HIKINGWITHMIKE'S STORIES AND ADVENTURE TALES

1/11/00: "Tale of the Dairy Bear"

It was the Fall of ’96. My backpacking buddy (let’s call him Davy) and I were camped at Nelly Lake in the Kaiser Wilderness, northeast of Fresno, CA. Davy was in deep sleep and I was dozing restlessly beneath my poncho, which I’d draped over a large fallen tree on the opposite side from our campfire. The night was star-filled and beautifully peaceful.

A sudden and forceful nudge to my back brought my breathing to “full stop” and thunder to my ears - the sound of my pounding heart. I lay on my side, facing the log, my essential glasses out of reach, a mosquito net adding to the darkness beyond my nose.

A heavy breathing moved towards the foot of my sleeping bag; there it stopped and tested the air. Then it moved away.

Seizing the moment, I quietly unzipped my bag, rolled onto my stomach, and found my glasses. I slipped the insect netting off of my head and slipped on my glasses. The snuffling returned. A smell not unlike a garbage pile assaulted my nostrils. BEAR!

I was again prodded through the sagging poncho. Being a good little camper, and never taking food to bed, nor wearing clothing impregnated with the aroma of cooking fish, nor doused with sweet-smelling deodorants, toothpaste, etc., I proved thankfully uninteresting to this ursine creature, and he or she moved once again away.

“What the heck is Davy doing?” I asked myself. Believe me, two against one, no matter the futility, sounded better than one against one. Davy was sleeping. That’s what Davy was doing. Being close to the fire, Davy had not been visited by the Black Bear which couldn’t seem to get me out of his or her mind.

After an eternity of nerve-racking and muscle-straining still, I determined that the bear had moved along. It was then that I heard bark being ripped from a tree somewhere in the distance. With that revelation, I leaped to my feet and began yelling and banging a small hatchet against the log. It was my strong desire that the bear not return.

Davy awoke - finally. I explained in a voice filled with tension what had happened. Davy, being ever so informed -he’d slept through the entire affair - pronounced with certainty that it surely wasn’t a bear. He dismissed the noise in the distance as “whatever,” and in the morning, finding no claw marks in the dirt, concluded that it was not a bear. A deer, perhaps, he surmised. Later that night, a large deer-like creature did pass by our camp at a distance, instinctively avoiding our camp.

The next morning we set out on a cross- country hike to find and ascend Kaiser Peak’s 10,320 height. I was in the lead, when, rounding a large tree, I saw a healthy patch of black fur. I spun around and warned Davy, “Bear!” Davy peered around the tree trunk and turned to me. “It’s a cow!”

“A cow? A Cow? What’s a cow doing up here?”

By now, the cow had raised its head - it was clearly a cow. All I’d seen at first was the hunk of black fur. You can guess the rest. Davy proudly and sagely announced that surely this was the previous night’s interloper - a Dairy Bear!

And Davy continued to irritate me with this little tale for the rest of the trip. I argued that he’d slept the entire time and therefore knew nothing - nothing. But the damage was done. OK! Black Bear or Dairy Bear, it definitely made for a great memory and, I hope, an enjoyable tale.