Katie knew some of this in the moment. I think often that Katie must have been so frustrated, believing she was doing the right thing, waiting for the bear to do its part and leave. She did what an American in the wilderness is supposed to do when she sees a black bear. Katie must have felt hopeful about her survival. Perhaps she was not conscious in the moment during the attack when I arrived. Or perhaps she knew I was there and felt disappointed that I did not do more.
This is the man I married, she thought, the one who will not save me, who loves me but cannot save me.
I threw bigger rocks. The bear moved away, flashed its muzzle, and moved back.
A boy and his father, hiking in the opposite direction, had stopped us just past the kilometer marker on the ridge to say they had seen a bear crossing from the other direction. It could not be far from the spot where we stood. We should be careful on the ridge at night, use our flashlights, and make as much noise as possible to announce our presence and deter an attack.
Did each of us, in that moment, imagine a bear attack and our survival? Or did we shrug off his warning as improbable, full of the wrong kind of caution? How could we suddenly be in a moment of worst-case survival? We were standing together, taking pictures next to a kilometer marker. We were making our way to the only hostel on the ridge with rooms to rent for the night. We could not stay in one place. The sky was plum colored. It was cold. The wind was picking up, and already we were wearing sweaters and stocking caps to stay warm. Already, we were survivors, in our minds, the likely elect, moving in wide circles far from danger; the very improbability of an attack, its cartoonish quality in our imaginations, made the odds of our survival more certain.
As I turned the crank to keep my flashlight on the bear, I saw a group start down the trail from the hostel. I thought, Someone is coming to save Katie, and then, No, someone else is coming to save Katie. I yelled to Katie to wait just a little longer.
I thought, A husband who loves his wife would have charged the bear already.
I walked back to the path to make a signal to the group, to jump and wave my arms, but I was too early. They processed so slowly, moving together, now a rescue party, now a funeral rite, taking care with the steep rocks and riverbank. Hours seemed to pass as their flashlights inched forward.
I could not startle the bear and also wave them down. I had chosen to walk toward them, and now a distinct feeling of inconvenience bothered my sense of helplessness. In both places, the trail and near Katie, something inevitable was made to feel drawn out. Katie would die. I knew this already; I could imagine nothing else. But also I knew we had the right tools—guns, knives, reinforced cookware—to intervene and save her, if only they would hurry up. I both wanted Katie’s suffering to be over and for her voice to carry on a little longer and further, just far enough to persuade the hunters to move more quickly. But if she could not be saved, then I wanted her to die quickly. I could not listen to her screaming, even from a distance.
In the end, with their guns and yelling and clanging pots, they came like a soccer club, a band of revelers, a wedding party, all noise and celebration, unmistakable and intrusive in the cold summer night air. It must have carried for miles across the ridge. I walked back to the trail and toward them, so that they would be sure to see me.
They asked, Where is the bear?
They were hunters arriving, someone explained, from the nearest village. We should move together in a large, loud group toward the bear and Katie’s body. We moved in darkness. We moved hypothetically, uncertain of our arrival. We saw no bear, and then we saw Katie’s body. I made myself walk over and look at Katie’s face. I did not want to look at it. Her face was perfect: intact. Some mud on her right check. Her hair down across the forehead more than usual.
And then I saw it, and I understood. We shined the light onto her face, into her eyes. The Israeli doctor was there with her husband. She performed a few simple tests. Katie’s pupils, she explained, were dilated and black. They did not shine back as they should. The doctor found an irregular pulse, then no feeling. It was Katie’s body. It was cold. We needed to leave the ridge before the bear returned.
In the moment before the attack, Katie walked in one direction, laughing and smiling, making progress toward a light bulb hung from the porch of the smaller hostel to which only Sara and the Romanian would arrive. Now, a hunting patrol carried her body in the other direction, toward the larger hostel where we had eaten dinner. I walked behind them. I could not touch Katie now. I was terrified of her body. I could not look at it. I thought, We are moving your body inside where it will be safe. In the basement of the larger hostel we laid Katie’s body on a tarp on the concrete and waited for the doctors.
Arête: a sharp ridge. From the Latin arista: ear of wheat, fish bone, spine.
I am told that a climber makes a ridge sacred with her death, that the place where Katie died locates a point of reverence for other journeys, but I do not believe it. For a while I imagined there were flowers there and a pile of stones stained at the base with her blood, but I know this is not true. I have not returned to the place to make it sacred. I can’t imagine I ever will. Any marker has long since collapsed. Or it has lifted like a prayer from the place of her death and vanished somewhere along the nearby trail.
3. The Legend of a Life
Maybe the bear had been there for a while, and they did not see it until that moment: the now-lit path, wide across the ridge, coming into focus. Katie’s flashlight reflecting brighter on the far rocks as she turned the crank. She stood like that a moment, testing the charge, looking in every direction for the trail. A mountaintop.
