Category: Fieldcraft

I spent my last three years in the Army stationed at Fort Wainwright, Alaska. For a substantial portion of that time, I was the operations officer for a CH-47 Chinook helicopter unit.

I picked flight crews and assigned mission responsibilities. That also meant I got to do some really cool flying all across the last frontier. If you were paying taxes back in the 1990s, sincerely and from my heart, thank you for that.

Megafauna

When you encounter moose while flying out over the vast Alaskan muskeg, they typically either ignore you or run. These things are as big as Clydesdales and quite deadly up close, but they’re herbivorous ungulates. They don’t hunt people for food. Alaskan brown bears, by contrast, will gladly make a meal of you.

One fine day, I was piloting a Chinook helicopter north to south just east of the Salcha River on the far side of Eielson Air Force Base. We were flying nap-of-the-earth right above the trees at maybe 160 knots (about 185 mph). In this configuration, I serendipitously happened upon an absolutely enormous cinnamon grizzly bear.

I wasn’t trying to molest the wildlife. He just happened to be right in my flight path. I popped the cyclic back and cleared him by scant feet.

A CH-47 tops out at 50,000 pounds, and it makes the devil’s own racket. Most animals are rightly terrified of it. In this case, my flight engineer reported that, as we passed over this big gentleman’s head, he stood up on his hind legs and swatted at us. Human beings are not the apex predators in this space.

The Monster

In 1923, along the Unuk River near Cripple Creek north of Ketchikan, Alaska, a young fur trapper named Jess Sethington struck out to make his fortune. He packed a .38-caliber revolver and a .33-caliber rifle for personal protection and subsistence. He was never heard from again.

For years afterwards, trappers reported a particularly large bear in the area that regularly stalked them and molested their camps. The bear was unique for the strange groaning sound it seemed to make. Locals named the beast “Old Groaner.”

Old Groaner operated mostly at night and showed little fear of man. Several prospectors and trappers had fired at him, but none had connected in the dark. With all this in mind, in November 1935, two grizzled prospectors struck out into Old Groaner’s territory to stake a claim, accompanied by their dog.

The Attack

One of the miners ventured out alone with the dog and his rifle to post signage establishing his claim. Setting his rifle aside to erect the sign, he was surprised when his dog rushed past him barking furiously. Grabbing his weapon, he saw a massive grizzly swat the dog away effortlessly and charge. With no time to shoulder the weapon, he fired from the hip instinctively. The muzzle was mere inches from the animal at the time.

The impact threw the man backwards, but his shot had connected. As the bear struggled to rise, the prospector gauged his angles and shot the enormous beast two more times. Old Groaner was done.

The Aftermath

The massive bear’s paws were more than ten inches across. However, that wasn’t what made the animal memorable. Once they got the big bruin dressed out, they found its jaw and skull to be grossly deformed. This accounted for the weird groaning sounds.

The two miners dug three .38-caliber pistol bullets out of the animal’s jaw along with a pair of .33-caliber rifle rounds. It seems that Jess Sethington had connected five times before the monster bear killed him. That was the sole physical evidence of Sethington’s gory demise that was ever discovered.

Ruminations

Alaska plays home to some 140,000 bears of all sorts. That’s an estimated 100,000 black bears, 30,000 brown/grizzly bears, and a further 4,700 polar bears. However, Alaska is a really big place. If you split Alaska in half, Texas would be the third-largest state.

Despite the space over which these animals are distributed, they are hardly rare. Attacks on humans are quite unusual, but I met two men during my time there who had been mauled while out hunting. I never left the confines of the Army post without a serious gun. More often than not, that was a registered short-barreled 12-bore stoked with sabot slugs. I still felt underequipped at times.

An adult male brown bear can reach 10 feet long and weigh 900 pounds in the summer. What purportedly determines whether you survive a violent encounter with one of these creatures is the relative size of your head to his jaws. If he can get his teeth around your skull, he will pop it like a grape. If not, you only get scalped.

There is an amazing series of books that were required reading for those of us planning to spend any time in the bush, titled simply, “Alaskan Bear Tales.” There are three volumes, and you can find them on Amazon. Be forewarned, these stories can be pretty gruesome. However, they serve as a reminder that there are some places where man is not always at the top of the food chain.

A libertarian mindset and compassion aren’t, at least by definition, mutually exclusive. However, there are occasions in life where one has to plant a stake in the ground and choose one or the other.

Most every range outing, I spot a new(er) shooting cautiously aiming a pistol downrange, arms quivering, anticipation coming off their body in near-visible waves. As I peruse the stance and grip, I see it. The dreaded “thumbs crossed” over the butt end of a semi-auto pistol.

The mini-libertarian elf break dancing on my left shoulder says, “So what? If they choose to come to the range to torch off a lethal weapon without even considering the instruction manual, then they have to live with the consequences. It’s not our role in life to save people from themselves.”

