North of Hope (15 page)

Bears appear in the oldest records of humankind. The Chauvet Cave, which sits in the Cirque d’Estre at the edge of the Ardèche River Gorge in France, is one example. The cave is dated at 32,000 radiocarbon years, or 35,000 calendar years. Vivid paintings and etchings of large animals cover the walls. Nearly two hundred bear skulls have been found throughout the cave, fifty-three in what has come to be known as the Skull Chamber. Scientists are still hesitant to claim that this ancient grouping of skulls indicates a bear cult, although it is the best of myriad examples of apparently careful and ceremonial placement of bear bones across northern Europe. Scientist Philippe Fosse, one of the world’s preeminent cave bear researchers, spends a month a year at the Chauvet Cave, and believes that “predators played a very important role in human evolution.” In the varied and multifarious relationship between humans and bears, this cave appears in all respects to be the foundation.
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When we consider any number of ancient and modern indigenous cultures, not to mention the ubiquitous presence of bears in our own culture, it is hard not to be intrigued by the evidence of our spiritual connection to this creature. Carl Jung once said that “there is a bear with glowing eyes deep in the heart of human consciousness.” The Gwich’in believe that this spiritual connection includes the bear’s awareness of thoughts and words. “You can’t talk about bear,” says Catherine Mitchell of the Gwich’in. “Our people say it can hear you.” Other native cultures refer to bear only obliquely, calling it grandmother, grandfather, all familial terms of respect. I never would have that kind of understanding. But it seemed there must be more for me to learn.

I hoped that indigenous, and specifically Inupiat or Gwich’in, spirituality might offer a way to understand this connection to the wilderness that our culture does not have words to describe. Maybe those answers would be salve for my wounds.

The Inupiat are primarily ocean people and are more familiar with the polar bear, or
nanuk
. Grizzly and polar bear rarely interact (though changes in wild animal behavior because of warming trends in the Arctic have resulted in more frequent interaction and even interbreeding), so the interior Gwich’in are more familiar with grizzly, which they call
shih
. Though the Gwich’in call themselves the Caribou People and think of themselves as sharing part of the heart of the caribou, they hold bear in even higher esteem. “Our ancestors say that long ago animals on earth used to talk to one another and to humans. There were shamans who talked to animals. The animals warned people of how to protect themselves from animals,” says Gwich’in elder Hannah Alexie. “Grizzly is the strongest animal of the north. I always have respect for grizzly bear. They are on their own out there. We were told not to interfere with animals, not to tease them. They are on their own, like we are on our own. Be careful when you go onto the land, be alert.” Then she adds, “All things are from our Lord. We have to protect our animals, never take more than we can use. This is what our elders taught us.”

The bear is central to religious beliefs in nearly every Arctic and northern boreal culture from ancient times to the present, with uncanny similarities of beliefs and practices even among peoples of disparate geographies. The cult of the bear and the “sending home” ceremony practiced by the Ainu of Japan continued as late as the 1930s. In this ceremony, the Ainu men brought a bear cub home to the village. The cub was raised according to strict protocol in a cage kept in the village, and then killed and consumed with extraordinary intricacy of ceremony. For the Ainu, the bear was an intercessor between humankind and the mountain gods. The sending home of the bear allowed the god to return to the home of the mountain gods and report on his time in the village, judging the villagers by the careful execution of the rite surrounding his death.

This ceremony is shared by the Sami of Scandinavia, the Gilyaks of Eastern Siberia, and the Inupiat and Gwich’in of North America. The hunt for a cub is conducted when the bear is denned in early spring, and meticulous instructions explain the use of the implement for killing the bear. Additional prescriptions detail the preparation and consumption of bear meat by a village, with specific gender restrictions. In the case of the Gwich’in, the skin is stretched, and the women preparing the skin must walk around it clockwise. Bones are separated at the joints, so that no bones are broken. Finally, the various cultures follow strict tradition with the ornamentation of the bear skull and special preparation of the bones in order to support the bear soul’s journey back to the home of the gods.

