The river had been doing most of the talking that afternoon, rushing around great grey boulders and carrying us deeper into the forest, where the mountains folded one behind another and the world of roads, houses and people seemed a long way behind us. Fred, of course, was doing his best to compete with it and, during one of those conversations boys have when there is nothing much to prove except that they are tougher than the bloke sitting beside them, announced that he reckoned he could take on a bear.
Tom looked across at him. “You’d run.”
“I would not.”
“You’d scream first. Then run.”
Fred gave him a shove and the raft erupted in laughter, and that might have been the end of it had the river not arranged an answer of its own.
An hour or so later we pulled into a small gravel beach where the forest came almost to the water. While the boys unloaded dry bags and began the familiar business of making camp, Tom wandered a little way downstream. He had gone perhaps twenty metres when he stopped, and there was something about the way he stood that made me look more carefully.
“Bear,” he said quietly.
At the edge of the forest, perhaps thirty metres away, stood a black bear. She was close enough for us to see the afternoon light touching her dark coat as she lifted her nose and tested the air, seemingly aware of us but not greatly interested. Then a small black bundle scrambled onto a fallen log behind her and another appeared from the undergrowth.
“Cubs,” somebody whispered, and for once even Fred had little to say.
Only an hour earlier he had been ready to take on a bear, but now he stood quietly beside me, the bravado gone from his face and replaced by something I had seen many times in young people encountering a wild animal at close quarters. There was fear certainly, but mixed with it was wonder, and perhaps the beginning of an understanding that not everything in this world was there for us to conquer.
The mother raised her head and looked directly towards us, and without anyone needing to say very much we began moving slowly back towards the rafts. Wild country has a way of reminding us that we are visitors, and at that moment every one of those boys seemed to understand that this little patch of riverbank belonged far more to her than it did to us.
Then Tom noticed something moving near the water. One of the cubs had climbed down from the log and ventured onto a wet rock at the river’s edge. Its feet slipped and suddenly the little fellow was in the current, tumbling once before its head appeared again several metres downstream.
“Do something!” Fred called, taking a step towards the water.
I understood the impulse because every decent instinct tells us to rush in when something small and frightened is in trouble, yet years spent on wild rivers had taught me that helping and interfering are not always the same thing. Before any of us could move, the mother bear crashed into the shallows and headed downstream. The cub was clawing desperately at the bank when she reached it and, with a combination of nudging, pushing and what looked remarkably like motherly impatience, managed to get it onto dry ground.
For a moment the cub simply stood there, dripping and bedraggled, before shaking itself so vigorously that water flew in every direction. Then it scrambled after its sibling and disappeared into the bushes behind its mother.
Fred let out a breath that he seemed to have been holding for some time. “I was going in.”
Tom glanced at him. “No, you weren’t.”
Normally that would have been enough to start another argument, but Fred smiled and let it go. We stood watching until the last movement among the trees had disappeared, then went back to making camp with a story we knew would find its way to the fire that night.
And it did.
Someone eventually reminded Fred of his boast that he could take on a bear, which brought the expected laughter, but this time there was no need for him to defend himself. He stared into the fire for a while before admitting that when the mother bear looked directly at us he had been frightened. Perhaps a few days earlier someone might have made something of that, but nobody did, and the conversation wandered on as campfire conversations often do until Tom, who had been listening more than talking, quietly returned us to the moment.
“Maybe being brave doesn’t always mean doing something.”
I looked across the fire at him and then at Fred, who seemed to be thinking about what his mate had said. I could have stepped in with one of my little talks about courage, fear and the strange things we men sometimes do to convince other people that we are not frightened, but fortunately I had enough sense to keep my mouth shut.
The river had done the teaching for me.
Somewhere beyond the glow of our fire, a mother bear and her cubs were getting on with their wild lives, while beside me sat a boy who had wanted us to believe he was afraid of nothing. That afternoon he had discovered otherwise, and around the fire that night he had been brave enough to admit it.
Nobody thought less of him.
I suspect a few of us thought rather more.