My eyes became habituated to look for the bear, if only fragments of it, nearly camouflaged by the landscape. I scanned for variations of the colour black, glowing onyx in the morning light, sooty beneath an overcast sky, not black but blue after the sun had dropped below the horizon. I always saw colour before my mind registered bear. The shy bear would not show itself fully to me, however. I spied triangular ears bobbing above the budding alders. A small, pointed snout protruding from a yellow curtain of tall, cured grass. A mound feeding on small purple spears of fireweed in the cutblock.

When I stitched together these fragmented sightings, I formed the image of the young bear in my imagination, one that seemed to me cautious, even fearful of overstepping boundaries, and yet also very much at home in the way it navigated the landscape. I recognized the bear was following a pattern, one I’d seen before, the same schedule of feeding that the mother bear had followed the previous season. First, the fireweed in the cutblock. Then, the balsam poplar buds high up in the trees. Next, the dandelions on the slope. This observation felt like a small marvel to me. Nothing about the bear’s behaviour was random. Biologists call this “site fidelity,” when an animal returns to the same location every year to feed, mate, and den. I thought of my brother and me, the way we’d both wandered back home to Peace River.

I speculated that the bear was female, based on what I’d recently read about black bear behaviour. Whereas males tend to roam widely, taking more risks to seek out breeding grounds, females stay close to the places where they are born, where the food resources are familiar, a strategy for reproductive survival.

I sensed that I could not live beside the creature for much longer and refer to it so generally: bear. For the bear was not just any black bear. The bear was its own bear, just as I was my own person. And I was not like most of the women I knew in my life. Thirty-five. Solitary. No offspring. Habitually living alone in the woods for half a year. I’d spent nearly two of the past five years alone with my dog in the boreal forest. I did not represent all women any more than the small bear represented all bears.

Osa. Spanish, feminine of Oso, for bear. The name surfaced in my mind and stuck.

A part of me felt hesitant to name the bear. To name the bear was to project myself onto it as though it was one of the velveteen dolls I dressed up and played with as a child. My father always instilled in us, as kids, the danger of anthropomorphizing wild animals. “Bears are not your friends,” he reiterated. He pointed out the inaccuracies of Walt Disney films and their romanticized portrayal of animals. In Brother Bear, for example, a male bear adopts an orphaned cub. “In the wild, males are known to prey on cubs,” he explained.

Anthropomorphize is a verb that derives from the Greek words anthropos (“human”) and morphe (“form”), meaning to attribute human traits, emotions, or desires to non- humans. It’s a bit of a sinful word amongst Western biologists and scientists, whose methods rely on observable evidence, studying what they can see, weigh, measure, and count.

Wildlife managers have always been more comfortable assigning numbers to bears rather than names. Problem bears, for example, receive identification numbers, and their information is entered into a database. Years ago, my dad told me, officers would tranquilize a bear and spray-paint a neon-coloured number onto its side. Today they use plastic ear tags, or radio collars and GPS trackers. Numbers create a kind of distance between people and wildlife, a buffer zone that prevents us from caring too much about the individual. It’s easier to take out a number than a name, after all.

What’s the loss of one black bear when there’s forty thousand more out there?