“Wow!” we both said, then Jeff stashed the fish under his arm, a touchdown pass of generosity we’d managed to catch in spite of ourselves. And after thanking Wally heartily, we dashed back to the boat.
INTO THE GREAT BEAR RAINFOREST
“Just look for something yellow,” Marven said, when we finally took off in search of the spirit bear. The three of us were speeding past Princess Royal Island in his small aluminum fishing skiff. “The bears sometimes come down to feed here.”
I looked and looked. Each white-yellow patch along the rocky shore revealed itself to be something else: a cedar stump, a weathered log, a boulder. But Jeff and I were finally here—here in the epicenter of the Great Bear Rainforest!—home of the legendary Kermode, one of the rarest animals in the world. I smiled. This was what I’d been hoping for. If we didn’t understand just how wild and remote and storm battered this stretch of the Pacific Northwest Coast was when we’d first left on our empty-nest adventure, we did now, flying across the water with Marven Robinson in his small boat, cold fresh air streaming off the Pacific.
I want to see a spirit bear, I thought, my mind fixed on our surroundings, but if I don’t, that’s all right too. I glanced over at Jeff and grinned. He looked psyched—his face intent, his eyes lit up.
Maybe it was enough—just being out here together and feeling so alive—searching for a fabled white bear on this far edge of the continent with its rocky shore stretching on and on in a misty gray-green band of forest and island. Maybe it was enough, and would always be enough: just trying to pay attention. That was the thing. Just opening our eyes to this day: its clouds, its mist, its sky.
* * *
Marven dropped us off on the shore of Princess Royal with a handheld radio and a canister of bear spray.
“Ever use one of these?” he asked, handing over the spray as we scrambled out of the boat onto the mudflats lining one of the island’s coves.
“Sorry?”
He raked the bristly hair atop his head. Marven was in his early forties, with a handsome, fleshy face, a direct gaze, and thatch of black hair. “Only use it if the bear is five feet or less from you, and if his ears are back,” he said, then shrugged in a fatalistic way. “If his ears are forward, he’s just checking you out.”
We stood and watched Marven speed off to anchor farther out.
“I won’t be long!” he hollered, his lichen-colored rain jacket vanishing in the mist.
Jeff and I turned and stared at each other, incredulous. “Yikes, he has to kayak all the way back!” I said after a slightly startled pause. The head of the inlet where we stood, boots on barnacles, looked like a salmon slaughterhouse: fish carcasses strewn everywhere—some ripped and shredded by hungry bears; others intact, only the brains bit out of their heads. (“Wolves,” Marven explained later, describing how sea wolves feast on that delicacy.)
“This place is insane!” Jeff said appreciatively as squadrons of white gulls shot past, wave after wave of them, followed by lines of frantic, electrified terns. We took in the raucous scene: salmon leaping, bald eagles soaring, herons squawking. There were more birds than either of us had ever seen in a single place, trees and canyon walls reverberating with crazed caws and cries. A great blue heron swept the length of the inlet like a jumbo jet, its huge wings flapping slowly, neck outstretched, thin yellow legs trailing behind. Before long we were staggering with laughter, blundering around on the mud bank.
“You look mighty tasty there, sir,” I quipped, my voice ringing out across the deserted estuary. “Do you even know how to use that stuff?” I added, miming a guy with a can of bear spray.
Jeff shrugged. “Hell no! Are you kidding me? I’ll die of a heart attack before I pull the trigger.”
This struck us both as hilarious.
“If a grizzly comes, we’re dead,” I pointed out.
“Shit, if a black bear comes, we’re dead!”
“The boys would think we’re so lame.”
“Who cares? They think we’re lame already—we’re their parents!” Jeff said.
“Well, you’ve got that right.”
* * *
“Are you guys ready?” Marven asked, dragging his kayak onshore and plunging into the forest. “The bears have been gorging themselves here for the past few weeks,” he said, over his shoulder. Hearts beating madly, we trailed him toward the head of a copper-colored creek.
