“James, I think there’s a bear swimming to you.”  Janna’s vision isn’t always the best so I finish washing the bowl before I look up from the morning dishes and realize that she’s right.  There’s a bear ferrying across the river, not really trying to swim towards me but the current is arcing it to the pebbles at my feet.  I stand from my dishwashing squat and take a few steps back from the main body of the Yukon River and make some noise to let it know I’m here.  “Yo Bear! Yo Bear!”  It’s become an old joke but I learned from a wildland firefighting training video years ago that this is what you should say to an attacking bear.  It seems to have worked in the video so I’ve used it a hundred times since, usually but not always with success.

As it gets closer I can see its shoulder muscles working while it’s swimming and realize this black bear is huge.  I’ve worked and played around this species a lot and don’t often see them this big.  Luckily, it’s trying to swim away from me. But, the harder it swims the closer the current brings it to me and the more it seems to be getting upset.

As I stand there, I use myself as a deterrent between the bear and the other 7 members of our group.  The four girls are playing while the other parents are starting to pack up for another day on the river – one that can never match the day we’ve just lived.  I work the angles and make sure that the bear will land upstream of myself, keeping myself between it and my downstream family.

Then I hear my oldest daughter, Julia’s, voice, “Dad, there’s a grizzly swimming towards you on the other side of the river.” I look over and my first thought to myself is one of pride, “Wow, my 10 year old daughter can recognize the differences between grizzlies and blacks while they’re swimming.”  My second more lucid thought is, “I have a grizzly AND a black bear both swimming at me, I have a family to defend and I’m only armed with a damp dishrag.”

I call to Eric, the other dad, to get the bear spray, a modestly better mode of defence than a dishrag and do a dance of angles with the 2 bears and our families being the 3 points of an ever moving triangle with myself in the middle. A bear bang goes off with no effect on the bears and the dance continues.

The previous day the plan was to paddle until dusk in the hopes of seeing even more wildlife than usual in the twilight hours.  As usual, most of the day was spent with the 2 canoes rafted up while we lazed about soaking up the sunshine of a near-Arctic summer.  We enjoyed endless singing and ukulele and the mandatory stop to catch some grayling in a pocket of clear water at the foot of a joining stream. That afternoon, we heard the first motor for several days when a conservation officer in a zodiac pulled up to us. He told the story of two men who were sleeping while their tent was stomped on by a curious black bear the night before only a few miles upstream.  We had already seen several black bears that day on the river’s edge and wondered which one it might have been. 

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We were new to the Yukon but figured that it wasn’t usual for the temperature to be 27C at 9pm.  It had been that way every day for the past nine and we had sunburns to prove it.  It felt like we could paddle all night and probably have enough light.  The kids had already asked for exactly that – their hope was to pull out their sleeping bags and fall asleep in the middle of the canoe to the rhythm of the river around them while mom and dad paddle them into the morning. They’ve done this a few times before and watching them, I can see that they love it. 

At about 10pm, not wanting to paddle the increasingly slate coloured river all night we decided we should start poking our noses into eddies to look for a place to set up tents.  My family saw a small inlet and pulled into a narrow 50m long finger off the main channel with vegetation hanging into the water off both banks.  The kids weren’t initially interested in this claustrophobic recess until we saw the cow moose and her calf standing in the water watching us only a few canoe lengths away.  We sat in silence for several long minutes while they munched on whatever moose eat and watched us, more curiously than cautiously. 

When we spun the canoe back into the main current we couldn’t wait to gloat our friends about the experience we just had.  We paddled up to them loudly, barely able to contain ourselves with the news of what we’d just seen until we realized that they were even more excited than us.  It turns out that just after we’d nosed in to the channel, they had seen from 10 feet away, a lynx pounce and destroy an unseen but well heard rodent in the weeds under its feet.  They floated silently by while the lynx earned its dinner unaware of 4 humans less than a boat length away.

