The Big, Black Dog

 The Big, Black Dog

The end of roads for cars

The beginning of water trails for canoes

The Boundary Waters wilderness

Car camped here fifty years ago 

Before getting on the water

Where a bear came into our campsite

Many years later at the same site

A big, black dog approached

Getting closer and bigger 

The dog became not a dog, but a bear

The earlier bear’s grandson perhaps

He turned his head, sniffed into the wind

His eyes on us

Then turned and moved off into the woods

Some  four hundred miles away in Wisconsin

Bears are sighted way south of their normal range

One only five miles distant from our Fox Valley home

Haven’t had one, as yet, knocking on our door

Though we have deer in “our” back woods

One now gazing at me as I write this

As humans expand into the natural world

The wild yields space to the tame

The tame needs to understand that the wild needs space

And that all Earth’s inhabitants must co-exist