When Trina Moyles was five years old, her father, a wildlife biologist known in Peace River as "the bear guy," brought home an orphaned black bear cub for a night before sending it to the Edmonton Valley Zoo. This brief but unforgettable encounter spurred Trina's lifelong fascination with Ursus americanus -- the most populous bear on the northern landscape, often considered a hindrance to human society. As a child roaming the shores of the Peace in the footsteps of her beloved older brother, Brendan, Trina experienced the elemental world her father guarded. She understood bears to be invisible entities: always present but mostly hidden, and worthy of respect. Growing up during the oil boom of the 1990s, the threats in the siblings' hard-drinking resource town were more human, dividing them from a natural reverence for the land, and eventually, from each other. After years of living abroad, Trina returned to northern Alberta to work as a fire tower lookout, while Brendan was working in the oil sands, vulnerable to a boom-and-bust economy and substance addiction. In 2019, she was assigned to a tower in a wildlife corridor. Bears were visible and plentiful there, wandering metres away on the other side of an electrified fence surrounding Trina's site. Over four summers, Trina begins to move beyond fear and observe the extraordinary essence of the maligned black bear -- a keystone species who is subject to the environmental consequences of the oil economy as humans. At the same time, she searches for common ground with Brendan on the land that bonded them.
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