But there’s another gnome on my right shoulder. He’s playing Kenny G. remakes on a harp, and his counsel is different. “You have an opportunity to save someone from slicing their thumb clean off and bloodying up the range. Don’t you love your fellow humans? What, do you watch reruns of Halloween XVIII in your spare time? What’s wrong with you? Go help them!”

He’s got a point, because empathy comes into play in this particular situation.

I’m not talking about sympathy, where you kinda think you can relate to someone else’s situation. I’m talking about real empathy. The kind of empathy Brian Williams and Dan Rather share. You physically feel their pain because you’ve been there before, made that mistake and suffered through the consequences.

When I see the crossed thumbs, I’m pretty sure I have so much empathy the web of my support hand starts to bleed, and I start looking for a police escort to the nearest CVS Pharmacy. That’s because, once upon a time, long, long ago, when I was even more of a dope than I might be now, I just about removed a body part as a result of hubris.

My first “real” handgun was a Series 1 Colt Woodsman .22 LR semi-auto pistol. My grandfather bought it back in 1936 and fired maybe 50 rounds through it. While he didn’t save the box, he did maintain it meticulously. Apparently, his maintenance regimen included sharpening the slide rails, but we’ll come back to that. Anyway, it was (and is — sorry, I’m never parting with it) a gorgeous pistol, and I was anxious to shoot it.

At that point in my life, I’d shot a few BB guns and .22 rifles here and there. If memory serves, I even fired one shot from a .50-caliber flintlock rifle at summer camp, although I now realize the coach charged it with barely enough powder to dribble the lead ball out the fiery end. I had precisely zero experience with handguns.

But no worries, you can tell by looking handguns are easy to operate. Hold the handle thing, yank on the trigger, and it’s sure to perforate the target of your choice, right? Why would anyone bother with directions or asking for help? After all, I was a man and born in America. I’m pretty sure the genes for firearm “expert-cy” are passed down in a meandering genetic path straight from Daniel Boone.

So off to the range I went with a fresh box of .22 ammo. After carefully emptying my newly acquired Wal-Mart shooting bag, opening my fresh bulk pack of ammo, and unwrapping my Woodsman from its well-oiled T-shirt, I was ready to shoot. Admittedly, I was a bit nervous, not having any real idea of what I was doing. It was also my first time in a shooting range, so I didn’t know the etiquette.

I loaded the magazine, inserted it into the pistol, aimed, pulled — not pressed — the trigger and … click. After a hot second or two, I realized there was nothing wrong with the old, but pristine, pistol. In my haste, as you’ve already guessed, I hadn’t racked the slide. Easy fix there. Upon correcting this problem, I proceeded to empty the magazine in short order, putting at least some of the shots on paper somewhere. Success! I figured I was now an experienced, bordering on expert, handgunner! So I removed the empty magazine and reached for the big box of .22 ammo to reload.

It was then I noticed some idiot had bled all over my shooting table, splattering pints of Type O- and various bits of tissue all over my gear. Huh? Where’d that come from? After a minute or two, I figured out the source of the bloodletting was my left hand, in the web between my thumb and index finger. I was flummoxed. How could that possibly have happened? Ricochet? Did the sketchy looking guy four lanes to the left shoot me? Falling pieces from the Skylab Space Station?

While I was pondering the source of my impending death by exsanguination, I made like the old spaghetti westerns and wrapped up my hand with a dirty rag. The only one I had available was the oily T-shirt shroud serving as the faithful preservation agent for my Colt Woodsman. Oil makes a great antiseptic, right? If it works for Clint Eastwood, it’d certainly work for me.

It took me quite a while to figure out what happened. As all of you likely know by now, a Colt Woodsman slide reciprocates rearward at Warp Factor 7 after each shot. And like an asteroid, it doesn’t really care what’s in the way, even if it is a frequently used body part. Oh, and I also learned Colt designed those early Woodsmans with a special bonus feature. The bottom of the slide rail doubles as a great straight razor in a pinch, pre-oiled to go easy on facial skin. I also learned precisely how much blood you can lose and still remain conscious and capable of driving. The range was a bit out in the boonies, and it took me a good 20 minutes to pack up, sneak out the front door, and find a pharmacy well-stocked with bandages and tape. That sucker didn’t stop bleeding for a good hour. What? Ask the range for a first aid kit? That’s ridiculous because it would have been … embarrassing.

I learned a valuable lesson about how semi-auto pistols work, and even more about how not to hold them. I might have also learned a thing or two about the importance of recognizing one’s own ignorance and limitations. I guess, in hindsight, it might have been a good idea to make that first range trip with an experienced friend. And, also in hindsight, I’ll bet a nickel the proprietor of that indoor range would have been happy to help me out had I swallowed the hairball of pride and asked.

By the way, if anyone needs any tips on how to best leave a shooting range discreetly, while bleeding all over the place, drop me an email. I’m kind of an expert in that.