And then, none of us said anything. We crept through thickets of thick spongy moss, over fungus-wrapped trunks edged with devil’s club, and past thousand-year-old cedars, trying not to snap any twigs. Fortunately, the forest floor was clotted with leaves that dampened our step. There was so much moss cloaking the branches it looked like there’d been a green blizzard. The leaves sucked at our boots. We found a log buried in a bed of wet ferns and crouched down on the bank, waiting for bears.
This was the same spot where after weeks of reconnaissance and hours of waiting, the National Geographic team finally found and photographed Ursus americanus kermodei, the legendary spirit bear. Thrilled, Jeff and I settled down to wait.
“Spirit bears are shy,” Marven said, leaning in close. He smelled like pine needles and mint. “They could be right here and we wouldn’t even know.”
We made ourselves still. Marven poured coffee from a brown thermos. Slanted late-afternoon light haunted the centuries-old forest. Everything felt verdant and ancient. We waited and waited. Wind breathed through the branches. I tried to watch for movement on the river’s opposite bank but instead felt the coffee warm my stomach. Rust- and cinnamon-brown leaves shuttled downriver. Everything seemed to be flowing into the river, except the fish, which were going back up it. In the river salmon were packed so close fin to gill it seemed like you could almost walk across their backs. You could hear them muscling their way upstream, fighting to fling their silver lengths up the gravel streambed—splashing and scraping and then, when they got their energy back, leaping again. The whole thing was so fierce and sad, noble and inevitable. It was Nature and Death, that final dance.
None of us said a word for a long time. The creek hummed with the sound of fish jumping and river stones jostling and spruce needles dripping. A gang of ravens went by croaking and cawing, and flying so low we could hear the shhh-shhh-shhh sound of their wings. My joints started to ache and my foot was falling asleep, and it hadn’t even been an hour. I crouched and waited some more. Jeff hates to wait, but when I snuck a peek at him he was sitting as still as a Gore-Tex statue—until he turned his head and raised his eyebrows in a mock grimace.
“Listen,” Marven whispered, his head slightly cocked as he caught my gaze intently. “We never spoke of mooksgm’ol—the white bear. My grandmother, Helen, tells the story of Raven. How Raven made one in every ten black bears white to remind people of a time when the world was all snow and ice, so people would be thankful for the lush and bountiful land of today. Many of our people believe mooskgm’ol holds supernatural powers—that the white bear is a special creature left to remind us of that earlier time when everything was covered by glaciers…”
“You mean like an ice age?” I said.
“Yup…” Marven nodded gravely, his voice trailing off.
That’s when we saw the bear ambling up the river. The bear was midsize, lovely, but it wasn’t a white bear—it was another hungry black bear, Ursus americanus. It pawed at a pile of dead salmon it had stashed on the riverbank. Our quest to see the spirit bear, I realized, was just beginning.
MOOKSGM’OL
“This is the big moment, Brown,” my husband said.
Neither of us could believe this was it: I noted our coordinates, N 53° 32′ 27″, W 129° 00′ 7″. We’d been up since six, sliding Heron out of Hartley Bay on a rising tide before seven. And now, motoring along on a stunning still morning, we’d reached the apex of our trip, having traveled close to seven hundred nearly windless nautical miles. White waterfalls tumbled down Gribbell Island’s rocky flanks in the dawn, and a small brown spa
rrow settled on our halyard, hitching a ride.
That morning the sky was steel blue, the water dark and deep. Islands of mist crowned Gribbell’s granite peaks and cloaked its escarpments, scraped smooth by glaciers eons before, and although it was the last day of August, snow patches clung to the highest bowls. I stood in the cockpit, steering Heron up a channel called Verney Passage, the northernmost point of our whole trip.
“I’m glad it’s not pouring rain today,” I said, tilting my face toward the burgeoning light.
“I’m glad it’s not pouring rain any day,” Jeff said. He’d pulled his red foulies over his faded fir-green fleece in the predawn dark, and with his old knit wool ski cap topping his tanned face and silver stubble, he looked like the star of a Norwegian sitcom.
