Soda Pop for the Bears

Somebody at Thornton Gap once looked at a black bear and thought, that fellow could use a soda pop. That was Panorama, the other resort on this mountain. Horseback riding, miniature golf, and several caged bears. If you believe a guest named John Nichols, the management encouraged folks to feed those bears soft drinks and ice cream. He was standing by the pen, getting set to do just that, when one of them sprang on the fence, pushed a paw through the wire, and tore his face. He took Panorama to court in nineteen thirty-five. The owners said he was drunk and teasing the animal. The court gave him two hundred dollars, and the bears stayed on. Which brings me to Bill and Betsy. They were two bears out of one litter, brought from the Alleghenies and held at Panorama. In June of nineteen thirty-four, by the park's history, they were turned loose in Deep Run. Darwin Lambert, who wrote that history, believed they'd been roadside exhibits. They only came free, he thought, after officials and plenty of citizens protested their captivity. They were used to handouts, even to begging, and he didn't rate them much as founders of anything. Three years old, and as far as anybody could tell, what they knew of the world was a fence and a hand with something sweet in it. Betsy walked off and wasn't seen for certain again. Bill went looking for company. One Friday he kept a work crew company at the foot of Lewis Mountain. The next Friday he turned up on Big Flat Mountain with a different crew, like a fellow hoping to get hired on. A CCC superintendent named Hagenbuch told of one bear, maybe Bill, following people around outside the park line and frightening them badly. So he and a crew coaxed that bear to camp, no chain on him, walked him out into the forest, and left him. Back he came. They'd put two animals in the woods who had never been taught how to be bears, and nobody could teach them now. How it ended depends who you read. One wildlife man reported in nineteen thirty-five that one of the pair was killed in an organized hunt soon after it was let go, and the other never accounted for. The park's own article has different dates altogether. And Lambert says none of it was needed, that wild bears could have come in from the mountains on their own four feet. That crew walked off through the trees, trying not to look around, and a bear with ice cream in his past padded along after them to see what was for supper.