Did Somebody Say Salmon?

Ten yards. That’s about how close this was, on the ground, with two guides who knew exactly what they were doing standing with us.

We’d flown in from King Salmon — an hour in a bush plane, put down on the water at Crosswind Lake — and camped there, spending the days walking sections of the Copper River and working the gravel bars for bears. He was asleep on one of them when we came up, and this is the moment he decided to find out whether we were worth caring about — head up, eyes open, and then, once he’d decided we weren’t, back down.

You can’t see the river or the bar in the frame because at 840mm there’s no room for them. All that’s left is the sedge grown up through the gravel, which is how these bars usually look by that point in the season.

It was flat overcast all day, which for a subject like this is the best light there is — the whole sky working as one soft source, no hard shadow anywhere on him.

He was the biggest and best-looking bear we saw on that trip, and clearly had been eating whatever he wanted whenever he wanted it. What I like most in the frame is small: the detail that held in the texture of his nose, and his front paws tucked up under him like a cat’s.