I flaked yesterday for a few reasons, not the least of which being that I ripped a blister off the side of my thumb yesterday, and it’s sore and hurts to type! Here is a quick bear tale, in which no one was bare, but my nerves were stripped right down to their unmentionables!
I moved to Larsen Bay, Ak. in April of 1989 with two small daughters in tow and hopes and dreams of both adventures and a brighter future for the three of us. I had been convinced that the village was a great place to raise kids by friends I had met and worked with installing windows in Seattle. Roy was born and raised in the village, and his wife Shari was the sister of a friend of mine, so with friends in the village, approval by the tribal council and both a job for me and a HUD house available and waiting for us we boarded the ferry m/v Tustemena and headed north.
Fast forward to June and we were living in a house less than a city block off the ocean in the Alaskan Bush. I had acquired a dog, half beagle and half border collie and named him Luther. He looked exactly like a beagle except in black and white, and he was a happy young guy. My neighbor two houses up had six (mostly) young adult children. One of the underage kids was a teenage boy who had a very large black Labrador, and his father, who lived down the road in a shack on the beach, also had a huge black Labrador. The father and son went forth and back in front of my house during the day and night, and the dogs roamed freely. As dogs are wont to do, the two labs felt the need to chase my Luther onto the front porch regularly and beat on him, which angered me. My pleadings with father and son to take responsibility for their dogs were met with derision, and so one night when a friend was over visiting me I heard a ruckus outside and ran to the window to see what was up – at this point I ought to set the scene a bit. It was about 10:00 pm, but in June in Alaska that is just a dusky kind of light time. – And there were those two damn labs in the road and my dog was freaking out on the front porch, barking his head off. So I ran out the front door hollering at the labs to get, reaching down and grabbing some rocks and throwing them as I ran straight towards them. The dogs began to move towards me and as the distance between us was closing, with me hucking rocks and yelling at them, I suddenly realized that these were not the labs I thought they were. No, these were two, two year old Kodiak bear cubs on their own for the first time and as curious as puppies, oh holy shit! I did an about face and beat my dog back to the door, although he was right on my heels, and the bears were on his! In the yard! Bears! At the foot of the steps! My friend (a native girl, in fact the sister/daughter of the boy and man who owned the labs) thought I was kidding and laughed, but she finally realized I was telling her the truth and she also became excited and we pulled out some tiny firecrackers to try and scare the cubs away, but the pops only seemed to pique their curiosity. Finally someone with a truck came driving by, noticed our predicament and drove up, revved the engine and laid on the horn until the cubs wandered off. It took a while before my nerves calmed down, and with a sore and bandaged thumb I offer you a quick peek at my first face to face with Kodiak bears.
There will be more tales until you tell me enough already! 
Even funnier is the fact that Mr. Resign applied for the position of the person who was promoted. Ummm… yeah, that was gonna happen.
