Final Look

He came down the river like he owned it, because he did. The male was enormous, and she read him long before he was close. No standoff, no noise. She had both yearlings out of the water and moving before he ever reached the seam of current she'd been working. In Katmai the best fishing belongs to whoever can hold it, and she wasn't going to argue that with two cubs behind her.

We'd been with that family for hours by then. The yearlings did what yearlings do: wrestled in the shallows, chewed driftwood, ambushed each other and lost interest and started again. Their mother fished. She almost never kept her head down. Every few seconds it came up, scanning the bank, the bend, the water behind her. That's the part that stayed with me. The salmon wasn't the work. Never getting to relax was the work.

The light was nearly gone when she finally pushed them out of the river and up the bank toward the tundra, where they'd bed down for the night. It's a steep, loose climb. The cubs went first. She came up last, and at the top she stopped and turned back to look upriver into the setting sun. I don't know what she was checking for. Maybe him. Maybe nothing. I made one frame and then let her go. It was the last photo of my trip, and nothing I took after it would have meant anything.