Surprises in May


                Did I ever tell you about the wildly exciting thing that happened to me one May evening a few years ago? It was a day we still haven’t stopped talking about.

Once again, it was the month of May, the doorstep of summer. Trees and flowers were blooming, grass and shrubs were a lush green, birds that disappear all winter were back in droves, the air was fresh and the world was alive. So why wouldn’t we go for a walk? We were out in the country for a weekend and the weather happened to be lovely, and we intended to make the very, very best of it.

It was a gorgeous evening. The sun was beginning to melt into the western horizon, and our shadows were beginning to grow long on the pavement of the country road as we wandered away from Auntie’s house, talking and laughing.

What could be more peaceful? Tall grasses blew around slanted barbed-wire fences and wide fields were criss-crossed with the furrows of the early stages of irrigation. That far away from anything else, the only sounds on the air were the swishing of the breeze among the branches, the gentle, drowsy honk-honking of geese and easy chirruping of a family of frogs in an invisible pond behind a stand of spruce. One of our older companions, drawn back to his childhood days in the country, pulled some quackgrass and showed us how they used to make whistles out of it.

It was one of Mother Nature’s perfect evenings.

We strolled down to the junction and, still laughing and joking, we turned around to head home. That would make it a good mile or so worth of walking by the time we were done. Not too bad.

Suddenly, one of us stopped dead with a harsh whisper:

“What IS that!?”

A ways down the road, about half-way between us and Auntie’s house, something dark sauntered across the road. Someone’s dog out for an adventure? Perhaps a small deer or…”

“It’s the bear!”

Auntie’s words were like a punch in the stomach. The neighbor had left a message warning us that a bear had been reported in the area, but we thought we’d go out anyway. Who ever sees a bear around here?

Now we stood on the pavement in the evening air swallowing our words, hard.

But we were being silly. It was just the power of suggestion, right? We weren’t really seeing what we thought we were seeing.

I lifted my monocular to my eye and, nervously, peered through. There was the unmistakeable shaggy, four footed and powerful figure of a full-grown black bear. He had stopped dead in the middle of the road. Now, as I peered at him through my scope, he slowly turned his powerful head and looked directly at us.

Huge adrenaline surge!

We all started talking at once.

“What do we do?”

“Run for home?”

“Let’s go see if the neighbor is home.”

“Let’s get out of here!”

Someone was on the ground ready to crawl under the barbed wire and sprint for home. Someone else was backing down road away from the bear. We didn’t know what to do! We couldn’t just stroll on past such a powerful beast, and running wouldn’t help. Every species of bear can outrun even the fastest human. We couldn’t just stand here all night, either.

We were just on the verge of an all-out, full-blown panic, when some friends drove by in their SUV. Auntie frantically tried to wave them down for help. I guess she wasn’t quite frantic enough, because they waved back a friendly ‘hello’ and kept right on driving.

They weren’t more than a minute beyond us, when the car came to an abrupt, squealing halt. After a moment’s pause, they backed right up to our spot. The driver rolled down his window.

“Hey,” he said, “Would you folks like a ride home?”

We were already piling into each other’s laps in the back seat, chattering away breathlessly. Where had that bear come from? How close had we passed by him when we were walking down the same road he was crossing minutes later? Was it our talking and laughter or perhaps our quackgrass whistle that had frightened him away from us?

The driver stopped the car at a space between the roadside trees where we could see across one of those furrowed fields. In the middle we could see the bear loping along across the fresh soil. He was young – a yearling at best – and skinny from the winter’s sparse diet. Again he stopped and stared at us.

The driver made an abrupt, sharp blast on his horn, and the bear jumped and galloped off in the direction of the valley. There are plenty of berry bushes and fresh water down there.

All that evening and the next morning, we watched through Auntie’s living room window, scanning the roadside, trees and shaggy bushes, but we never saw hide nor hair of that bear again.      

And we NEVER ignored bear warnings again.
Another bear in another year. What impressive animals!

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