Just A Brown Teddy Bear

A huge dark shadow ambled along nearer and nearer towards us, emerging finally from the woods and stepping out on a great log that lay across the stream about fifty or sixty yards away. But soon he retraced his steps. He had caught our scent. Time passed, and no bears came. It was late in the afternoon when our guide decided that we could risk going up the stream before it grew too dark. The wind now blew from the side, and any animals that might be ahead would be liable to get the scent. Putting each foot down with care, the hunters worked their way up over the slippery rocks, through riffles where the salmon shot out from under their feet with nerve-racking suddenness. They had hardly gone a hundred yards when, from a thicket not twenty feet ahead, a low growl met them.

Our guide handed his haversack frame to me, and pointed his rifle. Another growl; and another. It was either a mother with cubs or a bear that had been wounded. Quietly we edged away to the other side of the stream, and along the edge of the opposite woods, our guide keeping his rifle aimed at the point of the thicket, ready for any sudden charge. Hardly fifty yards farther our guide stopped suddenly. All three hunters looked directly into the face of a brown teddy bear, not thirty feet away. There they stood, the bear peering from the woods in surprise at the three motionless humans in the stream, while the three equally surprised hunters stared at the bear.

Our guide was plainly worried—had the bear charged, he could not possibly have been stopped in that short distance. As for the camera hunters, they were too disappointed to be frightened—the animal was too much in the shade to photograph. Then as suddenly as he had appeared, the bear faded from view. He might have been the Cheshire Cat himself, so quietly did he vanish. Just then a salmon leaped from under my feet with a resounding splash, and I jumped as if I had been shot. Our guide spun around with his gun pointed, and the others were poised for flight. For a moment there was panic, then the ridiculousness of the situation struck the three; every bear on Admiralty must have heard their laughter.

Indeed, it might have been so, for no more animals were found along the stream that day. The bears had not yet come down from the mountains in full force. Signs showed that they had been feeding mostly on sedges and blueberries, but once the presence of light hairs revealed where a fawn had died.