The dog stiffens with tension beneath my hand. I can feel even before I hear it the soft snarl beginning deep in her throat. I press down, hushing her alarm.

Out of the silence, surprisingly close, upwind, comes the noise of a heavy, shambling body forcing its way with arrogant or perhaps only carefree indifference through the scrub oak, thorny locust, jumbled and decaying logs. I hear sniffing and snorting sounds, the unmistakable, unintelligible mutter of another oafish hermit talking to himself. But I can see nothing, nobody. The sounds come closer, stop. Still as a bump on the log, I hold Ellie down (though she makes no effort to rise) and stare into the dark beyond the pond.

The bear is staring at me. It is a mature male, a huge and powerful black bear, golden-brown despite its breed, and it stands—looms—above the oak brush on the other side of the water. The bear peers directly at where I sit but cannot really see me, cannot quite perceive and identify what I am. The close-set red eyes squint with effort, the ears twitch, the nostrils flex in the upturned black muzzle, trying to smell me out. We are so close to one another that if I wanted to I could count the flies circling around the bear’s massive head. I can smell him. I can smell that odor, rich rank tangy as skunk, of wild and living beast.

I can’t speak for the bear, but for myself I can say that I feel no trace of fear. It never occurs to me to feel fear. Instead I am overcome by the usual naive presumption that this bear, like any other stranger, will like me, be pleased to meet me, want to know me better. This same enchanted innocence has borne me in and out of a hundred Saturday night cowboy bars without a scuffle and once carried me for a season safely through the streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn during a previous incarnation as a public-welfare caseworker. As with a day of rock climbing, the fear comes afterward during sleep, in those hectic dreams that wake you at four o’clock in the morning.

And, so, I begin to rise, extending my hand in greeting. Now at last the bear perceives me, giving a start as he catches the scent of man the enemy. The bear shakes his head, somersaults backward and crashes away through the tangle, disappearing into our history.

That’s all that happens. Nothing more. Ellie stops trembling. I let her chase the water striders for a while (back home on the farm we called them water skippers). The new moon floats like a slice of lemon on the wine-dark sky. Its light comes down in columns through the dark trees.

After a time I get up, grope along the path to the main trail, Ellie cruising in wide circles around me, and trudge uphill toward my tower on the mountain’s summit. The vultures, well settled in their roost, let us pass this time without reaction.