BLACK BEARS

Some 1500 black bears live in the Smoky Mountains. We saw none. Some guy leaning on a barbed wire fence looking at wild horses at Cade’s Cove told us that a momma bear and cubs were sighted just around the bend; supposedly, when we got there, the ranger drove them off with a stick. A volunteer passerby on the Laurel Falls path warned us to be careful, that there’d been bear sightings all day. We saw crawling paths up and down cliffs, and even a fake paw print in the mud—a curled palm and four thumb prints—but no bears. I looked so hard I began to see bears: I took a large, dead black tree stump under a thicket of Rhododendrons to be a feeding male. Bears were sighted on the four-mile horseback trail according to our Wellington-booted, sleeveless Tennessee guide—but nothing. By the end of the week we began believe that warning out-of-towners of bear sightings was a running local joke, that it just couldn’t be helped, that they had to say it—because it was so easy.