Have you met your bear? If not, it is time to do so. An encounter with a bear is one of life's essential experiences. You meet fear, you meet love, you meet the wild world and you meet yourself, all of them head-on and all at the same time.

It's something about the muzzle. That's what throws you, that's what devastates you. Look at a bear full in the face, eye to eye, and as close as possible. How close was I? Bloody close. And when you look at a bear and a bear looks at you, you see your own teddy.

You see yourself, and you meet, unexpectedly, your own childhood. A teddy is a bear anthropomorphised, softened, humanised; the face is flattened, demuzzled, so the toy bear becomes one of us. And when you look at a bear head-on, perspective flattens the face and makes him half-human. Surely this is Pooh, Paddington, Baloo; ears like furry semi-circles, stuck on as if they were afterthoughts in a child's drawing.

And then he turns his head. It is a transformation like the smile of Dracula. The face elongates, the savage muzzle grows before your eyes, square, extensive, full of teeth, and it is at once clear that bears aren't human beings at all. Perhaps the point is that if humans are prepared to empathise so much with bears, then humans must also have their savage side.

Billy Connolly: on top of the world in Canada

Billy Connolly faces some harsh truths in the Arctic wilderness of Canada - a journey he had dreamt of since childhood

• The growth of Arctic cruising

The 12 best wildlfe holidays

A month-by-month guide to the most spectacular wildlife holidays around the globe

Polar bears on an Arctic safari

Sure, they look sweet from this distance – but up close, polar bears are bloodthirsty predators with 5in claws

Related Links

• Simon Barnes: return of the osprey

• Billy Connolly: on top of the world in Canada

I have been with big carnivores before, sought them out and been thrilled with a fearful intimacy. But lions and leopards and jaguars mean less to us children of the north than bears. Bears are part of our culture. We met them in a thousand childhood forests; we dreaded the consequences of stealing their porridge; we joined them at picnic time; we knew that they would get us if we stepped on the cracks in the pavement.

Bears are part of our lives, part of ourselves. We need to meet them to complete our experience of growing up, to understand why the bear that was lost on the railway station and the bear that had very little brain and the bear that taught the law of the jungle all mattered to us.

And we discover that it is because bears are very much like us, and that it is because bears are very much unlike us. For two reasons, then, bears are scary. The most loveable bear that ever was is scary and can trace his lineage from the furred, fanged and clawed dwellers of the forest that I encountered so closely in Canada.

I set off by boat from a lodge floating in a remote Pacific inlet in British Columbia and then waited on a platform, as if for a train, overlooking a fast-flowing stream. The salmon were spawning and for once in the year you know precisely where the bears will be. They'll be fishing and, if you wait long enough, you'll see them.

The first one, black and ambling, utterly self-confident, was staggeringly tolerant of our presence, fishing with confidence and efficiency - a melanistic teddy in full-face, a salmon's nemesis in profile. But then a small miracle. He was joined by a white bear. Not a polar bear; no, a pale morph of the black bear; same species, wholly different colour, cream with honey highlights, like Winnie-the-Pooh's elevenses. They are referred to as spirit bears, bears around whom local legends accrue; or Kermode bears, from the naturalist who first described them.

The colour of the bear was reflected in the colours of the river, the pale boulders and the hurrying waters. It has been suggested that the coincidence of these few waterways with such colours allows the survival of these oddities; they appear invisible to the salmon and so they can fish with majestic certainty. There was something other-worldly about this animal, as if he were aware of the privilege he bestowed on those who watched with such intensity and for so long. But he was a gentle fellow compared with the black bear, who chased him away. The white bear shambled off like a pantomime horse and proceeded to urinate and defecate to express his unease.

Back at the lodge I was aware of an extraordinary euphoria among the guests who had been with me on the platform, all of us who had been almost within stroking or biting distance of a bear. There was a sense of fulfilment, as if something important had been realised and shared. It was not just a nice bit of holiday; it was a profound achievement, a soul-deep coming-to-terms with the wild world and our wild selves. It was a night of jubilation.

I travelled on. I wanted more bears, I wanted grizzlies, I wanted to meet the really big ones - the ones that are the most savage, the most human, the most revered, the most feared. I went inland to Tweedsmuir National Park to find them, taking first one float-plane and then another, before seeking out bears by drifting downstream in a boat.

Times recommends

• 'New York has lost its edge'
• The UK and Ireland's 25 best Christmas events
• Chalet Chef 2010: the winners