Timberline: The last bear encounter

Timberline: The last bear encounter

(Timberline part 22)

The last year that I was at Bristlecone we had another bear in camp but this one was a whole different experience. As we were getting ready to have our dinner meal and some of the boys were still in the patrol sites getting ready there was the shout from some of the boys that there was a bear running through camp. I only caught a brief glimpse of it but didn’t figure it to be any threat since it was a small cub and was running like it was scared to death. I am sure it was more scared of us the we of it. It ran through camp form the bottom tent areas clear through the top. One of the scoutmasters coming back from town pulled into camp a few minutes later and they had seen it several hundred yards up the canyon still running. We later learned that a sow bear had been hit and killed by a train 6 miles lower in the bottom of the canyon from where we were located. I still wonder if that little fellow was by it’s mom when she was killed and had been running all the way up the hill because it was so scared. I even found myself wondering many times after that whether it was able to remain alive during the rest of the summer and following winter. It was a pretty small cub.