Timberline: There's Bear Tracks

Timberline: There's Bear Tracks

(Timberline part 5)

About the second or third year we were holding Timberline at Bristlecone Camp we had our first experience with bears, or so we thought.

Doug and I were doing an activity with the boys that didn’t include the Sr Patrol Leader or his assistant. We were well into the activity when they came running oer to Doug and I. We just saw some bear tracks near camp they said as they were nearly out of breath. We looked at each other and then left the other assistant Scout Master in charge of the activity and went to investigate. We were told where the tracks had been seen but as Doug and I walked up and down the ridge we could not see any ourselves. We didn’t doubt that they had seen them but we could see their tracks but not the bears so we didn’t worry about it anymore.

It did lead into an interesting event later that night however. After all of the boys were back in their tents some of the staff were in Doug and my tent talking. The subject came up again about the bear tracks and we told them that we didn’t find any. We got to talking about bears however and what to do should one confront one of them and what we needed to teach the boys as well. It became apparent however that one of the staff members was very scared about bears or appeared to be somewhat nervous at least. After they all went back to their own tents Doug looked at me and said “you go down the back of the tents and I’ll go down the front and when we get to Derrick’s tent we will growl and run back to our tent.” So we did and we also shook the tent a little as we growled. We both ran back to the tent followed so closely by Derrick that we were sure he had known it was us. Well as he ran into our tent it became quite obvious that he had not suspected foul play but that he truly thought the bear was behind his tent. He was as white as could be and very scared. It took Doug and I several minutes to calm him down before we explained what we had done. It was a very mean trick but helped us to truly know his extent of discomfort with bears, it was very high and on a level of a 1 to 10 with ten being the most scared he rated nearly a 15, no not 1.5 but 15 well off the charts.