Environmental historian Paul Shepard suggested that these ancient cultures believed that bear is tutor to man. “The human question went beyond ‘How do we survive the cold winter?’ to ‘How do we survive the cold death?’ The bear more than any other teacher gave an answer to the ultimate question—an astonishing, astounding, improbable answer, enacted rather than revealed … the bear was master of renewal and the wheel of the seasons, of the knowledge of when to die and when to be reborn … the bear seems to die, or to mimic death, and in that mimicry is the suggestion of a performance, a behavior intended to communicate.”
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Shepard believed that the survival of the wilderness is key to the survival of the psyche of humankind. He contended that wilderness, and specifically the presence of and human coexistence with predators, and especially bears, which share habitat and omnivorous characteristics with humans, helped to form the psyche of
homo erectus
by teaching us to come together as communities to protect ourselves from predators. Grizzly expert Doug Peacock agrees that “a hundred thousand years of evolution bind our genome spiritually and psychologically to those ferocious beasts … the anchor of the wild keeps us tethered. Somewhere in the modern psyche we crave contact.”
⁶

A tethering. A ferocity. This is the dichotomy I wrestled to hold in my mind, holding it gingerly away from my heart as it worked desperately to heal.

There was a time when I thought I would be happy if I died. The past year, I’d wanted to die, wanted to stop the pain of grief. But another time, after my freshman year in college, I’d hiked alone in Hatcher Pass in the Talkeetna Mountains north of Anchorage with Oakley, our golden retriever. Granite ridgelines sliced the clear Alaska air, carving away extraneous thoughts. When I brought pictures from that hike to college the next year, one roommate, a debutante from Louisiana, gasped, “Oh my God! Is that
Switzerland
?” No, more vast. More wild. More beautiful.

I had not seen a soul on my hike, and heated by exertion, I stopped to let my head hang back, feeling my pulse pounding at my throat and the breeze, cool from the snowfields, warm from the sun, passing over my skin. Oakley and I scrambled up a scree slope and walked along a ridge, stopping to rest where we could look across the verdant valley under a cerulean sky. There was no water near, so I squirted water from a bike bottle into Oakley’s mouth. He lapped it up appreciatively. A marmot whistle cut through the mountain air. Another answered from across the valley. I listened and thought I heard all the wisdom of the world. In sound and wind and light and blood, the pleasure I felt through every part of me could only be called erotic. I remember thinking that if I died, right there, right then, I would be happy with my life, and with my death. It was enough.

In these Arctic mountains, though, I wanted to suffer. I wanted to live, so that I could suffer, believing that if I was hurting more, I was somehow closer to Dad and Kathy, impossibly closer to the time of their deaths and thus closer to their lives. I wanted that pain, reaching for it with growing desperation in the moments it ebbed.

Even as we gained altitude, the ground remained boggy, and my spirits sagged. Because of permafrost, summer tundra is frequently soggy; there is nowhere for water to go. Arctic grasses grow clumped together, attracting and holding dust blown by the wind to build up peat around the base of the grass. This helps protect it in the deep freeze of winter, when icy blasts hurl frozen particles across the landscape. In the summer, though, the unwieldy tussocks foil foot placement, interrupting any rhythm of movement. Each step was a struggle. I put one foot in front of the other, ascending into cloud, driven only by hope and the familiarity of moving my legs up the side of a mountain.

Along the way a caribou antler, bleached white by the sun, contrasted sharply with the tundra. Both male and female caribou grow antlers and shed them every year, the females after calving, and the males after the fall rut. It seemed as good a spot as any to rest.

“You guys want to take a break?” I asked. “I could use a granola bar.”

I sat on one of the drier tussocks, letting my daypack fall off my shoulders and pulling out a bag of granola bars and my Alaska wildflowers book. I handed bars to Sally and Ned.

Turning the pages in the book, I tried to identify the tiny blooms surrounding us. Despite my reference book, my attempts at classification were subject to a large margin of error: still, I could name the plentiful white mountain avens, capitate lousewort, yellow anenome, groundsel, frigid arnica, tall cottongrass, moss campion, Arctic sandwort, bell heather, woolly lousewort, and something I thought was either purple mountain saxifrage or Lapland rosebay, I wasn’t sure.

