Eating Dirt

by Charlotte Gill

  The bachelor suite is separated from us by a Plexiglas porthole, a square of cardboard for a curtain. We eavesdrop on the inmates, a phalanx of single men who sleep cheek by jowl. Pierre, Sly, Oakley, Jake, Doug, Nick. So used to being around each other they fall asleep farting and talking about girls. Tonight Jake shows around a photo of his mother.

  Your mom is hot, says Pierre.

  There is a brief discussion about who has dibs on this romantic pursuit, once the contract is through and we return to civilization. This is not a rational conversation. It belongs to the wild, jungly, right-now—to an outdoors without an indoors, to life smeared around, mashing one discrete thing into another. To cabin fever, which is really just claustrophobia pushed out into a vast, wide open.

  We listen to Jake talk about the fictional vicissitudes of Ian McEwan’s Atonement. We never pegged Elfie for the bookish type, mostly because his every second word is either loud or profane or both. Such are the surprises of working life, where our talents are mostly hidden. We listen to the rustling nylon of sleeping bags. The scrape of pages turning.

  Is Pierre fucking ready to roll the fuck over and turn off the light?

  I don’t know, dude. Fucking ask him yourself.

  Fuck, sighs Pierre, clicking them into darkness.

  There is no privacy. No unshared indulgence. No TV or Internet. No traffic or sirens or take-out food. No anonymous comfort of strangers. No silence. And yet we’ve never felt less alone.

  Keira finishes her prep for tomorrow and then climbs up into the ceiling to bed. The sun descends and the fog slinks down the mountains until just a wafer of clear air hovers on the still and mercurial water. Gulls mope on the old log booms. We hear snoring through the walls. Keira rubs her feet together in her tiny sleeping berth. K.T. dangles his hand over the side of his bunk. We touch fingertips for goodnight. I hear dripping and then the flap of unseen wings. And then finally the day lies down.

  WE MOTOR deeper down the inlet. The Daughters moors at a shambling dock made of tilting floats nailed with roof shingles. As we pull up Keira checks out the window, all the while slicing and chopping. At the very last second she dashes out onto the deck and climbs the gunnels with a fat, blue mooring line in her fist.

  On shore, we find a cluster of rambling structures. An old camp situated on a gravelly landing amid tangles of salmonberry bush, alder, and cottonwood switches pushing in at the edges of a disused gravel parking lot. A cabin painted the governmental peanut brown used on buildings throughout national parks of Canada. A few dented Atco trailers parked behind.

  Two men live here, engineers who drill and feed explosives down into rock. They blow up the land’s inconveniences so that the roads can go in. They come out to greet us wearing down vests and Stanfield sweaters with holey elbows and the nutty, jubilant look of people who’ve spent too long alone in each other’s company. Their boat bobs at the dock, a small white motorboat, its freeboard hairy with algae. Behind this outpost there is a notch in the land, a drainage along which the logging road runs. Behind that lies a high slab of snow-covered rock, like a mauve-toned cake domed with white frosting. Inexplicably, we find a weather-beaten stuffed animal tied to the branches of a bush. A teddy bear strangled with flagging tape. A sign or a warning—there’s no way to tell.

  In a few days civilian interlopers arrive in the camp. A group of five men, dressed in camo, jetted down the inlet in an aluminum boat with a roll bar and twin turbo engines. The following morning they rise at the same time we do and zoom off down the inlet, their vessel laden with Pelican cases and coolers and an ATV. Toward whatever kind of guerrilla mission they’ve come to accomplish.

  Even at sea we must have days of rest, a pause for our tattered bodies. On the night off, Adam and I wander up to the ramshackle trailers with the hope of scoring time with a washing machine. We find three of these visitors on the dusty landing, standing around in a circle with beer cans in their fists. We introduce ourselves to a guy named Dale, who says he’s come all the way from Michigan. He’s a retirement-aged man wearing aviator glasses and dentures a shade too white. Dale waves toward his friend, who lifts his chin to us. The friend stands at a propane stove on a tripod, attending to some meat sizzling dryly in a lidless pressure cooker. He stirs with a fork. The tines scratch the bottom.

