The Bear

George knelt over the droppings and prodded them with a stick. Unlike some other scat he had seen on the trail, these were fresh and not yet dried out. Mostly red in colour, they were fibrous and lacked a strong odour. The bear that had produced them must not have eaten meat recently. George knew that such a meat-starved bear might well try to snatch up a lone hiker if it had the chance. He massaged the cool aluminium of his bear spray canister and rose to his feet.

George surveyed the area. He was several hours from the trailhead. The track had taken him at first through dense pine forest and then a series of meadows. Before him now was one of that area’s many small lakes.

An ancient glacier had gouged the lake out of the earth and polished smooth the limestone hills around it. Stout pines and alpine heath ringed the clear water. George did not continue until he was sure there were no hulking creatures along the lake’s shore.

There had been a sign at the trailhead concerning bears. It displayed the silhouettes of both the black and grizzly bear, the former relatively slight and the latter bulking and ominous. At the top of the sign were large red letters – DANGER. George had tried to send his mother a picture of the sign, but he had already lost signal.

The trip to Wyoming had not been George’s idea. His mother had asked him to go. She set him a simple task: recreate a photo she had taken of his father twenty years earlier. The photo showed his father grinning before a lake. She had written the name of the lake on the back of the original photo – Island Lake. “It’ll be good for you,” George’s mother had told him. “Go there, take a picture of yourself in the same spot, come back. Easy. And don’t worry about the bears. Your father was never afraid.”

George followed the edge of the lake and watched the muddy trail for any bear sign. There were many boot prints, the fresh pressed on top of the old. At the far side of the lake George reached a particularly muddy stretch where a stream trickled down from an adjacent hillock. In the sodden earth was a fresh print left by a creature with long raking claws.

The mud was loose enough that he could not judge whether the print had four or five digits. A bear has five. He reached out his hand to measure the size of the mark and found that it encompassed the whole of his palm. It pointed in the same direction he was heading.

He followed the trail into a sheltered gully, zigzagging back and forth. He watched the woods alongside him as he went. Black bears are most dangerous when they stalk a person. They only do so when they intend to kill and eat them. For that reason, you must resist when a black bear attacks, the risk of injury making the meal too costly for the beast.

Here and there among the trees George caught sight of a fresh stump with bright golden wood exposed, or a rock with a patch of unusually bright lichen. In response to each of these unexpected glimpses, he whipped his head about and squinted through the trees to examine the sight more closely.

He filled his water bottles at a river crossing just down from a large waterfall. The sound of surging water overwhelmed all the noise of the woods and George could no longer hear any singing birds, tapping woodpeckers, or buzzing insects.

By the waterfall he would not hear the disgruntled grumbling of a disturbed bear just out of sight, a warning which he would certainly not want to leave unheeded. In a rush, he skipped across the stones that poked out above the water, very nearly slipping on the last of them. Although his strength was already waning, he darted up the trail and out of the gully.

Once away from the waterfall, George stopped to catch his breath. He listened to the sounds around him. The trees and grasses stirred. Countless birds sang. Mosquitoes buzzed in his ear, and his hand slapped against his skin as he swatted them.

His mother said that such a trip would help him move on and finally relax. But all he could think at that moment was how great a pleasure it would be to turn around right there, go straight to his car, drive directly to the airport, and take the very next flight back to Boston. He planned to camp by Island Lake just off the trail, but he was sure he would not sleep at all. He did not even know how to make a fire.

Before the trip, he had watched many videos online about bears. A large share of them had concerned the proper use of bear spray. It was essentially pepper spray in a very large and highly pressurised canister. You must aim the bear spray below the bear’s nose and sweep side to side, letting loose with one second bursts. Doing so creates a cloud of irritant that partially blinds a bear and takes away its sense of smell, most often causing the beast to turn tail and flee. George recited these facts in his mind over and over again. He edged around every corner in the path quite ready to unleash his capsaicin on the fiend that could well have been only just ahead.

George’s father had once told him a story about an animal he had encountered at night in Utah. It had come into his camp with heavy footfalls. He could not see the origin of the sound through the tent and so he assumed it was a bear. He sat alert with his knife in one hand and his bear spray in the other.

The creature stood close to the tent, but it did not sniff or scratch at it. It remained perfectly still and quiet before walking away with the same heavy footfalls, crushing the undergrowth as it went.

The rest of the night his heart did not stop racing. Even the smallest of sounds snapped him awake. What dreams he had were full only of the most ravenous, murderous, hateful bears. In the morning he rose at dawn to find no bear sign. There was instead a small group of elk just down by the river. He listened to their bugling.

Coming around a particularly dense stand of trees, George spotted three men ahead of him on the path. They were no more than twenty yards off. They wore a common uniform, olive green and khaki. However, they were not alone. Behind them was a hulking, stumbling beast clothed in a coat of dark fur. It stood several feet tall and walked with slow loping strides. Stalking the men for hours, it was now ready to pounce, ready to tear them apart and devour every scrap of flesh upon them and every morsel of viscera within them.

George immediately raised his can of bear spray and called out, “Hey! Hey! There’s a bear right behind you!”

The three figures halted and turned. They adjusted their hats to block the sun from their eyes and stood watching and pointing with inexplicable nonchalance. Meanwhile, the creature following them had also turned around. It came bounding towards George. It moved much more quickly than he had anticipated, closing the gap between them in seconds.

But George did not let loose his bear spray. Rather, he returned it to its holster. He saw now that the creature was no bear. It was a dog, a large Newfoundland with a wagging tail and lapping tongue. It wriggled before George, and he reached down to pet it. It jumped excitedly up and down, bouncing on unusually large paws.

George went to the three rangers with the dog by his side. The nearest of them smiled and said, “Did you say there was a bear?”

“Sorry. I came around the trees back there and when I saw the dog, I thought for sure it was a black bear.”

They laughed together and assured him his mother was right to say the chance of running into a bear was really very low. They were Forest Service rangers who had been in the area for more than a week already. Their task was to maintain the trails.

“So what’s the dog for?” George asked.

“Lucky just keeps us company. He’s my dog. He loves it out here.”

George told them that he was planning to reach Island Lake that evening to take a photo of himself for his mother. The rangers said they were going to camp there as well and invited him to join them. He keenly agreed. They reached the lake just as the sun was setting. George showed them the photo of his father and asked them to take him to the area where his mother had likely taken it. They knew just the spot and led him up a low hill that overlooked the valley.

The lake was the largest they had seen all day, a long body of bright blue water that reached for several kilometres north to south. It was bounded to the East by Fremont Peak, a broad mountain that stood proud over the basin. Like tour guides, the rangers pointed to the mountain’s sharp slopes and described to George the processes by which glaciers had carved away the rock.

George passed his phone to one of the rangers and posed before the view. The three rangers huddled around the screen. They discussed among themselves how best to match the original photo of George’s father. They directed George back and forth to make sure he was in just the right spot. Lucky was at their heels as if trying to make a contribution.

That night the rangers showed George how to make a fire. They sat around it and toasted dried sausages over the flames. They traded stories and pointed out the various constellations above them. On the horizon, George thought he saw another campfire between the trees on a distant ridge. After some talking it over, the rangers said it was only Mars. George insisted it was too fire-like to be a planet. But the earth turned, the light rose into the sky, and the rangers were proved right. Lucky lay on her stomach by the fire, gazing dozily at her friends.

Although George was sweat stained and mosquito bitten, when he crawled into his sleeping bag, he fell asleep more easily than any night since the accident.