A01=Trina Moyles
animal planet
Author_Trina Moyles
bear stories
bears
black bear
black bears
boreal forest
braiding sweetgrass
brothers and sisters
carl safina
Category=DNC
Category=WNCF
chloe dalton
eat pray love
eight bears
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=0
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
grizzly bear
h is for hawk
lookout
nature memoirs
oil sands
perseverance
raising hare
siblings
solo travel
steve searles
ursa americanus
what the bears know
wild stories
wildfires
wildlife
Product details
- ISBN 9798897100347
- Weight: 499g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 26 Feb 2026
- Publisher: Pegasus Books
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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A dazzling memoir about one woman's coexistence with bears in the boreal forest and a singular meditation on sibling loss.
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 Calgary 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 nuisance to human society. As a child roaming the shores of the Peace in the footsteps of her beloved older brother, Brendan, 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 working for human rights organizations, Trina returned to northern Alberta for a job as a fire tower lookout, while Brendan worked in the oil sands, vulnerable to a boom-and-bust economy and substance addiction. When she was assigned to a tower in a wildlife corridor, bears were alarmingly visible and plentiful, wandering metres away on the other side of an electrified fence surrounding the tower. Over four summers, Trina begins to move beyond fear and observe the extraordinary essence of the maligned black bear—a keystone species who is as 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.
Impassioned and eloquent, Black Bear is a story of grief and a vision of peaceful coexistence in a divided world. It captures the fragility of our relationships with human and nonhuman species alike, and the imperative to protect the wild—along with the people we hold closest.
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 Calgary 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 nuisance to human society. As a child roaming the shores of the Peace in the footsteps of her beloved older brother, Brendan, 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 working for human rights organizations, Trina returned to northern Alberta for a job as a fire tower lookout, while Brendan worked in the oil sands, vulnerable to a boom-and-bust economy and substance addiction. When she was assigned to a tower in a wildlife corridor, bears were alarmingly visible and plentiful, wandering metres away on the other side of an electrified fence surrounding the tower. Over four summers, Trina begins to move beyond fear and observe the extraordinary essence of the maligned black bear—a keystone species who is as 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.
Impassioned and eloquent, Black Bear is a story of grief and a vision of peaceful coexistence in a divided world. It captures the fragility of our relationships with human and nonhuman species alike, and the imperative to protect the wild—along with the people we hold closest.
Trina Moyles is an environmental journalist, creative producer, and author. Her debut book, Women Who Dig: Farming, Feminism, and the Fight to Feed the World was a finalist for the High Plains Literary Awards and is currently being adapted into a documentary film. Lookout: Love, Solitude, and Searching for Wildfire in the Boreal Forest, a memoir about her work as a fire tower lookout in northwestern Alberta, won a National Outdoor Book Prize. In 2022, Moyles received the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Award, the province's highest honour for the arts, for her dedication to writing. She lives in Whitehorse, Yukon with her partner and their three dogs. Read more at www.trinamoyles.com.
Instagram @trinariannemoyles
Instagram @trinariannemoyles
