Live & Learn

THERE ARE SALMON ENOUGH for us too: wild coho, line-caught in these waters, prepared by our excellent chef. At night, we dine below deck, wedged around a mahogany table, sharing Okanagan Pinot Blanc, organic Argentine red and any words we know for rain. Books on seafaring, First Nations mythology and the region’s flora and fauna fill the built-in shelves around us. Above, a skylight opens onto the deck.

Our conversations drift invariably toward the world’s problems, issues forced upon us by the immediacy of a wilderness that has become, to most of humanity, something ancient, mythic, falling away, recalled mainly through the prism of Saturday-afternoon nature documentaries (Japanese and BBC film crews are in the area). Sandy, an epidemiologist and amateur photographer from Toronto, decided to take her vacation in the rain forest because of a “fear that this is disappearing.” Though I grew up next to the second- and third-growth woodlands of southern British Columbia, I was unaware that there are still places like this, where hundreds of dolphins race our ship over the course of half an hour one morning, leaping and diving like synchronized swimmers. It occurs to me that I have become an urbanite, as transformed in my vision of the world as the world itself has been transformed by my culture’s vision for it.

We are about as far off the grid as is possible in the modern world. Our only bathing takes place at natural hot springs, our only communication is with the creatures we encounter, and every attempt is made to minimize our impact on a place threatened from all sides by the reality from which we’ve come: logging, mining, big-game sport hunting, salmon farming and mounting pressure to permit oil and gas exploration, as well as rising tanker traffic as the North melts. Even with a groundbreaking 2006 agreement between conservation groups, industry, First Nations, local communities and government, less than 30 percent of the Great Bear Rainforest is protected, and even that is open to hunting.

This is naturalist Watt’s fourth trip to the rain forest, and she has yet to see a spirit bear. Even if we don’t, she has already begun to chronicle some of the dozens of other species we see on our excursions into one of the most biologically productive forests left on Earth. In a mist-covered estuary one morning, we count 100 eagles perched like sentinels on the tops of ancient trees. Rounding a bend in the river, we come upon a lone white swan. That afternoon, two Dall’s porpoises — the world’s second fastest-swimming mammal (after the blue whale) — chase the ship below my perch on the bowsprit. Reaching down, I can almost touch their silvery skin.

MARVIN ROBINSON, a 39-year-old Gitga’at from Hartley Bay, is the resident “bear guy” on Gribble Island, his band’s ancestral territory and one of the only places in the world where spirit bears are found. Originally thought to be albinos, these bears are the product of a double recessive gene, such that local black bears, on occasion, produce startlingly white cubs.

Standing in waterproof rain pants and a baseball cap to address us, Robinson explains the bear-viewing rules. “Stay in a group. Don’t run. Your instincts trigger the bears,” he warns, solemnly scanning the group, “to hunt you.” Point taken.

Walking single file through a forest of alders, we arrive at the creek where the Gitga’at have built viewing platforms designed to safeguard bear feeding patterns. Dozens of pink salmon are jostling one another on their way upstream. “It’s been 10 years since they logged this island,” says Robinson, “and the salmon are just starting to come back.” A ferret-like pine marten tugs a salmon its own size into the woods, while another steals up a dead tree to raid a bird nest.