A Hungry Bear

So what did we do? We yelled louder and banged our pots harder (I waved my canoe paddle harder, as soundless as that might have been) hoping beyond all reason that this giant animal would be afraid of us, or at least of our ridiculousness. We decided to make our presence better known by moving closer and throwing rocks to scare him away. The bear didn't care for that one tiny bit. He turned toward us now that we were no more than fifteen feet away and jumped down to his feet, smacked both front paws against the ground, shaking the very earth, and let out a low, rumbling growl. I had remembered from somewhere that bears sometimes did bluff charges and running would only encourage them to chase you so I stood firm (while shaking pretty badly as my body OD'd on adrenaline), waving my canoe paddle and shouting. My father, on the other hand took off running like a frightened deer. Hop hop, hop, and he was gone. If the bear had been human, it would have smiled malevolently, and I still imagine it did anyway, as it turned away from us realizing its size and home team advantage trumped our pots and paddles.

There was a point then I considered pulling a Daniel Boone and going mano y mano with the bear using the wooden paddle I had suddenly become so attached to, but I kept looking at how damn big the bear was and could only imagine such an incident ending with my innards becoming outwards with one good swipe of the four-inch claws at the end of the bear's paw. I imagined the rangers, flat-billed hats and knee-high socks, gathering around my mangled body days later, pushing away the torn little ribbons of skin with their Coleman hiking boots and taking notes on little recyclable clipboards about what would have caused this attack. They would sift through the remains of the tent and the shredded left-overs of the food pack and find various breads, pastas, and then, dreadfully, our cheap swisher sweet cigars. That would be the great culprit, I knew it. They would then issue a report to all campers henceforth that cheap cigars will drive nice berry eating bears mad and they'll tear you apart. But not to worry, this is only the third attack like this, and you surely won't be the fourth. Even though I found this outcome unlikely, the idea kept me planted.

All this yelling, shaking, and theorizing took place in a half hour's time, but it wasn't over yet. After completely failing to upset the bear with all our taunting, screaming, and rock throwing, we decided we'd have to get out of the campsite as quickly as possible, but for how long we didn't know. There still remained but one little problem: to get to our canoe, we either had to walk right past the bear--bad idea--or head along the slippery shoreline, all the while hoping he didn't suddenly decide we'd be easier catches than our pack of food. We decided the shoreline was probably the better option and made it to our canoe safely but we were suddenly confronted with yet another new problem. In the time it had taken to not scare the bear away, the sun had set and it was dusk with only twenty some minutes of good light left if we were lucky. We had two options: we could either canoe all the way back to the outfitters and sleep in the car, or we could go the nearest campsite and ask for help. Dad quickly pointed out that the latter option was the best, mainly because he had left the car keys in the tent, up by the bear. The closest campsite was a half mile north on the lake and we took no more than five minutes of good paddling to get there, finding the other campers waiting for us, an audience to all our noises. The other campers, a father and his two teenage sons, quickly and kindly agreed to add to our numbers to help scare out the bear. Fortunately, though, by the time we got back to our site, the bear was gone already and our food had survived, hanging tenaciously still between the two trees, both of which had deep claw-lines up and down both trunks, leaving them looking something like two sticks of string cheese with only the outside layers peeled.