The story of how we built a bear den, across the road from grandma's house

So my closest siblings and I, ages 8-14 thereabouts (myself in the middle), were going on one of our many visits up to our grandma's place, four hours north of the prairie homestead, and grandma being more or less in the middle of a forest. When I say we were a loose gathering of homesteads in the fields, grandma was an even more loose gathering of homesteads in the forest. The next nearest house was about 3/4 of a mile away, with forest or fields built in the forest inbetween.

Now, this one year, it was during school summer break, were up at grandma's, and almost immediately after getting out of the car, were beyond excited to get into the forests again. This time, we as a group had decided to go into the forest across the road! A loose barbed wire fence was there, but it was straight common to go through there, that's more to hold back the cattle of the area than anything (not that there was cattle in there, they were about a mile west, but maybe for deer or bear, not that it would even slow either of them down just pushing between the wires, I think it was a legal requirement more than anything). So we went into the forest, and within minutes, found a tree broken off in the middle about 6 feet up, the top angling down onto the ground, the branches making a vague shelter beneath. So we took that opportunity to gather more branches and stack them up around the tree, and create a den out of it. We even gathered moss and leaves and grasses and anything that we could find to stack overtop of the sides to make it as sheltered as possible, with the one opening facing deeper in towards the forest.

And we played in it that summer, and visited it multiple times (amongst visiting the other directions of forest and the frog filled ditch a quarter mile away, and playing in the loft of the barn and what have you). And at the end of our trip, we sadly had to part ways with our den, and travelled back south to the fields again.

The next summer, we of course visited again (as we did every school break), and excitedly ran across the road again to see how our den was holding up.

So we found bear droppings nearby, and flattened down grass inside, and broken branches, and tufts of fur, and oooohhhhh, someone else is living in our den.

So we avoided that area during our visit, and generally kept out of that area on any future visits. That was the bear's area now. And we mean that literally, our grandma would tell us that on occasion, they would wake up in the morning to find bear paw prints on the bedroom windows, just... watching them sleep. It was the neighbourhood bear! A brown bear, I assume the same one I had seen several years earlier across the watering hole from me, about 40 feet away. I mean, it was always the neighbourhood bear, it was well known that it (possibly more than one I suppose, but A bear) visited the wild raspberry bushes in the forest on the other side of the house, the watering hole of course to the west. To the east is where we heard wolves howling most nights (howling with the wolves is amazingly fun, you start and then they start, or they start and you join in, it's great fun), but I don't know if the bear and wolves inhabited the same area of forest (the land was generally divided up into a grid by gravel roads every mile or two in the area, though in most areas, there wasn't any fencing whatsoever). We generally avoided the wolf area, cycling up the road on rare occasion (there was a gentle hill up that road, and it was fun to roll down), but the rest of the directions were definitely the bear's territory.

None of us were eaten though, so all good!