Bear in the boat

Published 6:15 am Sunday, October 15, 2017

Talk about a role reversal in the great outdoors.

A Louisiana black bear rummaged around inside a boat like it owned it Wednesday morning. All the while, a Jeanerette deer hunter who owned the boat watched nearby from his perch in a tree.

Dusty Viator, 29, was deer hunting at the time on a lease on Weeks Island. He had beached his boat and tied it off  before settling into his 20-foot high tower stand close by.

As the minutes melted away, Viator eventually realized he wasn’t alone in the area where he recently killed an 8-point deer on opening morning of the DMAP land in Area 7. The boat was about 20 feet away.

“I was sitting in the stand. I didn’t even hear him come out on me,” Viator said a day later.

It was an adult bear, for sure, he said.

“Oh, shoot, he was probably pushing 300 (pounds). He was a solid bear,” he said.

Apparently, it moved ultra-light on its paws. Unbeknownst to the outdoorsman who’s been hunting deer since he was 5 or 6, when he killed his first deer on an outing with his father, Russell Viator of Jeanerette, the bear materialized as if out of nowhere.

“I heard a little bitty stick crack. I hurried up, grabbed my phone and started videoing,” he said. “It came across and started smelling the rope on my boat. Then it started smelling around, like, inside of the boat. So he climbed in the boat.”

One of the things Viator had inside his boat was a sack of corn, he said. It was open.

The bear nosed around and, naturally, found the corn.

“I figured he was fixing to stick his head in the bag of and start eating, the way he smelled it. But he kind of got back on the deck of the boat,” he said. “That’s when I really got curious. When he went back to the corn, he grabbed the whole bag, picked it up and started walking out of the boat with it.”

The bear was on all fours the whole time and never stood up on its hind legs, he said.

Viator, who works as a production operator for Morton Salt on Weeks Island, thought it was high time he made his presence known.  He started hollering from his deer stand.

“Whenever he got back on the deck of the boat, holding the bag of corn, that’s when I hollered at him. He put the corn down,” he said.

But not for long.

“He picked it up and carried it off the deck of the boat. That’s when I really started making a bunch of noise. I was trying to distract him and get him off the bag,” he said.

Finally, he said, the bear put the bag of corn down and s-l-o-w-l-y walked away from the scene of the attempted theft, then disappeared in the marsh.

Viator finished his deer hunt as if nothing had happened.

It wasn’t his first encounter with a bear and it won’t be his last. None of them have been worrisome.

“They really don’t bother me too much,” he said, noting he usually sees about two bears a season. “They don’t ever bother me. I’ve walked up on them. They don’t really do you anything.”

Well, he admitted, he would have had to draw the line if that bear expressed other intentions during the visit to the boat.

“I had taken my wallet out of my pocket before I got out of the boat. Once the bear got in the boat, I started thinking, ‘If he goes smell that wallet …’ I was thinking, ‘If that bear steals my wallet, then we’re going to have issues,’ ” Viator said with a chuckle.

The bear stayed away from the wallet, thus averting whatever might have happened if it absconded with it.

Viator said he put the images of the uninvited bear in his boat on Snapchat as soon as possible and shared them with his girlfriend, who killed a big wild pig recently from that very deer stand, he said.

“I sent it to my girlfriend, told her I had to run the bear out before it stole our engagement boat,” he said, chuckling some more. “We’re not engaged or anything. I just told her (when he got the boat) instead of a ring I’d just get a boat … We’d get a lot more use out of that.”

The bear wasn’t part of the deal.