Artemis

She covered about ten feet in a sprint, straight through the shallows after a salmon, and she did it fast enough to be briefly alarming given that we were standing in the same water. She missed that fish. I watched her eat a different one about ten minutes later.

We’d been out on that gravel bar close to four hours by then, at a fork in the river with bears working both channels and more of them behind us. Surrounded, technically. It never felt tense — every animal out there was fixed on salmon that were dying and slow, and none of them had any interest in us. Both our guides were with us the whole time. She was maybe sixty feet away when this happened.

I’ve called her a she and I should be honest that it’s a guess. She was so well proportioned and frankly so good-looking that I decided she was female and have gone on believing it since. She’s the same bear as Beauty Queen.

The name came from that. Artemis, goddess of the hunt, in the middle of her work.

This was the same afternoon as Did Somebody Say Salmon?.