Bear Mountain

On Ursus americanus, fat as a precious metal, the power of hugs, photosynthesis, Jesus, the vernal equinox, cancer, convictions versus truth, and sporadic aging.

The wandering, cash-strapped, radical proto-hippie Jesus evidently arose from the dead in April, an apt month here in Montana and across the northern latitudes for contemplating the entangled themes of death and resurrection.

In January, I had been close to the ultimate end, and I wasn’t counting on a return ticket such as the legendary Savior had punched. Formerly, this kind of thing happened only to other people. My kingdom was, I once assumed, subject to a predictable linearity. Those whom I loved, who were older than me by decades, would grow older still, become moribund, and finally perish. I would bury each of them, one by one, memorialize them, and grieve them.

If one is lucky, throughout life death will more resemble a game of chess, a logic of attrition—the oldest generations, having lived fully dilated lives, succumbing in a neat, orderly sequence relative to their ages—than it will a storm-ravished sea, the very epitome of disorderliness and chaos upon which no logical arithmetic can be applied.

Though by all appearances unchanged, things are now different. Throughout the lengthening days of this spring, I watched as our two dozen or more houseplants grew new parts of themselves on a diet of filtered water and sunlight. Each newly formed leaf began as a shy furl, who each successive morning was bigger and bolder than the day previous. This fresh growth was simultaneously a consolation from the leukemia circulating in my blood as well as an unsettling visible reminder of the miraculous division of cells, which were subject to shattering mutations.

Though I had long looked upon all manifestations of life as connected to everything else and had taken solace from this perspective of interdependence, this was the first time that the internal biological workings of these silent household companions compelled me to consider the cellular structure of living beings, such as myself, as the source of a potential doom. I was host to a different type of madness than the psychological kind, and it disturbed me to think of my blood as gone berserk. When my platelet count sunk and blood ran in warm streams from my nose, the sight of it made me afraid, as if it were spiders crawling out of me.

The Koyukon people of Alaska, while hunting black bears, avoid speaking of their prey directly, choosing instead to allude to physical characteristics of the bear that reveal clues about its size, gender, species, temperament, and geographical location. To refer to the bear specifically is offensive to its spirit. A successful hunter, one who had killed a bear, entered immediately into a moral contract with the deceased animal. There were inviolable matters of etiquette toward the carcass of the bear that the hunter was obliged to follow. Violated taboos resulted in future punishments, some of which could be severe and last many years. As I began to recover the vital energies leeched from me by my disease and the powerful chemotherapy drugs, I felt a renewed interest in being out again in the enormous mountains near our home, but for months I was uncertain if I was prepared to pursue and kill a black bear—hulzinh, literally “black place,” for Koyukon women—during the forthcoming spring season. To do so would require that I enter physically into the body of another, a bloody undertaking.

Modern anatomical humans—Homo sapiens—have been around for at least a few hundred thousand years. For all but a fraction of this time, bears were a primary source of food for us, especially their fat stores—excess fat in most hunter-gatherer cultures being rarer and far more useful than gold. When I first began teaching myself how to hunt four years ago, I was ambivalent about killing bears for food, elevating them above the ungulates to a totemic animal somehow more sacred if not untouchable. This bifurcation made me uneasy. Our penchant for reducing complexities to tidy categories is longstanding, and it has led us to do some ghastly things, especially to one another. Obfuscating emotions are among the most persistent of our misleading illusions. Grasping this, I came in time to dismantle the hierarchical notions about animals that I brought to hunting. How could I logically deem ungulates disposable but bears beyond killing? To hunt is not to moralize but to eat, and to not eat is to die, which is the most basic and fundamental law of all life. The way most of us in industrialized nations procure food, especially protein, is actually the unthinkable thing. That is: it is done without thinking at all.

Bears, by going underground each fall and emerging months later, are probably the foundation of some of our most imperishable myths, such as that of the resurrection of the dead after a descent into the world below us or into caves. Their emergence out of the invisible foretells of the return of spring, of warm light after months of cold darkness, privation, and existential dread, what we these days know as seasonal affective disorder. As April became May, I began to redevelop confidence in my body and trust that I could handle myself again alone in the mountains. My brush with death had rattled me, yet in subtle ways, I felt that my life before cancer was less my own than the one circumscribed by the disease. All my old anxieties over the hard-knocks of daily life went up in smoke, as if someone somewhere had uttered an incantation that worked upon me as spells do, by dint of recitation, magic, and faith. I sleep better now; I sleep more. I feel less baseless guilt, less anger, more like a child than a man. I love more and crave more love, and I’ve scarcely eaten a morsel of food that has not tasted to me like Eve’s apple—forbidden, yes, but more pointedly consequential.

During my last visit to the cancer center, the waiting room was abnormally crowded. For months there had been only a half dozen other patients there at any given time, almost all of them far older than me. Across from where my wife and I sat on a couch beneath a photograph of a river running through conifers, there was a young woman leaning over a man my age. As she spoke to him, their faces barely separated, he stared blankly ahead into his thoughts. Briefly, the woman noticed me observing them. Our eyes met for a few seconds before she returned her attention to her company. One of them, I knew, was gravely ill, and though I had no way of being certain without asking, the faraway look in the man’s eyes revealed such a profound desolation that I knew it was her that had to be afflicted. The loss of oneself is bearable, but for the loss of a loved one there is no consolation. The phlebotomist called my name, and as I arose from the couch to walk with her to the room where patients’ blood is drawn, a second phlebotomist appeared and called out the name of a woman. I looked back over my shoulder. It was her, the young woman.

In the phlebotomy room, there are two very comfortable reclining chairs, like ones you’d see in a chic ski chalet. As our phlebotomists made kind small talk to distract us from the gravity of our reasons for being there, the woman and I locked eyes, this time in solidarity, and smiled at one another. The awkward distance that ordinarily separates two strangers had between us evaporated. Each of us knew our kingdoms were in jeopardy. We sat our fancy chairs like royalty. I felt the prick of the needle, then the bandage being applied to my arm, and then I was free to go. Looking back now, I wish I had thought to rise, introduce myself to the woman, and if she wanted one, hug her like a bear. Maybe the hulzinh, the “black place,” would be her guide.