I haven’t shaken the image of the eyes glowing blue-green against the deep darkness.

They reflected the light of my headlamp back at me, though the animal was just far enough—10 or so yards—from our tent that I couldn’t make out its full shape or size. But I could see how high its eyes were off the ground, how widely set. They could belong to just one animal.

The eyes stared for long minutes, and they moved only when the animal dropped its head, lolling it back and forth in a signal of irritation. The grizzly bear’s claws crushed rocks and twigs as it thudded away. Then it returned.

My husband and I were 11 rugged miles from our truck, and 35 miles along a winding, mostly unpaved road from the nearest town of Cooke City, Montana. We were camped along a small lake on the first night of a backpacking trip through the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness—a remote, pristine, and dizzying area of nearly 1 million acres spanning the Montana-Wyoming border, adjacent to Yellowstone National Park’s northern edge. The Beartooths are dramatic, and wild in the true sense. Active glaciers still shape the landscape, forming surreally blue lakes in the mountain cirques and freezing icy caps atop the dozens of jagged peaks that rise above 12,000 feet. They impose, but they also beckon. To sleep among them is to sleep outside the scale of human time.

That cold night in early September, my feet and shoulders ached after the day’s hiking, but satisfyingly. I took a warming sip of whiskey and wrote the final, now laughably ironic lines in my journal entry for the night: “Watched the golden light fade behind a mountain and over the lake’s surface. Tons of stars already out at 9:30. Just saw a shooting star—wished for no bears.”

“I took a warming sip of whiskey and wrote the final, now laughably ironic lines in my journal entry for the night: ‘Watched the golden light fade behind a mountain and over the lake’s surface. Tons of stars already out at 9:30. Just saw a shooting star—wished for no bears.’”

Ten minutes later, the grizzly wandered into camp for the first time. I can still close my own eyes and conjure the bear’s instantly, even a year later. Despite our shouts, the eyes stayed still and steady, eerily fixed on us. I pulled the safety off my bear spray and we hastily assembled a small stick fire a few feet from our tent. I tore pages out of my journal to feed the flames. The bear stared, and rocked its head, and after a few minutes, it turned slowly away, back into the impenetrable darkness. I exhaled, but not fully. Ten minutes later, the eyes returned, in the same spot. I added another handful of sticks to the fire, and resumed shouting.

There was nothing to do but wait out the night, anticipation rumbling in my stomach like a pot of water just off boil. My raw, exposed nerves flinched at every rustle of wind. Eight hours later, the first soft rays of sun unfurled themselves like a gift.

Only a week prior, my husband, dog, and I had come close to running into a black bear hauling its freshly killed deer carcass off a hiking trail on Ch-paa-qn Peak, outside Missoula, Montana. We’d rounded a curve in the trail past a thicket of fruit-laden huckleberry bushes and nearly stepped on the deer’s entrails, still steaming and odorless in the sharp morning light. The bear dragged the rest of the animal’s body away from us as we reached for the bear spray clipped to our belts. It followed us for a quarter mile as we retreated back the way we’d come, watching us from the ridge above the trail. Even after we lost it from view, I thought I felt its gaze.

LEARNING TO READ AIR

My minor run-ins with bears have sliced gashes in what was already a thin, permeable fabric separating my life from the wild. That barrier has become more flimsy with every encounter, exposed for the gauzy spiderweb it’s always been.

People assume that backpacking is a way to relax and to push away the world. This is how I used to imagine it, during my childhood growing up in suburban New Jersey—lulled to sleep not by a river or owl but by the thrum of planes descending into Newark Airport. The wild would be a place to disconnect, I assumed, to feel less. Later, time spent in the wild disabused me of this notion—the unearthly quiet deserts of the Southwest and the teeming mountains of Montana set me straight.

“My minor run-ins with bears have sliced gashes in what was already a thin, permeable fabric separating my life from the wild. That barrier has become more flimsy with every encounter, exposed for the gauzy spiderweb it’s always been.”

When camping or hiking, I’m in a state of heightened awareness of sound and movement and the ground beneath my feet—whether there are tracks, and how fresh they are. I can now recognize the smell of elk who’ve just left a meadow, and am attuned to the direction a river’s current hugs around a fallen cottonwood. This vigilance isn’t the same as anxiety, though it’s difficult to articulate the distinction.

