"I Tried to Tell You"

I TRIED TO TELL YOU

(a reworked version of a Redoubt Reporter article from November 2009)

Sometimes people can be so certain they are right that they can be blind to evidence to the contrary, even when it is placed squarely in front of them. And sometimes, other people, who actually know the truth, can help sustain another person’s ignorance simply by playing dumb. Such was the case in the early 1960s when a young state game warden’s aide learned the hard way not to jump to conclusions--and a pair of peninsula hunting pals allowed him to “jump” to his heart’s content.

The pals in this story were my long-time neighbor, Dan France, and my father, Calvin Fair, who flew in Dan’s red-and-yellow Super Cub into the Tustumena benchlands a day before the opening of the Dall sheep season. Dan landed his plane on a reasonably flat hillside bordering a pond about four air miles west of the Harding Ice Field. There, they set up camp just north of Tustumena Glacier, east of Green Lake, and south of the south fork of Indian Creek. After pitching their tent and arranging their packs, they headed further up the hillside to scout for black bear because Dad was hoping to bring one home and smoke the hams. Bear or no bear, however, their plans called for a sheep hunt the following day.

Some distance away, they spotted the spike camp of another hunter. They wandered on in for a visit, and they learned that the other man, who had been flown in by Kenai pilot Bud Lofstedt, was also preparing to hunt sheep the next day. He had also spotted a black bear, which he said had been making regular nightly appearances to feed on berries just around the hill from where they were camped. Dan and Dad headed south toward the glacier, and, sure enough, the bear made an appearance. Dad took aim with his high-powered rifle, and fired. His shot struck the bear, but the bear didn’t drop. Instead, it bolted farther downhill and disappeared. They gave chase.

 “We could see blood here and there because the vegetation’s pretty scant,” Dan told me many years later. Dan had come to Alaska to serve as a federal game warden in 1954 and became a state game warden in 1964. “So we got down there, and here’s this bear laying there, dead.” As the afternoon wound down, they got to work. “We skinned it, and it was little,” Dan said. “It was an old bear because its teeth were all worn off.” Consequently, after the butchering was complete, they needed only their two packs and one trip to haul the hide and head and everything edible back to camp. One pack held all the meat, while the other held the hide and head, which Dad had made into a rug that eventually hung on the wall of my bedroom until I was almost 10 years old.

As they trudged uphill, they left behind only some blood on the ground, a small gut pile, and a tuft of coarse black hair from where they had cut off the hide from around the bear’s anus.

When they arrived at their camp, they were surprised to see another tent nearby. It was the shelter of a temporary officer—Dan called him a warden’s aide—who had been flown into Green Lake and had hiked the four or five miles into the hills, presumably to monitor sheep-hunting activity. Probably he had heard my dad’s rifle shot, but definitely he watched as the men approached with their heavy packs. And since it was the day before sheep season, he very likely believed that he was about to nail his first violators. He came to their tent to question them, and his very first line of inquiry got him in trouble. “He wanted to see the horns,” Dan recalled. “And I said, ‘She didn’t have any horns.’ And, see, this area was closed to ewes. You could only kill rams, so that means it’s illegal, right there.”

At this point, the warden’s aide surely believed that he had them dead to rights on a double-violation. He wanted to know who’d done the shooting. Dan pointed to my dad and said, “He did.” The officer asked Dad, “You shot it?” and Dad admitted that, indeed, he had. Then the officer said, “Come on. I want to go down to the kill.” Dad asked him if he might be interested in examining the hide first, but the officer insisted that he was interested only in the horns. So they donned their jackets and ventured back outside into the lightly falling rain.

Dad and Dan escorted the warden’s aide down the hillside to the kill site. As he looked around for damning evidence, Dan wandered over to the patch of black hair, picked it up, and held it out for the officer. “Here, will this do?” he said. “No,” said the officer. “I want the horns.”

“Well, she didn’t have any horns,” Dan insisted. “Oh, yes she did,” the officer replied.

“So he started making circles around and around the kill, maybe 30 feet away, looking in all the little bushes,” Dan said. Again, he held up the black hair and offered his assistance. Again, he was rebuffed. Amused but trying to keep their composure, Dan and Dad walked a short ways uphill and found a spot to sit. “We watched him as he made circles around and around and around, and finally he went over to the guts. And he looked at the guts, and the stomach was stained from eating blueberries. And he give that gut pile a kick and sent it rolling down the hill. Then he come up and he sat down beside us on the hill. And we laughed and laughed and laughed. And he said, ‘That was sure a good one.’”

But that is not the end of the story.

The next morning, Dad and Dan were up early and climbing into the headwaters of Indian Creek for sheep. By nightfall, they were returning to camp with two packs containing the horns, hide and meat of a full-curl ram. They arrived in the dark and loaded Dan’s plane with all of the meat and hides and heads so they could get an early start the next day. The warden’s aide did not come out to check on them. But when morning broke and Dan fired up the engine on the Super Cub, the officer hurriedly exited his tent, and yelled, “Did you get one?” Dan opened his window and yelled, “Yeah!” When the officer said that he wanted to see it, however, Dan merely waved, closed his window and flew away.

But even that is not the end of the story.

A month or so later, in two Volkswagen vans, Dad, Dan and a couple of their friends drove north of Palmer to go caribou hunting in a remote mountain area near the Susitna River. They were flown to a remote camp by pilot/guide Denny Thompson. After they were flown a few days later back to their vehicles, they carried meat bags containing four caribou and one Dall sheep. And as they drove south in the pouring rain, they encountered a check station, manned mostly by state game biologists trying to keep tabs on the annual harvest. When they stopped, a biologist hurried out with a clipboard to collect data. The hunters opened up the vans obligingly.

The biologist began by counting meat bags, and he determined aloud that the hunters had killed five caribou. Dan refuted that estimate. “We only got four caribou,” he said. So the biologist counted again, and he insisted that there had to have been five. The numbers were batted back and forth until the hunters themselves began pretending to argue over who had shot what. “He had a hell of a time with us,” Dan said.

Eventually, the biologist demanded to see Dan’s license, and, even though Dan knew precisely where it was, he feigned confusion, burrowing through bags of dirty, bloody clothing and stacking filthy pants and shirts atop the biologist’s clipboard as he looked. Finally, the frustrated official stalked inside to fetch a protection officer to help him. Even in the pouring rain, Dan and Dad recognized the officer as the temporary warden from the Tustumena benchlands.

He took one look at Dan and said, “Not you again.” And, to show that he had learned his lesson, he sent them immediately on their way.