The Bear
Chauncey and I had hiked this canyon many times. It wasn’t far from our house, and on this particular day we made the familiar short drive to the trailhead.
I remember something strange about that drive.
As I looked at the surrounding hills, I seemed to be seeing images in them—lines and shapes in the landscape. It’s difficult to describe, and I didn’t attach any particular meaning to it at the time. It was only afterward that I remembered the sensation and wondered about it.
We parked the truck and started down our usual trail into the canyon. As always, Chauncey ran ahead of me.
I was still adjusting the small pack I carried when I heard a tremendous crushing noise coming through the brush on the hillside above me.
My first thought was elk.
But before I could even finish that thought, I saw what was making the noise.
A full-grown bear was running directly toward me.
What I remember most vividly was its power. The undergrowth that would have been difficult for me to force my way through seemed to offer no resistance whatsoever. The bear simply crashed through it.
And I did absolutely nothing.
I just stood there with my mouth open.
There wasn’t time to formulate a plan. There wasn’t time to decide whether to run, climb a tree, yell, or do any of the things one might imagine doing when discussing a bear encounter from the comfort of home.
I simply watched it come.
Then, when it was perhaps twenty feet away, the bear suddenly turned.
It ran back up the path we had just come down and disappeared.
I suspect the bear was every bit as surprised to encounter me as I was to encounter him. Whatever its reason, it had decided that it wanted nothing to do with me.
That was fine with me.
My first thought then was Chauncey.
He was somewhere farther down the trail, and the last thing I wanted was for a hundred-pound Golden Retriever to decide that confronting a bear was his responsibility.
I ran down the trail, found him, put him on the leash, and the two of us continued at full speed down into the canyon.
We did not look back.
Once we were well down in the canyon, we stayed there for quite a while.
There was an obvious problem with going home.
The truck was back at the trailhead.
And getting back to the truck meant going back up the same trail the bear had just taken.
Eventually there wasn’t much choice. We returned cautiously to the truck, got in, and drove home.
Later, when I told friends who had lived in the area for years what had happened, they had trouble believing that a bear had been that far down in the canyon. Bears normally stayed at higher elevations. My guess was that this one had come down looking for grubs. Drought had left a lot of fallen timber in the area, which may have provided good feeding.
But that isn’t what stayed with me.
What stayed with me was the moment when that bear came through the brush.
I had never before experienced such an overwhelming sense of my own helplessness.
Here was an animal moving through heavy undergrowth as though it weren’t there, coming directly toward me with extraordinary speed and power. And there I stood, suddenly aware of just how physically insignificant I was.
There was nothing heroic about it.
I stood there with my mouth open.
The bear made the decision.
And fortunately for me, he decided to leave.