That morning it was overcast. A cool mist hung in the air, not falling so much as simply condensing, like breath on glass. My father, Harlan, was my fishing partner; our guide was a stolid and inscrutable Chipewyan named Moise, a man who, in the absence of a direct question, might go hours without uttering a word. We rounded a bouldery, reed-stippled point and saw, in the middle of one of the Cree’s lake-like widenings, another boat from Morberg’s. It was circling something in the water, something moving, swimming, alive.

A bear.

A Killing In SaskatchewanComing closer, we could make out the broad dome of its skull, the tan, doglike muzzle, the erect, almost cartoonish ears. The occupants of the other boat, a pair of jowly retirees from Duluth named Bill and Clarence, were blithely snapping away with their Instamatics; their guide, a lean, self-satisfied Chipewyan who was Moise’s polar opposite — the Wolf, I’ll call him — stood in the stem with the outboard’s tiller in his hand, hazing the bear, keeping it in open water. It did not appear especially large, as bears go, but it was large enough.

As our boat came alongside, the two guides began to converse excitedly. Even the stoic Moise was unusually animated. I thought nothing of it, at first. But then something in their tone brought me up short, and I realized, with a kind of awful, epiphanic clarity, that this was not merely a photo opportunity for us “sports,” like easing up to a loon carrying its chicks on its back. The guides saw the bear as a windfall. The old imperatives — atavistic, tribal — were still in force.

I turned to Dad and said, “They’re going to kill it.” The Wolf did most of the talking, and his stabbing gestures revealed the plan: He would fashion a spear.

A copse of skeletal dead spruces staked the muskeg at the edge of a shallow bay, and while the Wolf searched for one he could shape into a shaft and lash his hunting knife to, Moise took over the task of guarding the bear.

It is tempting to anthropomorphize, to say that I read panic and confusion in the bear’s behavior, that I saw terror in its eyes. But I did not. As if its stamina were bottomless, its patience infinite, the bear simply kept swimming, always pressing for the shore. There was nothing else it could do.

You may wonder why we didn’t intervene, why we didn’t put a stop to it. It was our time, after all, our money and no matter how we felt about the bear and its impending execution, the guides were still on the clock. But while I can’t speak for Bill and Clarence — although I suspect they were interested, like bystanders at the scene of a grisly accident, to see how the scenario would play out — I don’t think it ever occurred to Dad or me to protest.

Maybe we were just being chickenshit, afraid to risk an ugly confrontation — especially with the Wolf, who struck me as a man you shouldn’t turn your back on. That was probably a part of it, but the bigger part was the sense that the bear’s fate was out of our hands; that, as in classical Greek tragedy, the events set in motion were destined to run their course, irresistible as gravity. It was a course that no earthly power could alter, or prevent from reaching a final, terrible resolution.
    -ESSAY: A Killing in Saskatchewan (Tom Davis | Jan 7, 2025, Sporting Classics Daily)