Maybe the bear was migrating with the season, seeking out less encroached-upon spaces, guarding the path for its cubs. Seasonal construction crossing this path put the bear on edge, making it more cautious but also wilder, wary. Hunters crossed here; and tourists with cameras who threw rocks; cars and state vehicles and construction trucks; the long gondola whirring when there was no wind. The buildings all year now shook with noise and lights. At night the windows dimmed and went silent. Here was the safest place and time to cross this ridge and perhaps the next ridge; to make a wide circle of other bears; to be alone; to move down across the forest, toward the streams, to fish and forage.
Katie put on her pack. Her ankle was swelling now; it would soon be stiff. They walked the trail single-file, cautiously, stepping carefully up and down the rocks, making little noise to announce their presence. So perhaps they surprised each other. The bear ambling toward them, doglike, taking its time, careful about the surrounding darkness. The hikers securing their footing and saying nothing in the last light. The bear must have seemed enormous: three and four times the size of bears at a zoo, outsized but also vibrant, so plain in its terror. The claws retracted. The snout closed.
How far away was it? Ten feet? Twenty? No one seemed to know. Katie’s mind flashed options, calculating the intervening time and space. Three or four seconds. Did the bear really see them? Did the bear care that they were there? She thought, We can run, but she knew they could not outpace it. She thought to open the pack and find the pepper spray. Was there enough time? The pepper spray was zipped into a pouch inside the top pocket. If she dropped the pack and dug inside of it, then she might call attention to herself and distract the bear. It might charge. Of course, anything she did could provoke the bear. There was a space between them still; that was important. And maybe the bear had not yet seen them.
Katie was easily the most fit, the one who knew and loved nature. She looked to the two hikers behind her. How quickly did the surprise turn to terror? Was it in an instant? Was the understanding of their danger, and their mortality, obvious? Or, did they laugh at first? Were they shocked and overwhelmed? A fucking bear! Was that shock held in check by reason and optimism? There were three of them and only one bear. Could they, together, scare it off and escape the situation?
Katie looked at Sara, then the Romanian. No one did anything. They stood
there, stock-still, and the bear approached.
How long had it been now? A few seconds? Katie took off her pack and threw it as far as she could in the other direction. Sara did the same thing. If the bear was hungry, it might follow the packs. The outer pouches were filled with candy, water, granola bars, dried fruit. They had only managed to toss the packs three or four feet, but it might give them enough time. They walked as a group, slowly and backward, shading just right, to open a distance between themselves, the bear, and the packs. If the bear followed, Katie told Sara, then it might still become distracted. It might break off its pursuit to find food. It might lose interest.
Did she imagine then they would all survive? Was she hopeful for it? The hill inclined toward the path, then the water. Bears were faster but perhaps not as sure-footed as humans. Could they make it to the rocks at the stream? Should they arm themselves with rocks and sticks? The pepper spray was in the pack, but perhaps with a few rocks and a little luck they could grab it.
Or perhaps this was the foolish option. The bear was large, heavy, resolute. It could charge at any moment. Why was Katie making these decisions? The bear continued forward, slow and deliberate. Katie said they should all play dead, so they rolled onto the ground and covered their heads. At what strange angles to the ground they must have held their bodies. How terrifying, that waiting in the dark for the attack to either begin or not begin, and thinking still, this might pass. They might survive all of this, if they only remained still and waited.
The bear pawed first at Sara and the Romanian, not Katie. It swiped at their heads, tore at their scalps and legs, pushed into their backs. They were injured and afraid but not yet hysterical. They continued to play dead.
They submitted to the bear, but the bear did not choose them.
Who was the first person to think of it? That one or two of them might survive if only one of them didn’t? That they did not have to outrun the bear, or defeat it, or discourage it. Perhaps they thought of it like this: the odds are on someone’s side. Individually, whoever ran first had only to get clear and back to the trail. If the bear did not follow, then it would be the other person who abandoned the victim. They had only to surrender the idea of the group, and wasn’t the bear doing that already, focusing now on Katie, leaving them be? How long should they wait like that? Didn’t each minute they stayed only increase the odds that the bear might turn back to them and take a second look?
Could they turn away from this last part of themselves? They did not have to want to do it. It could appear suddenly in their minds, a surprise, a well-reasoned and complete idea for which they had no agency. Fortune. Distraction. Survival.
Who worked out the math, the timing, the imperfect logistics, until running became the only real option? Who lay there, waiting to try it? How long did they wait? It seemed an eternity, this waiting, but it had only been a few minutes since they stood at the kilometer marker with the rest of the group, taking pictures. Hadn’t the other group abandoned them there? The victims were here, while the survivors had gone ahead to the hostel to sleep for the night. Did anyone notice their absence? Hadn’t they missed their window to catch up?
They must have heard a voice yelling Katie’s name, then their own. Perhaps they recognized it. Should they respond to it? Did their voices risk unsettling the balance of disinterest and safety? Still, they were all alive. The bear seemed now more menacing than curious. It seemed to wait for something.
And then Katie’s voice yelled back, sudden and louder than the wind on the ridge, clear and insistent.
Don’t come closer. Find a gun. Get back quickly.
Katie had spoken. She had broken the silence.
