Every August for the past 30 years, my family and I have vacationed at a camp in northern Canada, a collection of cottages by a beautiful lake, where we enjoy a few days with our friends who own the place. It is idyllic in every way except one.
The cottages have no indoor plumbing so everyone has to make use of a two-holer outhouse when nature calls. It really isn’t much of an inconvenience and I used to troop out there in the middle of the night a couple of times, guided by a pretty effective yard light.
But one summer years ago, a bear was spotted behind the outhouse in broad daylight and ever since then, my nighttime visits have ended and I am a nervous wreck during my daytime sitdowns.
My fear of bears at the outhouse has been the subject of much merriment from our friends and other cottagers. What kind of city boy would be afraid of a 500-pound animal that has been known to kill humans?
Every summer they laugh and every summer I tremble.
But this summer, if we can make it there, I will arrive with some scary facts in tow. Last week, a woman in Alaska visited an outdoor john in the bush only to be bitten or scratched on the “bottom”, as the English like to say, by a great big bear that was hibernating in the depths of the outhouse.
“I got out there and sat down on the toilet and immediately something bit my butt right as I sat down,” Shannon Stevens told reporters.
“I jumped up and I screamed when it happened,” my soulmate said.
The woman’s brother Erik, who had joined her on the snowmobile run, at first thought she had been bitten by a squirrel or a mink, or something small. He picked up his flashlight and ventured to the outhouse to do an inspection.
“I opened the toilet seat and there’s just a bear face just right there at the level of the toilet seat, just looking right back up through the hole, right at me,” he said, emphasizing the word “just.”
“I just shut the lid as fast as I could. I said, ‘There’s a bear down there, we got to get out of here now.”
The next morning, they found bear tracks all over the property, but the bear had left the area. “You could see them across the snow, coming up to the side of the outhouse,” she said. They figure (being the kind of people who “figure”) the bear got inside the outhouse through an opening at the bottom of the back door.
“I expect it’s probably not that bad of a little den in the winter,” Shannon said.
A wildlife expert believes Shannon’s wound was caused by the bear swatting at her with a paw rather than being bitten. Either way, the incident might be a first.
“As far as getting swatted on the butt when you’re sitting down in winter, she could be the only person on Earth that this has ever happened to, for all I know,” the expert said.
Erik says he’ll carry bear spray with him all the time when going into the backcountry, and Shannon plans to change one behavior as well.
“I’m just going to be better about looking inside the toilet before sitting down, for sure,” she said.
Next time?
Backcountry?
Before sitting down?
These are not my people.
I figure.
©2021 Jim Hagarty
