The airplane diminishes downriver, banks and turns through a pass in the hills and is gone, out of sight, suddenly silent, ephemeral and lovely as a dream.

I notice now that we have been left behind. Two of us, myself and Dana Van Burgh III, a handsome, hearty young man who looks a bit like Paul McCartney or maybe one of Elvis Presley’s possible sons by way of Linda or Stevie or Jesse, good sound symmetric genes interlocked in a Rubik’s Cube of hereditary coefficiency. But we’re treading on a cluster of taboos here—better back off. I’m not too sure about Elvis anyway.

From Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside (1984)

But we have definitely been left behind. The Cessna is bound for an Eskimo village called Kaktovik (“fish seining place”) about one hundred miles away on the most dismal, desperate, degraded rathole in the world—Barter Island. If all goes well the plane will return in two hours with more of our equipment and two or three more members of our party. Our expedition. Mark Jensen’s Alaska River Expeditions, Inc., Haines, Alaska.

The river at our side, more crystalline than golden, is called the Kongakut, and the plan, if all goes right, is to float down this river in two rubber rafts to another straight gravel bar eighty miles downstream. There, ten days from now, the airplane will pick us up and ferry us back to Kaktovik and Barter Island. Something to look forward to. But the river is alive with Arctic char and grayling, first-rate primeval fishing waters, and in the valley and among the treeless mountains around us roam the caribou, the wolf, the Dall sheep (close cousin to the bighorn) and of course the hypothetical grizzly bear. Himself, Ursus arctos horribilis. So they say.

If I seem skeptical about the bear it is because, after several efforts, I have yet to see with my own eyes a grizzly in the wild. I spent a summer as a fire lookout in Glacier National Park in Montana, saw a few black bear but not one grizzly. Even hiking alone, after dark, through alder thickets on a mountain trail, failed to attract the GRIZ. I sweated up another mountain trail behind Douglas Peacock, himself half grizzly, to a secret place he calls the Grizzly Hilton, where he has filmed, encountered, talked with many grizzlies, but on that one special day we saw nothing but flies, mosquitoes and the devil’s club, a mean ugly plant with hairy leaves, thorny stems, a fist of inedible yellow berries on its top. Ten days on the Tatshenshini River in the wilderness of the Yukon and southeastern Alaska again failed to produce an authentic grizzly bear. I even tried the Tucson Zoo one time, but the alleged grizzly (if such there be) refused to emerge from its den in the rear of the cage. I could see a single dark paw with ragged claws, a host of loitering flies—nothing more.

The grizzly bear is an inferential beast.