Goldilyn and the Three Bears

Illustration by John Batten, 1890

Once upon a time there was a not-so-little girl named Goldilyn.  One evening she was on her way through the not-really woods when her Prince Charming called out to her.  "Come here!"  He pointed to the crest of a low hill and said, "What do you think those are?"  Goldilyn couldn't believe her eyes, and she ran through all the things they weren't--not coyotes, not wild hogs, not deer...  Finally she turned to her Prince and said, "I think they are bears."  "So do I," he replied.

Photo credit:  Lyn Fenwick

OK, I'll stop with the nursery rhyme, because that evening what my husband and I saw were three bears running across our field, and they were no fairy tale.  We suspected that people might think we had lived in cities so long that we didn't know what wild animals in Kansas looked like.  We avoided mentioning the bears, although we did notify the Forestry, Fish, and Game.  We also alerted our neighbors who might be out in the fields or tree belts, especially those with children.

A few days later I went out to water my trees.  It was still daylight and I had been there not long before and had noticed nothing.  However, as I walked to the hydrant behind the barn there they were--a series of bear tracks between the hydrant and the barn.

We took photographs, laid a ruler beside the tracks to document size, and put flags beside each print from where they began to where the soil became too hard for tracks to show.

Photo credit:  Lyn Fenwick

About two days before we first saw the bears there was a large pile of scat on our lawn, perhaps ten feet from our back door.  There was a smaller pile about twelve feet from our garage door.  We both commented that they didn't really look like the raccoon scat we occasionally see, but we dismissed the scat by assuming the raccoons had eaten something unusual.  My husband had mowed over both piles before we saw the bears, but what we saw definitely looked like the bear scat pictures we found online later.  

Photo credit:  Lyn Fenwick

People are sometimes reluctant to tell anyone when they see something likely to be dismissed by others as being misidentified or imagined.  We certainly experienced that.  However, once news spread about our having seen the three bears, other local people began telling their own stories about  recent sightings.  One man said he had seen "three black animals" run across the road in front of him, too far away to identify.  Another man said something had frightened his horse badly enough to run it through the fence.  Still someone else said their custom cutters during wheat harvest reported having startled a bear in the wheat field with their combine.

We are confident we saw three bears, but we have seen nothing for several weeks.

Photo credit:  Lyn Fenwick 

One of the things I was very diligent about while writing my manuscript about this area of Kansas in the late 1800s was not to describe plants or animals in the community where Isaac Werner homesteaded unless he mentioned them in his journal or I could otherwise document that they were present in his locale during the years he homesteaded.  So, if anyone is writing a story about central Kansas during the summer of 2017,  here's your documentation that there were bears in the vicinity.  Isaac, however, never mentioned seeing a bear!