* * *
We were ninety miles south of the Alaska border, close enough to dip a toe across that finish line. But turning south here—at the northernmost range of the spirit bear—made sense. We’d made plans to meet Marven again: this time on Gribbell Island. We’d anchor, hike in to a different spot, and wait for the white bear.
The sea glided along beneath us, spattered with the countless chevrons of tiny waves. The mountains ranged around us illuminated, silent and bright. Everything had a shining edge to it. As the granite cliffs and forested humps of uninhabited Gribbell Island passed to starboard in the new-day sun, I suddenly understood why the Gitga’at people would have been so secretive and protective of their white bears for so many years. Decades. Centuries. How it could be that Marven, now forty-three and a revered bear guide, hadn’t even seen a white bear until nineteen years ago.
When your world is water, rock, sky…When everything else external is stripped away…What is left? Cloud. Light. Wind.
Spirit.
I’d come to appreciate out here that the essential truths, the only truths that really matter in the end, are the ones we don’t always understand. What’s mysterious, nebulous, holy. The things that don’t have an easy answer. Patch of dirty white fur in a dark forest. Flash of cream-colored paw fishing for salmon. The space between dreams and wakefulness, the gray between black and white, a line so tenuous it sometimes doesn’t exist…like a river between a thousand trees.
Jeff and I had pushed ourselves nearly to the breaking point as a couple, and now our world was stripped to that: water, rock, sky. Piloting Heron over the lead-blue sea, sharp wind on my face, bright sun warming my bones, I was almost sorry to reach the turning point of our trip. We were in the middle of nowhere, but we hadn’t gotten lonely. Instead, being out here in these immense open spaces, we didn’t have a sense of ourselves the way most couples do. Sometimes it was almost as if we were the wind, or the weather itself.
I longed to see a Kermode bear because it seemed magical and beautiful. I longed to see a spirit bear because in its rarity it felt, somehow, like the living embodiment of the loneliness that separates every living creature from every other living creature.
But it was going to take time. Yesterday, after hours of waiting in the woods with Marven—after a day packed with gliding humpbacks, dive-bombing birds, and salmon-crazed black bears—finding mooksgm’ol, the sacred white bear, seemed about as likely as finding Sasquatch.
* * *
Marven’s boat was bobbing in a small forested cove. We saw it flashing in the pale watery light as we neared Gribbell Island. We waved, dropped anchor, pulled on our rain pants, and dinghied ashore.
“Hey, you two—ready?” Marven asked as we lashed the dinghy to a log.
“Yep, can’t believe it’s already midmorning,” I replied.
Marven gathered his things: a radio, a coffee-browned thermos, extra socks in a knapsack. He pulled on his muck boots, fit his backpack over his shoulders. “Let’s go find the white bear, then.”
We hurried behind him, hiking through thickets, brambles, ferns, fungus-wrapped trunks, and into a sodden ravine where everything smelled of rain. There was the snap of twigs, the crunch of leaves. Even the air emanated wet spruce and dirt and centuries of moss. The leaves pulled at our boots and flung drops of mud onto our rain pants. In the space between our footfalls I could hear the river whispering from the depths of the woods.
The trail got narrower and steeper, winding upward along the side of a deep gulch, when, suddenly, Marven stopped. I looked past his shoulder toward the river, expecting to see some sort of clearing where the bears would magically appear. But there was nothing, just endless forest and the ravine dropping down to the river. We began scrambling down a steep muddy path, backpacks jouncing, boots sliding. And then, when I looked toward the river again, I saw a wooden platform he’d built in the trees on the edge of the river, with a rickety ladder that led up to it and disappeared in the leaves.
Jeff had stopped and was standing behind me, and Marven was saying softly, “Sorry—I’ve got to hike on and check if there’s been any activity upriver”—he nodded in that direction—“so climb up. I’ll be back.”
What? I mouthed to Jeff as Marven hiked off.
But Marven was already scrambling up the ravine and hiking to the next platform, leaving us alone on the edge of the river.
I turned toward the ladder. Wooden rungs. Wet, leading up. I tugged on Jeff’s sleeve.
