The Tatlatui Bear

When Roland and Nancy pulled up to the beach on the Firesteel River, I was loading up my Super Cub to check on a friend’s cabin on Lake Tatlatui that had been trashed by a bear.

“Would you like to come along?” I asked Roland.

“I’d be more than happy to,” he said.

Doing a flyover of Lake Tatlatui, we didn’t see anything on the ground, so we dropped in on the lake and taxied to the dock. I secured the plane, and we gathered our tools and approached the cabin.

The siding had been torn off the back side of the lodge, exposing the storeroom filled with supplies. At the side door of the lodge, laying at our feet was the kitchen window. The bear had ripped open bags of flour, punctured large cans of tomatoes with his teeth, and bear droppings were scattered throughout the mess.

On the other side of the kitchen, we heard a noise and backtracked to the cabin porch. I positioned my rifle on the porch railing, and Roland was ready with a hammer in hand. Two paws appeared from inside the missing window, then his shoulders, then his head.

Beannie radioed us on the way home: “Everything okay?”

“Everything’s fine,” I said.

~A special thank you to Roland Pascal for submitting this story