BEAR SIGHTINGS

My friend Ben Darrah saw a bear on Abbey Dawn Road a few days ago, just ten minutes from town. Many years ago I remember another was sighted just west of Coronation Boulevard in Amherstview. It’s rare for them to venture this far south. They make the news.

And the kid in me (there’s not much left) is weirdly excited by this whole idea of wildlife, the untamed, the other, encroaching on our city spaces. There’s something of Yeats’ slouching beast to it. The idea of the world as a map of inner space, a collective unconscious. But I go on. Bottom line is I love Ben’s nearly breathless announcement.

By contrast, I used to work in northern Ontario each spring, mostly north and west of Thunder Bay. I planted trees for a couple of years and then spent a few more years as tree deliverer for a reforestation company. I would often see bears. There was pleasure in it, always, but not surprise.

It would happen regularly early mornings on the old rail-bed we used for access into what were then Abitibi freehold lands. We’d stare at each other as I passed in my truck, or the bear would just turn disdainfully away and drop bum-last into deep, shaded ditches.

I saw a bear east of Upsala one day, racing through endless waist-deep emerald grass, rising and then plunging again like a dolphin. I can see her even now in my head, the perfect arc of her leap.

I once saw fresh cubs playing on a red curve of the Dog River Road. Their fur dusted with mud. Blackflies between me and them like a sort of static.

One blazing hot day I came upon a beast, a slab of black bear big as a garden shed, in a clearing of gorse and sand I don’t know where, like something out of nightmare or myth.

Ryan Land and I once found ourselves between a mother and her cubs. We were digging out a snow cache at the mouth of Armistice, a frightening block of land made up of mile after mile of swamp and black muck, the odd finger of plantable land. We were a half mile from our vehicle. The cubs scampered away and one of them at least raced up a needle of tree. I don’t remember how it ended, just Ryan imploring me not to panic, and the cub off in the distance like a nib of liquorice swinging at the end of a pendulum.

I have seen half-bald and half-starved bears nosing through garbage in municipal dumps, red-eyed indifferent scavengers.

I have seen the corpses of bears, fly-buzzed and their pelts blood stained, in grimy pits beside logging roads. 

I once fired bangers into the air trying to scare off a bear that threatened a camp we’d set up in  a narrow clearing not far off the road. Somewhere down in the trees blow us, the bear hissed and whined like a big cat.

So I’ve seen bears. Seen tents ripped open and fish bones and paw-prints at the edge of lakes unheard-of. But on Abbey Dawn Road? Not once. I’ll ride out there myself soon, just in case. Like a kid again, I’ll stare into the trees and wonder at all the hulking shadows in there, the Tygers burning bright. I’ll pedal away faster than usual, suddenly feverish, and having made, for an instant or two, a dream of the world.