What a Standoff with a Black Bear Taught Me about Life in Northern Alberta

I was five years old when I had my first encounter with a black bear. In the spring of 1990, my father, a wildlife biologist, brought home an orphaned three-month-old cub in a cardboard box. The cub’s mother, having burrowed beneath the roots of an old tree, had been killed in the den by a logging excavator, but the cub, weighing barely more than a bag of apples, survived. Forestry workers caught the young bear and dropped it off at the Fish and Wildlife office in Peace River, Alberta, where my dad worked, and he called my mom with the news.

“The cub is going to stay in the basement for the night,” she told us.

My brother, Brendan, older by three years, raced out the front door, jumped on his bike, and pedalled down the street to tell his friends. The kids who lived on our street often joked that we “lived in a zoo.” Previously, my dad had brought home three orphaned coyote pups that tumbled in play on the concrete floor. On another occasion, there was a barred owl with an injured wing. The summer before, my dad had helped to rescue a moose calf that had been stranded on the riverbank after its mother swam across the kilometre-wide Peace River. The tenderness with which he took off his blue sports jacket and gently wrapped it around the calf’s eyes, so that it wouldn’t be frightened by the crowd of people that gathered on the riverbank to watch, has always stayed with me.

My dad’s work as a biologist felt heroic, even godly, to my five-year-old mind. He seemed to be able to communicate with animals in their wordless languages. He wasn’t afraid to get close, handling them with the same affection he showed when tucking us in at night.

The cub looked at me, and her eyes were a shade of blue not unlike my own.

Once in the basement, my dad held the cub in his gloved hands and invited me and my brother to gently stroke her fur. The feeling of the bear was paradoxical: her long guard hairs were coarse to the touch, but underneath, her coat was soft as a goose down pillow. To feel the warmth of a live bear, a creature that embodied the word wild, provoked an upwelling of wonder in me. The cub looked at me, and I was surprised to see that her eyes were a shade of blue not unlike my own.

The cub fell asleep on the cold floor as I kept vigil next to her. My mother took a photograph of us: a pigtailed girl crouching next to the bear, who is coiled into a tight black ball. There is a strange sense of symmetry to it. Two cubs of different kinds—Ursus americanus, a solitary species, and Homo sapiens, a species that’s evolved through socialization—curling into the protection of their soft, gummy bodies. My small fingers are interwoven, hands clasped. My eyes, wide as planets, express wonder and empathy for the creature who’d lost her family.

May 2019

I was in my fourth season as a fire tower lookout in northwestern Alberta, where I was tasked with spotting smoke from a hundred-foot-high tower and alerting firefighting crews to potential burns. However, while surveying the land, my eyes were often drawn to an abundance of wildlife: migratory birds, moose and their gangly legged calves, mysterious lynx, and groundhogs that emerged from their dens, standing on guard like foot soldiers. The cabin beneath the tower, my base camp, gave me an on-the-ground perspective. If I wasn’t watching for fire from the tower, I was watching for wildlife from my cabin windows.

A mother black bear and two cubs sauntered north of the fire tower through the cutblock, a clearing where the forest had been logged several years before. The aspen and birch saplings hadn’t yet grown tall enough to obscure the view. The bears stuck out against the landscape, their black fur shining like polished stones against the dead grass and leafless brush. Banks of snow sheltered against the willows. The fire moss, a carpet of coral-stemmed lichen, glowed in the afternoon sun. From up in the fire tower, I watched the bears. It appeared as though they were walking across a bed of hot coals.

From afar, the bears were beautiful. Fixed in time and space, like a landscape painting or a photograph in a gallery that I could pause in front of and appreciate without feeling threatened. I knew that bears were mostly afraid of people. These bears didn’t want anything to do with me.

The animals looked huge, as bears do to the average person who rarely sees them. The human mind, when seeing a bear, often reacts with shock and awe, as though the animal’s astonishing bulk of fur, muscle, tooth, and claw has appeared out of thin air, like a sleight of hand, a magic trick, as though bears belong only in our imaginations and not along the peripheries of our daily lives. Now you see me, now you don’t. An appearance that might be accompanied by the click of a camera shutter or the sound of a rifle firing. Sounds that translate to: We love bears, and we hate them.

The bears grazed on fireweed and coltsfoot emerging from the bare earth. They appeared calm and at home on the land. Unbothered by the tower, the cabin, the scent of a woman and her dog, and even the forestry radio that chirped alive with human voices.

I hoped they wouldn’t edge any closer.

Every April for the previous four years, the melting snow and the geese returning to the northern skies signalled it was time to pack my boxes of food rations, books, clay and pottery tools, and climbing gear and prepare for another season alone watching for wildfires. In a world gone digital, many people are surprised to learn that such a job even exists, but there are a hundred active fire towers remaining in Alberta. Lookouts are the first line of defence in wildfire detection in the province, responsible for keeping vigil over the forests and grasslands and reporting the faintest trace of smoke.

I loved the thrill of climbing a hundred rungs up a vertical ladder to reach my office every morning.

