Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/116174
The Traveling Sportsman "We'll sneak around it," my confident guide assured me as I stepped into the small Lund. He threw me a float coat. "You can sit on your life jacket." They were a perfect combination, the coat providing insulation and a welcomed windbreak, the lifejacket softening the hard bench seat. The isolated bay where we launched was delightfully calm, protected from the open Pacific by a series of small islets. Boulders and eelgrass showed clearly at two fathoms. Waterfowl gabbled and pattered near the stony shore. A murder of fish crows, their calls sounding as if they had head colds, attacked a bald eagle that shrugged from atop its snag and flew stoically down the coast. Mergansers steamed out from a small river's mouth while flocks of mallards and widgeon sprang from flooded sedge meadows. A small wedge of swans spooked behind the ducks and creaked by within shotgun range. Kim cruised a few hundred yards offshore, weaving and weaseling through narrow channels, exposing secret bays and backwater flats where bears could forage unseen and undisturbed. "Let's wade around the corner," he said after killing the engine and drifting quietly into a shallow nook where old bear tracks slowly disintegrated underwater. A grassy beach bent back around a point of forest to extend much deeper into the woods, creating a nearly cloistered corridor between bordering firs and cedars. It was empty of bears, but spattered with their droppings. "Good place. We'll check it again." In quieter waters Kim stood to glass, the motor idling. I mimicked him, panning with a new 8x42 Swarovski EL Range. "Nothing here," I said, proud that I hadn't let a black stump excite me. "Just that female with a cub," Kim observed. "What? Where?" I looked more intently, finally spotting her tight against the Nootka rose and salmonberry brush edging the rainforest, half of her bulk concealed by the green sedges on which she fed. I couldn't see the cub. "It stands up now and then," Kim said, and then he motored on. His ability to spot bears was uncanny, honed over decades. "The grass is deeper than you'd think and there are dips and holes. A lot of them will hang right against the forest edge where they blend with the shadows." T he mysteries of the islands and back bays, river outlets and waterfalls were equaled only by my guide's knowledge of them. He would steer past a shoal of harbor seals, aim for a wall of stone and emerge in a channel smooth as a mirror that led to a small beach rich with sedges and wildflowers. "Let's hike up this old logging road," he'd say. "We took a seven-foot boar off it a few years ago. My nephew missed a big one down below that cut bank one time. They usually hit this spot at low tide. They like to eat clams." Black spots at great distance would slowly resolve into black bears, hump-backed and so busy feeding they wouldn't notice the steady putting of the outboard as we motored past. Then we'd beach, one of us slipping over the gunnel to slow the aluminum hull before it could grate on the rocks. With the wind in our faces, stalking was easy. Just go slowly and stop if the bear looked up. "Mature boar, but only a six-footer at best," Kim said. We found eight bears that first day, the last four coming practically within sight of one another in the last hour of daylight. We pulled ashore to eat eggs, sandwiches and raw oysters plucked from the shallows. The