River's BEAR

A Mule Wreck, A Giant Bear Missed & A Redemption Story

- River Newcomb

Since I was a little girl, I’ve been hunting the mountains of Arkansas with my family. I was four-years-old the first time I saw a bear in the woods while we were putting out bait. I remember watching that bear and my initial response was fear. I grabbed onto my dad’s leg and said, “Let’s go.” We watched the bear throw his nose in the air, wind us and run off. I remember looking to my dad to see him grinning ear to ear. “Did you see that?” he asked. And his excitement immediately transferred to me. The drive home he had me recount what I had seen and made sure that I understood how special it was that I got to be so close to a wild bear. That was a privilege that not many four-year old kids have.

That same year, the season started and the bears left my dad’s bait. He was planning on giving up, but I had a dream. I woke up early in the morning and told him, “Daddy, I had a dream that the bear came back.” As a four-year-old, he acknowledged the dream and agreed to keep it out one more week.

The next time he went to check the bait, sure enough, a bear was back at the bait. I’ve always loved bears. It was always important to my dad that we valued and respected the wildlife we hunted. We spent our summers catching lizards, snakes, crawdads, and whatever else we could find. Then when fall would come around, we would pack our school bags with hunting clothes so we could leave straight from there to the farm. Just about every night of the week we would help some one track a deer, and then we would sit at the truck and listen to some of the best story telling you’ve ever heard.