A giant spruce, splintered at mid-trunk and in decline, stood on the meadow's edge. Near its base, a thin line indented the trunk at the point where a horse's rope, or successive horse's ropes, chafed it. Indians likely camped in this clearing and left this evidence of their passing, because that spruce stands in country unknown to Europeans until 1893 and only then explored at intervals. By that time, the First Nation Kootenay and Stoney had been traveling the mountains on horseback for 200 years.


The paths through these passes come to us firsthand.

They are big animals, bigger than us -- 300, 400 pounds. Occasionally, a large one deep in the wilds creeps up silently and kills a hiker. They interest us. All through time, we have arranged our meetings with these animals on the tops of mountains, more with cameras in America, more with bait and rifle in Canada. We meet in the autumn, when they are fat and set in a pattern of living more so than usual. We meet under beech trees.

Climbing, bear claws leave prints -- tear-shaped indents with the nail print above, sliding lines mirroring a difficult ascent with the smooth toenails.

Bear claw marks are one of the few permanent signs of wilderness.

I lay there on a June night when a lightning flash lit the clearing and the rain pelted down. In the mugginess after the rain, I drifted around and saw lightning lying fallen and still, a flash of lightning on the woodpile. It glowed like the lights of some natural city unto itself, where by day was only broken and sawn wood pieces, fox-orange under the clouds.

It was foxfire, the luminescent fungus, and it came from under the earth, from the roots of a dead sugar maple sapling. It had shown itself on other nights in this clearing, over the years, from diffuse sources: luminous chips from an ax-blasted stump; beneath papery bark, glowing within the rotted heart of a yellow birch limb.