I read recently that black bears were expanding their range in Alabama. Our resident population is mostly down in Washington and Mobile counties. Folks who have seen them tell me they’re scrawny critters that look anything but ferocious.

A fellow outdoors writer form North Carolina that I duck hunted with last year tells me that bear hunting is all the rage in his state now. I told him our bear population had remained fairly static. He assured me that it would grow and that bear hunting would eventually become a popular sport here, too.
They were saying the same thing about 40 years ago. Whether the bear was real or not, and I imagine it was, it ruined my long-planned squirrel hunting camping trip.
My father told me about his father taking him and another boy on a squirrel hunting/camping trip in a northwest Florida river swamp. My father managed to bag a couple of young squirrels with his little Harrington and Richardson 28-gauge single shot, and my grandfather cooked them over an open fire. My father talked about the special barbecue sauce his father slathered on the tender young squirrels, and I thought he was going to lick his fingers to see if the taste still lingered 50 years later.
Of course, when someone draws such an idyllic image with words, it has a powerful influence on a 13-year-old boy. I had to experience a camping squirrel hunt and eat squirrel roasted over an open fire covered in a special barbecue sauce.
My father at some point must have realized he’d made a terrible mistake by telling me the story. Let’s forget for a moment that he’d never once cooked a squirrel over open flames and that he didn’t know his father’s recipe for that barbecue sauce. Honestly, I don’t see how someone could allow the secret for something so savory to be lost to time, but he did.
When I began begging for a camping trip that I would tell my son about decades later, I’m sure it conjured up a different image in my father’s mind. I imagine he could see us chewing on a rubbery 3-year-old boar squirrel coated in Kraft barbecue sauce and pretending that it was good. And after the meal was done, he could envision reclining his 63-year-old bones on the hard ground for an evening without rest.
For those who aren’t old enough to remember, it’s hard to image the technological advancements in camping equipment that have developed in the last 40 years. A lot of thought has been put into helping people achieve some level of comfort under primitive conditions. Basic things such as clothing, coolers, tents and sleeping bags are evolutionary leaps beyond where they were in the ’70s, and more people have these modern marvels.
My father knew how ill-equipped we were to spend a night under the stars. But he eventually gave in to my harassment and let me invite a childhood friend to go with us. He got a pup tent for us and came up with an ingenious idea for himself. He’d put a cot in the back of his pickup and rig up a covering with a canvas tarp.
The weekend after squirrel season opened we departed from Demopolis on a Friday afternoon in my father’s 1963 GMC loaded with a hodgepodge of improvised camping gear, some from our house, some borrowed from the friend who accompanied us. It was a perfect day for squirrel hunting, clear and still with the leaves turning bright shades of orange, red and yellow along with the muted greens and browns.
As we were headed up May Hill on the road between Coatopa and Belmont in Sumter County — so named by the locals because it was so steep that in an old Model T Ford, you “may make it and you may not” — my father remembered he had something important to tell us.
“Dewey Marchand says he saw a bear over here while he was logging,” my father said nonchalantly. “If you see it, just leave it alone and don’t shoot it or anything.”
Growing up in northwest Florida, my father knew that large animals such as bears and alligators were largely harmless if left alone. It’s hard to convince 13-year-old boys of that when television shows and movies depict them as vicious man-eaters. My friend and I never exchanged a word, but we were both thinking the same thing.
When we arrived at the woods, my father took my friend one way and I went into the beautiful, open hardwood swamp that we knew was loaded with squirrels. It was a perfect afternoon. And every noise and movement made my heart jump into my throat. I tried watching for squirrels, but I kept scanning the woods for the bear. I was sure at this point that it was stalking me.
Visions of fire-roasted squirrel smothered in barbecue sauce gave way to pure survival instincts. Yes, I was carrying a 16-gauge shotgun loaded with high velocity No. 6 shot. But I was sure that it wouldn’t stop a charging bear bent on sinking its teeth into my throat and ripping my limbs off with its claws.
I went back to the truck an hour earlier than normal and waited for my father to arrive. I hoped he would arrive before it got dark. He did, and he was surprised that both my friend and I wanted to leave so early. I was grateful that he had decided to set up camp on a hill far from the swamp where the bear was lurking.
My father had the good sense to be prepared in case we got skunked. Or perhaps he had hoped to convince us all along to cook the hamburger meat he brought with him and leave the squirrel for out housekeeper, Nonie, to cook. Regardless, the hamburgers were delicious and we ate s’mores afterward.
A front blew in, but the tent kept the light rain off of us. My father’s contraption didn’t work so well. He didn’t have as much headroom as he’d anticipated. Sometime in the night, he got painful leg cramps and got all tangled up in the tarp when he leapt to his feet.
The next morning was clear and cool but windy. That was a deal-breaker for squirrel hunting. We gave it a shot but never saw a squirrel. I was even more dejected when my father told me that he’d turned down what was likely a really good dove shoot invitation to go on our camping squirrel hunt.
I think both my friend and I confessed that day to my father that we had been too scared to hunt. If not, we confessed later. He was completely disgusted with us that we would be afraid of a scrawny, little, garbage-and-berry eating Alabama bear. Of course, that’s not what we were afraid of. We were afraid of a ferocious, man-eating bear. It’s just that “bear” meant something different to him than it did to us.
Was the bear really there? A lot of the hunters on our club scoffed at the possibility. But while rabbit hunting the following February, a friend and I found a track in a logging road that appeared to have been made by a bear’s front paw. Not being a professional tracker, I was never sure.
To this day, I haven’t seen a bear in the wild. I can’t say that I’m sorry either.