I was there when it happened!

This story was published and copyrighted by the Suburban Journals around 1993.  At this point in time, Missouri Conservation officials were not admitting that Missouri had a bear population. 

I just received my March issue of the Missouri Conservationist and was lazily scanning through the table of contents when an article's title caught my attention: "My Aunt Was There When It Happened," by Joel Vance.  Would it, I wondered, answer some questions that I have carried with me for fourteen years now?  I quickly turned to the article and began reading.  After just the first sentence, my hopes were raised that this article would touch on something that I had been wondering about ever since that night, fourteen years ago, when my husband Tim and I camped out in a cave along the upper Meramec.

We were on a float trip together; just the two of us.  My in-laws were keeping our young son for a few days, so we decided to float down the river, and camp out at the mouth of a much-frequented cave.  We were the only ones on the river, being a Monday.  Or so we thought.

After an adventurous float through a thunder and lightning storm which caused us to pull out for a bit and sat under our tarp, we worried whether we would make it to the cave in time to set up camp.  We finally arrived in time to cook some supper and put up the tent.  Nightfall came quickly to the gray, cloudy sky.  We were exhausted from all of the hard rowing in our hurry to reach the cave, and it didn't take long for us to begin to drift off to sleep.  But just as I was slipping from the point of consciousness into dreamy sleep, I was awakened by the almost imperceptible sound of breathing.  And it was coming from inside the cave!

I told myself that it was just Tim breathing, and that the cave was somehow causing an echo.  But the breathing became louder, and it was coupled with a kind of snorting sound, like that of a large animal.  I awakened Tim and he, too, heard it.  As we lay motionless, listening in fear, we began to hear other sounds.  We heard the unmistakable sound of a very large animal's body scraping along the side of the cave, as if it were shifting around, trying to get comfortable, grunting and snorting as it moved.  The really peculiar thing was that every time we heard the body scratching along the cave wall, a group of bats would stir and fly out.  There was no longer any doubt that were sharing our sleeping quarters with a bear!  And a big one, I gathered, at that.

Our whispers were especially soft when we spoke to one another about what to do because we didn't want it to know we were there.  I wanted to run down to our cnaoe immediately, but my husband wouldn't have it.  We would have to leave all of our camping gear if we did that, and if we took off downstream we wouldn't be able to get back to collect our things.  The cloudy, starless night made it too dark to pack up and leave until morning.

As we lay there trying to figure out what to do, visions of stories that I had read began flowing through my mind.  Stories from the Reader's Digest, stories from my own local newspaper; stories that told of hapless campers that had been mauled by bears.  My uncontrollable fear caused even more uncontrollable muscle spasms in my legs.  My leg muscles were twitching violently from my thighs down to my claves.  Try as I did to hold my legs still, fearing we'd be discovered by the bear as my shaking legs were causing noise from the sleeping bag, it was useless.  There was no stopping them.  I realized then the origin of the term knock-kneed since, had I been standing, my knees surely would have been knocking together.

Tim's answer to our dilema was to pray.  But I felt that we should do something more.  You can't just pray, I reasoned, and then sit back with your hands behind your head and expect your prayers to be answererd.  He realized that I had a point.  Finally, he told me of a cliff that we could climb up on.  It sat on the outer wall of the cave, and he had been holding off telling me about it because, given my fear of heights, he didn't think I would be able to cliimb it.  I climbed it.  It was literal rock climbing, but I dimbed it.

We sat on that narrow edge of the cliff for about three or four hours, until the sun finally came up.  The bear had obviously fallen asleep by then, since his noises had long since silenced.  I stayed up on the cliff and kept watch on the cave entrance while Tim went down and packed up our things.  As soon as he finished, I climbed down and we hurried ourselves out of there.

We tried to make something of the day we had left on the river, but with the lack of sleep and my shattered nerves, I just couldn't enjoy myself.  As we floated along, I noticed for the first time how very narrow the river was.  If a bear were along the river's edge, it could easily come into the river and reach us.  I scoured the river bank up and down, looking for any movement in the tall reeds.  When we took our lunch break, things didn't get any better, since I feared the smell of food would be attracting.

We finally reached the end of our journey, although behind schedule because we were so tired.  We were pretty happy to see Joe, the canoe rental man, waiting for us.  As we drug the canoe up to the truck, we asked Joe if there were any bears in Missouri. 

"Sure," Joe said.  "They've imported them from Kansas."

"Kansas," he went on, "didn't have any turkeys, so we sent them some turkeys and they sent us some bears."

"Well," I informed him coldly, "we had one in our cave last night."

"Oh," Joe laughed, "they're just honey bears, not much bigger than a good sized dog.  It probably came in just to get out of the storm yesterday." 

I wasn't quite sure what a honey bear was, but the name made me think of the sun bears that I had seen at the St. Louis Zoo.  They were black with an orange chests, and not you'd call large, for a bear.  Still, on their hind legs they reached about my height, and they had the claws of any bear.  With that description in mind, the name honey bear didn't ease my convictions that we had been in a precarious position that night; then again, it sounded a little less frightful than if we had been sharing our campsite with the larger-sized black bear.

For years we wondered about that night.  Was it just a harmless honey bear, whatever that was?  Or was it a big black bear?  We both felt that, based on the noises it made, it must have been quite large.  However, we both thought there weren't any black bears in Missouri anymore.

And now, after reading Joel Vance's article, I have come to find out there is no such thing as a honey bear.  So that leaves only one explanation for what was in our cave that night.  It must have been a black bear, as we feared, after all.  But in Missouri?

Well, a year or so ago I read an article in the St. Louis Post Dispatch about a black bear, called Big Red by the locals, that has been traveling back and forth between Arkansas and Missouri for years.  The article presented a map that chornicled the bear's travels.  I showed it to Tim, and he said it went directly through where our campsite was that night.  So maybe we have an answer after all these years.  Maybe we were sharing our camp that night with Big Red.

So here is yet another bear story to go down in the books for Missouri conservationists.  The only difference is, this one's true.  After I, I was there when it happened.