In a way I feel I have grown up with bears. Ever since early childhood, they have been somewhere in my life. The first time I saw a bear was when I was four years old and camping with my parents in Jasper National Park. The bears were everywhere in those days, and most campers were well aware of the dangers. My father and mother had taken me camping from the time I was two until I was a teenager. They had chased more than one bear away from the campsite!

I always remember my dad saying whenever you see a bear cub stay away. The mother will be somewhere nearby and she will attack if she feels her cub is threatened.

Many tourists never learned that lesson and often did not pay attention to signs warning of the dangers. My dad in fact scrambled to move a child from the path of a bear cub and shouted at the parents to get away. They screamed at my dad telling him he had ruined the picture they had been taking!

I have had a bear sleep next to me during the night and only found out about it the next morning when our neighbour, another camper, discovered it leaning against our tent the following morning!

I have also been awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of snorting and heavy sniffing outside the tent. The bear, I learned the next morning, had been attracted by the campsite across from us, where the campers had left food out on the table. The bear ate a jar of jam and left a terrible mess!

My mother once took my brother and I hiking up a mountain trail only to stop and tell us we were turning back. Then she pointed out the massive paw print in the mud ahead of us and told us it looked like a Grizzly print. She was calm but her voice was suddenly very quiet. She knew not to mess with one of those. A male grizzly bear can weigh in at 136 to 300 kilograms while an adult black bear weighs 90 to 136 kilograms.

In all the years I have been camping I have always been cautious, careful and rarely afraid. But not this most recent trip two weeks ago. My friend and I went camping to a favourite spot; a somewhat remote area in another national park. As always we kept our site clean. All food and anything a bear might desire locked up in the van. We even change clothes at night so no food smells can emanate from our tent.

One morning I happened to walk out to the road beside our campsite and there almost directly across from me was a good sized cinnamon-coloured, black bear ambling down the road away from me. I yelled, hooted the car horn to warn others camped further up the road but the bear paid no mind. It stopped and chewed some grasses and then headed into the bushes opposite another campsite. It was not afraid, a sign it had become accustomed to humans and therefore potentially dangerous.

We phoned the emergency number and 45 minutes later a wildlife officer was patrolling the campsite. He had a paintball gun which he uses to scare a bear away if found. He didn’t find it. But a day later the same bear was seen near the beach by other campers which means it definitely wasn’t bothered by people.

But it bothered me. For the first time in seventy some years of camping I felt afraid of a bear. The feeling was unusual and uncomfortable and sadly, in some ways a harbinger of what is slowly but inevitably overtaking me. I am having to face the fact that I am growing out of who I once thought I was, and who I still want to be; strong, confident, fear-less. I don’t completely recognize the woman I am these days. I am not sure I can depend on her or know how she will react in a given situation. It isn’t the bear who has shaken me up as much as this new me who panicked when she saw it.