hardcover Limited Edition Some Bears Kill By Larry Kaniut Pub. 1999 /324pp  Paperback One Tough Alaskan "It was awful the way my guts wiggled in my fingers."     Within a year of Alaska Bear Tales' appearance on the newsstands, I received a phone call from a generous gentleman who complimented me on a job well done. He said, "It's about time someone told the truth about bears in Alaska. You did in your book." Then he told me, "If you do another book on Alaskan bears, include some of these," and Hank Taylor told me bear stories for nearly an hour.     After deciding to do another bear book, I went back to my notes from our conversation, determined to contact Hank. In the fall of 1987 tried to locate him. I checked the phone book, called the Anchorage Telephone Utility, and phoned a former student and paralegal, Leonard Hackett. I told Leonard I was working on another book, and he said, "If there's ever anything I can do to help, let me know."     "As a matter of fact," I said, "I'm trying to locate a guy who told me bear stories a few years ago and I'm not having any success."     Leonard responded, "What's his name?     I replied, "Hank Taylor."     Leonard asked, "Oh, Hank works right down the hall from me."     I couldn't believe it. We made arrangements to meet Hank. Two unusual bear stories involved Hank's friend George Brown. Hank called him Greg. Before Hank told me the tales, he shared Greg's bear-hunting philosophy. Greg Brown used to say he was part Aleut, part Siberian Eskimo, part Scottish sea captain, and part brown bear. He was an interesting man whom I first met in 1958. Greg always used to say the Aleut prayer before he shot a bear. It started with the Aleut word for ursus. "Old Man in the fur coat. My wife needs your hide for our house. My children need your meat for their bellies. I must kill you; please forgive me." Bam.     God help you if you shot before you apologized because it was believed if you took the life of the bear without respect, that bear would come back to get you. The Aleut's apology states the reason for taking a bear's life. To his dying day, Greg wouldn't shoot a bear without saying that.     The Aleuts considered brown bears a form of people in prehistory.     During his lifetime, Greg's grandfather was the bear hunter in a village on Kodiak Island. His grandfather told him what it was like to hunt bear before guns came, and he passed on much of his knowledge to Greg. Hank recounted for me Greg's first serious encounter with a bear that Hank called "The Mirror Bear."     Greg was hunting with his family up the Kenai River as a twelve-year-old. It was fall; the sky was blue, the trees were yellow and pretty. He was thirsty. They came to a beautiful spring and Greg laid his rifle down and kneeled to get a drink of water. He was using the water as a mirror as boys will do, looking at his reflection and how pretty he was, and letting the water get still from the ripples after the drink.     From behind him something big and brown and dark loomed in front of the sky. He saw that it was a huge bear standing upright over him. As he turned hoping to get to his gun, the bear hit him and knocked him through the air. He came to twenty feet away, hanging in the alders with his shoulder dislocated. They put his shoulder back in again, but it hurt all of his life. The bear just gave him a swat. That was all he remembered.     That bear injured Greg, but it was another bear that nearly killed him.     The next time Greg had a run-in with a bear it was late summer or fall of 1932 or 1933. He and his brother were fishing and getting ready for the winter's trapping in Chulitna Bay, where glaciers abound. He walked up Middle Glacier, prospecting a trapping area. He looked up the hill and saw a monster bear, a great big bear. Greg was raised on Kodiak Island, and when he says big, you can bet your boot on it.     He said, "My gosh." Times were hard in the Depression, and he thought he could get a lot of money if he could sell the hide. He had a little .25-20 and figured he could kill the bear with it. He climbed up a deep gully to the bear which was feeding on grass. He got in a good position and drilled the bear right through the engine room. The bear let out a spine-tingling roar, jumped in the gully, and started downhill.     Greg thought the bear would go downhill, so he ran to his right down the hill to intercept the bear and to pump a few rounds into him. He stood with his rifle on his shoulder waiting for the bear to come out at the bottom of the hill. The bear didn't show up.     