Timberline: The bear we treed

Timberline: The bear we treed

(Timberline part 11)

The year after we had the sighting of bear tracks near camp we had an actual bear sighting. Doug and I were down on the activity field with the boys as they were doing some of the challenge course games when the SPL came down and told Doug that there was a bear in camp. Doug quickly but silently got my attention from across the field and after I got over to him he let me know about the bear so we let the other SM know and went to look for it. We left the activity in the hands of the SPL. Well it wasn’t hard to find. It was a small two-year-old bear that was standing by our cook stoves licking the grease off of the skillets where we had cooked breakfast of bacon and eggs. I quickly grabbed my camera and moved within about 10 feet across the grills from the bear. I took several pictures before it finally decided to turn and run down the mountain. Well with the boys nearby we wanted to make sure it didn’t go toward the boys so three of us headed down through the trees in hot pursuit of the little critter. Well we got to the road down below the camp only a 100 feet or so below and couldn’t see any signs of the bear, there were no tracks crossing through the dirt of the road. We finally gave up the search and climbed back up to the camp where we found it licking the grills again. This time we forced it to run away from the camp and the boys and followed it a little more closely until it climbed the only huge pine tree near the camp. The other SM had a potato gun (a piece of plastic pipe that would shoot potatoes), anyway we got that gun just to make sure the bear stayed in the tree since we could send a potato below it if it decided to come down. Well that ended up being quite fruitless since the little fellow had no intention of coming down as it curled up on a large branch about 30 feet up the tree. It woke up later and moved down to a lower branch where it turned around and used the perch for a potty break and then went back up to sleep again. The Wildlife officer got there about an hour later and we helped him move a bear trap up to the base of the tree where he loaded it with fruit not meat like I thought that he would use. We all left the area at that point and 15 minutes later the officer came down to camp and got us so we could help load the little bear in the trap into the back of his truck. There was 2 inch hole in the solid metal gate of the trap and the officer wanted to let any of the boys who wanted to come and get a close look at the bear. So we had each patrol come up and on e at a time the boys looked through the hole at the small bear. However one young man was looking through the hole after the bear had turned around in the two 55-gallon barrel trap. As he put his eye to the hole the bear stuck his nose in the hole. It scared the poor scout and he turned around and ran straight back to camp without stopping and almost without even touching the ground he was moving so fast. It was a highlight of the camp however and the boys didn’t stop talking about it the rest of the week.