Their encounter was covered in the San Juan Journal, bolstered by quotes from the sheriff’s office and a state biologist. Over the week that followed, the newspaper reported two more sightings: one a few miles from them, by False Bay, and one up by Cabbage Leaf Inn. It printed blurry pictures of a furred animal photographed from a distance. Soon enough, the bear became to Sam like everything else: a thing laid claim to by other people. Sam and Elena’s experience, though the first, closest, and most shocking, faded. Was taken away.

Sam and Elena went to work. They tended to their responsibilities. Sam answered enough questions to reach the survey website’s redemption threshold of twenty-five dollars, which she would receive as a gift card and put toward the water bill. Then she started over again. When her shifts overlapped with Ben’s, he came up to the galley to bug her, and if there weren’t any customers, she would take a break from her register, and they would fuck in the bathroom. Inside her, heat bloomed, vivid. She pushed his shirt up and scratched her nails over his back. His radio hissed and crackled. Life went on as usual, until the Friday evening when she got a call, then another, then a text, from her sister. Elena wrote, Answer.

The ferry was leaving Shaw Island for Lopez—Sam barely had cell service. She called her sister back right away. Elena was panting on the other end of the line.

“What is it?” Sam said. Startled, distressed. Picturing the worst, of course. Their mother. Elena’s quick breath foretold death.

“I saw it again,” Elena said. “The bear. It was right next to me.”

Passengers were already gathering in front of Sam’s counter; announcements were playing through the loudspeakers. Sam was trying to listen, but the call couldn’t go on too long. The man closest to her register frowned at her. She grabbed his food—two apples and a cinnamon roll—and rang it up. Handed over his receipt while the phone was pressed to her ear. Elena was talking fast, but more from leftover jitters than any current danger. It seemed like the most fearsome moment was past. Still, Sam made Elena promise to text her, and report it, and stay safe. A passenger was asking a question about the wine selection. Sam had to hang up.

She showed the passenger the drinks on offer. They wanted to know what was local. “They all are,” Sam said. They wanted to know which was the most local. If any came from the islands themselves, and if so, where. Sam picked up the bottles to look at the small print on their labels. Tucked in her back pocket, her cellphone held her world.

Elena kept texting through Sam’s shift, thank God. Sam propped her phone behind a tower of plastic to-go lids so she could see the notifications appear on screen while she worked.

On Cattle Point right after the farm

I literally went right by it while I was walking home. Maybe forty feet away

Standing in the woods. I froze

No one else was around

It was so calm. Just looking at me. Very big and beautiful

I can’t wait to tell you

People kept bringing her their food. Sam rang up Greek yogurt and draft beer. She counted correct change. The boat passed out of cellphone range for a long, silent half hour, and then a shore appeared through the galley windows and the phone vibrated again.

The most beautiful yellow eyes

It wasn’t until her shift was over that Sam could call her sister back. Standing at the ferry’s rusty bow, Sam watched her screen until two bars of cell service appeared. The wind was fresh and wet on Sam’s face. Elena picked up. Her breathing on the other end of the line was regular now—she was home, she said, and all was well. Their mother had felt strong enough at dinnertime for them to eat together in the kitchen. Sam said that was good news, and Elena agreed, and then Elena said their mother was in her room resting, and Sam waited for Elena to go on. The edge of San Juan was growing larger on the horizon. The wind kept pushing. Finally, Sam asked Elena to tell her every bit of what had happened.

Elena must have been waiting for the invitation. She rushed right in. She said she had been walking, like normal, back from work, a two-mile commute around the mowed edge of the golf course and then through the private planned community on Fairway Drive and along the trail that bordered Cattle Point Road. That trail, a quiet dirt path that connected the town of Friday Harbor to the visitor center at American Camp, took Elena from home to her job and back every day. It rolled past pasture and woodlands and fenced-off properties. She’d hardly seen anything there more threatening than spiderwebs. This evening, she’d been humming to herself. Her headphones were in and her sneakers treaded softly on the ground. She saw a movement beside her, in the trees, and turned. She expected to see a deer. The bear came out.

“You’re kidding,” Sam said. Her waist was pressed against the ferry’s railing. On the level exposed below her, deckhands were moving, preparing to come into harbor. Passengers drifted. Soon they would be called to their cars.