I was thirty-four years old. Seasons at the fire tower—April to September—enabled me to slow down and do what I’d always wanted to do since I was a child: write. Write articles and books about the social and environmental issues I cared about. I loved the thrill of climbing a hundred rungs up a vertical ladder to reach my office every morning and the extraordinary views of the forest and skies. Whenever I spied a tendril of smoke rising out of the forest, my heart beat as fast as a hummingbird’s wings. Blood rushed to my head. Even though the isolation could wear me down, there was a kinetic draw to life at the tower I struggled to resist. And the pay was good. I was on my way to becoming a “lifer,” which is what we affectionately call the lookouts who migrate back to the job year after year.

This would be my first season at Hawk Tower, a site located in what Western scientists and land managers often refer to as the Wildland Urban Interface, which describes the transitory zone between wilderness and land developed by human activity. I’d previously worked at Muskeg Tower, located fifty kilometres west as the crow flies, where I saw the tracks of my wild neighbours—moose, bear, wolf—but rarely saw the creatures themselves. I assumed that my dog, Holly, kept most of the wildlife wary and away from the cabin. An electric fence surrounded the site, as did one at Hawk Tower, but I often left the gate wide open at Muskeg. The risk of a wildlife encounter seemed low.

My only close encounter with a bear at Muskeg Tower happened on a rainy afternoon when I was down in the cabin, designated on low fire hazard, and practising yoga in my kitchen. I went outside to pee. I couldn’t be bothered to walk the hundred metres to the outhouse, so I squatted down on a patch of grass beside the cabin. I looked up, startled to see a large cinnamon black bear less than twenty metres away—inside the fence, with no barrier between us. The bear was under my fire tower, lackadaisically propped up on its huge rear end and using a front paw to tear at the long grass and shovel it into its jaw. I noticed the bear’s muddy tracks on the sidewalk, which ran parallel to the cabin. I’d probably been upside down in downward dog as the bear strolled right through the open gate.

Knees shaking, heart jackhammering in my ears, I pulled up my pants and tiptoed back into the cabin. The bear didn’t seem to register my presence as I watched it gorging like a hungry cow. I photographed the animal through the rain-pattered window, then cracked the window open, tapped on the glass pane, and gently called out, “Oh, hey there, bear!” Terrified, the bear yanked up its head at the sound of my voice, spun on the spot, and bounced toward the fence as if riding a pogo stick. I laughed. It slipped effortlessly through the uncharged wires of the fence, as though it had done it a thousand times before.

After the encounter, I texted my father a photo of the cinnamon bear.

Wait a minute, came his response. Isn’t that inside your bear fence—was the fence even on?

Sheepishly, I turned on the electric fence and never saw that cinnamon bear again.

My lone encounter with a bear at Muskeg Tower confirmed what I thought I knew about them: save for a few bad apples, bears are mostly afraid of people.

But Hawk Tower was at a lower altitude, surrounded by mixed forest—black poplars, birch, fir, spruce, and pine—and located much closer to human activity. There was more food for a bear to forage here. Although the towers were what we called “next-door neighbours” on the map, the two sites were markedly different. Muskeg Tower was slightly cooler and surrounded by an ocean of scraggly black spruce and swamps. The nearest community was thirty kilometres away. There were no roads that led to the tower, other than an old ATV trail, which had become overgrown with alders. I suspected that the ridge on which my tower was built served as a safe route for wildlife to bypass people and reach the river valley.

Leaving the fence gate wide open wouldn’t be an option here.

By my fourth season at the tower, I had the seasonal routine down pat. In early April, I’d been flown in by helicopter, accompanied by Holly, a black-and-white shepherd-husky mix. Food and water would be resupplied monthly, delivered from the fire base in Peace River by helicopter. Firefighting crews would stop in every few weeks to use the site as standby for wildfire ignitions. But until the leaves faded orange and the cranes swarmed southward in the skies, I’d be left here alone, watching for smoke, tending a small vegetable garden, reading books, harvesting wild berries, and wandering the forest with Holly.

Don, the previous lookout who manned Hawk Tower, a lifer in his late sixties, had worked on towers for over twenty years. The last ten of them he’d spent here, until he decided to move to a tower site located closer to the town of Peace River.

“Sounds like you might have to redraw the boundaries,” my father told me.

I wondered about Don’s relationship with the bears. Only a couple of weeks earlier, as we were packing up our belongings and supplies at the warehouse in Peace River, he’d said something that surprised me. “Don’t worry about the bears, Trina—they’re peaceful bears,” he’d told me. “But don’t get close to them and talk to them like I did.”

I’d stared at him a bit wide-eyed, confused. I wasn’t sure how to respond.

“It’s okay, Don—I definitely won’t.”

Surely, he didn’t mean “close” in terms of physical proximity. The image of a bear eating out of his hand sprang to my mind. What kind of dynamic was I about to step into?

I shared my worries with my father, and I could tell he wasn’t happy.

“Sounds like you might have to redraw the boundaries,” he told me.

• The Value of a Bear
• How We Treat Bears in Cities Is Trash
• Dreading Wildfire Season

On that same day, the bears I’d spotted from the tower returned—only much closer to my cabin. I dashed outside in my socks to make sure the gate was closed on the bear fence.

