Day 13.

The bears are awake, and at least I know what the dog was barking at now. What you’re looking at there are bear tracks. Huuuuuge bear tracks that I discovered just this morning, while on a walk by the bank, directly east of the dock. I looked down below and saw some tracks and thought, Hmmmm. I don’t think I ever went walking there, and went to investigate. The stride on this thing is massive—there’s about five feet between each print, and you can see from comparison with my sunglasses how big each print is.

The prints come from the river to the west of the dock and curve inward toward shore, where they show that the bear climbed up the bank. I went atop the banks to see where they went from there, but as there’s nothing but bare ground up above there, I lost them. At least there’s no sign that it was sniffing around the cabin, and I’m quite glad I’m not keeping garbage or any sort of food outside.

The bears up here are black bears, smaller and altogether more skittish than, say, grizzlies. But if they’re waking up, that means that they’re incredibly hungry, having not eaten for four months, and the females will have cubs. Now—as opposed to later in the summer, when they’re fat and happy and gorging themselves on blackberries and tourist trash—is not a good time to run into one.

Anyway. I did nothing but write yesterday, churning out another chapter and sequestering myself inside except to pee and fetch wood. I’m sort of living and breathing this thing now, to the point where I’m becoming annoying to everyone I’ve spoken to. That’s okay, since the bandwidth left on my wireless card is running out and I’ll have to severely curb my internet use for the next week or so.

My friend Jeff is coming up tomorrow from where he lives in North Dakota, so it’s due time I leave the cabin again to get some water and provisions. It’s turned cold again, not the blistering negatives of last week but still hovering, at night and in the early morning, around 15 degrees. But it’s climbing to the thirties now, and tomorrow is supposed to bring more warmth and, apparently, rain.