The voice was gone now. A window of time was closing. Did any of them really believe that help would arrive in time? Now there was no longer obligation, only panic and its acceleration, and Katie, unable to move, laying stock-still on the ground, following the rules, still played dead and waited. She whispered to the others to leave, to go get help and come back. She watched them leave, and in the silence that followed, she understood she was now brave and selfless, heroic and elect, and that these were judgments that could come only after the fact of her death, in the witness of those who survived to speak of it.
I must tell this last part even if I do not know it. I have to think through how she made this decision and what happened afterward, even if I cannot know.
Katie lay on the ground, waiting. She made her body into a ball so that the bear could only strike obliquely. She covered her face and waited. She would not have felt optimistic or hopeful for herself, and she would not have felt good for the people she had rescued. Her mind did not work this way. There would be no pleasure, only a sense of obligation flashing once across her mind, to say she had done the right thing by the people she loved. She had saved them. Or, better still, she had given them the chance to save themselves. However they cowered from it and tried to refuse it, or say it was a matter of circumstance and timing and luck, always just below their complicated reasoning, their absence of guilt and refusal to explain, was the irrefutable fact of their witness. Katie had given them permission to leave. She asked them to do it.
In that moment, perhaps, Katie imagined her own death without consequence. She waited for it. Through the fear, the pain, and then the absence of pain. Long enough for her friends to get clear. Patient for what she knew now was the end. She heard the voices, closer, then further away. Then, no voices. No sound, no presence, no sense of self. Only the object of her body waiting to be received. Her mind becoming one part of that body, calling for help until it could not make words, only sounds, locating itself in the surrounding darkness. Then the mind, separate of that darkness.
It was roughly twenty minutes from the moment the two hikers left the hill until Katie’s death, but in this last moment, she was not present. She could not be. The mind cannot organize so much pain and fear and suffering and also withstand it. This is the last, great lie of the surviving witness, and from everything I could find to read about trauma after Katie’s death, it is also true. Katie’s pupils opened to receive the last light coming across the ridge. She saw nothing. Not the stars or the grass or the bear, or the bear leaving and everyone arriving, slowly and too late, to claim her.
4. Sunday Morning
I stayed up the night with Katie’s body. Local police, doctors, and reporters came through the room, performed or insinuated their duties, and left. It did not matter why they were there or when they would leave. I would never see them again.
Every half hour or so, I stepped out onto the hostel’s porch to catch my breath. We had carried Katie’s body about a quarter of a mile and laid it out on the basement floor. Someone thought to cover it with a tarp, which was pulled back with every arriving expert, who only confirmed the obvious. As though they had practiced it before, two or three people would stand me up and walk me to the other side of the room. I could listen to the various tests performed, but I did not have to watch them, a small grace for which I felt overwhelming relief and resentment. Who were they to deny me a place next to Katie? How could anyone think I would want to watch?
The place where Katie had died was only a few hundred yards away, but I couldn’t see it. I imagined a sleuth of bears waiting there. I fantasized about killing them with my hands, braining them with large stones, spring-loading rusted traps that would stump their limbs and snouts. A bear would bleed out several days before it died somewhere, disoriented, alone, with only half a paw. Or maybe another bear would come along and kill it. Were bears hierarchical creatures? Empathic? I had no idea. The wind was blowing hard on the ridge. It was dark, cold and loud, and hard to listen or watch for anything from such a distance.
I was safe now, and I knew it. I would never put myself in harm’s way again. I felt like a kid playing army with his friends in the yard. However well I simulated the circumstances of Katie’s death, I would never repeat them. Some part of me would understand it was a pantomime, just as I unde
rstood on the porch that I had had an opportunity to be truly brave, and I had failed. Or, I had stood as close to the danger as I could bear, but not close enough to make a difference. So, it wasn’t like playing army; rather, it was like standing next to a large fire. There was a natural limit to the approach, which meant there was also a physical limit to my sense of the world. I had wanted to live. I had stood at a distance by a rock and watched my wife die. I had crouched in the neighbor’s bushes, barely making a noise, trying to win the game by not getting caught, while my world burned around me.
No one seemed to notice my absence. We could do very little before morning. I signed forms and made decisions. I reported Katie’s death in the careful detail that I had witnessed it. No one cared that I had not been heroic. No one asked me to explain my inability to protect Katie, my fear of her death, or the instinct to prevent my own. Didn’t they know I had made futile gestures to intervene? That I had not really put myself in harm’s way? This conversation kept not starting; that part of my answer kept getting lost or skipped over. I told the story again and again, slowing the night down, speeding it up, trying to keep the emphasis in the right places. The police distinguished motive from cause; if I had prevented Katie’s death, then my actions would become part of the report. Instead, I was a witness. To them, the facts of her death, and my knowledge of them, exceeded my feelings of guilt.
The hunters understood why Katie had died. For them it was very simple. Katie was menstruating, and the bear smelled the blood. She was throwing rocks at a bear, and it charged her. We all had taunted the bear by taking photographs of it and next to it, testing its patience with us. We were Americans hiking on a mountaintop in the Buscegi Mountains on a late summer night. What did we think was going to happen?
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