This isn’t a very good picture, it was taken using my phone from the deck of a boat at the the head of Bute Inlet this time last year. The grizzly was grazing on grasses at the estuary of the Homathko River. Even blurry, even from that distance, it was magnificent. We watched it move along the shore, lifting its head once or twice.
I’d already had a swim in Bute Inlet that day. The water was so cold! When the boat approached the little bay where it paused long enough for a woman to eagerly enter the water, to paddle in circles for a few minutes, unable to feel her fingers and toes, anyway, when it approached, there was a black bear on the rocks who quickly high-tailed it into the woods. On the stony beach, large scats threaded with grass. The waters of Bute Inlet are glacier-fed, icy cold, and to swim in them is to feel utterly alive. Wildly alive.
I’ve been revisiting my novel, Easthope, trying to make it good enough that a publisher won’t be able to resist it. For months I couldn’t see the gaps and now I can; I’ve been filling them in, darning the thin areas, weaving unruly strands into the fabric of the narrative. And last evening, reluctant to stop for the day, I found myself reading this passage about a swim in a coastal inlet. Not Bute but Narrows, where the Tzoonie River enters the chuck. (This section of the novel takes place in autumn, so the bears are feeding on salmon,)
In her bunk that night, Tessa felt the boat still turning under the bowl of sky, a circle within a circle, within. There ought to be words for this, she thought. So many gravities, so many currents, and we are circles in a universe that contains wars, genocides, wildfires burning across continents, and a grizzly bear at the mouth of a river, feeding on salmon. When she woke very early the next morning, she stepped out of her nightgown at the stern of the boat and climbed down the ladder into the water. It was icy! The moon had crossed the sky to the west. A star, she thought it must be Sirius, was visible too, the dog star. A few quick strokes out into the inlet, circling the boat once, then twice, and back, scrambling up the ladder to wrap herself in a towel. She made coffee in the blue graniteware pot, pouring a big mug to take back on the deck. Ah, there was the bear again, or at least it looked like the same bear, but this time a smaller one tailed it, stopping to sniff the air. Were they aware of her, did they know she had dropped into the water and come back with a strand of kelp on her leg? She took their photograph, mother and child, the morning so young it still held the light of a half moon, a star.
...Theresa Kishkan 