Peter gazed on, evenly, with awe. It is how Peter considers most things. I envied him that. I fingered the smooth top of the nozzle on the bear spray, which felt inadequate, and even absurd. The grizzly remained on his hind legs, towering, still, his small eyes peering in our direction, huge head tilted to sniff the air. We stood waving poles and hollering. In the chess game of wilderness, only he knew the rules. The next move was entirely his. We would have to try to understand with a quick interpretation. This was his land, his game. He only took a half-minute to consider. Turning a darker brown bottom to us, he bounded back up and over the mountain from where he had come, long strong bounds, covering great distances, so that it took him only perhaps a minute to ascend the hill and disappear over the other side. Why in the world he would turn and run from us still baffles me. Perhaps looking at us, he saw himself, too. I had envisioned a meeting with grizzly. I envisioned meeting him alone, or with my husband, or my unborn child, or my child once born – with those that meant more to me than life. He saunters toward me and stops, knowing that somehow he owed me one. He looks at me with confusion or surprise, but he knows. He knows and he turns away. My visions were of course ridiculous. There is no mercy or fairness in the wild. There is only untamed innocence. And in that there are no guarantees. My reaction demonstrated this: I froze. I did not rationally consider anything. But no matter. My shortcomings notwithstanding, I had been expecting him. We had to meet. Our meeting marked far more than merely satisfying my sense of eventual inevitability. To espy a grizzly was to rendezvous with no less than the creation which formed and still today forms these ancient lands. Grizzly, as the other large predators, is an indicator of the completeness and complexity of the Arctic eco-system. The Arctic is the last great wild space for them to thrive. I was face to face with creation. I was in and of creation. That night we crawled into our sleeping bags, zipping up the tent behind us. Outside a set of thin
the frosted spirals of its sepia translucence— wild cucumber vine
Wally Swist’s selected haiku, The Silence Between Us, was published by Brooks Books in their Goodrich Haiku Masters Series in 2005. He is also the author of several other books of poetry, including the forthcoming Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love, that was chosen by Yusef Komunyakaa as a co-winner in the Crab Orchard Series Open Poetry Competition, and will be published by Southern Illinois University Press in the spring of 2012. His scholarly monograph, The Friendship of Two New England Poets: Robert Frost and Robert Francis, was published by The Edwin Mellen Press in 2009.
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