KEY POINTS:
I was keeping a sharp lookout for bears from the hide on the banks of the Nekite River, which roars out of Canada's rugged Coastal Mountain Range, when our guide urgently whispered "Jim" and pointed to the bank just below us.
A big male grizzly had climbed out of the water about 5m downstream. As we watched, it scrambled up the bank, and headed towards the opening to our hide ... which didn't have a door.
The guide, John, moved casually to the entrance, while I watched nervously through the side window, wondering how effective the canister of bear spray hanging from his belt might turn out to be, and whether I could reach it if he was attacked.
After a couple of days with Great Bear Nature Tours I'd already seen dozens of grizzlies fishing, eating salmon, playing and walking down the road, but always at a safe distance.
Up this close this bear was HUGE - roughly twice the weight of Carl Hayman, I worked out later - with a head the size of a pumpkin and its already bulky body made even larger by the river water in its bristling brown fur.
The bear pushed its way quietly through the bushes until it was only 2m from us, at which point John said _ in an incredibly relaxed Canadian drawl - "Hi buddy. Easy."
At his words the grizzly stopped for a while, mused on the situation, and then turned away and climbed the bank to the access road above.
"That was fantastic," I whispered to John when he sat down beside me. "Just seeing the bears is amazing enough. But having one come this close was really exciting."
"Yes," he replied laconically, "when that happens it's pretty exciting for the guide too."
To be within touching distance of a 250kg bear certainly got my pulse racing, but Tom Rivest, who runs Great Bear, had said during our arrival briefing that in decades of organised bear watching, no tourist had been injured. "In fact, we've never even had to use the bear spray."
Dealing with grizzlies, he explained, was "all a matter of understanding bears and their body language and responding appropriately.
"What you have to do is avoid surprising them - they don't like surprises - don't do anything to make them nervous, and behave in accordance with bear protocol.
"Bears don't like fights, because if you have a fight there's a risk of getting hurt, and with nature if you're hurt then you're dead.
"When they behave aggressively it's usually just a matter of checking out where they stand in the pecking order rather than anything serious."
That was demonstrated very clearly not long after the grizzly came knocking at our door, when when an elderly Scottish tourist had to leave the hide for a pee.
John escorted him to the road, the safest place because it gave the clearest view of anything approaching, and the protection of the parked bus. But he was only halfway through when a big male grizzly walked up.
"I spoke to him quietly, just signalling that we were there, and he got a little irritated," John said afterwards. "At first he started to turn away. Then he changed his mind and decided to test us.
"He came back with his head down threateningly trying to see if he could push us around a little. I spoke to him a little louder and he thought about it some more and decided to let it go."
As for the elderly Scot, when I asked him how he felt, he replied, "I needed to go to the bathroom again".
Knowing how to deal with bears is clearly essential in an operation like this, because there are a lot of them around and it's a long way from civilisation.
To get there we had to make our way to Port Hardy, at the northern end of Vancouver Island, then make a spectacular trip by floatplane across the Queen Charlotte Strait and the fiords and islands of Canada's wild northwest coast to Smith Inlet.
Tom and his partner Marg Leehane have established a floating lodge there in the heart of the Great Bear Forest.
In spring, when the bears come out of hibernation and head for the riverside sedge meadows, their guests watch from small boats while the hungry animals graze nearby on the protein-rich grass.
But in autumn, when the salmon are running, viewing is from three hides on the banks of the Nekite River, overlooking prime bear fishing areas.
We had arrived just before the evening viewing, so there was just time to wolf down a couple of slices of pizza and a coffee before taking the gangway ashore, climbing aboard a bright yellow school bus and trundling a few kilometres down an old logging road to the first of the hides.
I have to confess, I was a little tense. Wild animals don't perform to order. After coming all this way would we see grizzlies? The answer was not long in coming. The bus had gone only a short distance when Tom slowed, pointed ahead, and said, "There's traffic on the road".
Wandering down the road just ahead were two half-grown siblings, happy to saunter in front of the bus until it was time to turn off and head for the river.
And when we got to the hide, there was another bear, a big female, splashing through the shallows in pursuit of a huge salmon, which she carried on to the shingle bank in the middle of the river and ate.
The meal was closely attended by seagulls and ducks looking for scraps. Several bald eagles watched from the treetops and the salmon, the focus of all this activity, splashed their way upstream, bodies flashing silver, pink and green as they jumped over the shallow rapids.
We had only started to take in this amazing spectacle when a sloshing immediately below the hide drew attention to two more bears - possibly the ones we had seen on the track - making their way up the edge of the river with the occasional pause to snack on a passing salmon.
And the bears kept coming. At one stage I felt as though I was watching a real-life version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, except that the food involved was salmon rather than porridge.
First, Baby Bear - well, she was only about 2 years old and a mere 150kg - wandered down the river and caught a salmon right in front of us.
She was eating when Mother Bear - five or six years old and maybe 200kg - came up the river in pursuit of her own breakfast.
When she arrived Baby Bear backed off, ceding the shingle bank which was the favoured place to eat, and the two munched away about 20m apart, eyeing each other with mild suspicion.
Then Father Bear stamped into the scene - probably eight years old and around 250kg - and took over.
The two smaller bears moved further up river, Mother Bear leaving behind most of her latest catch, and the Goldilocks of my story, a magnificent bald eagle perched at the top of a tall conifer, swooped down and picked it up, causing great irritation to the waiting gulls.
Meanwhile, another bear, probably a smallish female, sidled quietly down the far bank.
By the time we returned to the lodge, all my expectations for bear watching had already been exceeded. And once we had eaten dinner that evening - a delicious paella with salmon and crab caught in the inlet that day and accompanied by an Australian chardonnay - my food expectations had been exceeded as well.
In subsequent viewing trips, we saw lots more bears - a mother fishing while her two tiny cubs climbed on a log to get out of the icy water; two sisters working together to catch fish and enjoy a shared lunch; another mother with an enormous salmon in her mouth leading her cubs in a hungry procession to the shingle bank dining table; a big male swimming downstream in the flood-swollen river with only its head showing; a cub losing its footing and rolling down the bank ending up, embarrassed, in the river beside our hide; a big male greedily snacking on only the tastiest bits of the salmon, particularly ovaries full of eggs, and discarding the rest for the feathered onlookers to eat.
The area has plenty of other animals including black bears, cougars, wolves and black-tailed deer, although sightings are fairly rare. One morning as we drove up the road, a marten dashed in front of us, and during a cruise round the inlet in the rain we saw lots of little harbour seals.
But the grizzlies are the stars of the show. Our final sighting was of a mother bounding through the river in a cloud of spray to catch a salmon for her waiting cub. We lost sight of the pair as they disappeared into the trees, but then they appeared through the foliage right in front of us, the cub having to be encouraged to leave the safety of dry land and swim.
I sympathised. I didn't want to leave either.
Jim Eagles met the grizzlies with the help of Air New Zealand, House of Travel, Tourism British Columbia and Great Bear Nature Tours.
