Bear Hunting

Bear Hunting is a funny scary story based on an old Bulgarian folktale about a group of men who go out to hunt bears.

Once upon a time, a giant, man-eating grizzly bear was terrorizing the countryside near a small village. It had been eating people who were travelling to and from the nearby village and the people desperately wanted to be rid of the murderous bear.

One day, a group of hunters were passing through the village and the people decided to pay them to hunt down the bear and kill it.

A young boy named Yuri volunteered to go with them. The men decided to bring him along as he might prove useful on their mission.

The men tracked the bear, following it’s footprints all the way back to its lair, high up on a rocky outcrop in the mountains. The entrance to its lair was a small tunnel that descended into the bear’s den.

The hunters could hear the bear growling and moving about inside the den, but they were all too fat to fit into the narrow tunnel. They decided to send the young boy inside, since he was the smallest. They handed young Yuri a rifle, tied a rope around his waist and he bravely crawled into the tunnel headfirst.

The hunters waited for a while, but when they didn’t hear any shots being fired, they began to get nervous. They shouted into the tunnel but didn’t get any reply from Yuri. Then, they tugged on the rope, but Yuri didn’t tug back.

Finally, they pulled and pulled on the rope until they dragged him out. But when Yuri’s body emerged from the tunnel, it didn’t have a head.

“Didn’t Yuri have a head?”, asked one of the men.

“Of course he did!” replied another man. “Or did he? I’m not sure.”

The men stood over the body of the young boy for a while and argued back and forth. They couldn’t agree on whether Yuri had a head or not before he crawled into the tunnel.

Then one man said, “Let’s go back and ask Yuri’s mother. She’ll know!”

So the group of hunters walked all the way back to the village and found Yuri‘s mother standing outside her house, waiting for her son to return.

They told her what had happened and asked her “Did Yuri have a head?”

She thought a bit and said, “Good question.” Then she thought a bit more and suddenly exclaimed “Oh, I know! He must have had a head. I bought him a hat last year!”