Nose to Nose

The mother and the cub were swimming in the turquoise water when they turned toward each other - and what happened next lasted only a second or two but was unlike anything else I photographed in Alaska. We were on the flat-bottom skiff, low to the water, working the edge of a glacially-fed lake on one of the two days we spent on the water. The cub brought its nose up to its mother's nose, and the mother held still. Just the two faces, just above the waterline, touching. The rest of the lake continued its business around them.

I have spent weeks in Alaska watching grizzly bears, and I have seen remarkable things. But tenderness, in the specific form it takes between a sow and her young, is not something the landscape often stages for the camera. Most of what I photograph here is about power and abundance - bears catching fish, bears moving through rivers, bears claiming territory. This was different. This was simply a mother and her cub, briefly face to face, in water the color of a Caribbean lagoon, in a landscape that is the last great wild place in North America.

Nose to Nose is the image from this collection that I am asked about most often. It requires no caption, no context, no explanation. Whatever exists between a grizzly mother and her cub in that moment of contact is not a mystery, even to someone who has never been within two hundred miles of Alaska. It translates completely. On metal, large, the detail in both faces is present and the turquoise water holds its depth, and the image brings to the room something that wildlife photography rarely produces: a feeling of witnessing something that was never meant for us and is the more beautiful for that.