BRENDAN AND I wouldn’t ever speak directly about our estrangement. There were some topics we’d learned to avoid entirely to “keep the peace,” as my mother would say.

I bit my tongue when the topic of oil and gas came up.

“Holy fuck it’s been a good month,” my brother would crow. “Production is really picking up.”

What I wanted to ask him, but didn’t: “Great, but at what environmental cost?”

It frustrated me that Brendan didn’t seem to care about the negative impacts of extractive industries on the environment and First Nations communities. There was no shortage of evidence. In 2011, heavy rains damaged a pipeline that ran northeast of Alberta’s Peace River, which caused a leakage of 4.5 million liters of oil into more than three hectares of beaver ponds and muskeg only ten kilometers north of the Lubicon Cree First Nation village of Little Buffalo. It was the second-largest oil spill in the province’s history. Residents became sick with nausea, burning eyes, and headaches. It would take two years for the company, Plains Midstream Canada, to be found guilty for negligence.

I wrote extensively about the harms of extractive industries on the environment and Indigenous communities, publishing my book Women Who Dig in the spring of 2018—but I couldn’t even have the conversation with my own brother about the negative impacts of his work. Our relationship felt far too fragile, the wounds of estrangement too fresh.

IT WAS MY FOURTH season working at a fire tower in northern Alberta and my patience with the bears was running out. From the cupola, I watched for them, as though they were tiny black ticks that I wanted to pick clean from the landscape. On the ground, my encounters with the habituated mother bear of yearling cubs were becoming increasingly tense. We were both visibly stressed by the presence of the other and on the defensive.

The rubber slugs were just a band-aid solution for a problem that wasn’t going away. I’d become numb to the act of firing off a couple of shots into the bear’s backside. I’d even sent a round of birdshot, a projectile made up of lead pellets, into the nearby bushes to try to scare the mother bear, but it quickly learned that neither the shots nor the slugs—even if they stung a little—were a real threat.

I knew that I was privileged to live immersed in a wilderness that few would ever get to know so intimately. But it made me feel sharply aware of the disconnect between saying that we love wildlife—or the idea of them—and what it means to actually live closely with them. I felt as though I was running out of options.

Many folks in northern Alberta have a mantra when it comes to dealing with grizzly bears, a threatened species that has been illegal to hunt since 2006: “Shoot, shovel, shut up.” A lookout who manned a tower along the BC–Alberta border once told me that if a grizzly ever wandered into her yard, she’d shoot the bear and chain the body up to her truck and drag it into the bush. “Who would ever know?” she cackled. The aggression in her voice had stunned me. There was something inherently hateful about the way she spoke about bears.

People possessed even less tolerance for a black bear, a species of bear perceived to be plentiful, so commonplace, that it was dispensable. For one, it wasn’t illegal to shoot a black bear on private property. A black bear wasn’t a grizzly bear, or polar bear, protected by conservation laws. That ubiquitous saying rang in my ears, “it’s just a black bear.” No one would care about another ‘problem bear’ being culled—that word like kill made soft, destroyed, or put down—convenient euphemisms. Conservation officers would likely kill the cubs, too, since they too had become habituated to my fire tower.

I didn’t want it to come to that. There has to be a better way, I thought.

As if the mother bear knew what loaded question weighed on my mind—was I capable of ending its life?—it didn’t come back with its cubs for the rest of the season. Their absence grew into a presence that haunted me. I hated the feeling that my actions—and my emotional reaction—had altered the landscape and the bears were no longer a part of it.

I REMEMBERED MY biologist father telling me that bear cubs, after being weaned by their mother, would often stick together and face the forest as two. Together, they could hold ground against larger, more dominant bears. The sibling relationship in any species—solitary or social—is one of the most formative for learning how to be and survive in the world.

Brendan and I hadn’t yet regained our closeness, even as I’d grown to love his children and witnessed his ongoing commitment to sobriety. However, we couldn’t part ways. We were the people on the face of the earth most genetically like each other. Even while we were estranged, he’d always been omnipresent, buried beneath my every thought. Sometimes, when I looked in the mirror, I saw my brother staring back at me.

During long days in the tower, I began to re-examine the story I’d told myself about my brother for so many years: that he was an addict, that he’d inevitably hurt me again. I read a book by psychotherapist and addictions specialist Gabor Maté, called In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, that explores the way society stigmatizes, even dehumanizes, those living and struggling with drug and alcohol addictions. During the worst years of my brother’s addiction, before our falling-out, the words I’d used to describe him included monster and animal. I viewed my brother through a lens of fear. I didn’t see him so much as human, but rather as a beast that could harm me.