  Dale has soft, white hands. Like his buddy, he’s still wearing a camouflage turtleneck, matching pants, and an anorak printed with foliage. The pattern reminds me of seventies upholstery. He tells us he shot a bear yesterday, and he can’t stop smiling.

  A guy in a ball cap, logger sweater, and jeans materializes between our elbows. His name is Brent, and he’s a hunting guide, hired by these men to lead them to quarry. He is tall and trim with a neat goatee. He has clear blue eyes that are at the same time deeply bloodshot.

  Brent shows me the dead bear—a slab of purple meat covered with a bearskin—bungeed to the rack of their ATV. The guts they left on site. The head looks like something half-alive, something between a rug and a sleeping creature. I look into its open eyes. It’s got a battle scar that gives the lower lid a sad, drooping look. The meat, Brent says, is going to be sausage. I run my hands through the fur.

  Brent tells us that bears around here have pelts softer than anywhere else he’s seen. He wonders aloud if it’s because of their rich diet. As my fingers comb the bearskin, he probes me carefully in the eyes.

  It was an old bear, he murmurs.

  To prove this he opens the bear’s jaw and flashes some ground-down bicuspids. The bear’s mouth is bloody. He steps away and comes back with a roll of paper towels.

  It’s good to cull the old ones, he assures me, wiping his fingers one by one. They kill a few cubs every spring.

  The hunters discuss their quotas—one bear per person. They talk about technique and ammunition. One member of their team, their younger companion, hasn’t managed to bag anything yet.

  He’s still out there, they laugh, tossing glances toward the ocean and the sunset. Trying to score.

  Don’t go anywhere, Dale urges. He disappears behind the trailers and returns with a shingle-sized scrap of steel. There is a divot in it. The steel is at least an inch thick. Yesterday he took a shot at it from twenty paces, and the bullet almost penetrated. Dale begins to tell us about his gun, which, from the complexity of his description, sounds like an assassin’s instrument. It is constructed of titanium with a custom scope. Crossing the border, he tells us, he opened the hard case, and half the station’s agents came around the desk to ogle it. He shows us one of his spent shells. It’s as long as a middle finger. Adam’s eyebrows rise. Knowing Adam I’m sure he’s estimating the price tag on this trophy hunt. Yet these hunters are drinking the worst beer in the whole country, Molson Canadian, and perhaps this, too, is meant to be part of the rustic adventure experience. I wonder if we can wrest some of it from their clutches. As soon as I’ve glanced at their beverages, they shove two ice-cold cans into our hands. It’s the first beer we’ve tasted in at least a few weeks that hasn’t been lukewarm. It goes down quick and frosty.

  Brent hosts high-ticket hunting treks all year round. Bears in the Canadian summer. Cougars in the Russian winter. You track them up the trails through the snow, he says. And then they set the dogs loose.

  Brent, I guess, is as shrewd a businessman as he is a bushman. This place is for him, as it is for us, a living. At the moment he’s primed to catch the truth before it slips from our mouths: it’s not really hunting. We see scat heaped in disconcertingly large piles. We spot ursine shapes from the rails of the Daughters, grazing the shores at low tide. We see them from the truck windows. When they run from our bumpers their fur quivers, rippling with blubber and muscle underneath. We bumble into bears when we’re wearing neon orange vests and singing at the top our lungs. We run into bears, and we don’t even want to. We’re practically tripping over them.

  Have you guys seen any bears up there? Dale asks, opening his palm to the deep end of the inlet.

&nbs
p; No, Adam says without hesitation. Not a single one.

  Our beers are empty. My arms are filled with clothes hot from the dryer. It’s time to go.

  Come back, they beckon. Bring all your girlfriends. We’ll build a big old fire.

  ONCE UPON a time, our primate forebears lived not only among the trees but in them. Eventually they swung down from the boughs and became ground dwellers, living in the treed fringes for shelter and protection. Back then we were hunter-gatherers, a sustenance phase that dominated our prehistory for more than a million years. Hominids didn’t need to disturb the forests to forage, though sometimes they burned clearings to encourage the flourishing of favored foods. Mostly they kept on the move, exhausting local stores of game before picking up their walking sticks. About 250,000 years ago, we were only one million humans living in roving clusters. Our footprints were not great, and nature absorbed our traces.

