The Precipice, BC, early September to early October

Precipice Valley, North-West BC, East of Bella Coola. The remotest spot we've been in our travels so far. We feel like we've reached the edge where the tide turns, you hear it turning in the silence. We are with Dave and Rosemary Neads, who have carved out a life here over decades, in a place under ice and snow for 4-5 months of every year. When they first came it was a 4-5 hour journey to Anahim Lake and the road - rough west to Bella Coola, east to Williams Lake. It's now maybe an hour and a half, on the back of a logging track. They built their home over five years, Doug Fir (who was Douglas, I wonder) around broad windows over the valley. And left the Grizzly rub tree below the rim rock, where generation after generation of bear has trod to rear and scratch, always the same approach, the same care with which each in turn has placed its paws, in spots now so old and precise that the dents are worn deep in the earth. The bear is always there about that tree even if all you do is put your small feet in those steps and tug coarse hairs from the bark.

While they were building, they lived in a small log cabin down by the river. It's sandwiched between two of the half-dozen meadows ('long', 'round', 'river') that are scattered amongst the first-growth fir, pine, aspen, cottonwood - little human shapes in the wilderness. There were no meadows here 70 years ago. But there were the trails that we make like animals, never straight. The valley was an avenue for First Nations Chilcotin, Ulkatcho, and other bands, a meeting place for a clutch of paths that joined like rivers to flow-on down to the Atnarko Trench, a rare opening in the sheer wall of the Coast Mountains, path to Bella Coola and the sea beyond. The Hotnarko river of the Precipice flows into the Atnarko, so too trade would flow down-river, like the diamond-fine Obsidian from the volcanic peaks to the north and east, good for arrow-heads, later furs from the interior, while oolichan grease (boiled out of rotting catches of a smelt-like fish) flowed up the way, crucial preserve and dietary supplement for those far from the water. Alexander Mackenzie, first white to cross America east to west, passed north of here in 1793, rivalry between the bands shaping him a far more tricky route than that offered by the broad valley and its ancient ways.

That cabin is our home, cosy mattresses up a ladder-stair close beneath the steep pitch of the roof, big old stove, battered kettle, and a couple of teddy bears - just to keep topical - to welcome the kids. And in the mornings we brew porridge there and then hike up the hill along a steep-sided track, to be welcomed by Chilko, Dave and Rosemary's massive-breasted-hearted dog. He gets so attached to the kids that he won't eat his own breakfast until they arrive. Freya first, bursting out of the forestry at a sprint, red-faced, bright eyed, sweaty. Dave and Rosemary too, new to kids for such a good old stretch of time, build connection out of it - Dave working on his carpentry in the workshed with one on each side, deep in sawdust, hammering nails to make haphazard boats, or Rosemary, firm but loving, with Freya's head in her lap after she wolfs down a great bowl of supper and conks out. Close to the end of our time in the Precipice, Dave told us he was no longer scared of kids. And I no longer of chainsaws. Though certainly respectful. Which amounts to a pretty good exchange.

The sawing, the falling and the bucking, the stacking high into the roof-timbers of Dave's huge wood-shed, is our core task. All the heating over all those snow-bound months will come from that shed. It's getting your cave prepared, is how Dave describes it. I've never used a chainsaw before, and he's a good teacher. He gives sparse, key instruction. He watches. He gives you a clear sense of what you're getting right and wrong. Like getting the hell back and out of there as the tree begins to topple, not worrying for half a fateful moment about the saw trapped in the hinge. And then he leaves you to it. Each morning when I knew I was going to be using the saw I'd try and really focus on the power that blade had to change everything. Maybe that's just the novice in me, but Dave did lend me a book a few days in that detailed different safe techniques amongst dark boxes setting out how many fatalities there'd been in BC because of this, or that moment. And even when his bent-backed pal, another Dave, lumber man visiting from up north, three or four generations of sawdust in his blood, breaks from the fire and his songs to cut some fuel out of the black night, almost dancing with the saw he holds it so light upon his creaking joints, you sense respect. Becs and I are quite a team. Sometimes we head out with Dave as a threesome in the clanking ancient monster of a log truck to fall some real chunky old trees, Dave sizing them up and wedging them so they fall close to the track, the two of us, all day, heaving the barrels of wood across the rough and into the back.

Closer to home we're with the kids, who set up camps under the trees and use the stubs we saw to build palaces.

