Free The Book of Yaak by Rick Bass

down the trail, being careful not to step in the tracks, and feeling very fortunate, very lucky, to be on the same mountain with this bear, to be in virtually the same point in time and space with him. Walking just to the side, and behind, his footprints.
    I felt something filling me, coming from the feet up, some kind of
juice,
some wildness, some elixir. I walked slowly, carefully—expecting to see the giant head and shoulders just ahead of me, at any second, looking back.
    But there was nothing: nothing other than cold air, and winter coming. To my right—to the west—lay the beautiful uncut velvet of the roadless area—the wilderness. To my left, below and beyond me, lay the swaths of clearcuts. This was the edge, and it seemed very much to me that the giant grizzly was walking the edge of his territory, checking it out before he went back into the earth to sleep for five or six months. Checking things out—noting the new roads below, and the newly savaged hillsides—the patchwork of them drawing ever closer, and I imagined that it was a ritual he did, every year; and I hoped that his sleep was not as troubled as mine.
    But there was no trouble in my soul, in my heart, that afternoon. There was only glory and wonder—only peace and awe.
    There are places and moments where we must put away the yardsticks and rulers; and it is the artist's job to convince us of this, not the scientist's job to even attempt to prove it—often with the very use of those same rulers and yardsticks.
    Do scientists dream of howling?
    I know that they do.
    The tracks disappeared as the bear walked out of the thin snow—as the new snow disappeared into the open sunlit places. I thought of his four-inch claws and of how the mild sun must feel on his thick coat.
    When I couldn't follow after his tracks any more I felt again a burst of reverence, a mix of fear and euphoria. It was as if I'd made a small new discovery in science—as if one curious piece of data suddenly and gracefully connected with another. It was like writing a sentence that surprises and pleases you, one that carries you from all that has come before into new country. It was about anything but control.
    I paused, wanting more. I pushed on in the direction I felt he had gone. But after a while the wild juice inside me, the fizz of it, waned. I was still out in open country; he must have disappeared within the sanctuary of cover. I sat down on a cold rock in the wind, tried to feel the sun on my face, rested for a long while, and thought about what I had seen. I didn't want to leave the mountain, as I had the sense one has when one is in the presence of a great man or woman, someone who's meant a lot to you, and whom you finally get to meet. You want to savor the moment and say the right thing, but also, especially if the day has been long and that person is old and tired, you don't want to be a stone, a thing that weighs them down, and so you quickly savor the encounter and are reassured, almost relieved, to see that yes, there is something special and different about him or her, some force, something indefinable—a thing you can see and hear and feel, taste and smell, but not know or name—and then you say good-bye and leave soon enough.
    That was how I left the mountain—grateful, more than grateful, for having seen the tracks—and for the bear having heard me coming and having moved slowly away from me, rather than toward me. I knew it was very important not to overstay.
    It was late in the day. There was still about an hour of strong sunlight left, but already the light was turning from yellow to copper. The burned-out, frost-bright berry fields on the hill below me looked as if they might have just had a bear pass through them.
    There was movement on the hillside below me—twenty yards in front of and below me, beneath a lone fir tree. I tensed, then refocused. A bird's head blinked nervously above the bunchgrass; then