The Hills Are Alive

“This has to be as good as it gets”, I thought to myself. I had been hiking non-stop for over an hour, deep off the main tracks, and the Rockies had never looked better. Spring was late this year and the warmth was coming to the mountains with a bit of attitude. The sides of the hills were a Van Gogh collage of reds, yellows and purples and the trees were showing off their new greenery.

“God how I love this” I said out loud, not caring who might hear me and half hoping someone would be here to share all of this with me. I stopped to take a rest and sat myself on a large boulder that had a clear view of a small Alpine clearing just a few meters below me. The air was crisp and calm and I could hear everything, birds in the trees above, the sigh of the slight breeze through the pines and the soft rumbling of water running over rocks somewhere off to my left. As I sat there taking a deep drink from my canteen, a mother deer and 2 fawns came out from the bush down below and stopped to graze on the new grasses of the meadow. I was uphill and upwind from them and they didn’t sense my presence at all. I sat there enchanted by the innocence of it all and didn’t move a muscle as they moved slowly along.

Just as I thought this couldn’t get any better, a small bear cub came ambling out of the other side of the clearing towards the deer. The doe and the cub suddenly spotted each other from a few meters apart and I thought I must be watching some sort of National Geographic documentary. They both were startled by the other and the little cub sat up on its hind legs and let out a “woof” before falling over in a heap on its back. With that the doe and her babes turned and fled back into the bush.

I was splitting my sides laughing, when this chill came over me. It wasn’t that I thought maybe I was in danger. Something deeper and more primitive than that swept down my back and I knew I was in trouble.

Where there’s a bear cub there’s a mother bear and then I heard the sound of branches behind me cracking and a deep growl coming with it. I knew lots about what to do in a situation like this and got up very slowly and moved off to my right away from the cub and the noise behind me. As I turned uphill, I got my first glance of the mother, still skinny from her winter’s hibernation, cranky and angry, and coming towards me. I pulled my back pack off and took out a tin can of stones that was in it. Still moving slowly backwards, I shook the can with both hands and began shouting at the top of my lungs. This was supposed to be a good way to frighten off wild life. The bear obviously hadn’t been to that lecture. She kept advancing towards be with the hackles on her back raised.

Now I’ve always considered myself to be a devout greenie, but a greenie with his feet on the ground. I know that the mountains could be dangerous and that it might take more than a tin of rocks to fend off danger. In my backpack I also had a Colt 45, a handgun given to me by my grandfather that he had from back in the Second World War. I took it out and fired a shot over the head of the bear. The roar was deafening and it scared the shit out of me!

The bear didn’t bat an eye. Maybe she was deaf. As she got closer I aimed steadily right between her eyes. But I just couldn’t shoot her. There was this voice in my head saying “It’s her or us! Shoot you idiot!” But I couldn’t do it. I guess I was more greenie than I was common sense.

Then she charged and I tripped backwards over a rock. Suddenly there was this muzzle just inches away and I brought my backpack up in front of my face. She sunk her jaws into it and began shaking it back and forth. Time slowed down to a crawl and I could hear everything with a supernatural clarity. Maybe some people have their life flash before their eyes in a situation like this, but all I had was a sense of calm sadness. “So this is how it ends”,

Just as the bear ripped the bag from my hands, I heard this frightened bawling. The cub was still on its back wedged between 2 rocks and was panicking. As quickly as the bear had leapt at me, she turned and ran towards her cub. I didn’t wait to see what they would do next. I grabbed my gear and made like the deer.

By some miracle I didn’t have a scratch on me, not even a bump or bruise from falling over backwards. But a bit of my own innocence and naïveté was replaced with the knowledge that only comes from experience that the hills are also alive with the sound of danger.