“That was cute!” I said. “And, if you hadn’t scared the bear, you were right in my line of fire.”

She answered that the bear wasn’t charging. Clearly it was running toward us. But in previous encounters, bears had stood and studied us before acting. Chris thought that the bear was running toward some other destination and, like us, was concentrating on the jumbled ice. So it didn’t see us, even though it was running right at us. All three of us were just looking down, floe-hopping. Chris’s counter-charge was merely her way of announcing our existence and telling the bear to run in some other direction.

“And if your theory were wrong?” I asked, “You were in my line of fire.”

“I wasn’t wrong.”

I smiled. The moment was forever etched into my brain, joining a plethora of other such moments that have enriched my life. Another moment. We were hungry. Chris was right. Time to get going.