“As for me I am a child of the god of the mountains.” (Gary Snyder)

The other night we arrived home from supper at the pub in Egmont and saw this bear standing under the big crabapple tree below our vegetable garden. The bears come every year for the crabs that grow on branches too high for us to reach. Sometimes it’s a sow with a cub or two; she’ll send them up to the top boughs for the highest fruit. Sometimes it’s a young male, fending for himself, with a bit of attitude. These are the ones who break branches, who sway back and forth as they feed. They’ve come as long as we’ve had this tree, planted as a small offshoot of a tree in John’s mother’s garden. She brought it in the early 1980s. So these are the grandchildren or great-grandchildren of the original bears. They have very sophisticated spatial and temporal maps which they pass on to offspring. A neighbour’s plum tree, our crabapples, the salmon stream half a mile away.

Recently a grizzly sow and her 3 cubs have been sighted in our area. Grizzlies are not regular inhabitants on our part of the coast but they do swim from the mainland sometimes. My friend sent a photograph of the sow and cubs taken from her deck; they were feeding in a bay at low tide. This morning a woman told us they’ve been spotted not far from our place. Maybe that’s why the cat was skittish this morning, running from room to room, checking things out. Though he was skittish yesterday morning too and when I looked up from my desk, I saw a doe and her twins, their spots nearly faded away, eating salal at the edge of the woods.

Honestly, I’d rather think about and see animals than read the news. Every day, another crisis. I’m not turning away from it but when I weigh the dangers of failing diplomacy, trade wars, food-born illness (because of failing health protections), I’d rather learn how to live safely in the natural world. The rules are pretty clear: be responsible about garbage, food waste, your own behaviour on trails in their territory, and keep your vehicles locked because they’ve figured out how to open doors. (Last summer we woke to an open car door and muddy prints around the handle. But we realized that the motion light on our print shop must’ve scared the bear before it could do any damage. There was nothing in the car to attract it. Maybe the male with attitude?)

This morning one of the gates to the vegetable garden is broken. We picked the apples a few weeks ago because they ripened earlier this year but some mother told her offspring that there’s a gate they can break in late August and sometimes the reward is apples. Old lessons in a changing climate.

I hope the grizzly sow and her cubs find their way to a less populated area. I hope they travel safely. But the odds are against it. Last year the young grizzly who was sighted on a beach in Sechelt and who was trapped at Chapman Creek and relocated, found his way to Texada Island where he was shot by someone protecting his farm animals while officials argued about whose responsibility it was to move the bear yet again. The old stories have lessons for us: the girl who married a bear is one I read as a young woman and thought about during the years my daughter was a teen and how the story contains rules about sexuality and courtesy we might all benefit from learning. I think of Gary Snyder’s “this poem is for bear” with its beautiful epigraph: “As for me I am a child of the god of the mountains.” Today John will fix the gate busted up by the petulant child of the god of the mountains and I’ll think about the low huff the bear gave as he walked away (he didn’t run) when we surprised him under the tree the other night.