Something in the Trees
A camping adventure in a Canadian forest
─────────────────────────────────────────
We set up the tent while we still had light, which was the last sensible decision we made all evening.
The forest in northern Ontario is not like other forests. It is not a collection of trees. It is a single enormous thing, ancient and watching, and you are very, very small inside it. The trees go up for thirty metres and the tops disappear into the dark. When the wind moves through them, they don't rustle. They groan.
We made a fire because that is what you do, and it helped for a while. Flames are honest. They make light and noise and keep the darkness at a distance. Jamie cooked beans in a pan and we ate them without plates because neither of us had remembered plates.
It got dark quickly after that.
'Did you hear that?' Jamie said.
I had heard it. Something in the trees to the north, something large moving slowly. A branch breaking, then another. Then silence — the kind of silence that is somehow louder than the sound.
'Bear,' I said, with much more confidence than I felt.
'Probably,' Jamie agreed, with the expression of someone who did not find this as reassuring as he had hoped.
We had done everything correctly. Food hung from a tree branch far from the tent. No scented products in the sleeping area. We had read the advice. But reading advice about bears in a warm house and sitting twenty metres from dark trees at midnight are two very different experiences.
The sound came again. Closer.
We got into the tent and zipped it closed, which, if you think about it, is absolutely no protection whatsoever against a bear. But it felt safer. Humans are strange animals.
I lay in my sleeping bag and listened. The fire was dying outside. The trees moved. Something — bird, branch, animal, imagination — made a sound far away and then stopped.
At some point I fell asleep. In the morning the camp was undisturbed, the food was untouched, and the forest was full of ordinary golden light.
We had coffee and didn't talk about the night.
But we packed up the tent a little faster than usual.