The feeling lingers another moment. Then the forest exhales, and so do I.
By the time I reach my planned campsite, my shoulders are protesting under the pack and the backs of my thighs are staging a quiet revolution. The spot is a small, relatively flat hollow cupped between three massive trees and a moss-covered boulder taller than I am. There’s a narrow stream nearby—a cheerful, shallow thing tripping over rocks, fed by snowmelt higher up. It’s far from any official trail. If someone else ever camps here, I’ve never seen evidence of it.
Today, though, there is evidence of someone. Or… something.
I find the first sign a few meters from the hollow: a series of deep prints in the softened earth, claw marks visible at the toes. The gait is pigeon-toed, staggered. Heavy.
My stomach does a little flip.
“Well, hello,” I breathe, squatting to take a closer look.
The tracks are big. Bigger than my foot by a comfortable margin. The edges are still sharp, not yet blurred by melt or wind. A few tufts of coarse hair cling to the bark of a nearby tree where something brushed against it. The air smells faintly musky under the damp earth and pine.
Bear.
My brain clicks through species automatically.
Black bear, most likely. Grizzly this far in would be unusual but not impossible. Either way, large, omnivorous, strong opinions about food.
I straighten slowly, scanning. The hairs on my arms rise, not from the earlier watched feeling, but from sheer respect.
“Okay,” I say softly. “Ground rules, neighbor. You do you, I do me, we both go home with all our limbs. Yeah?”
The bear, sensibly, doesn’t answer.
I spend the next fifteen minutes on high alert, talking myself through the proper drill as I set up my tent. Food in the bear canister, stored well away from the sleeping area. No scented items left out. Cooking gear in its own stash. Making noise as I move—humming, muttering, occasionally reciting entire paragraphs from my last grant application just to prove I’ve suffered enough in life.
“This is fine,” I tell my stove as it stubbornly refuses to light. “We respect bears. Bears respect us. We are all part of one big ecological—oh, come on, you piece of?—”
The stove finally catches with a whoosh. I brew coffee that tastes vaguely of scorched aluminum and triumph.
Work first, though.
Once the tent is up and my pack is stowed, I shoulder a lighter day kit and head toward the slope where my microclimate station lives. The ground here steepens, the canopy thickening overhead so that the light goes green and dim, like walking through the inside of a bottle.
I find more signs of the bear as I go. A turned-over log here, shredded bark there, scat in various delightful stages of decomposition. All fresh. All indicating a bear that considers this area part of its regular circuit.
“Great,” I murmur. “Highly active bear zone. Love that for my career and bone structure.”
I follow my GPS and flagged trees until the familiar shape of the weather station comes into view, half buried under an old snowdrift. The sight makes my heart leap.
“You’re alive,” I tell the metal pole and its array of battered sensors.
The snow around it has slumped but not collapsed, thanks to the rocks I piled at its base last season. For a second, I have the odd sensation that it’s been… tended. The stones seem too neatly arranged, the snow too evenly disturbed.
I shake the thought away. Snowpack is messy. Wind is messy. My memory is messier.
I kneel, brush snow away from the casing, check the seals. Everything looks functional, which honestly, is super miraculous.
“Yes,” I say aloud, grinning. “Yes, yes, yes. You glorious, stubborn, frostbitten marvel.”
I’m up to my elbows in cables and sample logs when the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
It’s different this time. The watched feeling returns, stronger, threading under my skin.
I go still, one hand on the station, the other holding a screwdriver. “Hey,” I say quietly, aiming my voice at the forest at large. “Just me. Just the dork with the dirt obsession. Not a threat.”
The forest holds its breath.
