Imagine My Surprise...

I lived in this little town called Ocean Falls in British Columbia when I was 12 years old. During the three years there I met a lot of wildlife and this is a story about just such an instance.

I was 12, after all, and rather mischievous, so I took it upon myself (with a few friends all of course young boys themselves or they never would have seen the wisdom of my plan) to scare a young lady -- go figure, a 12 year old boy trying to scare girls – and while I don’t think we succeeded in scaring her, we certainly scared someone.

One of the dirt roads in Ocean Falls paralleled the only paved road in town, called the valley road, from above; it was some 25 yards up on a fairly steep angle and merged with the valley road at the bottom of the grade. Here we had perched ourselves behind tall grass and berry bushes to wait for this unsuspecting young lady to walk passed us on the road below.

The plan was to begin rustling bushes to make it seem like there was a bear above her. There were a lot of bears in Ocean Falls and we felt this would be a good way to give her a fright and to have some fun. I mentioned that we were only 12 year olds right?

As we waited for her we all quieted down and watched her distant figure approach our ambush. Then there was the noise of rocks stirring near us. I remember telling Cooper Campbell, one of my friends near me "Quiet Cooper, she will hear us!" After all, who could be making those noises if it wasn’t me? But he was not making any noise and we began quietly arguing over who was making the noise...she approached closer and I heard someone (or thing) behind me...as I turned in the now darkening night to see who was sneaking along the road behind me imagine my surprise when all I saw was black fur!

There no more then 8 feet away was a BEAR! He was probably 350 to 400 lbs of black furry and rather curious looking bear...he seemed to look at us and think "what the hell do they think they are doing"

My heart stopped and I must have been white as a ghost! Without a second thought I took off like an Olympic runner and headed down to the road over the fastest possible route! Here we were the would-be ambushers being ambushed by a black bear! He began, of course, to trot after us as if to say "I better follow them, they obviously know something is here to be running from" so there we were 4 or 5 boys and one bear, running and screaming (the bear never bothered to scream) down the road toward her (Danette Rouse I think was her name). All of us, including Danette and the bear) then continued to run down the road toward the valley in hopes of out distancing the bear! Of course he was not about to let us leave him for whatever had scared us! So he tagged along for a few minutes...then maybe he realized that he had no reason to be afraid, after all he was a BEAR and what could he fear...soon a truck pulled up and took us to the valley and the safety of a home!

Who knows what happened to the bear...he probably still wonders what we were afraid of, after all he could have just chased off whatever it was in the first place if we had bothered to ask!