At breakfast time on the third morning, there’s a grizzly bear fossicking out the back of the lodge and a humpback whale in the water right out front.
Most of us opt for the bear. The lodge is built on a series of rafts, moored by the shore, and
Close encounters with grizzlies at Knight Inlet Lodge
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Grizzly bear in Knight Inlet, British Columbia, Canada. Photo / Jason Drake, Knight Inlet Lodge
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It would have been a treacherous descent: these are glacial valleys, their sheer forested slopes plunging into the water, and the survival rate for cubs in those first months is only 50%.
Until the salmon arrive, Chloe will survive on sedge grass, salmonberries and shellfish. Today she’s looking for oysters and barnacles, which keep her alive and are slowly killing her at the same time: those shells will eventually destroy her teeth. One day, toothless and with a mouth full of sores, she will not be able to chew. Then she will die.
Why has she come so close to us? Why are we not being told to get inside, omg, right now?
It’s because the bears and the lodge have come to an arrangement. As a nursing mother, Chloe doesn’t want to get pregnant again, so she’s staying away from males. And the males, wary of humans because they know we kill them, are staying away from the lodge.
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We’re in British Columbia, where hunting grizzlies has been illegal only since 2017. The females have worked out that we won’t shoot them, the males remember when we did.
Which is why we’re safe in the presence of a fully grown and hangry grizzly bear. Provided, of course, no one makes any sudden moves or loud noises or goes near the cub.
We see grizzlies every day, from the lodge and from the kayaks, skiffs and larger boats. Some of us are lucky enough to see cougars and wolves that way, too. But when we’re on land, the guides call “hey-yo” as we walk through the woods, and whatever animals might be there melt away. More wary of us than we are of them. We know they might be watching; more likely, they’ve backed away quietly to hide.
When Chloe and cub eventually slope back into the forest, we turn our attention to the whale.
Humpbacks follow a pattern. Sometimes, hunting a shoal of fish, they burst up, mouths agape, swallowing hundreds. More often, you see their backs gently hump out of the water and they spout, then sink. They do this several times in a row and then the tail will come right up, that great beautiful expression of whaleness, hang for the briefest moment, then they dive, deep into the fiord, gone for minutes, before beginning again.
The boats don’t get too close to them, but part of the magic of this wondrous morning is that this whale has swum close to us.
Gulls, cormorants and other seabirds float about. Bald eagles nesting high above watch us with imperious disdain. Songbirds pierce the woods, with a whole different repertoire from what we’re used to in our own bush.
On another morning, guide Jules and I set off in a couple of kayaks. A fine misty rain that clears and returns and clears again. An eagle circles the lodge and the clouds are down between the peaks. Clusters of tiny ducks paddle the water as it gently swells and rolls and then subsides. Everything is moving and all is still.
You come for the bears, but you start to think, I want to stay for this forever.
“Can I have your job?” I said to Jules. She smiled. I think she’d heard it before.
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Knight Inlet Lodge is in the Great Bear Rainforest of the Canadian northwest and is owned by a partnership of five First Nations – Da’naxda’xw Awaetlala, Mamalilikulla, Tlowitsis, Wei Wai Kum and K’ómoks – people who have been stewards of this territory for thousands of years. Their culture infuses the experience.
For a New Zealander, it’s both familiar and strikingly different: the relationship of these indigenous people to their whenua is defined by the presence of large wild animals.
We arrived by float plane, flying in low over hills covered in western hemlock, cedar and Douglas fir, landing on the glassy inlet, a quick orientation and then we’re out on the water, puttering on a small skiff across to the far side of the inlet, binoculars scanning the boulders on the shore.
After a few minutes, our guide Effie says, “Mother and two cubs, by the waterline,” and we look again and sure enough, some of those boulders are moving.
All the guides had this skill. Pretty much none of the guests did. I asked one guide if there was a trick to it. He just shrugged. You learn to look better.
Another day, we’re out watching the same family. The mother is Thimble, sister to Chloe, but her cubs are older, entering their second summer. Not that you’d know it: they rush their mum, nuzzling, demanding, growling loudly.
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Thimble is a bit over it and unambiguously cuffs one of them away. She’s nervous, keeps looking up into the forest. Effie thinks Thimble can smell a male somewhere up on the hill and she doesn’t want him near her. She knows what he’ll do, if he can: kill the cubs and mate with her.
She’ll fight him and she could win. The males are bigger and heavier, but what they want isn’t as important to them as what she wants is to her. For the sake of her cubs, she’ll fight much harder.
Seals poke their heads above water; deer do the same in the spiky sedge grass. On a big boat trip up the fiord, one group of us encounters a pod of orca.
The day I’m rostered onto that trip, we are rushed by dozens of Pacific white-sided dolphins. Effie’s in charge again and she sees them from a long way off, so plants the boat in their path and waits. They stream down each side of us, twisting and surging through the water, on and on and on.
In another inlet, we watch a pair of bears mating on the shore. He leans over her, she doesn’t resist, they shuffle around. There are two small children on the boat.
“The bears are having a cuddle,” says Dad.
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“Where, where?” the kids clamour, because these things can be hard to see even when you have been practising how to look better. The bears go at it for absolutely ages.
Further on, we stop at the mouth of a creek, trees hanging over, the water tumbling down the rocks. Further up, Effie says, there’s a thousand-year-old village. There are plans to restore it, but nobody goes there now, except bears that are really wild. Bears that don’t come near the lodge or other settlements at all.
On one trip, we’re walking in the woods. Hey-yo, hey-yo, as we move quietly along a path made by animals. Here’s a tree, rubbed bare of bark all down one side. The bears have been getting up against it and rubbing away.
Not, as used to be thought, to deal with insects or other itches. They’re marking the tree, and not just for territory. They’re leaving their scent and with it, their intentions.
Hi, I’m Johnny, anyone remember me? I was here on Tuesday. Any girls want to hook up? I’ll be back Friday. And any guys hanging around, you can butt out.
It’s a learned behaviour, guide Sophie explains, discovered by Mel Clapham, a zoologist who has based much of her fieldwork at Knight Inlet. There’s video footage of mums teaching it to their cubs. Who muck about but eventually get the idea.
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We stand there, staring. At the tree, which has little sacs of sap and fine matted hair and bodily oils stuck to it. Into the woods around us: we are at the place where all the bears come. At each other: have we been through a portal and entered some kind of parallel world?
Perhaps we have. Sure, it’s our world, the lodge has comfy beds with great showers and good cooked food and the bar sells gin that tastes like whisky. Vancouver isn’t much more than an hour’s flight away.
But this here, this is the bears’ world. We’re standing in it.
Checklist
CANADA
GETTING THERE
Fly direct from Auckland to Vancouver with Air New Zealand.
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DETAILS
Where to stay: Knight Inlet Lodge.
What to do: Destination British Columbia.
New Zealand Herald Travel visited courtesy of Knight Inlet Lodge, Destination British Columbia and Air New Zealand.