Enough time had transpired for the bear to come before it dawned on Greg that the bear had circled and that he had been had. He's behind me. Subconsciously maybe Greg smelled him or heard him (he was a great believer in the subconscious). But somehow Greg knew that the bear had reversed his course, gone up the gully, climbed out, and was coming right behind him on the ledge Greg had just come down. He spun around as fast as he could, bringing the gun up to fire. The bear was in midair. The bear hit him and broke the stock of the lever-action Winchester in half. The gun went flying, and Greg went tumbling. The bear caught up with Greg and climbed on top of him.     Greg had listened to men talk about playing dead. He felt that ff you play dead the bear might oblige you. His grandfather told him, "Fight. He might leave you alone. Don't play dead. A man's supposed to fight. Let the woman play dead."     Greg continued, "Since I was pretty good with my dukes when I was young, I fought the bear. I hit him in the nose as hard as I could with a one-two punch in the chops. The bear shook his head. In my mind I can still remember the smell of that bear's breath."     As the bear opened his mouth wide, he came down on Greg's head, ripping the scalp off. Greg pulled his head out of its mouth. The bear was tryin' to crush his head, and he would get mad and bat Greg in the shoulder. Greg said, "I'm fightin' all the time. The bear got pissed and stepped back and hit me. I went flyin' down the hill. I was still conscious.     "I lit in the top of some alders, I'm hangin' up there, thinking Thank God, I'm away from that son of a gun.' He knocked me a long way off the side of that steep hill. Then he came again.     "He pulled me down on the ground and we went at it again. He hit me and rolled me in the leaves. He straddled me face-to-face. I grasped the chest hair under his forelegs in an effort to pull myself under him and away from his jaws. I slid under and he backed up. I kept trying to hold onto the fur, and he got mad and clawed me. As his head came down between his front legs to get me, I slid downhill under him.     "I had on some heavy, stiff boots. I kicked him in the belly as hard as I could. I believe I kicked him in the balls, because after a good kick he let out a Ruuurrrrhhhh! The brute turned me loose and ran over me and down the hill like a freight train, Ruurrrhhh ! I passed out.     "When I came to, my arm was dislocated again. Here I am bleedin', my scalp's lyin' over, blood in my eyes, I'm bitten all over, and I can't move my left arm. And I look down and my guts are hangin' out. I spoke to the missing bear, 'You son of a bitch, you knocked me down the hill.'     "There's nothin' runnin' out of the guts, it's just blood with the guts pokin' out and wigglin'. I figured that I was gonna die. I figured the bullet injury was awfully hot, and he was goin' to water to cool off. At the foot of the hill was a beaver pond with a beaver house in the middle. I knew that son of a gun was goin' down there to get in that water to cool off. I'm gonna die, but before I die, I'm gonna kill that bear."     It was eight miles or so back to the cabin. He had no hopes of getting back; his brother had gone in a different direction to prospect for another trap line. He crawled back up the hill to retrieve the rifle. The stock was off, but the action still worked. He took the rifle and then crawled slowly, because his guts were hanging out, and his arm was in tremendous pain. He couldn't use it because he kept bleeding and fainting.     He crawled down to the foot of the hill. Sure enough, there was the bear, lying on the beaver house. He was spread front legs akimbo, grasping the beaver house. His head was lying on top of it like a big bushel basket, and his body was under water below his forelegs. The bear sounded like a man saying, "Oooooo, ooooooooo."     Greg said, "I couldn't raise the rifle up with just my right hand, hold it with no stock, and get a good aim. I knew I needed to shoot him in the head and kill him or he'd finish me off.     "I crawled to a mossy log. I lay down and flopped that gun up on that log, just like putting it on a bench-rest--it was perfect. I put the sights right in his left ear and I fired. He collapsed on the house, dead as could be. That's the last thing I remembered."     