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.
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