Bear Wars

Alarge man with a GI haircut, Dave Henley so completely filled the cabin of his single-engine Piper Cub that he left little room for anything else. The mere sight of the bullnecked Henley crammed into the small wing-over plane’s cockpit would have aroused curiosity. But the real attention-getter rode atop the Piper’s wing, onto which Henley had mounted a war surplus .30-caliber M-1 Garand semiautomatic rifle, positioned so that shots from the weapon passed four inches above the tips of the plane’s propeller blades. A button on the pilot’s control stick served as the trigger. When he had emptied the M-1’s eight-round magazine, Henley could swap in a fresh clip through a sliding hatch in the cockpit ceiling. Aiming with a Nydar sight set to zero in at 150 yards, Henley could pump slugs into a 3’ circle from a distance of a football field and a half.

In late 1963, Henley was a veteran of a year of airborne marksmanship over Kodiak Island, off the Alaska coast. He was after one particular species—the Kodiak Brown Bear—and meant to kill every one of the big carnivores he could find. That year's tally had been 13, some shot with the Garand, others by fellow Kodiak cattleman Norm Sutliff, firing from the shoulder at the Piper’s rear. The hunters’ associates in the Kodiak Stock Growers Association, of which Henley was president, paid for the sorties.

During World War II Henley had hunted big game that could shoot back, flying 23 missions over Europe in Mustang P-51 fighters until he was downed in 1944 and taken prisoner by the Germans for the duration. He had come home to Utah and in 1946 moved to Kodiak with his wife and children, becoming a bush pilot and buying the Flying H, a small ranch along Kalsin Bay. He ran cattle until 1963, when he sold the Flying H to a couple from the Aleutian Islands. Henley had found cattle ranching on Kodiak to