One night I was cambin out solo just for yucks in the forested back acres of my parents' property. Quiet night alone to enjoy some whiskey and ciggies under the moon and trees.
Anyway, it was a pretty dark night and around 10pm some heavy creature with heavy footsteps started lumbering loudly toward my campsite. I shied away from the fire light into the shadows so I wasn't visible (thought maybe it was a psycho person out in the middle of nowhere without a flashlight coming toward me) and I didn't see anything. It got so close I thought it was about to be visible in the firelight, and I started making noise and flashing my light toward it in the darkness, and I heard it stop and quickly tromp off in the other direction until I couldn't hear it anymore. About 45mins later, the exact same thing happened again, but it was coming from a different direction. Went through the same routine, and it wandered off. This happened about 5 times until about 2:45am it came back but more aggressively this time. I realized I could never sleep with this shit going on, so I strapped my headlamp on, plus my flashlight, and grabbed my hatchet, and just yelled-out and ran toward it, on my way back to the house. It panicked and ran way from me desperately, and made a horrible noise crashing through the woods as it disappeared into the darkness. As I grabbed my things and started hoofing it back to the house I heard a couple small "whoops" in the trees above me. I shined my flashlight up and there were 3 little bear cubs hiding up in the tree. It was spring and it must have been a curious/hungry black bear with cubs sniffing-out my food.
Anyway, I just walked all the way home rather than deal with that until dawn.
