The shellfish-encrusted rocks of the intertidal zone—the most fertile in the world—are exposed in a vibrant display of textures and colors: blackish-blue mussels, clusters of off-white barnacles, green anemones, and colonies of starfish painted orange, blue, and green.
Several keystone species—creatures with intense relevance to everything in the ecosystem—reside in the ocean. The five major species of Pacific salmon—pink, coho, sockeye, Chinook, and chum—range for years before returning to spawn and die in the rivers and creeks of their birth. No less miraculous than the salmon’s cyclical return is the annual spawning of the Pacific herring, whose arrival on the shores of the Great Bear during the spring snowmelt is a landmark event. The fish return by the thousands of tons, each female laying up to twenty thousand eggs, which attach to underwater plants. Males discharge milt, or sperm, over the eggs in such quantities that the entire surrounding sea turns white for weeks.
As all things exist in relation to all other things, no creature or any process in which it partakes subsists in isolation here. The interrelation of all aspects of life in the Great Bear is its greatest spectacle. The sea bestows rain upon the land: rain which both sinks nutrients into the soil and in turn washes them out to sea to feed aquatic life. The big trees modulate the flow of that rain, preventing soil erosion and torrents along delicate creeks from blowing out salmon spawn. By helping the salmon survive, the big trees help themselves and other animals. Bears, eagles, and wolves feed on the salmon and deposit their carcasses, which act as fertilizer in the soil, encouraging the growth of berry shrubs.
Like complex, weaving motifs in arabesque art, each aspect of rain-forest life, each playing its own tune, combines with all the others to create a grand symphony of ecology.
I need no more than a minute to claim my bag and leave the confines of the Bella Bella airport—one of the smallest I’ve traveled through. The terminal comprises a small building with a check-in desk and a coffee counter situated on a strip of asphalt running through the bog forest coniferous jungles of Campbell Island.
My fellow passengers, a mix of locals and visitors, mill outside with the residents who have arrived to pick them up. We’re at the foot of the road that runs into town through a rough-and-tumble forest flanked by glittering ocean on one side and a pair of mysterious-looking hills on the other.
I hop into the back of a taxi van with a few others. The young driver asks my destination.
“Alvina Duncan’s bed-and-breakfast,” I tell him.
“Alvina!” he exclaims, chuckling cryptically to himself.
We drive up and down thickly forested hills with views of the sea. Huge ravens crisscross the sky above us. We enter town, passing aged wooden bungalows and two-story homes that sit spaciously beside one another on plots of unfenced land. There are signs in many of the windows: No to Enbridge Pipeline. Heiltsuk Nation Bans Oil Tankers in Our Waters.
We turn onto another street and pull into the driveway of a brown-and-white two-story corner house—the B and B. When I arrive at the front door, I find a note saying Alvina, the proprietor, is out of town. There are instructions to phone someone to let me into the house. I do so, and minutes later a young Heiltsuk woman, in her mid-twenties, with short black hair and wearing a white summer dress and flip-flops, arrives.
“I’m really, really sorry,” she says, as she scampers from her car, holding plastic shopping bags and fumbling for a key. “Alvina’s down in Nanaimo. She’ll be back in a few days.”
We enter the house and climb a staircase to the second floor, where I find a nicely furnished apartment with three bedrooms. A large window in the living room overlooks part of the town and the ocean just beyond. I drop my bags in the largest of the three rooms, which are all unoccupied.
“Here’s your key,” the woman says as I come out. “The shower’s broken, so you’ll have to use the one downstairs, where Alvina sleeps. No plumbers in Bella these days.”
The woman unpacks her shopping onto the kitchen counter, and then stops abruptly and turns to me.
“I’m so sorry. My name’s Sierra,” she says, laughing and extending her hand. “I’m Alvina’s grandniece. I watch the place and cook for guests when she’s away. I’d have been here when you arrived, but things have been so crazy the last few days with the fire.”
“Fire?”