Excerpt from Black Bear by Trina Moyles, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Excerpt
Black Bear

It was my fourth season working at a fire tower in northern Alberta and my patience with the bears was running out. From the cupola, I watched for them, as though they were tiny black ticks that I wanted to pick clean from the landscape. On the ground, my encounters with the habituated mother bear of yearling cubs were becoming increasingly tense. We were both visibly stressed by the presence of the other and on the defensive.

The rubber slugs were just a band-aid solution for a problem that wasn't going away. I'd become numb to the act of firing off a couple of shots into the bear's backside. I'd even sent a round of birdshot, a projectile made up of lead pellets, into the nearby bushes to try to scare the mother bear, but it quickly learned that neither the shots nor the slugs—even if they stung a little—were a real threat.

I knew that I was privileged to live immersed in a wilderness that few would ever get to know so intimately. But it made me feel sharply aware of the disconnect between saying that we love wildlife—or the idea of them—and what it means to actually live closely with them. I felt as though I was running out of options.

Many folks in northern Alberta have a mantra when it comes to dealing with grizzly bears, a threatened species that has been illegal to hunt since 2006: "Shoot, shovel, shut up." A lookout who manned a tower along the BC–Alberta border once told me that if a grizzly ever wandered into her yard, she'd shoot the bear and chain the body up to her truck and drag it into the bush. "Who would ever know?" she cackled. The aggression in her voice had stunned me. There was something inherently hateful about the way she spoke about bears.

People possessed even less tolerance for a black bear, a species of bear perceived to be plentiful, so commonplace, that it was dispensable. For one, it wasn't illegal to shoot a black bear on private property. A black bear wasn't a grizzly bear, or polar bear, protected by conservation laws. That ubiquitous saying rang in my ears, "it's just a black bear". No one would care about another 'problem black bear' being culled, like kill made soft, destroyed, or put down — convenient euphemisms. Conservation officers would likely kill the cubs, too, based on the fact that they'd become habituated to my fire tower.

I didn't want it to come to that. There has to be a better way, I thought.

As if the mother bear knew what loaded question weighed on my mind—was I capable of ending its life?—it didn't come back with its cubs for the rest of the season. Their absence grew into a presence that haunted me. I hated the feeling that my actions—and my emotional reaction—had altered the landscape and the bears were no longer a part of it.

* * *

I remembered my biologist father telling me that bear cubs, after being weaned by their mother, would often stick together and face the forest as two. Together, they could hold ground against larger, more dominant bears. The sibling relationship in any species—solitary or social—is one of the most formative for learning how to be and survive in the world.

Brendan and I hadn't yet regained our closeness, even as I'd grown to love his children and witnessed his ongoing commitment to sobriety. However, we couldn't part ways. We were the people on the face of the earth most genetically like each other. Even while we were estranged, he'd always been omnipresent, buried beneath my every thought. Sometimes, when I looked in the mirror, I saw my brother staring back at me.

During long days in the tower, I began to re-examine the story I'd told myself about my brother for so many years: that he was an addict, that he'd inevitably hurt me again. I read a book by psychotherapist and addictions specialist Gabor Maté, called In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, that explores the way society stigmatizes, even dehumanizes, those living and struggling with drug and alcohol addictions. During the worst years of my brother's addiction, before our falling-out, the words I'd used to describe him included monster and animal. I viewed my brother through a lens of fear. I didn't see him so much as human, but rather as a beast that could harm me.

Excerpted from Black Bear by Trina Moyles. Copyright © 2026 by Trina Moyles. Excerpted by permission of Pegasus Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.