We’re all hungry at this point and its getting darker.  We had opted to dine on the water today as the lovely, shady spot at which we chose to eddy out for lunch was already occupied by a very large black bear who didn’t seem to want to share his lunch spot with us.  After almost losing count of bears on the river’s edge and ridgelines today we decided it was more fun to just float and bloat than stop to eat.  Impending darkness lowered our living standards and we opted to set up camp on the nearest narrow, stony island.  The usual hum of activity occurred with tents being erected and filled, canoes being flipped and food being made then stored.  The kids were particularly loud and their high pitched voices filled the fire with stories of bears and moose and lynx.  I was away from the group, just out of reach of the excited voices when I heard the first howl.  I called to the girls to hush them.  At first they didn’t believe me. Silence.  Then I howled.  Then we all howled.  Then silence again. Then we heard a single loan howl, not far away, just beyond the far bank.  Then the valley erupted with howls, many wolves but far beyond the treeline.  This continued, the exchange of human and wolven howls for a few minutes until and after we put the kids to bed.

With the kids in bed I pulled out the trip bottle of tequila and poured a small glass and fixed my eyes on the near banks to see what I could make out in the dying light.  It only took a few seconds to see two yellow eyes.  At first I couldn’t be sure what I was looking at but as my eyes slowly adjusted I could see the svelte black shape and two yellow eyes of a large wolf, 25m away, staring at me across the narrow channel of the river. I walked quietly to the tents and whispered to the girls that they should come out silently.  After reassuring them that nothing would eat them, they joined me in their pyjamas to watch the wolf pace the near shoreline.

Bed.  I woke up early as usual and got up with the usual plan of stoking a fire to keep me warm while making the first pot of coffee.  I stepped out of the tent and out of curiosity looked to the spot where we had watched the wolf the night before.  The wolf was gone but there were prints the size of my hands scattered about only metres from our tent.  The pack had been over in the night to sniff us out and perhaps size up the howling visitors in their territory.

We breakfasted and broke camp, the kids still throwing out the occasional howl to see if the pack of Yukon wolves were still nearby. I carried the usual dishes to the edge of the river which brings us back to the beginning of this story.

The black bear reached the island first.  My eyes were drawn to the size of its paws and amount of water they pulled with each stroke.  Its transition from swimming to walking the shore was seamless. It was the same motion, only the paws were now pushing on rocks instead of water.  As I hoped, it walked upstream away from our group to the far tip of the island.  Some silent language was then spoken between the two bears and the now walking grizzly, having already reached the other bank of our island turned tail and retreated.  The massive black bear who easily outsized the grizzly then followed in the same direction and also left our island.

This seemed like the climax to an incredible river trip but it still wasn’t quite done.  We finished loading our boats and set out again for another float on yet another smoking hot Yukon summer day, the whole way playing ukulele and reminiscing over all we had recently seen.  That afternoon we saw plumes of smoke indicating wildfires in our future.  All day we watched the smoke move to our left and right and back but always closer as the river twisted its way through the subarctic.  Finally we were watching a forest fire march down a mountainside in the near dark straight towards us and the island in the river that we decided to call home that night.  It was rank 5 or that’s what we would have called it while we were firefighting.  It wasn’t a running crown fire but active enough to torch every tree top to bottom in its path. Fortunately, the wall of flames was doused by the only rain we’d seen since pointing north in our canoes from Lac Labarge 11 days ago.  By morning our tents were covered in ash as was everything else that was left outside that night and the sun was trying to shine through the smoke filling the valley.   

It had been another late night from the excitement of the flames so we decided for a late start on the water the next day. The adults were quiet, tired and still processing all that had happened.  Zadie, the 9 year old 11 days into a river trip done entirely on crutches from a recent knee surgery was the first to give her opinion on the matter.  As we paddled away from the flames she dramatically covered her face with a makeshift bailer made from a plastic milk jug and shrieked, “Um, I think we’re a little too close to nature!”