Yukon/BC border

It is already mid-September, and our current playing field is a bit muddled. The usually brilliant fall colors of Arctic tundra and yellowing aspen groves further south have been exceptionally dull this year, knocking out our rainbow-colored hopes and making landscape photography difficult. And since big furry animals and hunting raptors appear only rarely, we just travel on.  Still, our photographic pickings seem erratic and if not for many years of honing the demanding art of dashed expectations we may have become pretty despondent.

Most of the time, however, we turn the other cheek and do not despair. Nature does what nature needs to do, and these regions had more rain last summer than they had for years. This, and too much warm weather, may have turned our colors into their current Dijon mustard mess. It is hard, though. After all, these failed expectations have been created by bright memories of our fruit-bearing images imbedded in our minds: the golds and the reds and the oranges and the sky blues of the falls past. We remember the photographs we have already chased and owned, the ones we published, exhibited and memorized. I realize that these expectations, far more than the flatness of colors, now get in my way of looking at the seemingly dull vistas. Is it possible I harbor a subconscious streak -- not apparent to me -- which clings to the familiar rather than the unexplored?  Never mind my hidden underpinnings: I need to turn away from the world I memorized and look for the one I seem reluctant to enter. 

So John and I go and search. Noses to the ground, eyes blinking, ears flapping in the breeze. I know that John is more comfortable with trying anything new, and am not surprised when he attempts to photograph the way moss grows and mushrooms rot. Much of the time, he is crawling on his hands and knees or pausing near something which draws him in: a fallen conifer studded with brown cones or a pale layer of caribou lichen. I find fireweed leaves which, hit by first frost, convulsed into shapes only fire scorched metal sculptures could replicate, and muck along cold lakes and twisted narrow streams. Sometimes we walk away from each other and enter separate worlds of trees, rocks, streams and slapping branches. 

I suddenly remember that strong sense of separation from all I knew. Years ago, I crawled under an ancient fallen trunk of a Douglass fir half buried in yellow umbrellas of Devil's clubs in Southeastern Alaska. I stayed there for a long time -- a forest animal, unseen -- with my body sinking into the deep wet moss and my nose smelling the slightly acidic stench of forest decay. I sensed the hundreds of years since that tree matured in the relentless rush of its sticky sap and multiplying cells, with branches spreading under the cool Alaskan sky. Then one day -- was it a dark night? a grey dusk? it was hit by an enormous force, a bolt of fiery lightening or a hard fist of great wind. It came down like a tumbling mountain, tearing its heart apart and crashing through tree canopies left and right, with the cracking sound which reverberated in the old growth forest for a long time.

It is now many years later and I am no longer under that log. The evening comes and it is getting too dark to try anything hidden or unexpected. Our old camper sits at the end of an abandoned air strip which used to serve the Cassiar asbestos mine and the town with its 3,700 inhabitants. Defunct since 1993 due to carcinogenic properties of its long-exploited and lucrative product, the old mine with its collection of rusting monster trucks and greenish mounds of tailings is still scarring this wild, mountainous land. We eat our potato soup from Anchorage with some roasted chicken from Whitehorse, nibble on rich brownies baked by our Alaskan friends Tom and Mary, slurp some red wine to elevate the evening, and are now listening to the whirr of a hard drive as John downloads a few new pictures. We look at some forest floor images he took while crawling around, at my small creek making its way to Kluane Lake, and we see they are new to us.

It may rain or even snow soon, so John just reads aloud another chapter - the one about chickadees -- from Bernd Heinrich's book "One Wild Bird at the Time" before we turn in. The night is here and soon some black bears and perhaps their brown cousins may circle the camper and smell our soup and chicken. And the brownies. Should one of them try to get too close, I will sing "you are my sunshine, my only sunshine" at the top of my lungs, which will surely discourage the visitor. 

They may come in our dreams, though. Moving in the dark outside. Scouting the nearby forest, its rainy ravines, fallen logs and mossy hillocks. Swimming across cold rivers and climbing precipitous slopes studded with massive rocks. Covering the rough terrain with their long strides and searching for yet another food source: a berry here, a root there, a small mammal running downslope. They are relentless in their pursuit but the growing layer of fat under their rippling fall fur is the only life insurance they will have during the long dark months of the coming winter.

And dreaming about the bears as they move in the dark outside will be really, really good.

©Yva Momatiuk

Grizzly sandwich

Three days, one picture. One picture, three days. There are no great fireworks of animals throwing their muscular bodies into action. And if there was a recent drama associated with a chase, an attack and a collapse of a struggling ungulate -- we did not see it. 

