Only a couple of months living in our new home on the Kenai Peninsula and already I had accumulated a total of one friend. Her name is Allison, and she is teaching me squash. The first time we met it was for lunch at a cute bookstore and deli. My husband’s birthday was coming up and as I waited for her I found the perfect book for him, it was the very last copy of “Birds of Alaska.” My husband happens to be a proud “birder.” Perhaps too proud.
As the store clerk was gift wrapping the book, Allison and I had lunch and discussed birds which naturally led to the topic of bears. Okay, I may have forced the conversation. At the risk of sounding like a tourist I had been asking almost every local I came across about the probability of being attacked by a bear while hiking. So far no one has rolled their eyes at the question making me even more concerned.
“I was attacked by a bear while hiking with my dogs,” Allison says casually.
“You were?!”
She nods, “a mama bear with her two cubs. And it was in the springtime when bears are hungry.”
“Black or brown bear?”
“Black. I surprised her, I just didn’t see her until I was right in front of her, and she stood up and looked at me.
“What did you do?”
“Well, you’re not supposed to run.”
“That’s what I read! No matter what kind of bear, you’re never ever supposed to run. So what did you do?”
“I ran.”
“You ran?”
“yeah.”
“But you’re not supposed to.”
“No, you’re not supposed to. Everyone knows that.”
Allison takes a big bite of her grilled tomato and gruyere cheese sandwich. I had ordered the same sandwich because some decisions in life are just that easy. But, at the moment I was too focused on her tale to think about all that oozing expensive cheese. Allison ran when she saw a bear?! I was fascinated, because deep down I knew that in the same situation, against all expert advice, I’d probably run too.
“Didn’t you have bear spray?”
“Yes, but I was downwind, I figured that it would just blow back in my face.”
I imagined her stumbling around screaming and blinded as a bear reared up to attack.
“So, I ran,” explains Allison, “I wasn’t going to stick around.”
Now in my middle-of-the-night exploration of bear videos which were endless (but, I found an edited compilation of them right here) I tried to remember the rules.
See my post “4 Tips On How To Avoid a Bear Attack.”
“With a black bear you’re supposed to act small and timid, right?” I venture.
“No, you do that when you encounter a brown bear.”
Of all the things I keep getting wrong…
“With a black bear you need to look intimidating, and so I put my arms up like this,” Allison sets down her sandwich and puts her arms up above her head and makes “jazz hands.” It was intimidating, in a Broadway musical kind of way.
“But then I thought, this is stupid, and I turned and ran.”
“Did the dogs try to protect you?”
Allison laughs at this.
“No I kept telling them to run and they thought it was just a fun game, they kept stopping in front of me.”
I had been thinking of getting a dog to help alert me to bears, but clearly they don’t always do so. And, in fact, sometimes a dog can make a situation worse especially if they bark at a brown bear. Again, it all depends on the bear.
“The bear chased me until I got to the trailhead, “Allison continues, “then it stopped and turned around. I was lucky.”
She was lucky. Speaking of lucky, during my research I found a few other lucky people. I’m looking forward to our bear viewing trip out of Brooks Lodge next summer. I both want and at the same time definitely don’t want to see a bear this close.