My life’s been a great experience but sometimes I wonder how I lived through some of it.

For example, one summer I worked in the Grand Teton Park delivering bug spray for the park rangers. We’d load mules, or horses, with Jerry cans of bug spray and then haul them out to the crews who sprayed the forest all day to kill bark beetles.

Except for the supervisors, who needed to be actual responsible adults, the rest of us were young and ran all day mostly on Testosterone and Coors beer accentuated by overcooked pork chops, and eggs fried hard, that we got at breakfast and put in our jacket pockets to eat all day.

We would work all day until the spray crews came out of the forest. The foreman would have beer at his cabin for all of us while we waited for the chow hall to open and by about 9:00PM we were all ready to sleep. The company we worked for had a bunk house where all 20 of us slept at night, and we headed for that bunkhouse.
The bunk house had one door in the front and the beds were arranged on both sides of a wide aisle with a storage trunk at the foot of each bed. There were big windows along the wall on both sides of the cabin, and most of them were kept open keeping it cool in the cabin for sleeping, and because it didn’t exactly smell like a flower shop in there.

I never drank like most of those guys because I had to get up before the rest of them, to get my Pack animals ready for the day. And on this particular morning, I got up and went to the bathhouse. When I came out I ran into another guy from the crew who held his finger up to his lips signaling to be quiet and follow him.

We went to the bunk house, and he showed me that yesterday somebody had thrown a pile of those pork chops and eggs on the ground, instead of in a trash can. They were all over outside the bunk house. There was a young bear picking up pork chops and slobbering as he chewed. People who know bears are familiar with the noises a happy bear makes when they eat, and this bear was making all of them.

My friend and I decided it might be funny if we lured that bear into the bunk house and closed the door.

The bear was used to being around tourists and was not paying any attention to us, so we picked up a few pork chops and laid them out in a trail to the bunkhouse and threw the last ones in on the floor. The bear just started picking them up and went right in. When we shut the door there was a bear, that probably went about 300 pounds, happily sitting on the floor munching old pork chops.

After about another 10 minutes of silence, the world inside the bunkhouse exploded. First there was one guy we heard yelling “There’s a Damn bear in the cabin!”, and then a lot of yelling and swearing erupted followed by several guys in their underwear, or whatever they slept in, jumping out the windows.

Finally, somebody, a little smarter than the rest, realized the bear was busy eating and he just opened the door and walked out carrying his clothes. The bear finished his pork chops, left a thank you gift of bear scat on the floor, huffed a few times, walked out the front door, and ambled out of camp.

It was pretty obvious to the crew who had put the bear in the cabin because my friend and I were laughing to hard to tell a big story and deny we had done it. We got a lot of hard language but later that day it got worse.

To get to work we would all get in a big open truck and be driven to the Job site. The road crossed a river and, on the trip back from work that evening, the truck stopped on the bridge. The crew grabbed my friend and I and threw us over the side into the river. Fortunately, it was deep enough to swim where we went over but also shallow enough for us to just walk out of the river.

The crew pulled practical jokes on each other for the rest of the summer, but we all agreed on a truce where bears were involved. But Porcupines? Well, that’s another story.