The Spirit Bear

Just after lunch on Friday, we received an announcement over the loudspeaker: Attention, we have spotted a Great Spirit Bear on the shore at the starboard side of the ship. Not a second had passed before the entire population of the ship was scrambling for the door. We were among them. We looked and we looked and we looked. We went down to our room to our balcony, and we looked and we looked and we looked. Where was that Spirit Bear? Fortunately, Micky came down to our room to make sure we had seen it - considerably further up the shoreline, a white spot on a black rock. Put those binoculars on it, however, and sure enough it was a white Spirit Bear.

What a thrill! We were not expecting to see a bear, and to watch him for nearly an hour was beyond our expectations. As the ship moved along the shoreline, we drew closer and closer to him (or her). While we watched, he ate barnacles, he stood up to find berries, he climbed rocks, he walked ledges . . . it was beyond awesome. This was not just a drive-by sighting - it was a true learning experience that we were skeptical we would have the opportunity to see. On Saturday again we saw a Spirit Bear. This time we watched him as he crunched on barnacles and caught a salmon. A black bear joined the Spirit Bear on the shore, and it too found a salmon and disappeared into the woods. It is conjectured that when a black Kermode bear and a Spirit Bear are in the same area, the Kermode bear defers to the Black Bear - apparently discrimination occurs in the wild, too.