One day, long long ago, little Dicky Sanders went to scout camp. Dad worked hard setting up camp. He and 7 other scouts carried the huge, heavy wooden box that contained most of the cooking gear and put it on the table, ate a camp good dinner, sat around campfire and just did a lot of messing around. By bedtime, Dad was very tired and fell fast asleep……

     Ewww! Dad woke up because something hot and smelly was blowing in his face. He cracked open his eyes and……..looked straight up the nostrils of a HUGE bear! As you can imagine, Dad wasn’t very excited about this situation and couldn’t do much about it, but lay very very very still and pray and pray and pray. Meanwhile, his tent buddy was snoozing away, completely oblivious to Dad’s interesting situation. Finally, his buddy woke up, and was quite startled to find their tent so full of bear. Luckily, he kept his head (literally and figuratively) and kept very very very still! As Dad looked out of the corner of his eye, he saw his friend very very very slowly, reach out his hand to pick up the pie tin and spoon they had gone to bed with to scare away the bears. Once he had it, he sat up and hit the pan with the spoon with all of his heart and soul!

     Believe it or not, that pie tin and spoon really did the trick! That bear was so startled, he reared up, ripped the top of the tent off, lumbered over to the table where he had a little friend drinking up all of the maple syrup. Then, possibly out of frustration or maybe he was trying to redeem his big scary bearhood, he hit that great big, heavy wooden box, the one that took 8+ scouts to carry. It flew, end over end and landed clear across the road!

     That big wooden box still has the big gashes from the bears big claws. We, the progeny of little Dicky Sanders, are very very very grateful to his tent buddy and that the gashes were on the wooden box and not Dad. The moral of the story is to never never look up the nostrils of a very big bear — or even little ones.

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     Dad had another big adventure in the wild, later in his life, when he was a Daddy with 4 or 5 kids and a beautiful wife. Our family had a favorite camping spot next to the South Fork of the Salmon River, called Poverty Flats. One of Dad’s favorite things to do was to have Mom drop him up 4-5 miles up river from camp so he could fish his way down, back to camp.

     One day, after Mom dropped him off, he happily started down the steep decline to the river. He’d done the same thing the day before and could see his footprints from the day before. Much to his horror, he could also see the huge footprints of a cougar, following his footprints from the day before. All he could think of was that he had lead that big cougar back to our camp, where there were all sorts of tasty little morsels running around. He pulled out his gun, fired it in the air, to scare any cougars away and got down that river as fast as he could, seeing cougar footprints following his prints all the way down. He was very happy to find all of us still running around, without even one of us being eaten by that sneaky cougar.