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Twenty-five miles northwest of Bemidji, the cell phones play out, the FM stations fade and flutter and die, and the birch and pine and aspen roll on beyond the curve of the world. The Big Woods and the Big Bog, and me hunting bear there on the Reservation South Boundary Road.

I would tell you about this ground, the homesteaders' heartbreak, the pitiful cabins sinking back to earth, the sad and rusting plows, the blasted apple trees. About the Red Lake Nation, and the Anishinabe, where there is no ZIP code and the night crackles with aurora borealis and sometimes automatic weapons fire. I have heart and breath but not space or time, so I will just tell you about what happened on the Reservation South Boundary Road and why I do not hunt bear anymore.

I raised my children on bear meat. It's rich and dark and sweet and if you ever hang your lip over a plate of it, cooked long and slow with apples and onions and gravy, you'll know my children ate good. And should you ever get down in the bushes on your hands and knees and go after one in the fading light, you'll know their daddy got honest meat, too.

But my babies were grown and gone and I was there on the South Boundary Road when I met the warden. His voice bore the husky cadence of the old tongue.

"You're trespassing on the Red Lake Nation."

He was large and brown and not smiling. He was Anishinabe and wearing a pistol. I was a syllableless shinabe, a White Man, but I was wearing a pistol, too. We spoke across the hood of my truck, across two centuries of suspicion.

"I am parked on the south shoulder," I said. "The center of the road is the line."

His dark eyes hardened and he raised his face and pointed with his nose.

"We've resurveyed it. It's back down there a ways."

I considered the Red Lake jail, where one call will not do it all, where you get a hearing "in the fullness of time."

"There are those among us," he said, "who believe bear are the spirits of our ancestors." And I knew he was member of the bear medicine clan and I knew I was in trouble. So we compromised. He did not arrest me, I did not resist. Neither of us made any sudden moves. And I let him escort me off the reservation.

But south of that road was public land and I had a right to it, as surely as he had a right to his. The next day, I parked my truck a quarter-mile off the reservation and walked the shortgrass where I would leave no prints. An hour later, I heard his pickup rattle to a stop. He waited and I waited while the sun slid down the west, while the shadows grew long in the dappling shade, while a grouse drummed way back in the woods, like some ghostly old John Deere that would not quite start, while the ravens gathered and spoke in tongues I prayed to know.

The bear appeared as they generally do, not there one instant and there the next, a conjuration of earth and air and magic, standing now on White Man's ground. I swung my rifle and he saw me move and he rose on his hind legs and fixed me with his quick dark eyes and pointed south with his nose, the way the warden did. And in the ravens' cry I heard "shinabe, shinabe."

Now, I had shot bear over baits and I had shot them over trails and oats and corn and even for the DNR after the bear broke into people's houses. I had trailed them in the dark and been two dozen times scared-to-Jesus-death, but never scratched. But I did not shoot this bear. He considered me a moment, then dropped to all fours and turned again toward the Red Lake Nation.

The warden saw me come out of the woods. He nodded and waved and I thought for an instant maybe he knew. And that's why I do not hunt bear anymore.

—Roger Pinckney has also chased wild boar in South Carolina. His friends think he's an adrenaline junkie.