This is the continuing story of the three bears. Or maybe it is the story of one
bear, three times. Either way, here and there folks from Richfield, Rockwell and
South Rowan are coming forward to tell their bear-sighting stories.
Shirley Barringer was headed to Dr.
Charles Staley’s office in Richfield, after a stop at the post office on N.C.
49 about three weeks ago, when she saw tail lights on the vehicles in front of
her flash on. “I wondered what’s going on that they’re putting the tail
lights on,” she said. Then she saw the bear in the grass, headed toward the
Richfield Park.
In the doctor’s office, Charlie
Coble, the local UPS delivery man, dropped off a package and said he’d seen
the bear. And a man in a white pickup went into the office to report the
sighting. “He kept on talking and talking,”Barringer said.
He’s probably the same man who
went across the street to Town Hall and told Carolyn Lisanby, the town clerk,
about it. She called the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission.
Pam Smith saw the bear in Rockwell,
at the cemetery, at the same time Post employee Sally Drew did. Smith was
driving along U.S. 52 when she first saw the animal.
“I thought it was a big dog,”
she said. “But it was a bear, a black bear running toward the road. I pulled
over and called 911. They said Animal Control had already been called.”
Smith said she thought the bear
heard the cars, turned around and ran off into the woods. It looked like it was
scared,”she said. “All I could think of was it could cause a really bad
wreck.”
Smith’s son was highly skeptical
when she brought her story home. “Sure Mom, I know you saw a bear,” he told
her.
“But I did,” she said. “I
really did.
David Posee and several friends
were in the other vehicle Drew saw at the cemetery. At first, they thought it
was a big dog too, but Posee said he saw the animal “loping” and knew it was
a bear. He called 911.
Smith agrees that the bear wasn’t
big. “It looked like a toddler,” she said, “about medium size. It was not
a baby, and it was solid black.”
A caller in southeast Rowan, the
other place where everybody was talking about bear sightings, also wanted to
tell her story, but she wanted everybody to be anonymous so they wouldn’t be
embarrassed.
She and a friend were taking a walk
— she didn’t say exactly where — and met someone who told them he’d seen
a 350-pound bear. They kept walking and shortly met someone who told them about
the 850-pound bear. The caller’s companion said, “Isn’t that remarkable?
The bear gained 500 pounds in just two blocks.”
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