I began to learn that addiction isn’t about individual strength, or will, nor a reflection of moral character. It’s a chronic, relapsing disease of the brain. Even if Brendan was self-aware and recognizing the ways cocaine was destroying the relationships in his life—and I’m sure that he was—the disease of addiction was making it exceedingly difficult for him to change his behaviors.

I learned that Brendan was hardly alone. Crack cocaine is the most-consumed illegal substance in Canada. Men who work in the trades, including the oil and gas industry, are even more susceptible to drug addiction.

As I reflected back on the decade we’d spent apart, I began to feel increasingly compassionate for the loneliness—and shame—my brother must’ve been contending with.

“I’m proud of you for staying clean,” I told him awkwardly during a visit in Edmonton, unsure how he’d respond. “I know it can’t be easy,” I added.

He wouldn’t look me in the eye, but nodded his head.

The mother bear’s choice for proximity wasn’t about aggression, or dominance, but a strategy for raising her young… she was using the fire tower as a kind of nursery, a protective buffer from predators.

I BEGAN TO QUESTION the story I was telling myself about the bear as aggressive, dangerous—a threat. I’d interpreted every behavior—even their lack of fear of me—as dominant and aggressive.

I began to see the flaws in mutual avoidance as a strategy to coexist. It felt a bit like a misnomer, or yet another euphemism to placate what had really been going on. I’d turned myself into the aggressor in an attempt to make the bear afraid. What was even remotely mutual about that? The exchange between us wasn’t about mutualism, but antagonism.

For years, I’d criticized how the Alberta oil sands and other extractive industries had destroyed native habitat, contaminated the environment, and displaced wildlife from the landscape. How were my actions, standing on the hillside with the shotgun in my hands any different? I’d come very close to pulling the trigger on that bear. Maybe the real problem wasn’t the mother bear’s lack of fear of people, but my own fear that was preventing me from seeing the larger story.

LATE ONE EVENING, I saw the mother bear and cubs closer than usual. The family had stepped beyond the willows into the clearing, the no-go zone. I hesitated, wondering, should I scare them away?

The cubs pounced on the heads of late season dandelions with bravado. One tiptoed up behind its sibling and nipped it square on the rump. The cub bawled, bounced a few steps back, then turned to swat a tiny paw at its sibling. I laughed, recalling the same way my brother used to tease and egg me on when we were kids.

The mother bear did not look up at me. Mosquitoes swarmed the bear in a halo of light. One of the cubs sprinted to their mother’s side and disappeared beneath her shaggy fur. Suddenly, the mother collapsed into the grass, rolled over on her back, and opened her hind legs like a frog. The cub climbed up on their mother’s belly and began gnawing at one of her six engorged teats. In a hurry, the second cub galloped over and seized a nipple. Their heads worked up and down as they fed. The mother lay back. They were so close that I could hear the rhythmic sound of the cubs drinking their mother’s milk. A faint motor-like hum, a steady purr of contentment.

I stood there in awe, mesmerized, only meters away from the family. That the bear tolerated me there, watching her nurse, defied the dominant belief I’d been taught that bears are afraid of people. The mother bear beetling on her back, legs splayed wide open. The cubs, feasting on her milk.

I was suddenly conscious that I was breaking the rules I’d established with the bears. The mother bear had set foot beyond the clearing, the line I’d drawn, if only in my own mind.

It occurred to me that, perhaps, the mother bear’s choice for proximity wasn’t about aggression, or dominance, but a strategy for raising her young. Maybe she was using the fire tower as a kind of nursery, a protective buffer from predators.

PROXIMITY IGNITES EMPATHY. When I visited my brother’s family’s home in Edmonton, he insisted on teaching me how to gently change my niece’s diaper. He was constantly cooing to her, praising her, and loving her. Brendan was his most tender self with his daughter. Fatherhood gave him a sense of purpose and belonging. He stood taller because of his family’s love. My brother had begun to dream about the future again, one he insisted he wanted me to be a part of, and I began to imagine what that future could look like.

Being in my brother’s home, watching him parent, I could empathize with that which stressed him: providing for his children, and struggling toward his goal of building a home on the land where they’d feel safe—all while managing the addictive urge to use again.

When I saw beyond the one-dimensional lens of my brother as an ‘addict’, an oil worker, as someone whose political beliefs I didn’t agree with, I realized it’s possible to love someone without agreeing with them, or even fully understanding them. My brother and I might never really know one another, but we could practice love and empathy for the other.

We could learn to lean into the paradox of that which polarized us.

Excerpted and adapted from Black Bear: A Story of Siblinghood and Survival by Trina Moyles, copyright © 2026, used by permission of Pegasus Books.

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