I was on the road to Sudbury, and CBC Radio was keeping me company.

Claire Cameron was a guest on The Current, a daily show on CBC.  Claire is the author of a book, actually a memoir, entitled “How To Survive A Bear Attack.”  It certainly got me thinking.

She worked as a teenager in Algonquin Park, so when she heard about a young couple being killed in the park by a black bear a couple of decades ago, she took an extraordinarily keen interest in the story and began what she would call her “investigation.”

People manage to die in Algonquin Park every year, mostly as a result of their own negligence, and sometimes as a result of extreme health events, like heart attacks.  For the most part, though, park fatalities will come from health failures, allergies, drowning, and even the car or truck ride just getting to the park.  Way down the list of potentially fatal episodes are death through bear attack.  In fact, it almost never happens.

It definitely happened to that young couple though, and it became apparent that the bear was drawn by their careless storage of food where they had set up camp.  Death, in such circumstances, is a tough penalty to pay for such an oversight, but bears don’t employ that level of higher-order thinking when they’re out and about, almost always searching for, well, food.