“Come on,” I whispered. “Let’s go!” I felt a deep hollow in my core: giddiness.
“This is it!” Jeff said, pushing me toward the first ladder. “Let’s do this thing!”
I started up the first slippery rungs. Jeff followed, and together we climbed. The higher we went the wetter it got. We reached Marven’s small wooden platform, sat down, and dangled our legs over the side. It started to rain. Suddenly, everything was quiet, and all we could hear was the rain in the trees and the river murmuring. I looked at my backpack on the platform next to me.
It was soaked.
* * *
Seeing bears is all about waiting, we were learning. And quiet. There’s no talking, no chitchat, no joking around. We hunkered down in the dank tree fort while the rain, which falls ten months of the year here, slipped and slid down the branches and leaves, plumping the mosses and weighing down the ferns.
We poured coffee from the thermos. Adjusted our Gore-Tex. Sat and waited some more. There was the sound of the river threading over the stones and the wind breathing through the moss-coated branches. The splash of the salmon muscling their way upstream to spawn and die. The feel of the wind out of the northwest brushing my left cheekbone.
Sight quickly loses its supremacy, I realized, in dense forest. Hearing, however, is honed. The silence is rich. Even the slightest rustle grew audible, and soon it was as if we could hear for miles and miles, every sound clear and distinct, every murmur announcing itself in a way we’d never heard before. There were the tiny splashes and sucks of the river, the low bass booming of rocks being turned by the river. We heard ravens, trees, leaves falling, stones, fish…We both heard a thousand sounds we’d never heard together and would never have noticed. But sitting side by side squeezed onto a five-foot-wide platform secured to a tree—surrounded by the smell of wet stones, and mud, and mulching rotting leaves—we heard everything, the river muttering in a language that lifted through stones, air, and sky on its way to the sea.
I shivered and stood for a while, then sat again and watched the river rushing along, sleek and silver. It felt delicious, the irresistible tug of moving water and my blood coursing with it. I reached for Jeff’s hand.
* * *
It wasn’t long, maybe thirty minutes, before a black bear—trailed by two cubs—emerged from the weeds on the opposite bank about forty feet away. She sniffed the air, her coat glistening, and stepped into the creek. Lunged at a salmon. Missed. Grappled with a second fish. Missed again. I felt for her, the pressure to feed her hungry cubs, not half grown into their paws. While the young mother flailed at the fish, her cubs trundled over logs, scaled a tree, got stuck on a limb, unstuck, and forded the river themselves, trailing behind their mom boulder to boulder.<
br />
Mom-m-m, you could practically hear them whining while they snorfled up grubs and acorns. We’re hungry!
Jeff and I rummaged around in our backpacks on the tree platform and, being lucky humans, dug out peanut butter sandwiches. By early afternoon the sun burst through the rain in fast-moving arcs. A Steller’s jay flashed through the canopy of spruce and cedar, and a pine marten bustled overhead. On the ground directly beneath us, bear tracks etched the sand. The prints were clear and deep, each individual claw slicing sharply into the grit.
Hours passed. Marven returned. A second black bear trailed by two cubs appeared on the opposite bank, honed in on a salmon, and pounced, holding the fish clenched between her teeth while the first bear, probably a young mother according to Marven, looked on ravenously. When the hungry mom ventured a few feet closer, the older bear bared her teeth. Snarled. Lunged.
“It’s like watching two women going after a parking spot at Whole Foods!” I whispered.
“You kidding? Those suburban moms are way more aggressive.”
“What if we don’t see it?” I said after a while, meaning the white bear.
“Today is your day,” Jeff replied with certainty.
* * *
Another hour or so crept past. Marven grabbed my elbow. All of a sudden there it was. A giant. He was thickset, probably weighing at least four hundred pounds, alabaster pale. At the sight of him I was paralyzed with happiness; it was the spirit bear, not thirty feet from us, down to the cinnamon-fur stripe tracing its spine; its thick, cream-colored coat seeming to glow.
Uncharted Page 25