Chapter 12

CHAPTER 12 "I grew up about a hundred miles north of here, in Canada. My dad and I used to spend lots of time in the woods. One day, when I was thirteen, my dad and I were heading to our favorite fishing spot. We came around a corner and surprised a sow and her cubs." A sow was a mother bear.

Mel's stomach clenched. She knew what was coming. Mel had heard gruesome stories over the years of hikers slashed and bitten and left half-dead by mother grizzlies. "The sow went after my father first. Just slammed him with her paw. My father went down so hard. It was like he'd been struck by a sledgehammer. When he fell, he cracked his head on a rock." Steve took a breath. "Then the grizzly turned to me." Cassie's hand had crept over and was now gripping Mel's. They'd both stopped eating. Steve explained that there's no way to know for sure what a grizzly will do when it sees a person. "It's extremely rare for a grizzly to attack a person," he said. "It might make noise, growl, and whoof. It might stand up to get a better look. Or it might do a bluff charge…" "What's that?" Mel asked.

"It's when a bear comes running at you, but it stops short, maybe twenty feet away. It's just trying to scare you." "I bet that works," Aunt Cassie said, with a nervous laugh. "That's when most people would run away, which is a huge mistake. You should just never, ever try to run from a grizzly. Unless maybe there's a tree nearby. But even then, it's risky. Because some grizzlies will climb." "So what should a person do if they think a grizzly is going to attack?" Aunt Cassie asked. "Drop down and play dead," Steve said. "That's what I did. The grizzly came charging toward me, and I could tell she wasn't bluffing." "How?" Mel asked. "She was silent. Her ears were pinned back. She wasn't trying to put on a big noisy show to scare me. She saw me as a threat to her cubs. And she was going to eliminate that threat.

"So I dropped down onto my stomach and glued myself to the ground. I clasped my hands behind my neck to protect it. The grizzly slashed my back with her claws. I was lucky I had my pack on, because it protected my spine from her bites." Mel cringed. "I stayed perfectly still and quiet as she bit and clawed at me. I dug my toes into the dirt so she couldn't flip me. I didn't want her to slash my face or crush my chest. The whole thing was over in less than a minute. When I finally got up, she and the cubs were gone. I was in pretty bad shape. The worst was my leg. She sliced it open with her claw." He pointed at the scar. "And my dad… it wasn't the bear that killed him. It was the rock he hit when he fell." "Oh, Steve…" Cassie said. "But there was something else… something almost worse than losing my father. Men from

town went into the woods. They shot the sow. And her cubs. And that's the last thing my father would have ever wanted. He loved the wild. He wanted to protect grizzlies. He would have understood that the grizzly was protecting her cubs. There were tracks everywhere. We should have known to stay away. My dad shouldn't have died that day. And those bears shouldn't have died, either." "I'm so sorry I asked you about that," Mel said. "Don't say that," Steve said, reaching over and patting Mel's hand. "I didn't have to tell you. But it's good for me to talk about it sometimes. It's never good to keep sadness all bottled up." They all sat there quietly for a moment. And then Steve stood up. He shook his head, as if he was waking up from a dream. "All right," he said. "We've got about a mile left to go." They put their trash into their packs and set out on the trail. Clap, clap.

"Hey there, bear! Hey there, bear!" Steve called out. Mel looked around, wondering who — or what — was listening.