night guest

Closer to midnight, everyone gradually drifted off to their tents. The last one went to sleep around twelve. I was left alone in the open, while everyone else slept in their tents. I lay down on a bench and decided to doze off a little. I woke up around one in the morning and found that the fire had gone out. Damn... That's not what I need... I tried to revive it using my khoba (a sit-upon) that I always carry in my backpack — no luck, the wood was too wet... It was cold, but at that moment something else was bothering me. I was here all alone, while everyone else had long since fallen asleep safely in their tents. And here I was, in the gazebo, with food hanging inside it, and that food, of course, had already been sniffed out — cellophane is no obstacle for a beast — as far as I know, bears can smell even unopened cans of food, so if there's no fire in it, you can definitely expect visitors during the night... I had nowhere to run; a couple of hours earlier I'd seen bear cubs, which meant their mother was somewhere nearby, and she'd surely want to visit me too, which is the most undesirable turn of events. I got worried, I could feel the danger in my skin, and my earlier bravado was long gone... While I was thinking about how I'd save myself, a small flash flickered from the dying fire in the other gazebo. I went to check if there was still fire or wood there, and the sight I saw made me very happy — the fire in it was still smoldering. I carried over the remaining couple of logs from my gazebo, stoked the fire a bit stronger, and it started to burn, at least a little... Besides those dying sticks, there was one big but wet log in the gazebo, which, nevertheless, was burning and doing so quite well. I threw that in too, and it was only thanks to it that I had a fire for the rest of the night. And I dozed off again... I woke up about an hour later to a rustling sound. A bear was walking nearby! The same one, small, about a meter tall, a teenager. It was about ten meters away from me.

The photo isn't mine, but that's roughly how it all looked — we stared at each other just like that... We watched each other for a while, after which it started wandering around the camp. Near me was a big tent, and the bear cub started

trying to get into it. First it tried scratching at someone's door, then it started trying to climb in through the window. It was very funny to watch. Then there was some clattering from the back side of that same tent. In the morning I found out that at that very moment it had bitten through someone's pot of porridge, leaving several people without breakfast. )) Luckily, the she-bear didn't come to me, and the night turned out calm. This was my first encounter with a bear where I not only heard it but also saw it, and it could conditionally be called a rehearsal. For what awaited me next...