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dinner—maybe nest-building. Dinner will be our first meal in the dining hall. We were all given lunch bags from the school cafeteria when we left Pioneer Junior High, which we ate on the bus. A sour apple and two peanut butter sandwiches are lodged in my gut like little gooey fists.
    I slide my pen into the rings of my private journal and stick it down into the deep breastpocket of my shirt. Slinging my back pack over my shoulder, I climb slowly down the ladder. Why hurry when every step just brings you that much closer to your doom?

6
Bear Facts
    J ournal time has come and gone. We’ve all gathered together to listen to Mr. Mack lecture us about what he calls—with a little insincere laugh—“the bear facts.”
    His voice is monotonous but I’m listening close, making sure he has his facts right.
    â€œThere was a time,” he says, consulting the magazine he holds in his hand, “when Ursus Americanus , the American black bear, was almost gone from this land. Here in the Northeast, two hundred years ago, almost all of the forests where bears lived had been cut and turned into farmland. Not only that, bounties were being paid on such large carnivores as bears, wolves, and mountain lions.”
    I have to nod my head at that. It’s true. In the early 1800s they were paying five dollars a head for bear scalps, which was big money back then. There was a war on bears.
    It wasn’t just that those animals sometimes killed livestock. People were afraid of them. All kinds of grisly stories were told about humans being killed by wild animals…or saved from them at the very last minute by a hunter who was just in time to shoot the bear or wolf or mountain lion as it was about to pounce on some innocent person. Kind of like that woods-man who rescues Little Red Riding Hood from the evil wolf.
    In point of fact, though, it was those big animals that had to be afraid. For every wolf or bear or mountain lion that even looked at a human being, thousands were killed. There’s nothing more dangerous than humans.
    â€œIn all of the North American continent,” Mr. Mack continues, turning a page, “over the last hundred years, only fifty-two humans have been killed by black bears—most of them people foolish enough to get in between a mother bear and her cubs or unlucky enough to come upon a bear that had broken into a camp for food. What a bear does then is try to get away. And if you are between that bear and the door, you’ll be moved aside by that frightened but potentially lethal bruin.
    â€œToday the bears have returned. Slim as itmay be, there’s always the chance of a dangerous bear encounter when you are in the northeastern forests nowadays. In the Northeast, from Maine through Pennsylvania, it’s been estimated that there are now as many as fifty thousand wild bears.”
    It’s a canned lecture. I know all of those facts, even though they’re new to most of the other kids with me. Some of the kids in our group had begun voicing their fears about running into a bear even before they got off the bus here at Camp Chuckamuck. Or maybe fears is not a strong enough word. Try near hysteria .
    It seems that even though I was the only one who stayed in my cabin during the journal time an hour ago, none of the other kids ventured into the woods at all. It was starting to get dark, so they all just hung around within sight of each other and the main camp building. And when someone—and wouldn’t you know it had to be Willy Donner—saw something fairly big and black walking around behind the main cabin, he raised the alarm in that stentorian voice of his. People started screaming (boys as well as girls, I might add) and running.
    â€œBear! Bear!”
    â€œIt’s after me!”
    â€œHelp, a bear is chasing us.”
    Those terrified shouts had brought me outside just as fast as everyone ran for shelter. A real bear? Cool! I was actually