SMILE!

OGILVIE MOUNTAINS, THE YUKON

I took the photograph on my birthday.

A trip north with my buddy from Bozeman, dirt bikes loaded in the back of a Sprinter, loosely pointed at Dawson and then wherever felt better an hour later. We picked up a friend in Jasper. Drank a shot with a human toe in it twice, at Yukon Jack's insistence, which is exactly the kind of local custom I go out of my way to respect. Beat a South African trucker at pool who had no business losing to me, and did anyway. Won at cards at Gertie's on a run of luck that started feeling less like luck and more like a verdict. Apparently I was winning that week. We started the Dempster Highway after that, and my friend from Jasper called it the peak of the trip. I was pretty sure the trip hadn't peaked yet. I'm usually right about that, for better or worse.

The next morning he wanted a few days off. Fair enough. My buddy stayed to fish with him.

I went on alone. This is a phrase I've used before, always right before something interesting happens.

I rode the dirt bike up old cut lines until the ground stopped being rideable, never past a half tank because a half tank in means a half tank out. Basic math. Stashed the bike in the brush and went the rest of the way on foot.

The weather turns fast up there. In the span of a few hours I went from blue skies to a torrential downpour, fog, and cold, the kind of forecast that would send a sane man home. I kept walking. My jacket had quit being waterproof somewhere around hour two, and the cold had worked its way past that into something closer to permanent. It never got properly dark, just held at a gray that wouldn't commit to night, which meant there wasn't a clean line between the hiking and whatever came after it, just more of the same gray, hour after hour, until I stopped keeping track. Ridgelines would surface through the fog and dissolve again before I could trust they'd been there. The muskeg took each boot and held it a half second before letting go, like it wanted a vote on whether I kept going. By the time I found him I hadn't slept more than an hour or two in two days, soaked through, running on whatever was left after the coffee and the adrenaline of the last few hours.

I saw two moose on the way in. Heads down in the willow, chewing. Neither cared that I was there, which I've come to appreciate in an animal.

I caught something dark moving on a hillside above a bend in the river. At first it was just that, something dark against the grass, appearing and disappearing whenever the fog moved through. Then a shoulder came up. Then another. A grizzly, head down, digging hard enough to throw pieces of the hillside behind him.

I watched him for a while. His whole body was in it, laying siege to a ground squirrel's den for a meal that couldn't possibly have justified the effort. Committed to it, too. I respected the work ethic, even if the math didn't check out. Eventually he gave up and made his way down toward the water.

I got into position at the river. Put one foot in myself, and his head came around toward me. Click.

He started moving again after that, following the bank. He was unusually comfortable with me for an interior bear. This one had all the concern of a bear with more food than problems. The country around him suggested otherwise. I'd expect that kind of indifference from a coastal brown bear with a river full of salmon. Out here, it caught my attention.

The bank curved toward where I was standing, and after a while he was closer than I would have preferred. I tried to stay still. Then I tried to stay still while backing up, which is neither. My heart was going harder than the walking accounted for. The muskeg tried to keep a boot with every step, and I kept an eye on the spray at my hip the whole time, just in case this stopped being a photo op.

When I got back to camp I realized I'd pitched much closer to the river than I'd thought. Phenomenal.

I started breaking the tent down, which meant going back inside it, since it's a single-wall setup with the poles running on the inside. My hands were cold enough that the poles kept slipping. You crawl in and pull them yourself, and the second the last one comes free the whole thing collapses down onto you. I was in exactly that position, half-blind under the canvas, wet fabric against my face, when I heard the rustling.

I got out from under it fast, bracing for him to be right on top of me.

He was close. Closer than I would have liked. But he wasn't coming at me.

Oh. He's eating.

My hand came off the spray on its own.

I kept dismantling camp, pulling poles, stuffing the pack, looking over at him every so often. Pleasant enough to watch, honestly. He pulled at something in the grass, chewed it, took a step, pulled at something else. I knew exactly what I was looking at. A bear, foraging, thirty yards off, not remotely interested in me. Nothing about it required a second thought, so I stopped giving it one.

I crouched down to pull the rain cover over my bag and the rustling stopped.

A violent silence. I froze for a second, then turned around slowly.

He was looking straight at me.

Oh, hell. Here we go.

My hand started drifting back toward the spray, and I could feel my own pulse in it. I just stood there, breathing harder than the moment should have required. He just stood there too, not moving either.

Wet fur. Mouth open. He'd been chewing a second ago, that's all this was, the muscles just hadn't caught up yet.

Through the fog, the adrenaline, the moisture blurring my vision, I made out a shape anyway. Lips curled back, teeth showing, too wide.

It was a smile, and it was meant for me.

Which was ridiculous. Bears don't have expressions like that. He was 30 yards away, eating grass a minute ago, and he had no particular reason to be thinking about me at all. Case closed.

He put his head down and kept eating. A little while later he looked up again.

I knew what I was looking at. That wasn't helping.

He kept eating. Eventually he wandered back into the trees.

I've been charged before. Glacier, the summer before. Twenty feet at a dead run before I sprayed him.

That had been easier.

It had a shape.

Most of my other bear encounters had one of these two somewhere nearby. Did you see that. He's moving toward us. No, idiot, he's eating. This one I didn't have anybody to argue with.

I shoved everything into the pack in whatever order it would fit, hands not entirely steady, and started walking.

I got back to where my friends were camped around seven that morning, and found them exactly where I'd left them, mid-argument about something I couldn't quite make out, rested in a way I clearly wasn't, completely unaware that anything had happened to me at all.

I didn't tell them everything that first hour back.