The little girl and the bear

Once upon a time there was a little girl who went to visit her grandparents who had a little cabin in the forest. One afternoon when her grandparents weren’t looking the little girl wandered off into the woods by herself. Soon she was lost deep in the heart of the forest and could not tell from which direction she had come.

Suddenly a huge hungry brown bear appeared looking mean and angry, growling at the little girl. She stared to run but looking behind her realised she was no match for the bear who had giant paws and strong legs and could easily outrun her. She decided to climb a tree and quickly scurried up the branches out of reach from the bear. The bear stood at the bottom of the tree and grasping it with its paws began to shack it back and forth to try to knock the girl down.

The girl hung on for her life and thought she would be ok if she could just hangs on. But soon she realised the bear was an excellent tree climber as well. When he couldn’t knock her to the ground he jumped on to the trunk and one paw in front of the other clambered up the tree. The girl dashed up as fast as she could and made it just in time to the smaller branches that could barley hold her weight, swaying in the wind, high above the forest floor. The bear couldn’t follow her that high but was not far off and started pawning at her, nearly grabbing her as she swayed in the wind. She could barely hold on at this point and decided to make a leap for it to the branches of the next tree. She made it but no sooner had she jumped than the bear raced down the tree trunk like it was a pole and bolted up the next one. He was a very hungry bear. Again he was swiping his paws at her, so close she could feel the breeze of his paw pass. Barely able to hold on again she leap to the branches of another tree of which the bear followed in the same fashion of racing down the trunk and dashing up the next tree.

This carried on for some time with the bear growling and all the excitement and horror that an event like this could conjure up. Every time it seemed to change, how the girl was rescued, sometimes her grandparents turned up and scared off the bear, or some another passer by in the forest like a forest ranger or even another animal scarring off the bear. As this was something she did often.

This is a story my father repeated at my request almost every night before I went to sleep