In fact, what we see now is a nagging mystery because nothing makes much sense to us. And yet there are three grizzly bears, a sow and her two spring cubs, who were definitely not in this patch of tundra the day before yesterday. And there is something which looks like a long mound of dark vegetation which they sporadically paw and eat, then lie right on it to rest and snooze. Then the cubs wake, nurse, and they all paw the mound again and eat some morsels of food. But eat --what? 

This tableau continues for three days and never changes much. Sometimes the sow walks a dozen steps away and defecates. Or one cub ventures aside, nibbles on something we also cannot make out, and returns. And so does the status quo: three bears, an animal protein so hidden we cannot see it, and an occasional puff of the Arctic wind blowing from the east and heralding more of this drizzly Arctic fall weather. 

We know it must be a fresh kill but we are not sure what animal it is, for the bears are too far and the tundra's grassy fold raises and obscures what we are trying to see. We also know we cannot leave the road and come closer for several good reasons. A mama grizzly with cubs is dangerous. A mama grizzly with cubs and the source of food she is guarding is significantly more dangerous. And provoking her attack could (and quite certainly would) end badly not just for us but for her and her cubs, for most human casualties in this kind of situation tend to be followed by the destruction of the bear who seems, however vaguely, guilty of the homicide. Never mind the stupid and pointless provocations created by humans, or the fact the grizzly would have only followed her hardwired instinct to protect her food and her family. 

So we stay put. We use binoculars and long lenses, walk along the road to gain a different angle, and still have no idea what we are looking at. There seem to be some silvery strands of fur peeking out here and there from the mound: a caribou? but then one cub pulls up a lower leg with a hoof which is visible against the grey sky for a brief moment and -- John is sure of it -- appears very dark. A moose? It cannot be, because the fur we see is pale and not brown. And where are the antlers, certainly well developed in late August? OK, so there are no antlers because it may be only a pile of guts and lower legs and a hide some hunters left behind after they killed whatever it is, butchered the carcass, and carried the meat and the antlers with them.  

The meat we understand, but the antlers? This is a subsistence hunting region of the northern Yukon, so anyone hunting here, from Inuvik to Dawson City, already has enough piles of antlers gathering mold behind his cabin. The antlers would help us identify the prey but there are none. And one cub is now gnawing on what looks like a curvy rib bone. So, no hunters were involved, for the ribs would have departed with the meat they packed out. An antlerless baby caribou or a moose? Not likely, because the mysterious quasi-vegetarian mound is too long and too tall to contain a small ungulate. A female moose, then? 

We also want to know how this animal -- because there must be an animal somewhere in this messy dark mound -- died. Why? Perhaps because in our attempts to understand nature's doings we try to tie what we can observe into a cohesive narrative arc. It may not matter to anyone else but it seems profoundly important to us.  For instance: did the grizzly sow take it down? Or is it a wolf kill, and the wolf was later chased away by the bear like so many other wolves who kill and often get badly battered in the process but never get to eat a single morsel?  There are many ravens flapping and hopping around while trying to snatch a scrap of meat, and they may have followed the wolf as he tracked his prey. But this is not certain, either. The ravens, forever alert to predators who do the killing and tear open tough hides of dead animals making them accessible to the birds' beaks, could have arrived well after the deed was done. But - by whom? The riddle bothers us but we are none the wiser.

Time after time, we try to photograph as soon as the the bear family starts to move around. Time after time, the choreography sucks: a raven sticks up his head and obscures two bear faces, both cubs present us with their warmly furred behinds and nothing else, the mama griz collapses on top of the mound again and falls asleep for another hour or two. And it is still so damn far and dark anyway. So on the third day I give up.  But John, a champion of persistence, is still kneeling on the roof of our camper and huddling over his camera with a long lens and several teleconverters. It gets really blustery and he finally climbs down: let's stop, we say. No more of this too far too dark who knows what they are eating nonsense. In this day and age, such vague and imperfect pictures are worthless anyway: the market is already clogged by well exposed, bright, fully visible bear kills being devoured and dripping with picturesque gore.

Remembering we got nothing so far, we try to review John's latest images. And we find the one picture he hoped he nailed-- just one, with no similar previous frames and no good frames to follow -- which sums up all we were looking at in the last three days. A layer of the still not identified flesh partly covered by roots and earth, the mama griz looking straight into the lens with a somewhat bemused expression, her two fat cubs playfully biting each other, and an unperturbed raven, a sentry to it all. A classic grizzly sandwich, descriptive and yet not revealing what we want to know. 

And this is, as it must be, just good enough.

©Yva Momatiuk