Carolina Bear

The lost boy in his cold weather garb

When my oldest son was four or five, he told me an amazing story about a bear he saw visiting our house in rural Stem, North Carolina. The land where we lived backed up to a large undeveloped tract near the present Butner-Falls of Neuse Game Lands. The area was chock-full of Whitetail Deer and other wild creatures, but I never saw a bear there. I thought my son simply had a vivid imagination.

My sister lived for many years in the country north of Wilmington, NC, and she told me Black Bears often came out of the nearby swamp and ate horse feed in the barn behind her house. She resorted to making a feeding station close to the edge of the woods to keep the bears out of the buildings and away from her horses.

When I lived in Carteret County, NC, I sighted Black Bears several times in the fields of Open Grounds Farm, a fifty-thousand-acre Italian owned agricultural operation. Once I witnessed a huge bear leisurely feeding there. He or she sat in the middle of a corn field feasting on green corn ears. When it finally noticed me, the bear gave a loud buy real accutane online huff, then turned his back to me and went back to eating.

So, when I read the story of the three-year-old lost boy in NC ( https://edition.cnn.com/2019/01/28/us/casey-hathaway-bear-claims/index.html ) who says a bear helped him through two freezing nights in the swamp where he was lost, I didn’t doubt he might have seen a bear. But, did the bear help him as he said?

I choose to believe the boy and suspect some ursine mother cuddled him on those two below freezing nights when he was missing.