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A few years back I was with family members camping at a mountain lake which is easily accessible, the hike is short and it's a small lake. We were the only ones there by the time the sun was going down, although we noticed a couple other families had hiked up, enjoyed the view for a few minutes and left. I thought it was odd that nobody else was setting up camp in such an awesome location on a perfect night for camping like that.
We had the camp site fully set up and were finished eating by the time the sun went down. It was still light enough to see fairly well.
One of us decided since nobody else was around to shoot a pistol into the treeline. He made it look like he was just goofing around but later admitted that while I was out by the head of the creek feeding out from the lake (where I couldn't hear anything except the water), they were back at the site near the treeline hearing something like a low grumble and twigs snapping. They heard it so faintly that they couldn't be certain what it was, but he had the instinct to shoot his pistol to scare it off if it were a bear. This made sense after the fact when he explained it. I really thought he was just messing around.
30 seconds afterwards, we all heard something come crashing down through the hillside along the lake, breaking tree limbs (large ones from the sounds of it). It was running towards us. It stopped just at the treeline near our campsite and in the dark where we couldn't see it it paced around breaking smaller branches.
