What is a good man?
That question always makes me think of a story I wrote as a newspaper reporter in Alaska in December 1990. My wife and I had just decided to start a family.
Here’s the first paragraph: “Carl Stalker died battling a seven-foot polar bear with a pocket knife Saturday, but he didn’t lose the fight. His wife, eight months pregnant, is still alive.”
The story was simple, as I put it together on the phone that cold Sunday night. As a junior reporter, I was working alone on the worst shift of the week.
In the Iñupiaq village of Point Lay, on Alaska’s Arctic coast, Carl and his wife had just left a family member’s house when they met a hostile bear. The sun had set two weeks earlier and wouldn’t rise for another five weeks.
Carl acted immediately. He sent his wife to safety while he drew the bear’s attention. He had an eight-inch pocket knife. The bear weighed almost 700 pounds.
She made it through a doorway with her baby inside her and their other baby waiting for her. He didn’t follow.
Villagers and a school teacher gathered their courage and went out in the darkness looking for the bear. They found the tracks. The tracks led to a bloody mess on a frozen lagoon near the village. The bear was hunkered down. The teacher made a clean shot.
Carl’s body looked like a skeleton. The bear had been starving. Biologists later found 40 pounds of human remains in its stomach.
Such attacks are very rare, but not unheard of. Another death happened just a few years ago in one of those coastal villages. Again, an emaciated bear.
I learned all I could that night over the low-quality phone lines we had in rural Alaska in those days. Carl’s brother Jacob told me most of the story.
The part that impressed me the most was what Jacob said, still in shock and grieving, when I suggested his brother had been a hero. He said no.
“He had to,” Jacob said. “It was survival. He wasn’t going to let that bear kill his wife, with the baby inside her.”
The oldest of my four children was born nine months later, when I was exactly Carl’s age. Since then, I’ve understood what Jacob said. Carl had no choice.
When it counted, he was a good man.
I’ve never stopped writing about the moral choices that confront ordinary people every day. Few of us are ever faced by a demand for courage like Carl Stalker’s, and we can only hope we would respond as he did. But it isn’t uncommon to be called on to recognize needs bigger than ourselves.
Today, especially, I think it’s important, as writers and as human beings, that we depict and honor the good that people do. We need to remember clearly what goodness is.
As Jacob said, that’s survival.
If you enjoy my newsletter, please share it.