The Bear Hunt Gone Wrong - Men Fall on Bear
The plan was flawless: wait in the tree above the bear's kill. Nobody consulted gravity — or the bear. A true Plaskett Creek comedy, retold.
Retold from the family record — the kernel is true; the embroidery is in the family spirit.
Somewhere in the 1880s, on the benchland where Plaskett Creek slides down through the trees toward the sea, a grizzly took to killing Plaskett cows. This was a serious matter — a cow was worth more than most things a coast family owned — and so the men of the valley held a council of war and produced, as men in councils do, a Plan.
The Plan was sound on paper, which is where plans live best. A bear, they reasoned, returns to its kill. Very well: they would build a platform in the tree directly above the dead cow, haul themselves up with rifles and a net, and wait. When the bear came back to feed, they would have him — from above, from safety, from the one direction a bear never checks. The Plasketts were fine carpenters; the platform went up square and true, and at dusk the men climbed to it and arranged themselves like owls.
Now, the difficulty with waiting for a bear is that the bear has not read the Plan and keeps his own calendar. The night came down cold off the Santa Lucias. The creek talked to itself. The moon crossed a great deal of sky. And the men — brave men, hard-working men, men who had been up since before dawn doing everything a coast ranch demands — began, one by one, to nod.
The bear, of course, arrived precisely then. What happened next depended on which family member was telling it. In one telling a sleeping man tipped against another and the whole owl-roost went over like dominoes. In another the platform lashing — worked loose by an evening of fidgeting — chose that exact moment to let go. In every telling, the ending is the same: instead of the net descending gracefully upon the bear, the entire hunting party descended upon the bear — nightshirts, rifles, hats, net and all — a rain of Plasketts out of the dark oak canopy.
It is not recorded who was more astonished, the men or the grizzly. It is recorded that the bear left — left the cow, left the valley floor, left, one imagines, the county — at a speed no one present had previously associated with bears. The men picked themselves up out of the mud beside the carcass, counted their limbs, found the full number, and walked home. The cow was not avenged that night. But the family gained something worth more than a cow: a story that has now outlived every man on that platform, and the bear besides.
As the family record tells it: “One time a bear had killed one of the cows. The men decided to tie a platform up in a tree right above the carcass so that when the bear returned to eat its kill the men would be above it — and the men fell on the bear.”