At the Edge of the World

 

At the Edge of the World

By Wil Bosbyshell

Standing at the edge of the world, it's giving me the chills.

-      Green Day

 

It looked like a cartoon; one I watched as a kid on Saturday mornings. A big, round, pitch black hole in the side of a cliff with very large tracks going in and out: this was a bear cave.

Not just any bear cave; it was a grizzly bear cave in the middle of nowhere, Alaska. Except, this wasn't a cartoon, it was a real bear cave, only 25 yards away from me. I was standing at the edge of the world in front of a bear cave, and it was giving me chills, both literal and metaphorical.

“Sergeant Major Roberts is there a reason we stopped here,” I casually inquired. We were looking out of the top two hatches of our Army Arctic Snowcat. “Besides observing a bear cave, well… no,” he said laughing. I tried not to sound scared, which I was. Actually I was really scared. This was a grizzly bear cave, and it was a warm day for February in Delta Junction, Alaska at 10°F above zero. “It’s so warm, they might wake up from hibernating,” I ventured as an important theory. “Look at those prints, they are enormous,” the Sergeant Major added gleefully. He was a British Army combat veteran of the Falkland Island war. He had no fear, or at least far less fear than I had.

“We've seen it …. let's move along,” I said trying to sound tough.

It was going to be quite a day. I was the 2^nd Lieutenant test officer for the Army's new 105 mm light Howitzer at Fort Greely, Alaska (The Army’s Northern Warfare Test Center). It was February 1985 and we were testing the Howitzer’s performance on skis. Using a SUS-V Arctic Snowcat, a vehicle with two articulated sections equipped with rubber tracks so it could ‘float’ on top of the snow, which towed the Howitzer on skis. We were documenting the skis durability and what depth of snow, if any, they would get stuck in.

As part of the test, we were on a two-day trek through the northern warfare school property on Ft. Greely Alaska, which was thousands of acres of untouched wilderness. Earlier that morning we had driven to the top of a very large snowbank. We stopped, literally floating on the snow due to the snow cat’s rubber treads. I was navigator and opened my side door to check the snow depth. Looking down, it didn’t look that deep to me. Standard procedure dictated I put on my bear claw, or small, snowshoes to jump down into snow of unknown depth. Disregarding this standard procedure, I jumped into the snow certain that the ground was not too far below. I knew something was wrong when my head passed the tractor treads on the way down.

Fortunately, I grabbed the bottom snow cat track as I fell past it on the way to certain death by snow suffocation. I was hanging, feet dangling and arms outstretched, in the snow below the snow cat. Staff Sergeant Smith pulled me back in as I yelled, “no one else jump out.” “Lieutenant, that wasn’t the easy way to exit the vehicle. It wasn’t even the hard way. That was the ‘cowboy’ way!” Sergeant Major Roberts said, “Are you Americans normally this daft, or did you take pills today?” He had a point.

We never found the ground. We tried to measure the snow depth with a weighted string and never found the bottom. Ten in the morning and already a brush with death, a common occurrence in Alaska. It seems there was no amount of snow that would cause these skis to get stuck. I thought, test mission accomplished!

We traveled onto the unmanned remote weather station, Observation Post 35, that was the midpoint of our trek. On top of a lookout tower, the air was so clear with zero humidity that we could see Mt. Denali 200 miles away. I thought that we had successfully determined the Howitzer equipped with skis was able to trail the snow cat through any depth of snow. However, the Sergeant Major felt differently; he felt we needed to try the terrain in snowy ravines. Presently, we were traveling in a deep snowy canyon when we came across the bear cave.

The ravine walls towered 50 feet over the top of the snow cat. We could only drive forward, there was no room to turn around. There was no place to go should a pissed off grizzly bear charge out of the cave, which I was certain was imminent.

“Hibernating bears definitely get up and walk around on occasion…. you know, to maybe shit in the woods,” I tried a joke. “Is the cave scaring you Lieutenant?” the Sergeant Major asked. “Hell yes, it is,” I replied. The prints in and out of the cave were massive and many. We had only three live rounds in a shot gun to scare off wildlife. The Sergeant Major loved to pick on Lieutenants and especially this Lieutenant. I was used to it, everyone in the Army hated lieutenants. I could tell that SGT Vereen and the two 18-year-old privates with us were not too excited by the bear cave either. No one volunteered to get out or even suggested it. No dares were issued. A shot gun was not going to stop any bear that made the tracks we were looking at.

Fortunately for us, the bears were sleeping soundly. We slowly crept away; it was a little too warm that day to tarry in front of a grizzly bear cave.

We stopped for the night about five miles away and out of the ravine. We pitched the 5-man tent, small and hexagonal, for our camp. We laid out the canvas floor and lit the Yukon stove. No cots. A cot was too cold in Alaska; cold air circulating under you was a bad thing. It had been a warm day at 1:00 o'clock when the sun rose above the horizon for two hours. By 5:00 o'clock it was pitch black as usual, -10°F and dropping. Minus 10°F in Alaska was not too dangerous if you were trained for it and had the proper clothing. Not deadly like -55°F.

I lived off hot tea while I was in the Army in Alaska. Tea bags were weightless and many could be compressed into a very small space. Perfect for heavy backpacks. To warm myself, in the now minus 10-degree temperature, I drank too much hot tea for dinner. We heated and ate our MREs, chatted, told jokes, and the new Grenada combat vets told stories.

Sometime in the night, I had to pee because of all the tea I drank. I tried to hold it in but decided it was too long until morning. Going out into the Alaska night, I walked away from the tent into the dense, dark forest around our tent. The moon was bright on the snow and this close to the Arctic Circle the trees were very short. I started doing my business, sleepy, drowsy not paying attention to my surroundings. I was looking up at the amazingly clear, starry sky when I heard the slightest of slight noises in front of me. It's quiet in the middle of the Arctic tundra at night…. very quiet. I looked down and realized I had a new friend. In front of me, less than 20 feet away, was a very large, black wolf.

Alaska wolves can be five to seven feet nose to tail. I am unsure exactly how big this wolf was. I once encountered a mastiff hound in the Italian Alps; this wolf was larger. He was looking right at me. My eyes adjusted to the dark, I didn't need a flashlight to see the wolf’s face and eyes. I didn’t move a muscle. Two more wolves flanked the first wolf. They were big also. I didn't turn my head to see the other wolves in the pack, which I was certain were right and left out of my peripheral vision. They looked at me; I looked at them. No malice, no menance, just curiosity. 

I tried to remember the briefing from my dangerous wildlife training: was I to look the wolf in the eye or down and away? Which was it, shit? Brain freeze, literally. It didn't matter. I blinked and the wolves were gone. No sound. No sound at all. Just vanished into the night. I stood still, for a time, until I started getting cold. The next morning the tent and the snow cat were circled by wolf tracks … a lot of wolf tracks. Fortunately, wolves appeared to be well fed in these parts!

At the edge of the world wolves and bears were the masters, not man. I had spent two days travelling through the middle of nowhere, to the edge of the world, and lived.