ack when I was 12, my best friend Shane and I spent most of our summer weekends camping in the thick woods behind my family's farm house. We'd pitch our tent next to the fishing pond and would spend the weekend in the great outdoors.

While we imagined we were living off the fat of the land, we were really living off the larder of my father: Once or twice a day we'd go to the house, a mere quarter mile away, share a meal with my family, and stock up on chips, snacks and thermosfuls of sweet iced-tea. On Sunday mornings we would breakfast at the house for Sunday was the day that my father ventured into the kitchen to make a batch of his famous (at least among the Allen clan) biscuits-and-sausage-gravy.

It was one of these Sunday mornings that the great bear hunting incident took place.

We woke early one morning and set upon the task of fishing. If we were lucky we could catch a few fish before going on up to the house for breakfast. It was a peaceful day and we were enjoying the silence until we were disturbed by the clamor of something moving in the woods. Quiet at first but increasingly louder, the raucous noise quickly proved to be nothing than my younger sister, all of seven, traipsing loudly down the trail from the house.

"Keep it down, will you, we're fishing!" I yelled.

"Fine," she said, sticking her tongue out at the two of us. "Then I won't tell you that Dad said breakfast is ready." And she turned and tromped back up the trail louder than before.

As soon as she was gone, Shane and I eagerly started winding our reels in. Both our stomach's were growling at the thought of the meal to come. Just as we we're setting our poles next to the tent, we heard a scream that was obviously Michelle. Shane and I ran down the path, towards the noise, going just a short distance before seeing my sister who was tearing back down the path towards us.

"What's the matter?" Shane asked, putting his arm around her shoulder. Her eyes were wide and wet with tears and she was shaking like the treetops in a thunderstorm.

"I saw a bear," she sniffled between tears and pointed down the path. "There's a bear down there."

Now, to teenage boys looking for adventure, the thought of catching a bear was, well, almost unbearable. Without saying anything, I ran back to the tent to look for anything even remotely useful to bear-catching. The best I could do was a fishing pole and an old Army blanket. I raced back to where Michelle and Shane were waiting. "Okay," I said, "show us where this bear is."

We walked, slowly but every so stoicly down the road to where the bear was waiting.

The narrow path curved and angled up. Shane and I stepped carefully, attuned to every sound. Just at the top of the hill Michelle whispered, "THERE!" and pointed to a thicket of blackberry bushes.

Shane and I peered into the thicket. Something was in there, that's for sure, but we couldn't tell what. We were not, however, going to go through all of this without having *some* story to talk about so we quickly formulated a plan: Shane would take the fishing rod and I would take the blanket. We'd approach from two different sides of the bear quickly, to surprise him, and I'd cover the bear with the blanket and Shane would beat the poor animal down.

It sounded good. And it worked. Yes, our little plan worked. We had captured our prey!

Unfortunately, our prey turned out to be a gnarled old tree stump that, we had to admit, looked like a small bear when viewed from just the right spot along the path. Of course, we gave my poor sister endless grief for being afraid of a "little old stump."

We didn't catch a bear that day but we still took something from that adventure. We took the lesson that much of what we fear doen't really exist, and if it does exist, it's probably worse in our imagination than in reality. We learned that instead of running scared just tackle your fears head-on and you can overcome them. And we still have a great bear-hunting story to tell.