Meanwhile, the sight of the bear stirred me like nothing else the country could contain. What mattered was not so much the bear himself as what the bear implied. He was the predominant thing in that country, and for him to be in it at all meant that there had to be more country like it in every direction and more of the same kind of country all around. He implied a world. He was an affirmation to the rest of the earth that his kind of place was extant.
One thing I've never understood about McPhee’s bear encounter in “The Encircled River” is that, after the encounter, when he and his companions get back to camp, they don’t talk about it. I know that if I were on a wilderness hike and met a grizzly, and were lucky enough to survive, I’d be gabbling about it to just about anyone who’d listen. McPhee writes,
We sat around the campfire for at least another hour. We talked of rain and kestrels, oil and antlers, the height and the headwaters of the river. Neither Hession or Fedeler once mentioned the bear.
When I got into my sleeping bag, though, and closed my eyes, there he was, in color, on the side of the hill. The vision was indelible, but fear was not what put it there. More, it was a sense of sheer luck at having chosen in the first place to follow Fedeler and Hession up the river and into the hills – a memento not so much of one moment as of the entire circuit of the long afternoon. It was a vision of a whole land, with an animal in it. This was his country, clearly enough. To be there was to be incorporated, in however small a measure, into its substance – his country, and if you wanted to visit it you had better knock.
Lepore’s “Bear Season” continues the splendid tradition of New Yorker bear writing, including three pieces by McPhee (“The Encircled River,” “A Textbook Place for Bears,” and “Direct Eye Contact”), and Ian Frazier’s “Bear News.”
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