Our grandson has quite a collection of teddy bears. One, named “Baby Polar Bear” was especially reassuring to him and he used it as part of his bedtime routine each evening for a couple of years. That toy was lost on a family trip and has been replaced with another. There are other bears in his bed at home and each time he has a sleepover with Grandma and Grandpa, we have a bear that stays in our camper that joins him in his bed. Since he enjoys playing with the bears, it is only natural that Grandpa tells him some stories about encounters with real bears.

One story that has long amused me came from when I was a young adult and newly wed. Susan and I were serving as summer managers of Camp Mimanagish, a UCC camp located deep in the Main Boulder valley south of Big Timber, MT. In those days the telephone line was still 20 or so miles short of the camp and access was by a slow gravel and dirt road. We needed to be fairly self sufficient. Most weeks we were able to get by with a single trip to town for groceries and supplies even though we routinely hosted 60 to 150 campers.

The camp pickup was on its last legs and was burning more an more oil. About mid-way through our second season at camp, the pickup was parked and I began to use a Chevy Carry-All that had been our family car. Since it was carrying food and other supplies each week, we were pretty careful to make sure that it was fully unloaded after every trip. We had seen a black bear several times during the summer and we were used to taking bear precautions. We hauled food garbage to a place a half mile from the campers and put it into a bear-proof container after each meal. We made sure that all food supplies were kept secure and we didn’t allow campers to keep any snacks or other food stuffs in their cabins. Mostly the bear would just wander through camp and go on, looking for food elsewhere. We did get a few scratches in our car when the bear climbed up onto the roof, but the damage was minimal and we didn’t see that particular visit.

One night, after a long day that included a trip to town for additional supplies, we had unloaded everything from the car except for a single bag of patching concrete. I guess I must have gotten careless and left the top half of the rear tailgate open. I’m sure that there were some food smells left inside of the vehicle because it was used to haul food all the time.

The next morning we discovered that the concrete had been spread, rather evenly, all around the interior of the vehicle. The bag had been shredded and there was concrete dust everywhere. When you turned on the defroster, dust blew out of the vents. When you pounded the seats, dust flew into the air. It was a mess. We had previously removed all except the front bench seat from the vehicle in order to haul our supplies and it was a basic model without cloth liner in the back of the vehicle. It appears that the bear never actually got into the front seat, but simply went into the back and shook the torn concrete bag all around.

The next night I saw the offending bear. He looked rather gray with dust still clinging to his coat. We’ve laughed about that bear for decades.

Of course one has to be careful when telling bear stories to remind people that bears can be dangerous. It is important to give them their distance. There are plenty of stories of people who have been seriously injured or killed by bears. I’ve never had a frightening experience with a bear. We use caution, but we have been able to visit bear country without problems many times.

There is something very special about bears. I guess it would be true of any hibernating animal, but because a bear is similar in size to a person, it seems like a very interesting thing that the bear can spend the entire summer binge eating, making itself as fat as possible and then, in the late fall, when the snows come to the mountains, find a secure place to bed down and sleep through the entire winter. It almost appears as if they have died, but they are very much alive. The cubs are born during hibernation. Then, when spring returns, they shake off the slumber and find their way to the outside world and begin to look for food once again.

If you scan a hillside with a pair of binoculars in the early spring you might be able to find a bear den by looking for a hole with lots of mud around the entrance. The bears track the snowmelt around the entrance to their dens like children with muddy feet coming in from a rainstorm.

Black bears tend to find holes or places lower on the mountain, often at the base of a tree or an indention in the rocks. The grizzlies tend to seek places higher up. My grandfather knew of several places where black bears returned year after year to den. He was accomplished at taking visitors out to see the cubs in the spring.

It isn’t the same as resurrection, but the bear’s emergence from its hibernation den is a kind of symbol for me. We live in a world that is filled with cycles. The bear sleeps through much of the year. It is only in the warm weather that it wakes and is fully alive. Each year it spends months being unconscious. Of course we don’t know how much consciousness a bear has. It operates largely by instinct. But if you see a bear hibernating, it isn’t hard to believe that it is only fully alive in the summer.

Our lives, too, have their cycles. Kids become parents and then become grandparents. Some of our memories are forgotten soon after the event. Some of our stories linger beyond the span of our lives. We take our place in a long line of history-making that began long before our birth and will continue far into the future.

Grandpa isn’t dangerous like a bear. And he doesn’t sleep all winter long. But there is a part of him that is inspired by his experiences with bears and he loves to tell a good bear story from time to time.

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