ouch!” I said as I bumped my head on the underside of the bottom shelf. “I think I made it!”
I had to push out with my feet and wrestle the shelf. It didn’t move easily. I tried banging on it and it popped loose.
“Fore!” I yelled as it slid down the shaft. “Shelf attack!” Whack!
“Ouch!”
“Sorry, I tried to warn you. Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I think so. It just surprised me.”
I bumped my head on the next shelf too, but I thought I had enough space to crawl out of the refrigerator. I was glad the door was not like a modern refrigerator. The door was more like a cupboard door and swung open easily. It took some squirming to get through the opening but finally I stood up once more inside the lookout tower.
“Okay! I made it!” I yelled down the shaft.
“All right, coming up,” called Twiggy.
Bang, bang, bang went the door as the bear tried to reach Twiggy’s feet. It didn’t sound like an angry attack, but it was too close for comfort. I ran out onto the catwalk and looked down. The bear noticed movement above and paced below. In the distance I could see two bear cubs alternately eating and batting at each other. I didn’t know if they were playing or irritating each other. Probably both.
It didn’t take Twiggy long to climb the shaft but he had a harder time climbing out the door. When he stood up he found me grinning ear to ear pointing out to the catwalk. One cub dashed away from the other then turned around and invited a new attack.
“There’s bears!” I said excitedly. “Can we take a picture? It’ll be great to post it on the log!”
“Hold on,” he said. “Let me get the pack and the cache.”
He untied a rope attached to his belt loop, then went back to the refrigerator and pulled his pack up the shaft.
“It does have a little food in it,” he explained.
When he had the pack in hand he unzipped it and pulled the cache out.
Clang! Cloong! The bear was trying to open the grate.
Twiggy pulled the lock out of his pack and carefully used it to lock the grate closed.
“At what point do we ask for help?” I asked.
“I don’t know. What about you? How long are you willing to be stuck up here?”
“She’ll get bored and leave, then we can hike back to the van.”
We sat on the floor of the watchtower and looked through the contents of the ammunition container. I still was not so entrenched in the hobby that I called it an ammo can. There were still a few of the big, plastic fake jewels, but the geocachers before us had traded for most of them and the rest of the contents were typical of all the other caches I had found: Three fake jewels, a Matchbox car, a little girls’ bracelet, a stubby screwdriver, a business card for an auto shop, two erasers, and a plastic lizard. I signed the log with an additional note, “We saw bears!”
“I think we should trade for a jewel. It’s the one thing that will remind us of the cache.”
“Okay, sounds good to me. I don’t usually take things anymore. Just looking for them is the fun part.”
“Even if you get chased up refrigerators by protective mother bears?”
“Yeah, though I wish you’d heed my warnings faster.”
“I was more excited to see bears than I was afraid of them attacking.”
“If an animal has young, weighs four times as much as you and has sharp teeth and claws, I suggest not taking any chances.”
“Can I still take a few pictures?”
“From up here,” he said.
“All right!”
I was so excited. I had never seen a wild bear, much less taken a picture of one.
“Stand right here,” I said. “Let’s see if I can get a picture of you and a bear at the same time.”
I really couldn’t. The angles were all wrong. I could see the bear below the catwalk but in a picture there would be no way to tell. I tried sitting on the rail but Twiggy gave me worried looks instead of smiling. The best picture I could get showed a worried Twiggy with the rump of the bear sticking out behind the edge of the catwalk.
“Okay, my turn,” said Twiggy. “I want a picture in the watchtower. Sit on the counter. Here, we want the cache in the picture, too. Okay, turn a little bit.”
He looked past me to the forest below.
“Okay, look at me. Smile. Smile! Come on I want to see it in your eyes. I like happy eyes… Thank you.” He pressed the shutter release. “Do you want to see it?”
“Okay!”
He showed me the picture and then we clicked further to see the picture I took of him.
“Maybe I need to take Photography 101.”
“It might help if I hadn’t been worried about you falling over the rail into the jaws of the bear.”
“Okay, then… let me take a different one. Show the camera how to climb out of a refrigerator shaft.”
The bears were very content to hang around under the watchtower all day. We ate little cupcakes, granola and drank two pints of water we had packed. We lowered the cache back down the shaft on a rope so we wouldn’t have to spend time replacing it on the ground. We could just close the door, snap on the lock and take off quickly for the van. We unlocked the grate. We checked the ground for bears. Time after time they were still there, just quietly laying about in the berry patch. We caught a couple of glimpses of the cubs. I even got a pretty good picture of them. If I was going to continue geocaching I was definitely going to have to get a better camera. And a GPS. Finally, as the light was failing, we couldn’t see any bears. Maybe they had gone to wherever bears go to sleep. We crept down the stairs only to be met by mama bear walking out of the woods toward us.
“This is ridiculous. She isn’t scared of us. Bears are supposed to take off running if you threaten them,” Twiggy said.
“Maybe they are braver when they have cubs.”
“I don’t want to spend the night here. We have no sleeping bags. The windows are open to the elements. It’s summer, but it’s still going to get cold.”
“I’m willing to risk it if you are. Maybe if they see us leaving they’ll let us go.”
“Do you have any experience with bears?”
“No. Do you?”
“No. But I’ve seen online videos of bear encounters.”
“Yup, they always run away.”
