"Shhh, he's looking this way." He whispered with an urgency that felt more like a shout. "I'm sure he's already smelled us. We normally try our best to give him space, and he's never given us trouble before, but we don't normally get this close to him."
The bear turns back to his meal and seems to forget about us.
Still whispering, but more relaxed now and wrestling a stubborn idiot of an animal (a grey donkey) back towards the camp. "I'm sorry. I wasn't watching him he just wandered over here." "It's okay, just hurry." I said, a little nervous that we shouldn't risk speaking in even the most hushed of voices until we were in the clear.
"HhhhhURRRRMMMMM"
The donkey, apparently not near as nervous as I, let out a long exasperated sigh. "Shut up!" I whisper-screamed.
Too late, the bear had already turned to face us.
"Rifle!" Shouted my companion. I obliged. The bear already moving towards us in a straight line past a row of bee hives from about 300 feet away.
Pcheeowwwwww. The trailing sound of the 30 ot 6 still hung in the air, fading with distance. Birds flew up and the bear fell flat; dead.
The warm rush of adrenaline and relief began to wash over my body. My friends ears sagged as he began to quietly sob, the reality of the moment settling into his young, innocent mind.
"He was my friend." He said.
"I know." I whispered, choking back tears and putting a sympathetic hand on the shoulder of his pink and black striped unitard.
Pulling that trigger bothers him to this day. He often sits by the fireplace with his old friend (who he had stuffed with cotton shortly after the incident), and stares into his lifeless, plastic eyes. A kind of sick trophy. The ghost a better time. He doesn't speak much, but I still hear him utter the occasional "Oh, bother.".
Piglet will never be the same again.
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