Enter Bear

At first, I thought I saw a raccoon when the brown hump came lumbering along the shoreline but to my dismay it continued to grow into a much much bigger animal. I assumed it was a much smaller creature for two main reasons. The first was the speed at which the animal was moving indicated a particular lack of care for the great amount of human scent in the area, and the second reason was the light brown, cinnamon color. You see, the black bears here are usually jet-black in color, so there's really no reason that something light brown would have tipped me off. Knowing this you can imagine how shocked I was when a tan, bulky male bear standing nearly seven feet, the great body guard of all his pudgy brothers and sisters, lumbered into my campsite?

I remember the waive of adrenaline hitting me and my mind blurring as two distinct urges competed for my immediate attention, one yelling fight! and the other screaming flee! I was paralyzed. The only thing I did manage to do at that moment was grab my dad by the arm, point, and say one completely non-profound thing: Oh, shit. He must have been suffering from a little bit of the same brain-muddling I was because for a moment neither of us did anything and then we began racing around like field mice frantically trying to remember everything the rangers had told us: bang pots, make noise, look big. Dad decided he'd bang two cooking pots together over his head to accomplish both these tasks and I grabbed a canoe paddle and waived it over my head, probably accomplishing nothing more than appearing like some bizarre, intoxicated giraffe. At first it seemed that the bear was changing course thanks to our display and would leave us alone, but this change in direction was only to create a straighter route to our food pack. With what seemed like only seconds, this bear was under our pack and on its rear haunches, showing its great size and swatting away at what my father and I had left to eat for the weekend. I couldn't help but feel that I had been lied to. This wasn't some dumb, skittish creature. It was big, it was tough, and my god, it was trying to untie the ropes with its teeth!