  A mere eight thousand years ago, we discovered gardening. We settled down and became home-dwelling denizens of villages and city-states, passionate about our homelands and territorial about our terroirs. With the shift from hunting to agriculture, people moved away from the forest, since crops require sunlight, irrigation, and the borrowed fertility of alluvial plains. With husbandry came pastures. And then came the cutting of forests, since both crops and trees demanded dirt so wholly there was little room for sharing. Our minds began to change about the woodlands.

  Beyond the protection of city walls, the forest concealed dangers—wild animals, darkness, and disorientation. In our fables and folktales the wilderness is an unfriendly realm, a place of deep, existential terrors. It’s where crazy people go to wander alone. Where the guilty end up when they’ve been cast away from the tribe. In Greek and Roman myth it is the site of dissolution and metamorphosis, where humans transform into hybrid abominations—the human horse, the pungent goat-man. In the mythic wilds we encounter chaos and decay. And lust. There isn’t a vestal virgin who enters the woods alone and comes out with her white robes clean. The wilderness is where you sleepwalk, where you stray, where you lose yourself in unconscious Neanderthal taboo.

  The forest breeds aggressive florae as well. In our fairy tales beanstalks rise monstrously from cursed seeds. Whole cities grow over with thorns and thickets. There is something malevolent in the vegetative entropy that lurks at our civic fringes, in the weeds that creep along the far side of the moat. It is as if the wilderness seeks to reclaim what we’ve hammered and carved from its heart. And so we must remain forever vigilant with our brooms, torches, and scythes. All over the world, animistic monsters of the wild symbolize the threat of this backslide. The yeti of the Himalaya, the Sasquatch, bigfoot, and the abominable snowman. The ignoble savage who’d once been human before being snatched back by the jaws of evolutionary time.

  It’s a remarkable contrast, in our paved and climate-controlled world, that creatures can still be deadly. Great white sharks and komodo dragons, box jellyfish and saltwater crocodiles. Another beast that still lurks in this liminal twilight is Ursus arctos horribilis. The grizzly bear. Perhaps grizzlies still inspire fear because of the way we come across them in the wild—often enough, by accident. A twig snaps. Something ominously large crashes unseen through the underbrush. Or a grizzly appears in silence, a lumbering shadow in our peripheral vision. We glimpse a long sweep of brown fur. The silvery shoulders and wet lips. And if we are close enough, two beady, unfathomable eyes. The mind can’t quite believe what the senses register until all the parts coalesce into one creature: Bear.

  Sometimes we arrive at work to find grizzly bears hanging out at our tree caches, snuffling among our boxes, occasionally thrashing the cardboard to bits. We catch them sauntering down the roads, since the flat gravel surface provides easy conveyance for them, too. We have seen some of the biggest bears of our lives at the back end of Jervis Inlet. We startle them with our engines, and they run ahead of our grilles. They are as wide as refrigerators and as tall as our truck hoods, all muscle and shuddering pelt. They run at a brisk lope but can easily keep up with a vehicle.

  To see one from the cab of a moving truck is one thing. To encounter one when we are on foot and alone, without weapons or armor or even pepper spray—that’s quite another story. Whenever I wander into a bear’s company, I can’t help but stop breathing. It must be the paralysis of squirrels when they smell a wolf. A kick from the ancient brain.

  North American bears come in a range of colors from black to brown to cinnamon to vanilla. The white-coated Kermode is a genetically recessive black bear that roams isolated parts of northern British Columbia. Grizzlies are bigger than black bears and less common. At birth a grizzly can weigh as little as a loaf of bread. Full grown, it can be as heavy as a Harley Davidson motorcycle and run at speeds approaching thirty-five miles per hour. These bears are the largest terrestrial carnivore on the continent. In the world, they are second only to the polar bear.

  They may be legendarily toothy beasts, but grizzlies eat mostly plants. In the spring they consume leafy greens and skunk cabbage. In the fall they gorge on berries. In Western Canada they congregate to claw spawning salmon right out of streams. The fish carcasses they leave behind on the forest floor are a source of fertilizer, imported all the way from the sea. Occasionally a grizzly will take down an elk or a deer. They will eat carrion or steal another animal’s kill. They’re opportunistic feeders. Traditionally bears have found garbage dumps quite appealing.

