I should be terrified of bears. More than fifteen years ago, in the Teton Range of Wyoming, a friend and I were hiking down a darkening trail when a startled black bear charged us. As I stared into the bear’s eyes, I expected to see my death, but found only her bewilderment. Just before she reached me, she turned aside and thrashed into the underbrush, fading into green shadows beyond sight or sound. Perhaps her cubs were nearby, and she’d merely meant to frighten us. Still, the memory burned: her face so close to mine. I’d survived, but I was no longer the same.
Over the years since, I found myself drawn back to dusk and shadow. For a time, I lived in Vermont, and I came to love the stick season, after the last leaves fell and the tourists disappeared, leaving only the skeletal fingers of branches interlocking across startlingly quiet woods. Then, invisible things began to emerge in the emptied spaces: glimpses of distant ridgelines, the rolling contours of the land.
By November of the pandemic, after months of quarantines, I’d picked up a habit of silence and solitude, of running up hillsides at sunset and returning after nightfall, though I knew this was a time I might encounter bears. One evening, I was jogging alone up Haystack Mountain, teetering in spiked shoes over ice-coated tangles of roots and stones—when I saw bear prints again. Illuminated by my headlamp beam, the tracks formed crisp, silver patterns in the snow. Fear burst and vanished like a cloud of frozen breath, dissipating into the dark. Ahead, the first stars shone.
Was this bear still nearby? Or had she already run over the mountain and down the other side, on her way to somewhere else? I remembered a passage from one of Henry David Thoreau’s journals—how snow reveals hidden pathways of animals and how he dreamed of finding traces to lead him on a mysterious, transcendent journey, “the trail of some higher life that has been abroad in the night.”
In the gathering twilight, these prints seemed much larger than those of an ordinary bear: unnerving, but also jewel-like, wondrous. I thought of a silhouette lumbering through shadows toward some unknowable destination. A brush with death might also create marks within us, I realized. And perhaps, for an instant on that Wyoming evening, the Teton bear and I had even changed places, leaving traces of each other in our minds—strange pathways, formed of earth and bone and stars, that would outlast the melting ice and snow.
I still wanted to survive. But before I turned aside and fled home—abandoning this summit to another bear—I switched my headlamp off. I stood motionless, watching the air turn from fading violet to cobalt-black until I could see no more. I imagined myself dissolving, flowing invisible along the animal’s tracks, headed ever deeper and higher with her into the dark.
