by Doris Ray
My
first unhappy experience with a bear happened one dark night during
the early nineteen-sixties while I was employed as company cook at
an isolated sawmill camp in the Cariboo. A section of the cookhouse
had been partitioned off to make sleeping quarters for our family.
In those days I did not have a problem with insomnia. Except for an
occasional breeze in the nearby pines, the world outside my bedtime
window was invariably as still as death. But this night my husband
and I were awakened by a crashing cacophony of sound that cut through
the silence like a jagged knife.
We
fumbled around for matches to light the gasoline lamp and discovered
that the lower pane of the bedroom window, the base of which was at
least six feet from the ground, had been shattered. Splinters and shards
of glass lay everywhere. It was several long minutes before we comprehended
what had happened. The faint rattle of clattering cans outside in the
darkness clued us in. We surmised that a tall black bear (or perhaps
a short grizzly) had planned to climb in through the broken window
and feast upon cookhouse goodies. Our presence had put a damper on
his appetite and he was scrounging in the dump instead.
We
used to camp out a lot in a tent. Once, after returning from a boating
expedition at the other end of a lake, we found our canvas home-away-from-home
in shreds. The tracks of a sow bear and her cubs in the sand led us
to a disheartening disarray of torn pieces of fabric and metal poles
that had been our almost new tent. Claw imprints deeply embedded in
foam plastic mattresses and the illusive trail of our gasoline lantern
which had been playfully rolled into the bushes told the tale of a
fun-filled afternoon.
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Recently
our dog and I were returning from a stroll when we spotted a large
black bear in the middle of an uninhabited stretch of roadway. It was
intent on mulling over a piece of road kill and did not see us. I stood
stone-still for a minute or two hoping desperately for something with
four wheels and an engine to come along and clear the way. The dog
looked at me with a puzzled expression on her face. I knew she was
thinking, "What's with this cowardly woman, anyway? It's just
a bear!"
The
bear looked up from whatever he was chewing on. Bears are supposed
to be short-sighted but so am I. Even without my glasses I knew I would
have no trouble spotting him. In a state of panic I proceeded to wallow,
burrow and straddle my way through a thick forest of briars and brambles
toward the sanctuary of a neighbor’s home. The dog trudged behind
in disgust. But she forgave my cowardly transgressions when the neighbor
offered us both a ride home in her pickup truck.