  Grizzlies are mostly solo animals, and their distribution on the ground is often thin. Males can occupy a territory of up to seven hundred square miles in order to fulfill their significant caloric requirements or to home in on females during mating season. Like many animals whose numbers are dwindling—martens, red squirrels, and caribou included—grizzlies are sensitive to wildfires and clear-cut logging, all those encroachments that shrink their habitat. Like so many reclusive creatures, they like deep wilderness, space, and quiet. They like an old, mature forest to stomp around in.

  Grizzly bears may dabble with humans, but they prefer to live deep in the wild, far beyond highways and settled outskirts. When their travel corridors are cut or roaded or interrupted by cut blocks or golf courses, they retreat. Their numbers shrink whenever they are marooned in ecoreserves or in parks with impermeable boundaries. They need space the way birds need all of the air. Grizzlies move with the seasons, across big sweeps of land as well as up and down the mountainsides. Their territory once extended through the western American states into Mexico and spread as far east as the prairies. Now they are found only in pockets of the contiguous United States, in Alaska, and in Canada’s westernmost provinces.

  Although it may seem as if grizzly attacks are on the rise, mostly it’s the headlines that grab our fascination. Grizzly bears seldom go looking for a fight. They don’t need to. They’re the kings of the forest. They will charge and maul if they are defending their food or young or if they are taken by surprise. They steer clear of any place that smells like humans, for pretty good reasons. In 1805 Lewis and Clark shot at grizzlies before they had even seen one up close—also, perhaps, for good reason—before western biologists even knew what grizzlies were. If a bear tussles with a person, its fate is sealed. It may win the battle, but tomorrow it will be hunted.

  EVENTUALLY WE work our way to the back of the inlet, the mudflats where nobody likes to go. Back here, pregnant cumulus clouds dump rain as if it were Miracle-Gro. The valleys are always socked in with fog. Decadent vegetation gushes up from every available crevice. Club mosses that look like furry vines. Slimy liverworts. Ferns sprout from the smallest pockets of dirt, crooks high up in the trees and cracks in boulders. The ditch ponds are skimmed with rainbows of algae. Bear dung lies all over the roads, as if the bears were trying to tell us something.

  We drive away from the beach, across a mucky landing. The trucks spin and fishtail just to escape it. We climb from sea level out onto the spidering roads. This place is a whispering remnant. The logging was done year
s ago, and the camp has now been dismantled. No skidders or yarders or barreling haul trucks, just the strange quiet of fallow land redoubling and gathering strength.

  We park on a switchback. Our crew stands around in the fog, stomping our feet down into boots. We await the thump of blades, the helicopter from the base in Sechelt. Some big noise to scare the bears away on the ridges beyond the trees, to cut up the clammy roar of this place, which K.T. likes to say is the sound of getting lost.

  Adam comes at me and K.T., his hands cluttered with objects.

  You two, he says.

  He gives me an ink-scratched map, a golf pencil, and a radio in a chest holster. Plus a plot cord, which means K.T. and I won’t see anyone until the helicopter swoops down to collect us at the end of the day.

  This is your mission, Adam adds, should you choose to accept it.

  We have a choice? K.T. asks.

  Not really, says Adam.

  K.T. and I have been to work in helicopters a hundred times, and it never loses its thrill. Sometimes we lift off and set down on helipads crafted by loggers, their stringers made from planed hemlock logs. Often there are no landing pads. Then the machines hover down onto big stumps or abandoned trunks. We push our gear out the open door, then step out gingerly onto the skids. We’re blasted by rotor wash. We throw ourselves down into the salal and the woody shrubs, hoping for something other than a hidden stump to cushion our landings. Sometimes our pickups are no less exciting. Our pilots can’t find us in the mist. Or they can’t find anywhere to set down that isn’t too steep or jumbled up with slash, no slope with enough clearance for their long rotor blades. JetRangers. A-Stars. Hughes 500s. For the most part we are assigned excellent pilots. Some are exmilitary. They’re undaunted by wind or fog or tight, obstructed openings in the trees. They have to be this way. The logging pushes higher toward the mountain peaks, deeper into the bush, beyond the reach of any road.