Why you should buy my book

I was in the Coast Guard then, and when a tenuous radio link finally reached the CG after about 5 hours, who should show up but one of my best friends - a guy named John Workman. I was pretty close to to being bled out by then, but he poured enough Ringers into me to keep me alive until we reached a hospital.

It was just lucky chance that my friends back at camp could get a radio link. We had a marine band radio which is only line of sight. No roads of course, no cell phones even today. We were deep in a fiord ringed by high mountains. After a number of hours of Maydays between the emergency channel and the commercial fishing channel, they connected with a charter boat that had entered the mouth of the bay. That boat went back out to sea and connected with a fishing further east that connected with the Coast Guard. An hour later John was standing over me with his medical gear. An IV, a shot of morphine, some pressure bandages, and I was outta there.

 

KB, does the book have pictures and maps or is it all words?

Speaking of summer drinks Herr Ottomiester, you should try a mint julep, a traditional Southern drink. Since it is summer most of the year down here it is always in fashion. Try a Hurricane as well. It's a traditional French Quarter drink that rivals the mint julep in popularity even though the Sazerac is the official state drink of Louisiana.

 

It's odd, and I comment on that in the book, that the further east you go in the US the less aggressive black bears get. My theory is that those blackies with aggressive genes were simply killed off over the last 300 years. It may also be that in that richer environment, they are simply more tuned to plant food instead of being the part-time predator they are in the rockies and up though western Canada and Alaska.

A man was killed here in Alaska in early June by a black bear, attacked near his cabin and eaten. He faced the bear to allow his wife to escape indoors. She called the troopers, but it took an hour or more for them to arrive and kill the bear.

Even so, the brown/grizzly bear is far more aggressive in any environment. They are full time predators instead of opportunistic predators like the black bear.

Thanks for buying the book! I hope you found it educational, or at least entertaining.

 

The Kindle has lots of color photos. The paper version just has some black and white landscape images from a very talented photographer friend. She's quite an artist and in the early part of the book I wax rhapsodic about how beautiful the island is, so her photo section fit right in. She also did the very fine cover.

The print cost in a paperback goes up exponentially with color pix, so we settled for showing the bloody photos (some seen in this thread) on the rear cover where it doesn't affect the purchase price.

 

Yes, absinthe is pretty ranque (disgustingly nasty and obnoxious). There's a little old bar on Bourbon Street called the Absinthe House, and of course absinthe is featured there. There on the bar where they pour the absinthe and mix drinks you can see where it eats through the marble topped bar. Imagine what it does to the gut and liver if applied liberally.

 

City folk may not understand. A pit bull attack is terrifying, I'm sure. Help is one scream away. In the bush, there is no help. And you could be totally consumed, never to be found. sniff.
Recall a National Geographic bit on tigers in India. The locals would wear masks on back their head-facing behind them. They'd paint eyes on the mask- in order that it would appear to any tiger that it was being observed- and not attack the person from behind.
Some say the white spots on the back side of the ears of tigers are supposed to replicate eyes looking behind the tiger. Thereby discouraging rear attacks.
Prisoners may want to consider this tactic.

You write real good KB. I'd consider once back on feet, waiting for ipad.

 

Had always associated a sinister connotation to absinthe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absinthe
Thinking Aleister Crowley- wonder why that is... Maybe it was a drunk sex magic thing for them...Don't do the hard liquor. Maybe a shot of tequila now and then.

 

Lol... I thought he was crazy, that's why the ear. Cool. A good anti absinthe commercial- "You don't want to end up like Van Gogh." err. Maybe not. There'd prolly be a run for absinthe in all the college towns.
Forgot to mention that I'm not adverse to Jagermeister. Only because of its' absinthe properties.

 

The Juneau Empire is going to run something on my book next week - Thursday. This is kind of the official state newspaper, so a lot of people will see it. Also, the Anchorage Daily News (which has an even larger circulation) has promised to do something, but I don't have a firm date yet. Between the two of them, everyone in the state will at least have knowledge of the book - if they read the paper. The other large daily is out of Fairbanks and I don't have a promise from them, but they did ask me to send a copy, so maybe some love from them.

When you write a book, publicity is everything. This book is only of regional interest, so to get some free promotion from the largest papers in the state is a big deal to me. It could mean some real money from the book.

 

Oh, and I should have mentioned that not only will the wisdom in the book protect you from bears, but the book itself is specifically designed for bear defense. When our design team got together to talk about materials, we gave it a lot of thought. Some of use wanted to produce the book out of tin, another group was leaning towards ceramics, but for cost reasons we were coming around to cement. Then a young intern suggested paper. We laughed of course! A book made out of something as insubstantial as paper? He persisted, pointing out that paper was flammable and that wild animals fear fire, so If one were to ignite the book, would it not hold a bear at bay? This struck us as brilliant - of course we were pretty drunk by then... Whiskey is a terrible thing.

Yet, we went with that idea and even improved on it. Pepper spray is another valid defense against bears and there is a little known variant of the habanero pepper native to one tiny valley in the mountains of Ecuador - the Black Habanero, or Habanero Negro as they call it in those parts. It's so hot that burros have been known to burst into flame carrying sacks of it down to market towns. We extracted an ink from that black pepper and used it to print the book - on paper, which still cracks me up!

So now, if you are attacked by a bear you can just ignite the book and throw it towards the bear and it will look just like a Vietnam napalm strike, only with less palm trees and more flaming bears with watery eyes (you know, from the pepper). We haven't actually tried it, but in theory it should work just fine. If it doesn't, then you can just contact my attorney and get your money back. I don't have an attorney, but if people start asking for their money back, I'm going to get one.

All for $15!

 

Does it look like this?

 

Meanwhile, hiker kills charging brown bear with an AK74! Who says nobody needs an assault rifle?

http://www.adn.com/2013/07/29/2997953/section-of-turnagain-arm-trail.html

 

Great to read anything and everythig you have to say KB...Was wondering about a defense against bears...running? Climbing trees? They say to stand your ground and face the bear down...takes guts and relies on what "should" happen...i wouldnt face a charging bear...sorry.
Makes me think of our crocs here...we get about one-two deaths a year (we only have 200k people) A good defense is to place both arms out at right angles to your body,and lift them up and down slowly...gradually pick up the pace, keep doing this until hopefully you'll fly away...
Seriously though a tree is good for crocs, they cant climb for crap.
Also as a side note...remember we are great apes (like neanderthal and Gorillas) pound for pound we are among the strongest animals on earth and one of only a few species that kill for sport...I think the bear can "see" this in us as we see the killer in it...predators have an ability to "know" another predator...even if its never seen it before. - Still plenty of research on these subjects...

 

I will wait for the Kodiak-movie.

 

Yeah, once they charge the whole point of standing your ground becomes moot. You stand your ground to prevent them from deciding to charge, which usually works, but not always - as in this case. Once they start running at you, you'd better have a gun or at least some pepper spray. If you run from a bear who is not attacking, he will then almost certainly attack because running away sets off the same prey/predator response you see in dogs. You don't run from a barking dog, because he'll chase you. The consequences are much worse with a bear.

Many of the serious maulings and deaths we've seen in the last few years are people who have recently moved here and think it's a good idea to jog in the wilderness. People with this mentality are also prone to plugging music into their ears so they are totally cut off from any warning grunts a bear may give them. A young school teacher from Pennsylvania was killed not long ago by a pack of wolves (almost unheard of), but she was out jogging in the wilderness plugged into some rock and roll. Very ugly.