Under the Sign of the Bear
Prologue for an upcoming book about bears and people for the University Press of Kansas

        The black bear made no sound as it walked up behind me, and only later did I remember that old name for bears, Lightfoot. Perhaps I wasn’t listening carefully enough. My mind had fixed on the ruddy morning light washing over the cliffs beyond the Chitistone River. In my longing for solitude I had forgotten that wilderness is always inhabited.
         Once I believed the urge for time alone somewhere in the wilds was an antidote to the condition of being human, which is to say thinking too much, talking too much, doing too much, forgetting too much. It seemed easy to scribble myself a prescription (go forth in solitude), fill it (charter a Bush plane to drop you off in the Wrangell Mountains so you can spend a week in one of those remote public cabins), and return not healed but treated (take once a year; repeat as necessary). “What will you do out there for all that time?” people asked. Nothing. Everything.
         On this second morning of taking the cure, I bent over a notebook searching for words to accompany rough sketches of the abraded peaks rising above the young forest of birch trees. Leaves quickened in the breeze, the faintest yellow semaphoring the end of summer. In the distance, the Chitistone River was a hank of rope endlessly fraying across a broad plain cobbled with rocks and patched with mats of mountain avens. Behind me, thin smoke twined from the woodstove’s chimney. The first night, I’d huddled beneath a tarp hoisted out on the river flats, hoping the gray drizzle would disappear, hoping the couple occupying the cabin would disappear soon, too. Both wishes had come to pass.
         No sound, no smell, not even sight alerted me to the shadowy presence beside me.  Some vibration at the edge of awareness made me look up. Three feet away, just beyond reach of an outstretched arm, stood a black bear. It was Lightfoot. It was Black Place, Dark Thing, Medve. It was Bluetail, it was Broad-foot, it was the Dog of God.
         Curious, how Grandfather (or was it Grandmother?) stood so quietly, so solidly, as if he (or she) had emerged from the very earth. The bear did not look at me. It faced the same direction as I did, and it is only my fancy now that it was wondering what was so darned interesting about those mountains.
         For that one moment, I wasn’t afraid. I wasn’t even human. For that one moment, anything was possible.

         I leaped to my feet and shouted, “Hey, you!” It was, after all, only a moment. The bear seemed equally startled to realize I was there. It scrambled a few yards away and then paused when I blew on the whistle.
        “Go away!” I shouted. It had glossy black fur and a smooth tan snout, and it weighed maybe a couple of hundred pounds, if that. Hollers and whistles didn’t worry this bear. I blasted away with a small air horn as I grabbed my stuff and marched toward the cabin door, trying to force the animal away by the sheer force of my presence. The bear loped into the dark spruce forest descending from the nearby mountain.
        Inside the cabin, I felt safe, then shaky. A few years before, my husband and I had faced an antagonistic brown bear in Glacier Bay with nothing more lethal than our voices. For this trip, I’d brought an air horn, a whistle, and a can of pepper spray. The .357 revolver was my solution for any aggressive man who happened along, but it’s also true that when I imagined a bear breaking into the cabin, I didn’t imagine stopping it by blowing a whistle.
 Now, every story I’d ever heard or read about disturbing incidents between black bears and people appeared unbidden in a memory that usually couldn’t remember its own phone number.  Sitting there, alone in a dim cabin, I didn’t want to overreact, nor did I want to be careless.
        “It’s hard to tell yourself that you are exaggerating your fears when you look up to see your fear standing beside you, all in glossy black,” I wrote in my notebook.

