Go chase the bear off

[Buffalobob]

Some years back, my wife and two young children and I were camping up in Pennsylvania at a state park campground. As usual we had a plastic trash bag and being as there was no place to hang the trash bag we just left it laying on the ground. After dinner and several rounds of s’mores we all crawled in the tent for the night. About midnight I am awakened by my wife’s elbow in my ribs. She says "there’s a bear in the garbage”. I grunt back “OK” and roll back over to go back to sleep. She jabs me again and says “Go chase it off”. I mutter under my breathe something about it being her bear and why doesn’t she go and chase it off.

Well I had no gun nor no knife nor anything but I pulled on my pants and crawled out of the tent with my flashlight. Shining the light all around I see nothing so I try to get back in the tent but my wife says “ Did you hang the garbage bag up so he won’t come back?” I say “ummmph” and back out of the tent and go over and grab the garbage bag to take it and hang it up. Well, the bag just goes crazy jumping around in my hand and it is plain that something is in the bag, so I swing it around my head a couple of time and fling it way up into the woods. It bounces a couple of times and comes to a stop and just shakes and quivers and then out comes a skunk who looks around and waddles off.

[philny1]

Whadda guy!!
the point being, if it had been a bear........youda kicked his butt!!
Did ya have your brown drawers on??

[Buffalobob]

Survival in the wilderness requires the ability to quickly assess all dangers and to select a course of action that will result in the highest probably of minimizing personal damage. The choice of facing a hungry bear unarmed or an increasingly irritated wife was a relatively easy decision, the way I saw it. The bear might run off or at worst it would bite and claw me for about a minute or two and then after a few weeks I would be out of the hospital and have some great scars to showoff and a good story about fighting a bear. If I stayed in the tent I faced torture and emasculation for the rest of my life because my wife would go out and chase off the bear and then every time we were out with friends or at a party and I got to swapping stories she would smile sweetly and say “Honey, why don’t you tell your friends the funny story about the night the bear came into our camp”. There was little doubt in my mind that staying in the tent was going to be extremely painful.