Last week I had the most dangerous bear encounter I ever had, and I have played and worked in the forest literally all my life. I mean when my mother first sent me outside to play, we were living in a cabin in a logging camp, and the forest was our back yard.
Over the years, I’ve had quite a few bear encounters. The fact that I’m here to write this suggests all of them were successful. For example, last summer we ran into a bear while hiking on Grouse Mountain within shouting distance of North Vancouver City. The bear was eating berries and ignored us. We read the scene, walked by and kept going. Big deal.
So, I thought I knew bears. I guess it’s never too late to learn the big lesson: confidence kills. Expect the unexpected.
My recent bear encounter was inside the town limits of Qualicum, a pleasant little retirement village on the shores of Vancouver Island.
I was staying with friends who lived in a subdivision right across the street from an undeveloped park. It’s just a couple of square kilometres of trees with a whole bunch of narrow, winding paths all through it. I don’t visit very often, and I’m still trying to get the navigation straight. You know how it is; you take a trail, and it sort of bends left, then you get to a junction, and you take the left trail and then you end up heading north when you wanted to go south.
So that day I had done a few kilometres, and I figured I knew my way home. I was strolling along enjoying the ambience when I came around a corner to meet a full-grown black bear.
No problem. The bear stopped, I stopped. I waved my hands around and shouted and the bear cut into the bush at ninety degrees to the trail and skedaddled.
Now, at this point I had a choice. In normal circumstances, the bear turns around and goes back, and the human turns around and goes in the opposite direction, and all is well. The minor hassle is that you’re still in the direction the bear wanted to go, and the bear is in the direction that you want to go.
And in this case, I didn’t really want to be wandering around in this maze of trails with a bear who was as lost as I was.
The other factor you always consider is what you have done in reaction to the bear and whether it worked. In this case, I had yelled and stepped forward, and the bear had run away. It seemed a good idea at the time to just keep going on the trail I knew went home. Bad idea.
This all happened in a few seconds, and by this time I had reached the point where the bear had turned off the trail. As I passed that point, I glanced over to see how far the bear had run.
As it turned out, not very far. And then I saw the cub up the tree. And the bear turning to face me.
Now I had no choice. The only rule left to follow is to keep doing what you were doing. Don’t slow down. Whatever you do, don’t run screaming. So, I kept going at a fast walking speed. I looked back over my shoulder, and the bear was heading back towards the trail. At this moment, I considered that a slow trot might be a good idea.
I looked back again, and the bear had reached the trail and was turning towards me.
I trotted on.
I looked back again, and she had stopped.
It was only then that I heard the voices on the trail in front of me. A family of three with a big dog (on a leash) was strolling down the trail, unaware that they had been following a bear.
It was only after I was out of danger that I realized how close we had all come. I had just met a mother bear who was trapped between two threats with her cub. That explained why she had left the trail. The moment I got in the same direction as the other group, the danger abated, and when I stopped the other party and we took a trail at ninety degrees in the other direction (talking loudly), all was well. We navigated out to the edge of the park and walked home on the road. It seemed the smart thing to do.
The Bottom Line
We have a joke in our family. My niece had a serious encounter with a bear while she was tree planting. She later complained that while she did everything the training videos told her to do, they had forgotten to show the videos to the bear.
In this case, the smartest individual in the whole scenario was the bear. She acted exactly as she should have, for all the right reasons. Sure, I could say all my experiences with bears led me to intuitively do the right thing. As it worked out, I stopped the family from walking into a confrontation. But I’m quite aware that I lucked into the right action, and I’m not happy with that. In future I will not be quite so confident that I know what I’m doing.