Congratulations on Being Mauled by a Bear!

You and your step-dad have had a rocky relationship, to put it delicately. He has, on three separate occasions, tried to drown you and you once sat and stared as he was choking until he started to turn blue and hurled himself against a chair, narrowly avoiding death.

So this court mandated trust building camping trip is both much needed and unbelievably awkward. The two of you will barely speak to one another for the first five days. After that you’ll begin monosyllabic communications, with a smattering of nods and significant looks to indicate specific needs and desires.

The two of you will barely sleep the first week, each of you positive that the other will light him on fire the moment they attempt to sleep. The woods, after all, are a dangerous place and sometimes people go missing from them.

But around two and a half weeks in to the three month period of isolation the two of you will start to bond. You’ll learn that your step-dad is, as you already knew, one mean son-of-a-bitch, but that’s he’s your kind of mean son-of-a-bitch.

The two of you will share tender moments trapping and butchering small animals in various ways we’d rather not detail, then using the corpses to make food and nick-knacks. By the start of week three you’ll be cracking racist jokes to one another and espousing the reasons and details of your hatred of foreigners.

You’ll be espousing on the inferiority of Mexicans when the bear wanders into your camp site. It will have been drawn by the heady combination of ignorant prejudice, butchered animal, and uneducated redneck, and it’ll be vaguely puzzled when it finds the two of you instead of a KKK meeting (the two of you put out a lot of hate, is what we’re saying).

Once he steps in all that progress that the two of you have made will go flying out the window when your step-dad shoves you at the bear so that he can have an extra moment to grab the pistol he brought along.

The bear will immediately react with a nice one-two swipe and you’ll be on the ground bleeding in the fetal position, already weeping openly. You’ll be crying for your real daddy, who no longer returns your phone calls since he’s “tired of getting a white-pride rant every time he checks in on his first-born from his new home.”

Puzzled by your tears, the bear will decide that the best means of determining what’s up will be gnawing on your head voraciously, which he’ll proceed to do with gusto. By the time your step-dad comes back with his gun you’ll be bleeding quite profusely.

The first thing your step-dad will do, when he sees you return, is mentally pump his fist, thinking that you’re too far gone and that he won’t have to deal with you any more. The second thing he’ll do is raise his pistol and fire it at the bear, shouting “Fucking Mexicans!” at the top of his lungs.

The pistol, however, is an old .32, and the bear won’t be injured in the least. He will, however, be pissed off and charge your step-dad, pinning him to the ground and tearing him to pieces with his mighty jaws and claws.

You’ll take advantage of the opportunity to drag yourself away, already going in to shock. It’ll be a long ways to the highway and to safety, and a hard journey, but as you crawl, bleeding to death, through the woods you won’t be able to stop yourself from smiling. You'll finally have gotten rid of your step-dad.

Congratulations on being mauled by a bear, by the way.