And found himself nose to nose with a bear.
Jeff immediately forgot everything he knew about bear safety. He scrambled backward so quickly he fell off the picnic table, thumped onto the bench, and rolled onto the ground.
The bear snuffled closer to the table. Oh God. Jeff was a moron. Why hadn’t he finished his snack? He knew better than that. The bear box was fifteen feet away.
Which was much farther than the bear.
It was black, with a brown nose and round ears and enormous feet, and frankly Jeff was a little concerned the smell hadn’t woken him, because it was a lot worse than his post-run stank. It looked at him and made a noise like an angry cow as it shuffled closer.
Jeff had only seen a bear once or twice growing up. Then again, he hadn’t livedinsidea provincial park. He was pretty sure the black ones weren’t particularly dangerous unless they were mothers with cubs, and this was just one bear, so he should be fine, right? He scrambled to his feet, keeping the picnic table between them.
Something wet touched his leg. Heart in his throat, he turned around.
There was a second, smaller bear. The wet something was its nose.
The mother stood up on her back legs and roared.
Okay, yep, time to run away. Still disoriented from his sudden wakeup call, he staggered toward the cabin—only to find another tiny bear on the porch.
You gotta be kidding me.
His truck keys were inside. What was he going to do, climb a tree? No, bears could climb, couldn’t they? This mama looked like she might try it. He glanced around frantically. There had to be somewhere safe—
There. The fascia under the porch had a gap in it where the wood had rotted around the nails that held it to the support post. Jeff dove in, praying the area under the porch wasn’t already occupied by—God, snakes or skunks or… fuck, there were definitely spiders and other horrible crawly things. He took a deep breath and carefully pushed the fallen piece of fascia into the gap. Then he peered out through the slatted holes as the mama bear dropped back to all fours and resumed her perusal of Jeff’s snack plate.
Well. This was embarrassing.
Now that Jeff was not a threat to the cubs, the bears seemed content to take their time puttering around the cabin. Jeff didn’t think he’d left any other food around, but for all he knew, the bushes around the cabin were wild blueberries or something. Hell, maybe Mama Bear was tired and thought that if Jeff’s picnic table was good enough for a human, it was good enough for her.
Okay, so he was stuck under the porch of his cabin until the bears moved on. So far no snakes, skunks, or other animals, and Jeff wasn’t going to look around and find out about the rest. He was safe, mostly. All he had to do was… wait until the bears left.
Or—or! He had Carter’s number in his phone. Carter was a park ranger. In fact, he could just call the park’s dispatch and have them send whoever was closest to…. What did they even do with bears? Did they tranquilize them? That seemed extreme. Maybe they just scared them away? Did the park service pepper spray bears?
He felt prematurely bad about that for a split second, and then he felt a crawling sensation on the back of his leg and decided the bears could take it. He reached into his pocket for his phone….
And remembered it was still on the picnic table.
He swiped at the back of his leg without looking and prayed that whatever it was would crawl away.
So. Next time he decided to return to the town of his youth to fuckingfind himself, he was renting an apartment. He’d sign autographs at his front door if he had to. Bears he could handle. Spiders under the porch were absolutely a deal-breaker.
Canada didn’t have a lot of poisonous spiders, right? So they were just gross and not, like, lethal?
Right?
Maybe he should’ve taken his chances with the bears.
He debated how long he should stay there, growing more convinced by the moment that a black widow was going to be the end of him and that some poor park ranger—hopefully not Carter—would find his moldering corpse a couple days later when they came to collect his garbage.
Then it registered—tires on gravel.
The sweetest music Jeff had ever heard.
Then he realized they were probably Carter’s tires, and Carter was going to drive up to his cabin and find Jeff hiding under his porch because he’d been stupid enough to leave food out, and he wondered if the spiders could hurry up and kill him. Toxic venom would be a less painful way to die than embarrassment.
The engine cut out, and a moment later a door slammed. Jeff could only see legs, but they were definitely Carter’s, unless the park made a point of hiring stupidly tall men with thighs that could crush skulls. “Oh, it’s you,” he said. Something rattled. Jeff thought Carter was leaning into the truck bed. “Come on, move along. Don’t make me get the air horn. Go! Get!”
The bear rumbled loudly, but it shuffled off. The cubs ambled away with her and disappeared into the underbrush.