“What’s that?” Sally pointed to the top of the ridge one valley away from us. Two brown shapes made small by distance moved slowly toward the valley between us.

I squinted. “I don’t know … Is that …”

“Are they bears?” Ned asked.

“I can’t tell.”

The three of us stood, willing our eyes to bring the shapes into focus.

“Might be. They’re big,” I said. “I don’t think so. I think they’re … Wow.”

“What?”

“I think they’re moose. See that hump on their backs … and their legs? Now that they’re coming this way a little you can see their legs. That’s really weird.”

“I didn’t think moose came so far north,” Ned said.

“Yeah, I didn’t either. Or so high on a mountain. Strange.”

“Well, should we keep going?” asked Ned.

“We’d better if we want to get to the glacier,” I said.

I tightened the straps of my daypack, and we all clambered to our feet.

“Did you and Dad ever talk about stuff that was really important?” I asked Ned. I watched my boots to keep from stumbling.

“Yeah, sure,” he said.

“I mean, I know he wasn’t great at having meaningful conversations, but once in a while he could surprise you,” I said.

“He did a lot of telling me what I should do,” Ned said.

“When I told him I was dating someone once,” I said, “he asked me if that guy knew how to love me. That was a surprise.”

Ned let out something like a snort. “Seriously? You and I definitely had different relationships with him.”

“He really cared,” I said. “I think he just didn’t always know how to say it.”

Ned seemed to pick up the pace then. I noted it but didn’t try to match him. It occurred to me that in addition to mule-headed stubbornness and a love of reading, Ned and I also shared the need to make my father proud, and that in spite of, or perhaps because of, this similarity, we were less likely to bridge the gap between us.

With Ned moving farther ahead, I slowed down until Sally caught up. “Geesh, I can’t believe the ground is still so wet this far up the mountain,” I said.

“You mean this isn’t normal?”

“Not where I’m used to hiking. But it’s my first time here too. How are you doing?”

“It’s hard work, but it’s nice to walk for a change,” she said. I watched her make her way one careful footstep at a time, in the manner of someone still learning her way. She was a good sport, pushing herself, never complaining.

“You guys aren’t very close, are you?” she asked, with a care I found surprising and an awareness that startled me.

“No, we’ve never been close. I think we’ve always loved each other but never really got along.”

“I never had a sibling,” she said. “Always wanted one.”

“Yeah, my youngest brother seems to bridge the gaps,” I said. “But Ned—he’s tough. I’m sure he thinks I am too. You’re awfully good to come on this trip, given our reasons and our relationship. Guessing you didn’t know much about either. Thanks for hanging in there.”

“I’m just glad I was able to come,” she said.

We finally reached the top of the first hill, where Ned was waiting. This far up the mountainside, the cloud wrapped us in a discomfiting gray, limiting visibility to tens of feet. A house-sized boulder perched atop the hill, the only thing visible. Ned was looking at the map. Getting to the glacier would require more than an hour of steady walking. Even with the most positive attitude, walking in soggy tussocks in the middle of a cloud isn’t much fun.

“We won’t get much farther in these conditions, and won’t see anything even if we did,” I said. “I’m okay with going back to camp if you guys are.”

Ned nodded glumly. “Makes sense.”

“Sorry, guys,” I said. This trip, it seemed, would be all about conceding inadequacies.

“I’m glad we hiked anyway,” said Sally, and I found myself grateful for her cheerfulness and ashamed of my discouragement.

“Let’s have lunch and then head down,” I said.

Ned already had his pack off. Sally and I followed suit. I laid the shotgun next to me pointing out into the cloud.

“Remember that time Dad took us up to camp at Williwaw Lakes and the tent blew down?” I asked Ned, pulling a sandwich out of the top pocket of my daypack.

“How’d that happen?” Sally asked.

“The wind was just too strong,” I said. “It was one of those old tents with the center pole, and the pole ripped right through the top of the tent.”

“It was something like two or three in the morning, wasn’t it?” Ned asked.

“I just remember it was dark, but starting to get light again,” I said, then laughed. “Sam and Max screamed. They were still pretty young. And it was scary, that tent whipping around like evil spirits had got ahold of it.”