How smoking saved my life

I almost got killed this week. I went for a very early morning walk in a New Hampshire forest, in the icy rain. Black coat, black hood, black trousers. And so the hunter saw this hunched, awkward, shambling black beast, stumbling over sodden logs, and immediately raised his rifle to his eye and cocked the trigger. One thing, and one thing only, saved me. The armed cracker, looking through his telescopic lens, thought to himself: ‘Hey, it’s a bear — but it’s… smoking a cigarette?’ And so, at the last second, refrained from pulling the trigger.

I had this brush with death related to me, with great glee, by the people who ran the bed and breakfast where I was staying. I’d been quite oblivious. Word had got round the village quite quickly about this deranged Englishman wandering through the birch and maple in the teeming rain at ten to seven in the morning, apparently pulling off a remarkably accurate bear impersonation right in the middle of the state’s official bear season.