Читать книгу The Wild in You - Lorna Crozier - Страница 7

Drenched and cold, I squat above the ragged salmon, keeping my distance, but eye to eye with my first grizzly bear. I hold onto this sensation as if I’m gripping it with long sharp claws. For a moment, what keeps the spirit in the body and what separates one species from another disappears. I have moved outside my skin into a state of sweet connection. Attentive, nameless, quieter than the rain, I see the bear and the bear sees me. What is untamed and unafraid has reached out from me to meet the largest land mammal on the continent. “The brain is wider than the sky,” Emily Dickinson wrote. Our brains, human and bear, touch each other.

To be silent at such a time is proper; it’s part of being in a state of grace. But because I’ve lived most of my life as a writer, I’m obsessed with trying to find words that will hold my wonder, however clumsily, and pass it on. Like the best of photographers, poets strive to translate what the eye sees, but also what the soul catches and holds up to its own uncanny light.

Ian McAllister is such a photographer: he knows that inner shine. It illuminates his photographs of the Great Bear Rainforest, that sweeping track of coastline that flows from the tip of Vancouver Island to the Alaska Panhandle. He and his wife Karen have known this traditional First Nations territory intimately for over twenty years. It’s their home. Their life work is to protect it.

My stay in the Great Bear lasted only five stormy days one October. Kim Gray, the editor of the online magazine Toque & Canoe, sent me there to write a travel article and she set up a meeting between me and her