         The next morning, I opened the door and caught the bear in mid-step a few yards away. Yelling, blasting the whistle, banging on a pot—nothing fazed the bear. It merely watched as if I were an animated monkey plonking its tinny cymbals together. The bear left only after I heaved a rock that miraculously banged against a slab of rusted metal near its head. I’d actually been aiming at the bear.
         Ninety minutes later, as I sat inside worrying about how unbearish this bear seemed, how calculated and sneaky it seemed, I heard scratching and rubbing against the back wall, and then, the electrifying sound of snuffling around the door. I pressed the air horn against the tiny hole guiding the latchstring, and the blast sent the bear leaping off the porch and galloping into the woods, paws thudding against the earth. Now the canister was empty. I stepped onto the porch and fired the handgun into the air for emphasis. A fire-alarm clanged in my head for awhile, and I recalled a friend deafened in one ear after target-shooting without earplugs. At least, I thought, that bear knows I mean business.
        That evening, it wandered past the window as nonchalant as a cow.
        Thinking of the days that remained before I left, I inventoried my defensive arsenal: one fire extinguisher, three cans of pepper spray (two already in the cabin), a revolver and box of ammunition, my opposable thumb. I cooked indoors and dumped leftovers and dishwater into the outhouse pit, hoping to disguise the scent of food. Whenever I ventured into the outhouse, I clutched the gun in one hand and the pepper spray in the other. This made using toilet paper awkward, but it was too appalling to contemplate the possibility of being mauled with my pants around my ankles. “We told her not to go by herself,” my friends would say.
        In the mornings I left for the open expanse of the river bars, singing my way out of the trees. The days eroded as I wandered across the rock plains, reading and sketching and thinking and not-thinking. Fleets of orange-and-olive grasshoppers skipped ahead of my feet. One paraded around with me on my chest as if pinned like a broach. A magpie dropped by to see if I was dead yet. All around lay rocks busted open by the passage of ice and water into metaphors: a puzzle, a blossoming rose, a sliced sausage. Fox tracks led me along the river, but the fading prints of a smallish sow and cub evaporated into air. Playing the role of deus ex machina, I helped an ant drag a grasshopper leg across a field of boulders. I channeled Dirty Harry and gunned down innocent rocks perched on logs. Often I paused to scan the terrain suspiciously. “Now I know what an impala feels like,” I wrote in my notebook.
        Knowing that it wouldn’t be a bear that trapped me in the cabin, but my own fear, I hiked one afternoon from the confluence of Glacier Creek and the Chultina toward the looming peaks of the Twoharpies. It meant thrashing through alders and hollering songs that even the bears must have wearied of hearing.
        By now, I’d pieced together a familiar course of events between human and bear. Visitors with a keen sense of irony had scribbled notes of earlier black bear sightings on a brochure titled “Safety in Bear Country.” Mama & cub came by for a sniff. Teen-age black bear checked us out while we ate dinner on the porch. Bear peeked in the window. Black bear was seen—he loves beer. He took off with some. Prospectors had posted a warning in the airstrip shed describing a bold, young black bear that had picked over their stored food the previous summer: “He is not frightened away, only deterred by yelling & rocks.”
        This was the kind of bear I feared most: a young animal that did not fear people, that connected humans with free chow and cheap beer, that maybe was one of those rare black bears that biologists call “predatory.”
         One night I dreamed the bear stood beside my bunk.
         The evening before the plane would arrive, I sat by the window playing Solitaire with an incomplete pack of Uno cards.  The bear appeared on the path to the river that I used every day. The deliberate way it placed its paws against the earth explained how it had walked behind me so silently. It wasn’t sneaky or surreptitious. That’s just the way a bear moves in the world. I stared at its face, trying to see some intent in its eyes, but the bear did not look up. It walked around the cabin and climbed onto the porch to sniff at the door.
        “Hey,” I protested half-heartedly. No sense bothering with the gun or the whistle. In the morning, I’d be gone.

         Sometimes I wonder what would have happened had surprise and fear not driven me to my feet, had I waited to see what that black bear wanted, if anything, as it stood beside me. It’s a moment I return to again and again, a moment elastic with every possibility, each one shattered as soon as I stood and yelled. When I think of that bear—that curious pest, that creature of unruly appetites, that beautiful Lightfoot—the moment reaches into the long, long history between people and bears, recalling ancient reversals in which we are each sometimes predator and sometimes prey, sometimes sacrifice and sometimes revenant, sometimes noble and sometimes benighted, and again I see how that bear taught me less about what it means to be a bear than about all the fearful, hopeful ways in which I am so undeniably, helplessly, human.