Mom's Bear Story

When I was a kid, I used to be afraid of the dark. Well, it wasn’t a fear of the dark as much as it was a fear of Axe murderers in the dark who find children in their beds and hack off anything that lies outside the safety of the covers.  I used to stare out through the dark till saw shapes,  people shapes, monster shapes. Then one of the shapes moves.  I’d close my eyes tightly, and slowly, ever so slowly, so as not to draw attention to myself,  I’d pull the blankets over my head. Once my head was covered, I’d  slowly reach my fingers over my head and pull my hair under the blankets, then I’d pause. Listening. Noises. I could hear everything: Footsteps, breathing. My heart started to pound. I  stopped breathing. Then Id realized that my fingers were still outside the blankets. Everyone knows  that if there was anything outside the blankets it would be cut off  by whoever was in the room. Slowly, ever so slowly, I pulled my fingers under the covers still holding my breath until I fell asleep. Apparently, it worked because  the ax murderer  never found me. I never lost so much as a single finger!

So by the time I was 15, I was pretty brave. I knew by then that ax murderers did’t go around killing little children in their beds, or cutting off fingers that hang out over the blankets. In fact, I knew a lot of things, and none of them could scare this 15 yr old.  Except maybe a bear.

We’d been to Yosemite many times. We’d seen bears from a distance, and seen what they did to food. But never gotten too close. So this time, I was hiking with my brother and my dad. We’d been hiking since about noon, and it was midnight now, but we had a destination we had to get to that night, or the rest of the week would be messed up. 12:30 still hiking, exhausted. 1 am still hiking, soo tired there was nothing left. Finally at about 1:30 am we got to the saddle where we could camp for the night. We could hardly think we were so wiped out. But we knew we had to string up the food. So my brother climbed one tree, tied up the rope and pulled the food up with my dad’s help, while I laid out the tarp and our sleeping bags for the night. There was no way we were going to try to put a tent up at 1:30 in the morning with the energy we had left. Soon we were sound asleep.

Then, just like those nights long ago, I woke up to a sound. The sound of footprints. Not the light crunching footprints of shoes on gravel, but the soft, heavy padded thud thud thud of a very large animal with paws. I closed my eyes tighter, and slowly ever so slowly pulled my fingers inside my sleeping bag and pulled the drawstrings around the mummy bag around my face. Then I stopped breathing. And listened. Breathing, now, I could hear breathing, loud, heavy and wet. The footprints were very close. I tried to picture how close this animal was and from the heaviness in the foot print, just how big he was. That was a mistake. The breathing stopped and turned into sniffing. I could feel the animal right over my head. My heart was pounding so hard I thought it would explode right out of my chest. There was no way I was going to open my eyes. I just kept as still as I could, It was easy, I was frozen with fear. Then just when I thought I would die from lack of oxygen and fear, the sniffing changed to breathing again, and quieted with the sound of the footprints as they went on their way.

Slowly, ever soo slowly, I let out my breath, so as not to call attention to myself. Gradually, the blood started to flow again,  my heart calmed and my fingers relaxed. I fell into a wrestles sleep. When morning came, first thing I did was jump up to see if it had been a dream. No such luck. Up by our heads, in the dirt just off of the tarp, were the tracks of a very large bear who’d come calling.

My brother and my dad looked at them with me, our mouths wide open. Theyd slept through the  whole thing!. I wished I ‘d been so lucky, but was just grateful that I hadn’t used some kind of fruity shampoo in my hair that morning!