The Frozen Frontier by Jane Maufe

Author:Jane Maufe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

We were beginning to head back to Petersburg now, and our next call was forty miles beyond, which brought us round to Cannery Cove in Pybus Bay on the southeast corner of Admiralty Island – a lovely, gentle, open bay with a shallow sweep of grassland at its head, several high mountains surrounding the sides clad in fir trees with a rocky foreshore, and the remains of a canning factory converted into some kind of lodge. Admiralty Island, whose Tlingit name is Kootznoowoo (which means ‘Fortress of the Bears’), is reputed to have the largest concentration of brown bears in the world. It seemed to us that many of these islands were making the same claim, while we had yet to see a single brown bear.

We motored up to the head of the bay, which looked rather too shallow for comfort, I thought, and could have proved mosquito-y too. We passed a rather smug little Canadian sailing boat, the owner sprawled in a hammock on the after deck smoking a pipe, his wife sitting nearby, both wearing Tilley hats and appearing to be engrossed in their books. New arrivals at an anchorage are always a source of great interest to those who are already comfortably settled, having bagged their perch much earlier, their own anchoring dramas long forgotten.

We let the anchor down, then David decided it was too shallow, so up came the rope, which had to be coiled down on the foredeck. We started to motor a bit further out and passed the smug couple, who by now had lowered their books to observe our activities. At that moment a fisherman in a small motorboat came speeding up to us and told us that there was a brown bear eating grass on the foreshore. In some excitement we had another stab at anchoring.

‘Here, do you think?’ asked David, and then, answering himself, ‘Yes – this looks a good spot.’ I agreed, but by the time all was ready on the foredeck and the anchoring paraphernalia was in place, we had overshot, and now we were too close to another boat. Of course it was my fault. Up came the anchor again with a lot of muttering about the ‘wrong advice’, but on the third attempt we got it right, and the ‘hammock’ boat, rather disappointed, slowly lowered their eyes and reverted to reading their books.

This time we were close enough to the shoreline to make a prolonged study of the bear, which turned out to be a young one. We took endless photos of it munching the grass as it wandered myopically around, every now and again sitting down on its haunches to take stock. It seemed wholly unconcerned about noise nor about some kayakers who had paddled over to take a closer look.

We had been away from Petersburg for nearly two weeks on our sightseeing tour, and now we needed to return and prepare for our departure through the Northwest Passage. Taking advantage of the early morning current, we headed back some 54 miles to our berth at the north harbour in Petersburg.

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