Did you know there are bears in West Virginia? Well, duh, but when I was younger I assumed there were some tucked away in some mountain valley, but that there weren't very many, and you certainly wouldn't see them.
When my son was young, he was fascinated by and petrified of bears, due to a steady diet of awful killer bear movies he watched at Mamaw's house. He was about eight years old or so when we went on our usual summer sojourn to Grandma's house in Ansted. We took a pontoon boat tour of part of the New River Gorge a few miles from the house. The guide was telling us about all the wildlife to be found in the gorge. Cougars were mentioned. Awesome. "There aren't any bears, are there?" I asked somewhat confidently, because we had been telling him for weeks that there were no bears anywhere near Grandma's house. "Oh yeah, there's bears". Fantastic. Now he won't want to go outside, and outside is pretty much all there is in West Virginia.
Later in the week, we were visiting some old family friends down in Gauley Bridge. They casually told us a bear had gone through their garbage a couple of weeks ago. Not only will he never want to leave the house, but his parents have been lying to him all along.
It turns out that Granddad was hunting up north with some buddies, as he was wont to do. He was alone, probably gunning for birds, when he discovered that he and a bear were perusing the same shrubbery. They looked at each other, and then they both high-tailed it. I'm pretty sure that Granddad stopped running at some point, because he was always home for dinner.
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