Greg's brother came home that night. At first light he went looking for Greg and found him in the trail. Greg had crawled a long distance down the hill trying to get back, but he was delirious. He didn't remember having crawled. His brother picked him up and packed him back to the cabin. Greg came to and told his brother, "Build a fire and sterilize your knife in the flame. Go out and cut willow bushes to make probes and bring them back. Then sterilize your knife again and don't touch the blade."     His brother did and brought in a bundle of green willow limbs. Greg instructed his brother to "trim them down to probes, to open up my wounds that are full of brush, grass, dirt, and bear slobber. Lay them out so they don't touch anything."     Greg was a smart man. I've talked to doctors about this, and they said you couldn't get a more sterile instrument to probe. Back then gangrene, not the jaws, caused death in most bear attacks. He knew that he had to clean the wounds that had closed up--in his shoulders, back, neck and arms--get them bleeding, and wash them out with soap and water, which was a good antiseptic.     His brother probed, then washed and scrubbed Greg with yellow laundry soap and hot water. He cleaned all the wounds and the skin flap. His brother got all the dirt and leaves washed out of his gut. Greg said, "It was awful, the way my guts wiggled in my fingers."     After the wounds were cleaned, Greg told his brother to rinse his wounds with kerosene. It was the only thing they had except whiskey, and he'd given up all drinking. Greg said, "It hurt like the devil because I had so many injuries."     Next Greg told his brother to get some braided nylon fish line (this was before monofilament) and a sail needle. Even in those years they still had sail and they had to sew canvas. Greg told his brother to sterilize the needle and line in the kerosene and "sew my stomach up."     His brother started, then stopped and said, "I can't do this."     Angrily Greg retorted, "It's just like sewing up a sail. Sew it up."     Greg goes on, "So he'd stick that needle in and pull a notch up and I'd faint." He'd come to and his brother was doing it again, and his hands were trembling. Greg would say, "For goodness sake, you're gonna punch my guts and kill me. Be careful." But his brother told Greg he just couldn't do it, and collapsed in tears.     Greg exploded in anger and said, "Give me the needle." He said, "I sat there and tried to push my guts in. I'd get a hold of them and sometimes I'd sorta faint, but I just kept going. I concentrated on sewing like sewing a sari. I worked all the way around my belly. That's the last thing I remember."     Incidentally, after his brother took care of him, he went back and skinned the bear, then got one hundred dollars for it, a twelve-foot hide. It was the biggest bear he'd ever killed.     For two weeks he was unconscious. His brother would bring him around and pour soup and water down his throat until he came to again. He didn't get gangrene. He said, "It was another week or so before I could get around. I looked out the window and saw another brown bear. I got a bigger rifle and went over there and shot him dead. I walked up and kicked him and turned around and walked back to the cabin. For a long time after that I was hell on bears. But I don't hate 'em anymore."     He would tear his shirt off and show his scars. "See that." Greg got to town and showed old Dr. Howard Romig, who looked him over and said, "By gosh, George (what Dr. Romig called Greg), I couldn't have done a better job myself." Greg was proud of that. He didn't have to pay the doctor for it either.     Later I asked him, "Greg, how in the world could a 165-pound runt like you--stocky Aleut. bowlegged, strong-shouldered, good packer--take all that and live through it?'     He said, "Simple. I didn't want to die." - Later I talked to Bill Poland and asked him if he knew George Brown. Bill said, "I met George Brown up at the headwaters of Caribou Lake. He and I hunted together on Caribou Lake, in the Caribou Hills on the Kenai. He could really tell stories. He had one hell of a lot of experience. It wouldn't surprise me if he had been mauled and sewn himself up. He couldn't have made up all that stuff." See Appendix 9, Medical Aspects (this appendix applies directly to a number of these mauling victims and indirectly to all). Greg Brown had no problem shooting at the brownie he met; however, Marti Miller did not want to shoot the black bear that stalked her.

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