“Right there in the woods,” Elena said. “And looking straight at me.” Elena had stopped moving, averted her eyes. She could sense it padding forward.

Elena said she couldn’t stop trying to calculate the distance between them. Forty feet? Thirty? A few car lengths—an instant away, she knew, had the bear decided to attack. She held her breath and turned her head slowly in its direction. She saw its paws, which stunned her—their size— Over the phone, she laughed, then. “I’m holding up my hands,” she told Sam. “Like you can see me.” Its paws were the size of a dinner plate, she said. Bigger than a human skull. Sam pictured her sister’s skinny fingers drawing a circle in the air, sketching out the claws that could’ve killed her.

The bear was losing its light in Sam’s memory. It was turning into something shadowed and frightful. “Did you call the sheriff?” Sam asked.

“Sure,” Elena said.

“Did they find it?”

“I don’t think so.”

“How soon did they get there?”

“I don’t know,” Elena said. “I didn’t call them until after. Doesn’t it feel kind of silly to call?”

“Silly how?”

“Like…what was there to say? The bear left. I saw it leave. We looked at each other and then it kept going into the woods.”

This didn’t make sense. “They told us to call. They’re trying to track it.”

“I know,” Elena said. She sounded distracted.

Then Elena turned the conversation back to the bear. Describing it, she was focused. Detailed. Reverent, even. She spent a long time talking about its body. The impossibility of its size. The thickness of its arms, the depth of its smell, the force it exuded—its presence had made Elena’s ears keener and her eyes sharper, had shocked her senses into new sensitivity. It had looked right at her. Taken her in. Its eyes were small, close-set, colored a rich orangey yellow and lined with black. Its nose twitched as they stood there together. It inhaled her.

Elena talked about her sighting the way a person might if an angel touched down in front of them, or if a burning bush spoke, or if, Sam supposed, a grizzly walked up, met their gaze, and did not do them harm. It was remarkable, certainly. To come so close to danger and emerge unscathed. Elena’s day, before seeing it, must have been tedious, spotted by moments of frustration, but after crossing the bear’s path, the simple fact of her life had to be recast as some sort of miracle.

The ferry blasted its horn. Sam pressed the phone against her ear. Even through the air-shaking sound, Elena’s words came through clear and joyous. Elevated. Alive.

But when she talked about the rest of it—all the details that now seemed more urgent to Sam—she reverted to her usual voice. The most matter-of-fact and unimpressed version of herself, actually. When did the police arrive? Had the animal followed her home? Was she worried about the walk to work in the future? Elena didn’t seem to care.

“You should take the car tomorrow,” Sam said. “You’ll just have to drive me to the dock in the morning. I can walk from town to meet you in the afternoon.”

“No, I’m fine,” Elena said, breezily. “You take it.”

“You can’t go on the trail again. Not if you know it’s out there and coming up to people.”

“I’m really fine.”

“El,” Sam said. “Please.”

Elena agreed. But she didn’t sound scared, and Sam didn’t understand why not. Sam was. During the ferry’s docking routine, as Sam descended to the car deck and Ben, holding a rope, grinned at her and she stepped off the boat onto the wooden slats of the pier, she worried about how close the bear had been.

The week before, at their door, it’d been even closer, but she’d felt safer, then, separated from it by walls. And she and Elena had been together. This experience, Elena alone with it in the woods, nothing but rotten air between them—this was different.

Sam walked to the car on shaky legs. She could imagine it, what Elena went through. Heading home, worn out, one foot ahead of the other on the uneven dirt path, and then hearing movement. Another body nearby.

The bear stepping out and staring at her. Its small, glowing eyes and enormous wet mouth. Its claws digging into the earth. If Sam had been in Elena’s shoes, she would’ve screamed, or tried to run, or—anything, not knowing in the least what was right to do. Raised her arms? Climbed a tree? Stood there pissing her pants and weeping, waiting to be chewed apart.

Elena said she’d had nightmares as a child about this. A monster approaching her. She had lived that nightmare now.

The trees. The dirt. Its teeth. Her breath. The horror of that particular dream coming true.