I found some letters on my computer that I wrote from Port Armstrong. We have beautiful weather today and I want to go fly my airplane so I am going to paste some of those letters here for now.
Boy, are we having fun with the bears! Ervin has been here for about two weeks. He just left today, but he was staying in the house down by my shop. His front door opens on a board walk that is just a few feet from the corner of the shop, and down about another 30 feet is the shop door. He calls that area of the board walk the “Main Intersection”. It is where we and the bears use the same section of board walk for about 50 feet. The second day Ervin was here, when he left his house to come up here for coffee in the morning, there were great big wet bear tracks on the walk right at his door. That afternoon we smoked some salmon on his second floor deck. The next morning a sow and her two cubs were circling the house and trying to figure out how to get on the second floor deck. I had some sheets of aluminum stacked against the wall and they knocked them down trying to get up to that good smelling smoked salmon.
They have been pretty regular customers here. We see them several times every day, and often closer than is comfortable for either of us. They have been catching fish under our upper bridge and then taking off under the boardwalk and behind Ervin’s house to eat them in the bushes. But that is only when they have a fish to eat or in a hurry. When they are just coming or going they prefer to use the boardwalk in this spot.
At least they are not aggressive. They don’t like to see us up close any better than we like to see them at close range. They take off running but stop and look around as soon as they get to the bushes. One day Ervin and I chased the bears up into the bushes and as soon as they got there, they all stopped. We saw three heads looking at us from behind the bushes, the two cubs’ heads right together and Mama’s just above. They must have stood up on their hind legs because they were looking at us over the top of the brush. Ervin said it looked like they were posing for a family portrait.
These cubs look really cute. They look like big teddy bears, and they act like a couple of kids. They are always playing and into mischief and curious about everything. But then you have to realize that they are really big. They are at least 2 and a half to 3 feet tall at the shoulders and must weigh close to 300 pounds. I saw one of them stand up on his hind legs and he must have stood 7 feet tall. And their legs are very long and big around. I have been amazed at how long the legs are on these bears. When they first came around last spring they stayed at the head of the bay and ate grass. They looked like buffalo with the big hump on their back! They really did! When they walk, they take very long steps. They just have very long, powerful legs.
We have been trying to convince them to stay down on the beach and not come up among our boardwalks. Lon got some cracker shells and another guy from the Little Port Walter hatchery brought over some screechers. The cracker shells are things you shoot from a 12 gauge shotgun. It sends out a thing that goes about 150 feet and explodes with a loud bang, and the screechers also go in the shotgun but they go out with a loud screech. They are lots of fun! Today, a three year old male came down to where I was welding in the raceways. He was about 30 feet from me and hadn’t seen me. I put a screecher in the barrel and a cracker shell in the magazine, of course I had three slugs in the magazine after that. But I shot the bear in the butt with the screecher. It didn’t screech but it sure sent out a lot of smoke and fire. I had to move off to the side to see around the smoke to see him run for the bushes. I shot a cracker shell into the bushes and it must have exploded right beside him. I haven’t seen him since.
Yesterday, Ervin and I were up at the lakes. I had to replace a valve in one of the 12” pipelines and then recharge it. We worked there for about five hours. When we finished, we loaded our gear into the canoe and paddled across the lake. When we were unloading the canoe we saw a big brown bear on the hillside just a little above where we had just been. He was walking with a strong limp. In fact, he was not using one front leg at all. He was coming around the lake toward us. When he got to within about 300 yards from us, I hollered. He heard me and immediately ducked into the bushes. Then we couldn’t see him anymore and I got really uncomfortable. I finished packing our packs as quickly as I could and picked up my 45-70 rifle and we headed down the mountain as fast as we could.
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