It’s so quiet I can hear my own heart beating. You don’t often find this kind of tranquility in today’s society, where noise is accepted, expected and sometimes even desired – people can get uneasy when it’s ‘too’ quiet. Here, I can clearly hear every beautiful sound – a faint rustling of the leaves, the far off trickling of Chikanishing Creek and something, probably a raccoon, slinking through the woods. A group of ravens nesting nearby for the night starts up a conversation uttering a whole mélange of strange croaks, squawks and squeaks. I wonder what they’re saying - probably just ‘good night’ to each other.
So now I’ve mentioned wolves and ravens – so what about the bears, you ask? Well, I admit, I added bears to the title because it was catchy; I will see none of them during this particular visit to Killarney. But I have, however, seen or experienced direct evidence of them many times here in the past. I'll never forget the time I went hiking for the day and inadvertently left a cooler outside. It contained only beer and ice, but the bears didn’t know that. They know that coolers often contain food and therefore all unattended coolers must be investigated. I returned to beer and ice spilled out all over the ground and a cooler lid lying in the dirt with a deep puncture mark in it – the bear had evidently pried off the lid with its teeth.
Then there was the time I literally smelled bear breath. I was tent camping on this occasion and after a long day of hiking and a hearty meal, I retired groggily to my tent for some well deserved shuteye. I was pleasantly dozing when I awoke to shuffling sounds just outside. And intense sniffing. That’s when I smelled him – or rather, his wild breath. He was alternately sniffing and snorting, his nose evidently reporting to him that there was a human inside and he wasn't sure what to do. Fortunatelty, he must have decided that I wouldn’t make a good snack or that I was probably too much trouble because humans refuse to willingly become food and will fight back. In any event, he soon shuffled off snorting and huffing back into the woods from whence he came, but sleep didn’t come easily for the rest of that night.
Back in the here and now, I gaze up at a sky positively glowing with stars, as only can be seen in this magnitude in places like this where there is no artificial lighting for many miles around. Finally, as much as I am enjoying the night’s charms, I tire of shivering and my teeth chattering, so I go inside. While falling asleep, I plan to shoot the morning sunrise from a vantage point high up on a bluff near my favorite campsite.
I wake up about an hour before dawn. I go outside to pee and check out the current conditions and I see that all the stars have been blotted from the sky as if someone had closed the observatory roof – it has clouded over. There will be no magic light this morning so I go back to bed. When I wake up a couple of hours later the sky is an uninspiring gray, but at least it’s not raining. I hang around the site organizing my stuff (getting ready for the inevitable return to society), eat a leisurely breakfast and then slowly sip a couple of cups of tea - a very relaxing morning when compared to the pre-dawn starts of the last few days.
Finally, in the late morning I amble over to the La Cloche Silhouette trail, which starts only a few hundred feet from my campsite. I have no set agenda today; I will just wander wherever my wanderlust takes me. Almost immediately, it takes me off the trail - the wild north shore of George Lake is calling me. I bushwhack to the edge of a steep cliff and search for a way down. I find one and scale it down to the edge of the water. The view from here is spectacular - precipitous white cliffs plunging into the brilliant deep blue water as far as the eye can see.
The area surrounding the place where I am standing itself too is beautiful; soft white pines drape overhead and picturesque boulders decorate the shoreline with stretches of pink sand beach in between. If it were (much) warmer I would strip down to my birthday suit and plunge into the inviting water, but it’s decidedly not a possiblilty today. So instead, I sit down on a big chunk of quartzite and revel in this little piece of heaven, gazing dreamily out at the lake and the small islands dotting the horizon.
The gentle sound of lapping water and soft breezes singing in the treetops provides the soundtrack for my reverie. I think about how comfortable I am in Killarney, how it all feels so natural, it’s like I am at home here. NEXT - Part X - The Last Night in Killarney
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