A few years back, on the Kenai, there was a report of a guy taking his two dogs for a walk on one of the rural trails, a pair of Labs as I remember. He let them off the leashes and they ran ahead of him a bit. Soon he heard the dogs barking frantically, and soon they came back up the trail to where he was, with a very upset bear in hot pursuit. The dogs ran behind him for protection, as I read. He survived the mauling from the bear, but spent some time in the hospital recovering. The dogs were just fine, and probably proud of what they had found and brought back to their person. LOL
When I was living in the bush, 350 miles west of Fairbanks, I liked to travel, especially in the spring time, with my dog team, most of the time by myself. At times I would wander several hundred miles away from where we were living. At night time, I would set up my big freight sled, i normally used for travel and carry all my junk, food for the dogs, etc, as a bed for the night. All around the sled, I would tie out my dogs, far enough apart that they couldn't get to each other. These dogs were barely domesticated, tougher than nails but mean, in general. The average dog could pull double his/her weight for an 80 or 100 mile day. A few times I had the dogs sound the alarm at night, and the next day found bear tracks close to our camp. Most of the time I ran 12 or 13 dogs, depending on whether I was running a single or double lead dog set up. Doubt there is a bear alive willing to take on a pack of Alaska Native breed sled dogs, LOL.
While bear stories are the most fun to relate, the most dangerous animal most humans will run into in the north country is the moose. When running my dogs, I tried to keep a sharp eye out for moose as they were out year around, whereas mr. bear will hibernate during the winter time. Several times I ran across the remains of dead bears, a couple of them were full grown brown bears that had been killed by moose. The tracks usually indicated it was a cow moose protecting her calf. When a person realizes how big a moose is, almost 7 ft tall and weigh in the thousands of pounds, those long legs become deadly weapons when used to strike another animal, such as a bear.
The good news about moose, is if one does kill you, he/she won't eat you as they are vegetarians, herbivores, they will just crush your body, break most of your bones, and make your insides become part of your outsides, but they won't eat you like a bear may do. LOL
