“It is definitely a bear.”
We stood over the track. Shoulder-to-shoulder, strung fly rods in hand, we blocked the trail as we observed the depressions in the mud. It was most certainly a bear. Or someone had taken their very large and very ill-proportioned dog on a walk in the mountains.
“Well, it is also definitely a black bear.”
Stating this truth was really a question. He was asking me if I concurred with everything he had ever heard, read, and seen about black bears being more scared of you than you are of them. I did concur. It is a fact. But it is also a bear. When you round a corner on a trail it isn’t “just” a black bear. Waking up to something sniffing around your tent your heart doesn’t slow down because it is “only” a black bear. It is a bear. It is hundreds of pounds of muscle and claws and teeth.
“Onward and upward?”
We kept walking the trail. Our destination was the beginning of a long set of riffles and runs that consistently produced fish. We would routinely fish up through this stretch, starting in the afternoon. A few hours of leap-frogging each other and we would end up at a pool where two smaller creeks came together. The day would end with one of us, alternatively, casting into the deep hole.
“Have you ever seen a bear… a black bear in this part of the forest?”
The bear questions weren’t incessant. But they were persistent. It wasn’t unlike a child dropping hints about a desired birthday gift. He’d talk about other things, but the topic of bears would always pop back up. Sometimes the segues were organic (“Huh, look at that scat.”). Others were much more transparent (“I had been thinking about getting bear bells for my fishing vest.”).
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