Sleuthing around

After a rainy Saturday spent stuck in the office working on the annual graduation section, by the time the sun started coming out Saturday night I was ready for a road trip to the Chippewa Campground.

The popular National Forest campground is located on the shores of the Chequamegon Flowage (AKA Miller Dam to the natives and those who have ever tried to get directions to it.). The reason for my trip was to get the Camper of the Week.

Each week from Memorial Day through Labor Day a staff member at The Star News visits one of the several municipal, county and federal campsites to highlight those vacationing here.

The Star News has been running the camper of the week feature for the past several summers. It is one of those assignments that can either be looked at an adventure or a chore. It often falls to our summer interns as a way to get them out and exploring and seeing what Taylor County has to offer.

Other than the year where our intern seemed to go out of his way to find the creepiest people staying at any campground it has been a positive thing highlighting the diverse group of people who choose to vacation in Taylor County. Since he came from a southern state, I figured he was drawn to the Deliverance-style banjoplaying vibe of the campers he selected.

Taking my prerogative as the person who assigns the reporters tasks to do, I talked my wife into riding shotgun and keeping me company as we headed out to find a camper.

Things went along smoothly until we were on our way back. We were about a mile from the campground on CTH M when we noticed there was a car stopped in the middle of the road with its flashers on. We figured it was someone having car troubles and started to slow down to see if they needed help.

That’s about when we saw some brown and kind of cuddly in an apex predator sort of way moving on the side of the road. It was a juvenile black bear trying very hard to drag a deer carcass up the hillside into the woods.

I commend the bear for its efforts to keep Taylor County’s highways tidy and clean up the roadkill. We watched for a while creeping closer in our vehicle to try and get a good picture of the bear.

It was when we got even with the bear that my wife looked up to the tree line and saw that the juvenile bear was not alone. A very large, and surprisingly laid back, mama bear was watching her cub with the same sort of expression a human mother would watch their child attempt to move something that was twice its size. It appeared that the entire family was there for a nice roadkill picnic with another cub bear the size of the one closest to the road hanging out with momma bear and a smaller cub exploring off to the other side. A fun fact is that a group of bears is called a “sleuth.”

With no traffic on the road, we paused to snap our pictures from the vehicle window. After a few minutes, mama bear looking in our direction as if to say, “OK, you’ve gotten your pictures, now move along.”

A friend of mine, the one who is holding out hope for the eventual publication of a Onion-esque parody edition of The Star News called “The Spare News,” suggested I write the Camper of the Week as if I had interviewed the bears with the responses being nothing but roars and potentially ending with me being eaten.

While there needs to be healthy respect for bears, as there should be around any animal, I was more concerned that we were bothering the bears rather than them being a bother to us. Unlike the unfortunate bear home invasion incident reported on in last week’s paper, in this case we were the ones intruding on the family of bears enjoying an evening meal.

Brian Wilson is News Editor at The Star News.