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The Kodiak Plan | Field Ethos
By Ethan Denault Here is my situation: tomorrow, gravel strip to Larsen Bay, then boat, then foot, into…
fieldethos.com
By Ethan Denault
Here is my situation: tomorrow, gravel strip to Larsen Bay, then boat, then foot, into a tent, and at the end of it, assuming Dutch isn’t exaggerating, there will be a bear the size of a good Buick, and I will shoot it, cleanly, because that’s the thing I’m really good at, honed on four continents: the Selous, the Zambezi delta, a ridge above a Kyrgyz valley so remote I could hear my own pulse between shots. I want to be clear, mostly to myself: I do not need this bear to prove anything. That phase, shooting animals as a memo to a father who received approximately zero of them, is closed. I am simply a man who wants a bear. Clean, uncomplicated: bear, then whiskey, then home.
Tonight, however, I am in the hotel bar in Kodiak, not fancy but trying so hard to be fancy, antlers over the mirror, a laminated sign about muddy boots, that I find myself rooting for it, working through a pour of 19-year Pappy I talked the bartender into unlocking. Once the glass is properly started I carry it back to the hotel’s smoking room, a small glassed-in add-on with a space heater working overtime, since nobody’s let a man light up in the main bar in 20 years, and 36 degrees and a stiff harbor wind rule out doing it outside like some kind of martyr. A man’s cigar preferences seldom change after 40, and I’ve been packing my own travel humidor rather than leave it to chance. I light a Cuban-seed Nicaraguan saved for an occasion that hasn’t technically arrived, on the theory that if I keep waiting I’ll die with a humidor full of correct occasions and nothing to show for them.
A woman is already in there, at the far end of the little bench, a cigarette burning down between two fingers and a whiskey in the other hand, having made the same calculation about rules that I have, if by a cheaper route. She’s got an outdoor face, ruddy across the cheeks, the kind you get from actual weather, not from a spray bottle at a salon. I notice her. I notice myself noticing her, which hasn’t happened in a while, and which I choose not to examine too closely.
Whiskey and Other Vices
We sit there for a few minutes without talking, just the space heater ticking and the two of us working on our respective vices, before she finally says, “You’re one of the bear guys.” Not a question. There’s clearly been a whole line of us through here, each one probably certain he was the first.“Guilty,” I say, and hold her eye a beat longer than the word requires.
She doesn’t look away either. “Figured. You’ve got that look. Like you already know exactly how this ends.”
I pull on the cigar, let the smoke sit a second before I let it go. “I do. Never one up here, though. Came to see if the look holds.”
“So far it’s holding,” she says, in a tone filed somewhere between approval and warning, and something in my chest tightens in a way I’d describe, under oath, as pleasant.
“Glad to hear it,” I reply.
She’s a biologist, up here on a salmon survey, checking the checkers, a job that sounds tedious but honest. She says it like she’s daring me to have an opinion. I decline.
“You think I shouldn’t be doing this,” I say.
“Didn’t say that.” She turns her glass a slow quarter turn, studying it instead of me. “I’ve watched a lot of men come through that door talking about bears. Some of them have no business up here. A few actually do.”
“How can you tell the difference?
“The first kind either freezes up or tries too hard when they get within range.” Her eyes drop briefly to the cigar, and the whiskey.
“And me?”
She looks up, dead level. “Haven’t decided yet.”
The Kodiak Plan
I find, with real surprise, that I’d like very much for her to decide in my favor, more than I’d like to admit, more than I expected to want tonight besides ice in my glass and a clean shot tomorrow.“They’re something to see,” she says. “The big boars. From far away, mostly. Get close enough and they clock you back.”
“That’s usually when I do my best work.”
“I bet you do.” Not quite a smile. Something close to one, held in reserve.
We sit a while longer, not saying much, and it’s the kind of quiet two people construct together instead of falling into by accident. My cigar burns down slow and even. When she finally sets her glass down to go, she says, “Good luck,” and something in how she says it covers more ground than just the bear.
“Maybe I’ll see you when I’m back,” I say.
“Maybe,” she says, and leaves it exactly that open, and doesn’t look back, which I respect, and also do not entirely forgive.
In the morning the float plane is loud, and everything below is green and silver and enormous, making a man’s whole little folder of plans look small. Dutch is talking wind direction, and I am watching the tree line, steady, ready, doing the job the way I’ve done it countless times before. But some off-duty part of my mind keeps drifting back to a little glassed-in room off the hotel bar, and a woman who hadn’t decided yet, and how badly, for reasons that have nothing to do with bears, I want her to.
