Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, July 4, 1994 TAG: 9407220035
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Monty S. Leitch
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
A black bear came to call.
And he stayed around long enough to eat up all the dog food, test out the deck furniture and look in the picture window.
"He?" I asked Hurt, when she told me this on the phone. "Are you sure it was a 'he'?"
"I'm just calling it 'he,'" she said. "I didn't want to get close enough to find out!"
Ruby and Rufus Hurt live out at the end of Slings Gap Road. Their place is actually over in Franklin County, but it's only a few miles from Roanoke County's Bent Mountain community, in a wild and wooly area near the Blue Ridge Parkway.
An area in which bear sightings are "not really uncommon," according to the forest ranger who answered Hurt's call.
In fact, when I chatted with Sgt. Ron Henry about this bear, he sounded positively nonchalant. "Oh, there's lots of bears around," he said. "This is mating season and they're out feeding and such."
"No reason to be concerned at all," I said.
"Not really," he assured me. "Unless you're separating a female from her cubs, black bears are the most timid animals we have in the commonwealth. You hear it said about snakes, too: They're more afraid of you, than you are of them."
Ruby Hurt was, nevertheless, a tad concerned. She'd just been out working in her garden, where she'd assumed the rustling she'd heard in the bushes was a deer. She'd finished her gardening around 8 p.m., and then she'd gone inside and settled down with her Reader's Digest.
That's when she saw the bear out by the garage. That's when she got concerned.
She called 911. "I didn't know what else to do," she said. "They told me to stay calm and they'd get a forest ranger out here, but that he lived out at Smith Mountain Lake and that it would take awhile."
It did. Sgt. Henry arrived around 10 p.m.
Meanwhile, for at least an hour and a half Ruby Hurt and her adult daughter watched the bear sniff around the kitchen porch. They watched him stand up on his hind legs and look in the kitchen door. They watched him lie down on the deck and finish off the dog food, then amble around to the front porch, climb "I had my car keys in my hand," Hurt said. "If he came in that front window, I was going out the back!"
"People will tell you that they've seen a huge bear," Sgt. Henry said. "But around here, the biggest you're going to get is about 300 pounds. The thing of it is, we don't have grizzlies like they do out West. People are concerned about their pets and their children and all, but black bears don't normally attack."
Still, Ruby Hurt is being a little more careful these days when she goes out to do her gardening. She's lived at the end of Slings Gap Road for about seven years, and this was her first bear. She's just as soon it was also her last.
"There's no need to set a trap just on the basis of a sighting," Sgt. Henry said. Bears are only relocated if they've wandered into a densely populated area, or if they're causing damage.
And Ruby Hurt's handling of the situation was wise: If you see a black bear, just leave it alone and stay out of its way.
Most especially, don't make the mistake of trying to shoot a black bear, Sgt. Henry said. "There are very stiff penalties for killing a bear out of season."
He's pretty sure Ruby Hurt's bear was just passing through.
Her main regret is that she didn't get a picture. "It's a log garage," she said, "and it would have made a great picture: that bear out by the garage."
Monty S. Leitch is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.
by CNB