Read an Excerpt
The Twin Lakes Bear
In 1968 or 1969, when I was about nine or ten years old, my family and I were camping in a little ten-site campground called Twin Lakes near Lac du Flambeau, Wisconsin. There was a bear trap in the area (for relocation), but we had never seen a bear there.
One afternoon, after our dad and a fellow camper had gone fishing the night before and caught a bunch of rainbow trout, our parents sent us down to the other end of the campground to invite the other family for supper that evening to enjoy a fish fry. The campsites were all located along one side of the lake, with woods on the other side of the road. We had almost arrived at their campsite, when right in front of us five kids, a bear started to come out of the woods, probably intending to cross the road. Some of us screamed, but we all ran—my sister and I back down the road towards our site, and two of my brothers down the trail next to the lake. My youngest brother (who was around three years old at the time) took off cross-country, running through everyone’s campsites, even falling down once, but getting up so fast that before the people sitting around the campfire could even help pick him up, he was off and running again! We were almost too scared to notice that the poor bear was so afraid it took off running in the other direction!
When we got back to camp (I think I was the fastest runner!), my parents scolded me. Since I was the oldest, I should have made certain that the younger kids were okay. I insisted it was everyone for himself if a bear was chasing us (which it wasn’t), but we were just dumb little kids at the time. We all got scolded because our parents told us the bear wasn’t going to hurt us, and it was probably more afraid of us than we were of it (I highly doubt it—we were pretty scared at the time) and that there was no need to create such a ruckus, for goodness sake!
In retellings of this story, facts would sometimes become a little embroidered—my youngest brother ran through a flaming campfire, or the bear growled at us before he ran the other way, or the bear stood up on his hind legs and growled at us before running the other way, or even the bear chased us for a while before running the other way! I can assure you that none of this happened, and the true story is the one given above. Poor bear—he probably begged to be relocated after coming in contact with the likes of us!
Kathy Bruner Wisconsin Rapids, WI
