Al Hansen
Well-known member
“Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up—the tide is moving out and if we don’t leave now, we’ll never get there.” That was my boss and it seemed to be his favorite thing to say. We always had to have our gear packed and ready to go. It wasn’t until the Grumman Widgeon was in the air and Jim, our pilot, had leveled it off that for a split second in time I realized I was in another world. Just 10 days before I had wished my class of 5th grade students to have a great summer. Now here I was staring out the window of this remarkable WWII amphibious airplane that was taking my partner and me to some remote part of Kodiak Island.
Our pilot had throttled back to a good cruising speed as we headed to the far end of the island. Jim yelled back to us and pointed down when we were flying over Deadman’s Bay. He knew that I wanted to shoot a Kodiak brownie in the worst way. I already knew a little bit about that area because I had the good fortune to meet one of the greatest brown bear guides that ever lived. His name was Morris Talifson. He and his partner, by the name of Bill Pinnell, were legendary brown bear guides on Kodiak Island. My by chance meeting with Morris came one day in the late 1960s when I was working my 2nd job, which was for Denver Jonas Bros. taxidermy shop in Anchorage. My boss, Darrell Farmen, used to work for them as an assistant guide back in the early 50s. Of course, Darrell started out as a packer when he landed that job fresh out of high school from somewhere back in Oregon. Anyway, Morris just wandered into the shop to talk with Darrell for a while and find out how things were going in the “big city”.
My job at the shop was to help prepare big game animals prior to sending them off in a jet for Denver, Colorado so the taxidermists could do what they did best. While working in that small shop for the next several years I worked on about every big game animal that was deemed a trophy by someone. I'm glad that I found out how to flesh and prepare Dall sheep, mountain goats, black bear, glacial bears (the blue phase), grizzly bear, brown bear, polar bear, caribou, elk, Sitka blacktail deer, moose, bison, wolves, fox, coyotes, and wolverines just to name some. When we received a brown bear or grizzly hide from a hunter who had just flown in from the bush some place it was my job to flesh the hide, take all the cartilage out of the pads on the feet, turn the ears, split the lips, boil the skull and on and on goes the list. After it was done, I had to salt the hide down and get most of the moisture out of it prior to being shipped via jet to Denver. Little did I know right then and there as I stared down at this magnificent scenery, that in a few short years, I would be back to this spot—Alpine Cove, to be exact, which is a small inlet just off of Deadman’s Bay, hunting Kodiak Brown Bear.
I was that tall, gangly, 25 year old kid from western Minnesota, who on a whim one day in the Spring of 1966, decided it would be quite the adventure to live in Alaska and hunt ducks and geese. It didn’t take all that much time to find out if Anchorage needed some elementary teachers. My Western Union message told me that I had been hired. Now here I was on another little detour in my life, off the main highway but having fun looking out the side window of the plane as Jim prepared to land in the Pacific Ocean, then taxi up on a sandy beach as far away from the city of Kodiak as you could get. I did notice that there weren’t many trees around as we descended. Little did I know that the small creek we would set up camp at would have 13 brown bears feeding on salmon.
Al
