"A Pretty Good Thickness"

"these bear being so hard to die reather intimedates us all; I must confess that I do not like the gentlemen and had reather fight two Indians than one bear; there is no other chance to conquer them by a single shot but by shooting them through the brains, and this becomes difficult in consequence of two large muscles which cover the sides of the forehead and the sharp projection of the center of the frontal bone, which is also of a pretty good thickness."
-Meriwether Lewis, Journal May 11, 1805

The bear is watching salmon in the deep water; my brother is watching the bear. What the bear doesn't know is that, behind him, on the edge of the slack water underneath the two leaning cottonwoods, lie at least two twenty-plus-inch rainbow trout. Maybe the bear will leave before it's too dark to fish there. He's young. It will take him a while to catch a salmon. Then, he'll eat the eggs out of the hens and the protein-rich brains out of the bucks. The rest he'll leave for the hovering seagulls. We'll wait for him to move on. A great drift deserves this sort of cautious patience.

A nearby bear always changes the angling experience. We focus less on fishing and more on escape routes. Somehow the bear's presence also makes the experience more natural, more wild. We become competition; we become competitive. But we know our limitations, and we let the bear have his hole. In this world, he eats first.

We don't want salmon anyhow. There's at least two twenty-plus-inch rainbows underneath those leaning cottonwoods.