Nearly every Sunday of his adult life, Todd Leishman went to church—with two notable exceptions.

Sunday May 1, 2005 dawned bright and clear.  Spring was here, the weather was nice, and antler season was open at Jackson, Wyoming.  Todd succumbed to the temptation to spend the day in the hills looking for elk antlers.

By early afternoon Todd had an armful of antlers.  They were heavy and he was getting tired, so he headed back toward his pickup.  As he hiked along the side of a hill he noticed a group of crows making a big commotion.  He stopped to watch, listen, and wonder what they were upset about.

And suddenly he knew:  a bear roared.  He was no longer curious.  He continued his march.  For twenty or thirty minutes he walked along the hillside.  He was feeling jumpy.  He kept hearing little sounds.  “It’s only squirrels,” he told himself; “It’s just my imagination.”  And yet the sounds were not squirrel sounds.  In fact the woods seemed unnaturally quiet.

Finally, in an effort to calm his imagination, he stepped to the brink of a bank and looked down toward the place where the last sound had come from.  He found himself looking straight into the eyes of a big black bear.  Todd backed up, set down his armload of antlers, and walked straight away from the bear toward a climbable tree.  Just as he reached the tree, the bear came up over the bank and charged.

Todd climbed frantically.  The dead lower branches broke off beneath him, but sheer momentum and determination carried him up the tree.  The bear stopped at the base of the tree and circled it.  It woofed and reared against the tree but didn’t climb it.  Todd climbed higher.

The bear was a black bear, but was grizzled and white around its muzzle and eyes.  When telling his tale later, some theorized that the presence of the crows would indicate that Todd had disturbed the bear on a kill.  Todd, though, doubted that the bear would have left a kill to follow him for such a distance.  He, himself, believed that the bear was an old male who had recently left his nearby den.  The bear hadn’t liked Todd so close to his den, and the bear was hungry after his long winter’s sleep.

The bear circled the tree, grunting and sniffing for several minutes, and then turned and headed back into the woods.  Todd was much relieved, but stayed in his perch.  He waited there for perhaps 30 minutes, watching and listening.  He saw and heard nothing.  Finally he began his descent.  The lowest branch was now eight or ten feet off the ground.  He put his feet on it, and was about to swing himself to the ground, when something inside him told him to test things first.  He began bouncing on the branch, making swishing sounds and noise.

From behind bushes in a different direction from where he had disappeared, the bear came roaring out.  This time the bear didn’t stop at the base of the tree, but came right up after Todd.  Todd climbed for all he was worth.  The bear was right behind him, and actually swatted his feet a couple of times.  Todd was at the very top of the tree, perhaps 45 feet off the ground.  The diameter of the trunk was only about four inches.  Todd was weighing the possibility of swinging from a branch into an adjoining tree when the bear stopped.

The bear descended.  Todd stayed put.  There was no way he was going down again if there was any possibility of the bear still being around.  By chance, Todd’s brother happened to call him.  Todd told him his problem, gave him his GPS coordinates, and his brother called the sheriff who mobilized a search and rescue team.  Todd had climbed the tree about 2:30 in the afternoon.  It was 8:00 when the team located him.  He’d spent over five hours in the tree.

“And that’s not even the scariest thing that ever happened to me,” Todd said later.  My other Sunday experience was scarier.  “I was hunting deer, and saw a young moose on the opposite hillside.  I sighted in on him just to test my scope.  Something wasn’t quite right, so I lowered my gun and turned around.  There, crouched in the trail all ready to spring was a cougar.  When he realized I’d seen him, he bounded off the trail and started running up the hill.  I got him.  But if I hadn’t turned around just at that very second, it would have been the other way around.  I think about how close the situation came to having a different outcome, and am glad that I can still spend time with my family.”

Todd is an outdoorsman.  He loves the woods, he loves hunting; but he also loves the Lord, and is grateful for blessings the Lord bestows even upon people who sometimes aren’t where they ought to be on the Sabbath.  As far as he’s concerned, from now on, the proper place to be on Sundays is in church.