“G
o with the girls, Bud,” my brother Bruce suggested, “and take along the forty-four.” We were at a campground beside Resurrection Creek on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula. The time was nine or ten o’clock, on an evening in the middle of June. There was still light enough to let us find flecks of gold at the bottom of a damp, dark dish; but our daughters, ages eleven and thirteen, had tired of panning and were asking permission to go into the woods for a walk. Signs posted at the park entrance warned that we were sharing the place with bears.
I fetched the pistol and a box of ammunition from the motorhome we’d be sleeping in that night, and brought them to my brother, who, puffing a pipe and wearing a bright aloha shirt, sandals, and rolled-up jeans, was shin-deep in the icy stream. He lives in Alaska year-round; I do not. Me, I had just arrived from my home in Hawaii, for a three-week vacation, so I was wearing a flannel overshirt and would soon be putting on a down jacket as well. “Give me the quick course,” I said. “Tell me what to do if we’re greeted by a grizzly.”
Bruce stepped out of the swift flowing water and set his pan and shovel on the stone-strewn shore. “In the movie Dirty Harry,” Bruce said, “Clint Eastwood pointed a pistol like this one at an uncooperative bad guy and said, ‘...This is a Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off....’ The bad guy’s attitude appreciably improved. That was some years ago. Today there are other, somewhat more potent pistols on the market, but this should do all right if you have to use it on a bear.”
Bruce tipped the revolver to the left, released the cylinder by pressing on a thumb slide, and dropped six cartridges in place. With a flick of his wrist, he snapped the cylinder back again, then gave it a spin with his fingertips.
He showed me how to aim. “Use two hands. This will kick. It’s a double-action revolver,” he said, “which means you can bring the hammer back with your thumb before each shot if you want, but you don’t have to. You can just keep pulling the trigger, blam, blam, blam! A bear comes at you, first you try to back away, but if he keeps coming, if he gets about as close as that tree, shoot ’im in the face!”
“Anything else?”
“That’s about all you need to know.”
“Should we make noise? Wave our arms?”
Bruce smiled. “You can if you want, but if he keeps coming, Bud, blast him in the face. Have a nice hike.”
A
nd so we did, the girls and I, while Bruce kept going for the gold. We faced some ferocious mosquitoes, but we didn’t see a bear. The hunk of iron holstered on my leather belt put me in fear of having my pants fall down to my knees, but otherwise it gave me a sense of warmth and well-being. I wouldn’t mind having a pistol of my own.
A
week went by before I got my first chance to fire the forty-four, and that was at a gravel pit, with no predators present. I sent six quick slugs through a rusted five-gallon gasoline can at fifty feet or not much more. I couldn’t recall whether that distance was “from here to that tree.”
As Bruce had promised, the pistol packed a wallop, both in forward and reverse. The recoil bruised me, between my thumb and forefinger. My right hand was tender for several days.
T
hose six shots satisfied all my curiosity about big-bore handgun handling. I still think I might like to purchase a pistol like my brother’s. I have no plans to return to bear country anytime soon, but there are other hazards in this world. I could memorize Harry Callahan’s little speech, update it a little for technical accuracy, and present it when an appropriate situation arose. I am thinking, too, I could save a fortune in ammunition costs, by taking care never to pull the trigger. ♦
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