This kind of punch tastes awful by the way. In both situations you know you shouldn’t get close, but you are compelled to get a better look. With the gal, this all goes sour the moment the glass of punch ends up on her white dress. At this moment of course, is when her boyfriend shows up with biceps that are just shy of small cars. In moments you are doing painfully impressive gymnastic manoeuvres across the dance floor with an unwanted new dance partner. The bears on the other hand, are just happy with you snapping boring photos from the car, but the momma bears’ mood changes when you try to hog-tie her small cub for the action shots.
When being charged by a bear, I have read in the manual, that you are to spend some time yelling at the bear while waving your hands in the air. This is to make the bear fake charge you, it says this should be tried first as it can be very effective most of the time. If the waving of the arms gets the bears attention try not to look them in their cold blood-killing eyes, they don’t like that either. Only do this arm waving and yelling if the bear sees you, otherwise you just rung the diner bell! Confused? Yep, I am as confused as you. The fact is bears can be very unpredictable at the best of times. If the bear does not see you, then get out of there without it seeing you. This the best course of action the book says, and I agree.
Playing dead, if are not dead already, works better with the grizzly bears rather than the black bears, but not always. This is a judgement call that may or may not help. Now if you had a gun, and hopefully it would be a legal gun, and the bear is chomping in more than a friendly manner, say on your leg, and pulls out the salt and pepper, I would suggest that you start shooting by then. You should know that bears are wild animals and don’t really have all that many feelings for their lunch. Black bears find those trying to play dead, an easy lunch and will go straight for the salt and pepper. You may want to fight like crazy, which is more than likely your answer, and start shooting. This bear really does think that you are an easy lunch and will eat you alive.
At this point you calmly load your gun, if it is not loaded already. Then you will try not to shoot yourself as you are being whipped around like a human helicopter at the circus by this mammoth of a bear. You can judge by these actions and may sense that this particular bear is a tad bit on the grumpy side. A good gun is not a violent weapon when it comes to a big mean bear that wants you for lunch. A bullet puts a nice clean hole in a bear, but the bears will heartlessly rip out your liver…while you are alive.
A good knife -The knife comes in handy when it comes to bears, but the knives that muggers use, are just no good for skinning bears though. You need a real good skinning knife from a pro hunting shop. The bears’ hide is real tough, and the switchblades those bums have look cool and scary to people alright, but more than likely they would do little damage to a 1,200 lb grizzly.
If this nasty bear with bad breath is now standing on your chest slobbering chunks on you, and the gun is out of reach, try to stay calm (which I can only assume, staying calm means that you are almost asleep from the boredom or something like that) the whole time like the manual says. Pulling out the hunting knife at this moment is what you may want to do as a deterrent to the bear, but you will have to use it in a stabbing motion. I don’t think that demanding the bear to get his grubby paws off of you will work, even if it is in your deepest, meanest voice.
The manual says that you should know if it is a male or female bear. If it is a female, she may just be protecting her cubs or looking for lunch. But if it is a male, he is probably only looking for lunch. So if you have lost the hunting knife by now and it is out of reach, you may as well check the undercarriage to see if it is male or female. You can do this by lifting the bear’s tail if the opportunity presents itself. I am very interested to know if this really works or if it only makes the bear more upset. I would hate to give you faulty advice, but if that works, give me a call at 555-555-BOLD.
Here are the rules of engagement when it come to bears. Bears can be like pretty girls if approached in the wrong way, so proceed with great caution.
A little example of this would be at a school dance where a young man wants to just look at the pretty gals, in the same way that sightseers want to watch the bears. The naive young man being wet behind the ears, mostly from the profuseness of sweat that is pouring down his head, wants to get a closer look at the pretty gal. So being armed with a glass of punch, a shaking hand, and the pouring sweat, he goes in for a closer look. This again is the same with bears when you want to get closer with your camera, although bears don’t care for punch except for when they are delivering them to your head with a nasty left paw.