The electric fence hugged the edges of my yard atop the hill, protecting my cabin, a small tool shed, garden beds, and the fire tower. The fence had five wires at different heights—the highest at one and a half metres, the lowest only fifteen centimetres off the ground. A solar array charged a 12,000-volt current that ran through the wires. I’d never seen the fence work. In theory, when on, if a bear tried to slip through, it would touch its nose to the wire, which would deliver a painful shock. The lowest wire was necessary to deter a curious bear cub, or even an adult bear, from worming underneath the fence on their belly.

The lifers had mixed sentiments about the efficiency of the bear fences. Don had told me he once witnessed a black bear clear the top wire like an Olympic high jumper. “The big guy hopped right over the fence!” he’d exclaimed.

Several lookouts insisted the fences didn’t work. One grumbled that they were essentially akin to lobster traps. “Bear gets in, bear can’t get out. Now you’re stuck inside an electric fence with a pissed-off bear,” he’d told me. “Not good.”

I stood behind my fence with its gate securely closed, my arms crossed against my chest, gazing down at the bears. Holly lifted her snout to the air and perked her ears in their direction.

“What are we gonna do about these bears, eh?” I said to Holly, and she wagged her tail.

The cubs appeared to be about the same size as Holly, weighing maybe fifty pounds. They were yearlings, around seventeen months old, and would be weaned before the summer’s end. The cubs looked nervous, peering up in the direction of the cabin, darting closer to their mother.

I considered the faint thrum of the electric current running through the wires of the fence. If the fence failed to deter the bears, as my colleague had warned, I had other tools to choose from: two canisters of bear spray, an air horn, and a twelve-gauge shotgun. In my first season as a lookout, my dad had sent me a box of rubber bullets, as a non-lethal deterrent, and lead slugs that would be powerful enough to take down a charging bear.

“Load three bullets in the magazine,” he’d instructed, demonstrating with the lightweight defender. “First, a slug. Then two rubber bullets. You want your last shot to be a fatal one—if you need it.”

I decided that if the bears set foot beyond the willows into the grassy clearing around my cabin, then I’d scare them away.

At dusk, I slipped into an old T-shirt and a pair of pyjama pants and wandered outside to use the outhouse, leaving Holly inside the cabin. As I reached for the outhouse door handle, I saw the mother bear and cubs on the other side of the electric fence. Panicking, I hid behind the outhouse.

Had they seen me? I peered around the corner, trying to steal a glance. Up close, the mother bear looked enormous to me, maybe 500 pounds. It was not, in fact, an especially large female, probably weighing no more than 300 pounds, but I had no reference for comparison. All I knew was that it was big and close. Way too close.

The mother bear flopped down on its belly, furiously feeding on dandelions. I was so close that I could hear its jaw clicking, molars grinding, and lips making loud smacking noises. The cubs flanked their mother, chewing with vigour. One was bigger, more robust than its sibling, with blond fur around its eyes as though wearing a party mask. The smaller cub had a blond muzzle and bore unusual markings on its chest: two white crescent moons. A kind of birthmark. Instinctively, I touched the freckle in the corner of my left eye that I’d had since childhood.

“Hey bear!” I shouted down at the mother, only a few metres away.

The small cub with the crescent moon markings seemed the most aware of my presence. It kept scenting the air, as if trying to make sense of who I was.

I crept into the tool shed to grab an air horn, a canister of compressed air that, when activated, produces an extremely loud noise. They’re a smaller version of what’s installed on semi-trailer trucks, trains, and large ships to send out a warning or a distress alarm.

I told myself to be brave and marched right up to the fence where the bears could see me, bear spray in one hand and the air horn in the other.

“Hey bear!” I shouted down at the mother, only a few metres away. I waved my arms like windshield wipers and widened my stance.

The mother bear’s head shot up. My body trembled.

“Get out of here!” I yelled at the bears. The cubs tumbled down the slope, but the mother bear didn’t even flinch. The bear stood its ground, dropping its head and locking eyes with me. Its eyes were small in comparison with the size of its skull, and they felt cold and unpredictable. I couldn’t read a damned thing in that bear’s beady-eyed stare.

I sensed that bear was not afraid of me, however. Like me, it widened its stance. I held up a deterrent in each hand, as though they were loaded pistols and we were going head to head in a gunfight.

“You’ve gotta get out of here!” I pleaded with the bear. “You guys aren’t safe here.”

The mother bear cracked open its jaw slightly, and I swore that I could hear a slight huff of breath, as though the bear was saying to me: The new girl doesn’t know who’s in charge here.

I squeezed the air horn, which let out a deafening blast, like a semi-truck barrelling down the highway at breakneck speed.

The mother bear spun and fled downhill. When the cubs, waiting at the edge of the forest, saw their mother coming at them like a freight train, they turned and sprinted into the bush.

I felt a momentary swell of self-congratulatory pride. I was redrawing the boundary between myself and the bears. Mutual avoidance was for the bears’ own good, I reminded myself.

Adapted and excerpted from Black Bear: A Story of Siblinghood and Survival by Trina Moyles. Copyright © 2026 Trina Moyles. Published by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.