bears and matted by cold rain. A cap of fresh snow lines the mountaintops and tendrils of ice rim the nearby ponds. The sky is dark more often than light, making the scant hours between sunrise and sunset even more valuable for the few bears that have remained to scavenge the last of the year’s salmon.

It was under this scene, not the optimism of spring, but the melancholy feeling of a near-winter day, that I witnessed one of the most poignant events of my career.

Late in the afternoon on October 21, 2015, while searching for content to post on Katmai National Park’s social media pages, I found one of the park’s webcams fixed on a mother bear and her two 9-month-old cubs. The family was resting in a pile near the river mouth. Problem solved, I thought. Everyone enjoys watching cubs. Without devoting much brainpower to it, I invited the park’s online audience to watch. Moments later, regretting my haste, I understood this was no ordinary mother and cub scene. We had begun to watch a cub die a slow death.

During the two summers prior, 451 patrolled the river corridor rather unnoticed by the public. She didn’t have any cubs or compete for space at the falls, so she rather easily blended into the background until she injured her right rear leg. The injury healed but her limp never went away, so when she returned in 2015 with three young cubs, she became immediately recognizable.

Despite her injury, 451 provided well for her offspring. They grew rapidly under her care, transitioning from small and timid animals at the beginning of summer to roly-poly fur balls, well provisioned with fat by the fall equinox. Sometime in early October, however, one of 451’s cubs disappeared. Although its fate remains unknown, the event that took another cub makes me wonder about the fate of the first.

Not long before I tuned in to the webcam on October 21, a contingent of bearcam viewers watched one of 451’s cubs struggling to keep pace with its mother and sibling. The family plodded on the dirt road that skirts the south bank of the river mouth. Reviewing the footage, I see one cub sit then lay on the road, her family a dozen yards ahead. The cub looks almost playful, her head torqued slightly to the side. She’s pudgy enough for the season and her lumber-colored fur is dry and healthy looking.

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