July 28. Left camp sooner than I thought. Not one, but two bears came to the campsite around 11p.m. I’m writing this around 3 a.m., resting on a small island because the fog came in, and combined with the gloaming, I can’t see the river ahead. It’s been an odd night, but I get ahead of myself.
I was lucky to wake up with an apprehension to see the first bear near the canoe. All the packs were stored underneath. I rattled my rattle and startled him. He was young. He looked at me standing there naked with bare feet, forty feet away. I fired a banger. He backed off, but continued to stare. I had to put on clothes, and my sneakers, quickly, and then fired another banger. He lumbered over the rise. I chased after. Halfway up the hill, I stopped. Why would I follow a bear? To be sure he was gone? But it’s scruffy willows, some as tall as I am. Don’t do that. I started walking downhill only to look out at the river, and on the long sand spit reaching from the river’s other shore, saw the silhouette of a bear on the spit. The same bear? No. Not possible. Another bear? I watched her come to the end of the spit and then swim toward my side.
I say ‘her’ because she was larger, full grown, and the first bear was young. A mother and a not-left-home-yet cub? I decided I should walk down and meet her. Didn’t want her sneaking up. I walked toward where I guessed she came ashore. When she cleared the rocks, I watched her amble toward me. We regarded one another. She was big, a good layer of fall fat already on her. She paid no attention to the rattle. The first banger had no effect. She kept walking toward me. I pointed the second banger directly at her, thinking, as a last resort, I had bear spray on my belt, but she side-stepped when the banger exploded next to her, and headed away, up the rise and out of sight. If the banger explodes behind a bear it’s as likely to push her forward as away.
I like bears. Nothing wrong with bears. The Barren Ground Grizzly is formidable. An adult male can weigh more than six hundred pounds, and reach a height of seven feet on its hind legs. They are fast, especially sprinting. You can’t outrun them. I think about them all the time, even at home in Utah where there are none. They get under your skin. Most of the time what you think is one, isn’t. In the distance, the rock with a shadow can resemble a bear, especially in evening light. The test is whether it moves. Rocks don’t. The bear looks for movement, too. If it moves, he can eat it. Most people consider the grizzly king in the arctic. After all, he’s the top of the food chain, but I have an Inuit friend, Jack, who disagrees. Years before, Jack told me his reason in a small cabin on winter ice on Contwoyto Lake, just before breakup, in the new territory of Nunavut. He was making a bag from the leg of a swan he’d shot. He had cut the leg off and was carefully cracking the leg bone, removing the bits of bone from the wrinkly, leathery skin. He says the musk ox is king. He says not much bothers either one, but the musk ox is not aggressive like the bear. He says he’d rather have a benevolent lord, than a killer. After the bits of bone were out of the leg, he blew into the wrinkled skin and it expanded. He said, “ Here, store anything you like in that.”
Because it was mid-night, I ignored a fundamental rule: after bears come, pack up and leave. It wasn’t dark. Instead, I lay in the tent wondering if the bears would come back. Would they double team me? Should I stay or should I go? Fully dressed, I dozed off, but snapped awake when something big walked by the tent hitting a guy-line. When I looked, the older bear sat with her left hip against the side of the overturned canoe, her left arm draped across the bottom, head resting on her arm, as if she were demonstrating a yoga side bend. She swiped her arm across the bottom. I don’t know her next move because I fired a banger, interrupting her. Sitting there, she looked at me, annoyed. I fired another banger, yelled, and walked toward her, bear spray in hand, in case she charged, but she moved off slowly out of sight among the boulders.
I did not need a third invitation. I packed hurriedly, just bundled the tent into the canoe. The water was dead calm. Not a breath of wind. Chilly, and as dark as night would become, a gloaming time, a quiet time. A time between the sun dipping below the horizon and its return. Not having slept, and having dealt with the bears, I felt dopey. One stroke after the next. One after the next. One hour, two. Put distance between myself and the bears. The paddle pry against the gunwale, the water drip off the blade hitting the river as I reached forward, a small eddy-whirl-sound as I pulled through my ‘J’ stroke, along with my breath, the only sounds.
An odd optical: the thin strip of land at the horizon had the color sucked out; appeared as the thinnest line of a dark separation between the earth and sky. Each bank was a silhouette, stripped of color. The water tingled with sponged on color from the sky. No, ‘tingled’ implies motion and there was none. But it was alive, full of shifting, subtle pastels: blue, a light red, a contradictory white cloud edge lit by below the horizon sun. The water surface mirrored the sky. Turned upside down, I would not have known, until I fell out of the canoe.
Paddling across the smooth, slippery water, no longer attached to the earth, but paddling through the sky, I became a slow moving, fledgling angel, doing his best to leave this reality for another. It wasn’t hard. The west with its sunset glow was to my left (or was it now the sunrise?). High in the darker indigo sky to my right was one sharp, white diamond, Venus, riding the wave of dark blue across heaven.
Rising from the water’s surface mist became a scrim, masking sky, water, and land, making what my eyes saw more than other-worldly. Off the land, fog rolled and settled across the water. The scrim was gone, the curtain closed. There was nothing ahead of me, no sky, no water, no more angel. Just thick fog wiping the landscape’s slate clean. In grade school, I always asked if I could erase the blackboard. I don’t know why I enjoyed wiping the board clean. I wonder if they even have blackboards anymore?
On this small island, I wait for the fog to lift. The fog’s wetness glistens on the rocks, a sugary glaze, a big box of multi-colored rock candy. In the soft, wet sand run deep tracks of a single caribou, a meandering line beside the water, announcing ‘I was here,’ until they end at the edge of the river. I have to wait for the sun to rise, the fog to burn off. I don’t know where I am on the map, and seeing the caribou tracks, I felt a twinge of how alone I am, but it doesn’t matter. For a few hours, I was an angel.