We meet all the locals on our first night. For many years it was just Dave and Rosemary in the valley in the winter months, alone about the fire between the snow and the wolves, who winter with them on the rocky outcrops half-way up toward the northward rim. But now Klaus might join them for Christmas turkey, after he's fed the cattle. He looks after the 50 odd head, who'll be out on the range all summer, but huddle about the hay-shed once the snow comes. A few miles further down-river there's Fred and Monika, organic farmers just getting started in the valley, all our good potatoes come from them, and Kai's kilt companion. Fred, as with the little man, likes to wear the tartan to a party. And then there's Lee, the ranch-owning-making-life-large-x-impressario, who's here throughout the summer, and hosts us all that night, with a mountain of prime pork ribs, cooked on a bonfire barbecue, dripping thick source, and digs out more whisky and his bass guitar so we can get a tune up and running. Every one of these folk is both larger and smaller in this place - we each stand out, stark, licking grease from our fingers, our togetherness and separation drawn vivid in the space that stretches out beyond. Klaus folds tight into his beard, vanishes, the kids feed the dogs bones, Dave wrestles the pain in his hip, fights alone, Lee sleeves rolled up open-chested works the fire and the talk like a rodeo. We're a small pool of language and construction and cut grass, the laughter ringing out but cut short in silence. Maybe we share vulnerability above all else.

And vulnerability certainly comes to us in the days that follow. Alongside awe. As Dave shows us to the outhouse by the cabin, right on the banks of the river, he gives us a can of bear spray, a 'banger' firing spring, and a ear-splitting horn. Use in reverse order, he tells us. If you're using the spray you're very close indeed. And he reminds us that the bears won't hear us by the water. And he tells us that the most important tool of all is awareness. Stay aware.

Staying aware, growing aware. That's me in this place in those weeks. The way I walk around a bush, or across a meadow, senses open, focussed on the fact that we are no-longer top of the food chain, digging up some remnant sense of what it might be like to be hunted. The cool stones beneath me in the river when I lie back to sink my hair, the smell of hay in the barn as I pull out the fiddle to play in the rain, the age of the wood in the walls of our cabin, our cluster of togetherness, the balance on the open back of the old truck that Dave and Rosemary suggest we should use, even for the journey up to the house, after the bears come.

Dave had seen a sow and 2 small cubs in the meadow behind the cabin that first morning, as he travelled out to pick us up from Anahim Lake. And we saw fresh shits, great piles of it, from then on. Take a poke with your finger and you can tell how fresh it is. But we only saw them and our other locals three or four days in. Klaus came down on his ATV and we piled into the truck to cover 500 meters safe and perch above the meadow where another sow and her two were grazing. I was astonished to see how big she was. Vast. Bigger than a bull, her long long neck stooped down to the grass, moving with slow, deliberate, absolute grace. Contained in her world with her cubs, without fear. But very aware, even though we were downwind, and their eyesight is not great. And then, already juggling anxiety and fear with wonder and thankfulness, the privilege of seeing these beautiful creatures in their place, knowing our own, there's suddenly another adult, ambling out of the trees that lie to the left of the space between us and the others, beneath the ATV and truck. Even Klaus, calm and knowledgeable and aware of the bears he lives besides, was surprised, wary. We backed away, bundled up somewhat reluctant kids, got the motor started (trick where you have to stamp the gas, turn the key, and wriggle it rapidly to get connection - Becs had the touch) and jolted away. The next morning we woke up to the other sow and her cubs just over the fence at the back of the cabin. All in all, seven grizzlies right close by, with another juvernile male, three-year old, wandering about at Fred's. They say there are around 70 along the Hotnarko/Atnarko, one of the highest concentrations in the world, and they're the good old chunky coastal ones, growing far larger than there interior peers on a rich diet of fish and berries and grass.

But it all got a bit stressful, over time. The concentration was unusal even by Precipice standards. Klaus knew that one of the sows was unafraid of human contact - 'not a runner', even from the big dogs together, and the motors. One of the grizzlies had taken three of the calfs. I went for a couple of hikes up towards the rim with the kids, them doing just grand at the bear-bell-yell act, spotting poos and giving them good pokes to see if they'd developed their 24-hour film. But it was pretty fraught. And we couldn't let them out of our sight for one moment, for all the freedom they've grown so used to. We helped Lee and Klaus bring the horses across, 5 including 2 towering, crusading, hoof-crushing Percheron, but although that might have kept the bears out of the meadow in front of the cabin, our route for washing-up at the river, it didn't make any difference out back. And then, as we cut timber in the woods, we returned one morning to find that a grizzly had carefully placed four great territorial shits around the kids' camp of the day before.

We felt it was time for a break! And had always known anyway that we wanted to head up into Tweedsmuir, the broadest stretch of wilderness in British Columbia, for a good while during our time with Dave and Rosemary. And the window for doing so before the cold and snow really began to bite was closing. So we sat round maps with Dave late at night, packed our sacks full of home-baked bread and home-conjured granola, got a lesson on how to get our hosts' proud old Dodge Camper (originally a delivery van) chugging (another art), and set off up the pitted track, for the painted mountains, the Rainbow Mountain Range, kids sloshing about in the back.