I was five years old when I had my first encounter with a black bear. In the spring of 1990, my father, a wildlife biologist, brought home an orphaned three-month-old cub in a cardboard box. The cub’s mother, having burrowed beneath the roots of an old tree, had been killed in the den by a logging excavator, but the cub, weighing barely more than a bag of apples, survived. Forestry workers caught the young bear and dropped it off at the Fish and Wildlife office in Peace River, Alberta, where my dad worked, and he called my mom with the news.

“The cub is going to stay in the basement for the night,” she told us.

My brother, Brendan, older by three years, raced out the front door, jumped on his bike, and pedalled down the street to tell his friends. The kids who lived on our street often joked that we “lived in a zoo.” Previously, my dad had brought home three orphaned coyote pups that tumbled in play on the concrete floor. On another occasion, there was a barred owl with an injured wing. The summer before, my dad had helped to rescue a moose calf that had been stranded on the riverbank after its mother swam across the kilometre-wide Peace River. The tenderness with which he took off his blue sports jacket and gently wrapped it around the calf’s eyes, so that it wouldn’t be frightened by the crowd of people that gathered on the riverbank to watch, has always stayed with me.

My dad’s work as a biologist felt heroic, even godly, to my five-year-old mind. He seemed to be able to communicate with animals in their wordless languages. He wasn’t afraid to get close, handling them with the same affection he showed when tucking us in at night.

The cub looked at me, and her eyes were a shade of blue not unlike my own.

Once in the basement, my dad held the cub in his gloved hands and invited me and my brother to gently stroke her fur. The feeling of the bear was paradoxical: her long guard hairs were coarse to the touch, but underneath, her coat was soft as a goose down pillow. To feel the warmth of a live bear, a creature that embodied the word wild, provoked an upwelling of wonder in me. The cub looked at me, and I was surprised to see that her eyes were a shade of blue not unlike my own.

The cub fell asleep on the cold floor as I kept vigil next to her. My mother took a photograph of us: a pigtailed girl crouching next to the bear, who is coiled into a tight black ball. There is a strange sense of symmetry to it. Two cubs of different kinds—Ursus americanus, a solitary species, and Homo sapiens, a species that’s evolved through socialization—curling into the protection of their soft, gummy bodies. My small fingers are interwoven, hands clasped. My eyes, wide as planets, express wonder and empathy for the creature who’d lost her family.

May 2019

I was in my fourth season as a fire tower lookout in northwestern Alberta, where I was tasked with spotting smoke from a hundred-foot-high tower and alerting firefighting crews to potential burns. However, while surveying the land, my eyes were often drawn to an abundance of wildlife: migratory birds, moose and their gangly legged calves, mysterious lynx, and groundhogs that emerged from their dens, standing on guard like foot soldiers. The cabin beneath the tower, my base camp, gave me an on-the-ground perspective. If I wasn’t watching for fire from the tower, I was watching for wildlife from my cabin windows.

A mother black bear and two cubs sauntered north of the fire tower through the cutblock, a clearing where the forest had been logged several years before. The aspen and birch saplings hadn’t yet grown tall enough to obscure the view. The bears stuck out against the landscape, their black fur shining like polished stones against the dead grass and leafless brush. Banks of snow sheltered against the willows. The fire moss, a carpet of coral-stemmed lichen, glowed in the afternoon sun. From up in the fire tower, I watched the bears. It appeared as though they were walking across a bed of hot coals.

From afar, the bears were beautiful. Fixed in time and space, like a landscape painting or a photograph in a gallery that I could pause in front of and appreciate without feeling threatened. I knew that bears were mostly afraid of people. These bears didn’t want anything to do with me.

The animals looked huge, as bears do to the average person who rarely sees them. The human mind, when seeing a bear, often reacts with shock and awe, as though the animal’s astonishing bulk of fur, muscle,........

© The Walrus