Being observant in the wild is about self-preservation, but it also fosters an exhilarating sense of interdependence. My safety is bound up with the behavior of animals, the whims of atmospheric pressure, the stability—or not—of 3-billion-year-old rock. Whether or not I venture up a mountain depends on details as fine as rain droplets and as ephemeral as cold breezes. The mountain doesn’t exist to be conquered, but if I’m lucky, it might offer itself to me.

It’s a gift to read the natural world, to interpret and react to it in ways that keep me safe. To do this well is empowering, and I admire people who are more adept at it than I am. In his book “Desert Solitaire,” written about his time as a ranger in Arches National Monument (before it became a National Park), Edward Abbey makes a promise that people who continue with care and determination along trails that are “crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous” will be rewarded with “something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams.”

Abbey is a polarizing figure, not only for his direct-action approach to environmental defense but for his racist beliefs about population growth. His prayer-like hope, which he refers to as “Benedicto,” remains the best distillation I’ve read of why we push on through a “dark primeval forest,” through “miasmal and mysterious swamps,” in spite of the obstacles and fear. Or maybe because of the obstacles and fear.

It’s a surrender to acknowledge forces much larger than myself, some of which, without malice or charity, would kill me. That night in the Beartooths, three living creatures encountered each other, acknowledged the meeting, and debated whether to choose engagement or detached appraisal. We weighed risk against desire, performing a personal calculus. That night, the odds were in my favor, and the bear’s. A shared fate.

GRACE AND CHANCE

Humans are living beings within a universe of living beings, all constituted of the same long-ago stardust. But our planet is largely organized by a hierarchy that humans created and placed ourselves atop. When I watch the forceful precision with which an osprey fishes or consider the incomprehensible journey along which a butterfly has migrated, I doubt that anthropocentrism is defensible. Every night I spend in the wilderness, even when I’m kept awake listening for the snap of a twig under a bear’s paw, solidifies my conviction.

I’ve found it especially fashionable to reject humans’ superiority after drinking many rounds of beer and passing a joint around the campfire with my friends. Who are we to make such a big deal of ourselves? Fellow humans nod in assent. We are no better than the bears, and in fact, in many respects, are probably lesser beings. This is one way of knowing—an intellectual or spiritual knowing.

It is another matter to know this viscerally, to stare down the potentially fatal consequences of that belief and free your heart of resentment in the moment. I am not there yet. In the moment, I did not regard those bears with grace and wonder and magnanimity. I was scared of them, and I felt my mind and body flooded with mental and physical chaos: tightness in my chest, rapid breathing, obsessive thoughts, a distrust of my own senses.

“When I watch the forceful precision with which an osprey fishes or consider the incomprehensible journey along which a butterfly has migrated, I doubt that anthropocentrism is defensible. Every night I spend in the wilderness, even when I’m kept awake listening for the snap of a twig under a bear’s paw, solidifies my conviction.”

My husband, who has seen many more bears than I have owing to a career that involves remote fieldwork, does not seem to be filled with this terror any more, if he ever was. He benefits from both greater familiarity with bears, and from a generally less alarmed constitution. He reminds me that we take proper precautions when we hike and camp, and that prevents the worst outcomes. While I laid awake, he got some hours of sleep that night in the Beartooths. This summer, a black bear with a cub charged him when he unexpectedly came upon them in an alder-choked creek bed in which he was taking scientific measurements. He texted me afterwards: “Had to spray a bear today. Spray worked.” The risk of an attack is reduced by good preparation; after that, it’s just chance.

Chance is a part of the wilderness I’m still working to embrace. I want to accept risk with reverence, not panic. It’s a reorientation that’s still in progress: to feel myself as part of the whole and not the main character. It’s the difference between learning to navigate using Google Street View versus a topographic map. The latter integrates you and situates you in contextual space; the former makes you the map’s entire creator. Bears will roam where they roam, with or without me there. Rocks will be slick with rain, whether or not I step on them. Lighting strikes. Snow avalanches. Trees fall in the woods, whether or not I’m there to hear them.

In the year since my back-to-back bear encounters, I’ve thought about where the line is drawn between preparing for the wilderness and seeking to control it. There’s no removing chance from the splendor and aliveness of the mountains; they are one and the same. Eliminate risk and uncertainty and you erase wilderness. Every bear track in the soft dirt reminds me to gently check my progress on this reframing. One day, I will remember the blue-green eyes with a new way of seeing.