Black Bear - by Trina Moyles (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A dazzling memoir about one woman's coexistence with bears in the boreal forest and a singular meditation on sibling loss.

When Trina Moyles was five years old, her father, a wildlife biologist known in Peace River as "the bear guy," brought home an orphaned black bear cub for a night before sending it to the Calgary Zoo. This brief but unforgettable encounter spurred Trina's lifelong fascination with Ursus americanus--the most populous bear on the northern landscape, often considered a hindrance to human society. As a child roaming the shores of the Peace in the footsteps of her beloved older brother, Brendan, Trina understood bears to be invisible entities: always present but mostly hidden and worthy of respect. Growing up during the oil boom of the 1990s, the threats present in the siblings' hard-drinking resource town were more human, dividing them from a natural reverence for the land, and eventually, from each other.

After years of working for human rights organizations, Trina returned to northern Alberta for a job as a fire tower lookout, while Brendan worked in the oil sands, vulnerable to a boom-and-bust economy and substance addiction. In 2019, she was assigned to a tower in a wildlife corridor. Bears were alarmingly visible and plentiful there, wandering metres away on the other side of an electrified fence surrounding the tower. Over four summers, Trina begins to move beyond fear and observe the extraordinary essence of the maligned black bear--a keystone species who is as subject to the environmental consequences of the oil economy as humans. At the same time, she searches for common ground with Brendan on the land that bonded them.

Impassioned and eloquent, Black Bear is a story of grief and a vision of peaceful coexistence in a divided world. It captures the fragility of our relationships with human and nonhuman species alike, and the imperative to protect wild ecosystems, as well as the people we hold closest.

Review Quotes

"Black Bear is a moving and deeply personal exploration of the relationships that matter, the ways in which they can go wrong, and why it can matter so profoundly. Trina Moyles' unflinchingly honest and often poetic account of family estrangement and inter-species reconciliation is about much more than bears and siblings--it takes us right into the heart of the Alberta conundrum, of what it means to be part of a culture that simultaneously loves and ruins the places and lives that give it meaning. This may be the best book I've ever read about the things that live in our hearts while haunting our nights. Brilliant writing that sometimes brought me to tears, yet left me hopeful; I can't stop thinking about it." --Kevin Van Tighem, author of Wild Roses Are Worth It, Bears Without Fear, and, most recently, Understory: An Ecologist's Memoir of Loss and Hope

About the Author

TRINA MOYLES is an environmental journalist, creative producer, and author. Her debut book, Women Who Dig: Farming, Feminism, and the Fight to Feed the World (2018) was a finalist for the High Plains Literary Awards and is currently being adapted into a documen­tary film. Lookout: Love, Solitude, and Searching for Wildfire in the Boreal Forest (2021), a memoir about her work as a fire tower lookout in northwestern Alberta, won a National Outdoor Book Prize and the inaugural Memoir Award at the Alberta Literary Awards. In 2022, Moyles received the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Award, the province's highest honour for the arts, for her dedication to writing. Moyles's journalism has been widely pub­lished in Canadian Geographic, The Globe and Mail, The Narwhal, and Hakai, amongst other publications. Today, she lives in Whitehorse, Yukon with her partner and their three dogs. Read more at www.trinamoyles.com.
Instagram @trinariannemoyles