Mischief I've Made

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During college, several of my friends spent time as camp counselors. I went along a couple of years; free room and board for a week-long vacation in the mountains seemed a pretty good payment for a poor college student to look after a cabin full of junior high school boys.

One year, we went to a camp near Warm Lake, a short distance from McCall, Idaho. (McCall is one of the most beautiful places in Idaho, possibly eclipsed only by a thin stretch of Yellowstone National Park far to the east and Coeur d'Alene far to the north.)

I was a junior counselor. The senior counselor of the cabin was the 30-something Mark. He had grown up in Wyoming so he was very comfortable in the outdoors, very self-reliant, and seemed to have a gruff exterior if you didn't know him very well. Our cabin behaved as well as you could expect from a group of junior high boys.

The camp owners told us that they had seen a little black bear cub roaming the mountain recently. Everyone knew about it. Usually there's nothing to worry about; the cub was old enough to survive on its own and its mother had left it to grow up for itself. The cub didn't particularly like that, but so goes nature.

Only the cook had seen the cub that week. The bear tried to rummage through the garbage cans outside the mess hall around 2 am, but left when that proved unsuccessful. It definitely existed and was in the area. It was also the perfect subject of conversation for junior high school boys.

On the last night of camp, the camp director traditionally relaxed the curfew and let the boys and girls mingle until midnight or so, provided they did so in the open, lit area. This allowed a couple of counselors to walk through the area every few minutes to defuse trouble and make a visible adult presence while the rest of the counselors had a small party in the mess hall. Every ten minutes or so, another pair of counselors would duck out for the walkthrough.

On the way to the mess hall, me and another counselor banged on the garbage cans a bit to tease the cook into thinking the bear had come back. That gave us an idea.

Mark, being an experienced outdoorsman from Wyoming, took an empty cardboard oatmeal canister, a leather shoelace, and pitch from a pine tree. He punched a hole in the lid of the canister and threaded the shoelace through, tying a knot at one end. By smearing the lace with pitch and pulling it through his fingers, the vibrations of the string echoed in the canister to make a rumbling howl.

It sounded like you'd think a bear would sound.

We'd had a huge bonfire earlier that night, with flames several feet in the air. Add to that the noise of a hundred excited junior high school kids planning to stay up past their normal curfew and any normal bear would have left the mountain altogether.

The kids didn't know that though.

Around 11 pm or so, Mark and I approached the the girls' cabin compound from the back side, where we had tall grass and logs to hide us. The female counselors went to their cabins to prepare. Mark pulled the shoelace a couple of times. Then two counselors, in on the joke, ran screaming into the compound yelling "Bear! Bear!" and Mark let the noises fly.

The screaming probably had the most effect though. The girls rushed into their cabins and slammed the doors. The boys ran up the hill to their compound and piled into their cabins.

That probably should have been the end of it, but no one teaches college students the meaning of the word "moderation".

The camp had had more kids that year than normal, so there were seven or eight boys staying in the director's cabin. Conveniently, they were the youngest boys anyway, so they were all in their cabin — far enough removed from the action that they might have heard the screaming but didn't know our prank.

We still had more tricks to pull.

Mark sneaked up on the cabin and made a few bear noises. Then we waited.

A few minutes later, another counselor and I knocked on the door and told them that an adolescent bear, recently separated from his mother, had come back to the area. As far as we knew, this was all true. We explained how we had heard the bear howling and told the boys to stay inside and to keep the door closed.

They'd heard the noise and started to put things together.

Being the director's cabin, they had chests full of sporting equipment. They offered us a bow and arrow, among other things. I managed to keep a straight face — a bow and arrow suitable for junior high school students against an angry, frustrated adolescent bear? — and accepted a baseball bat instead. They recommended that we call the National Guard.

As we were leaving, we heard one of the boys telling another one "It's alright to cry. No one hear will blame you." I applaud the sentiment but feel a little bit guilty about it anyway.

We made another run through the girls' compound, receiving some muffled screams as a reward. Then we realized that we hadn't hit the main group of boys yet.

On our first round, there were only a dozen or so boys still mingling. Most of them were in our cabin and they found it suspicious that Mark and I were missing. Still, there were a few cabins and a few boys awake, so it was time to make suspicious noises and make sure everyone stayed in place through the night.

After all, on the last night of camp it's oh-so-tempting as a camper to wait until your counselors fall asleep and then sneak out to meet up with that cutie you've had your eye on all week or to do your own mischief.

That year, we struck first, hardest, and best.