That Bear Ate My Pants! Adventures of a real Idiot Abroad by Tony James Slater

Author:Tony James Slater [Slater, Tony James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Funny, Animals, Humour, Volunteering, Voluntourism, South America, Adventure, Humor, Comedy, Volunteer
Publisher: Various Things (ADT)
Published: 2011-06-22T04:00:00+00:00

Bear Faced Cheek

After a fairly lonely weekend, Toby and I were eager to start work again when Monday swung around.

It started like any other day. As it happened, it finished like any other day too, but that’s not important. The fact is, between those rather ordinary times, it was not at all like any other day. Well, the morning was different.

It was a day with a different morning.

We were halfway through the 7am feed when the alarm was raised (which happened fairly frequently at Santa Martha, and usually took the form of someone shouting “SHIT SHIT SHIT!” at top volume).

Toby and I legged it down the road to see what was up, leaving a cage full of hungry monkeys beating each other with our wooden spoons. The problem wasn’t hard to spot. Around the corner that led down to Osita’s enclosure there was a tall tree growing halfway down the hill – with a large bear cub at the top of it. Now, even in Ecuador bears don’t grow on trees, and anyway those native to our area had long since been endangered into endangerment. Sitting coolly up that tree with a triumphant grin on her face was our bear cub.

Oh bugger. My first panicked thought: What the hell was she doing out of her enclosure? Answer: Simple. Climbing a tree. Idiot. Next thought: How? How had she gotten out? Had I locked it properly yesterday? Of course! Even I’m not that dumb. Well, not twice. Had she been let out in the night by someone else? Or jumped somehow, despite the electric fence? Not that any of this mattered. There was only one pressing problem which definitely merited a Triple Shit Warning; how, in the name of all that smells fruity, were we going to get her back?

We joined Johnny, Jimmy and Danielo in a meeting of minds (which I appreciate is a bit of a contradiction in terms). I was thinking containment. Whilst Osita looked quite at home in the tree, more worrying was the prospect of her getting bored with it and climbing down. She could romp over the whole valley, and there wasn’t a thing we could do to stop her. If she ended up on some other farmer’s land she’d be shot without question, and there were no boundary walls or fences – at least nothing that would give her more than ten seconds pause. Osita was a master climber, which was another difficulty in itself. She could hide in the trees in the most impenetrable areas of forest, and be gone again by the time we cut our way through to her. All in all it didn’t bear thinking about. To my mind we simply HAD to keep her in that tree.

Jimmy spoke up. “Let’s get her out of that tree,” he said.

I stared at him, amazed.

“No!” I groped for some pidgin Spanish phrases. “I… sit at tree with food. Fruit. She loves fruit and… she likes me. She come to me?”

“Ha!” Jimmy wasn’t convinced.

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