Storyful
A Virginia deer hunter encountered a “once-in-a-lifetime experience” when a mother bear and her three cubs climbed up a ladder toward him as he hid in a tree.Tim Zello said he was hunting on November 8 in Virginia’s Orange County - an area not known for bear sightings - when he began to hear rustling in the leaves nearby.Zello looked around and spotted a deer, but the rustling sound continued and got “closer and closer” to the tree.“I thought it was a buck chasing a whitetail doe so I stood up to see if I could spot the deer,” said Zello. Then, all of a sudden, “the four bears seemed to appear out of nowhere just 20 yards from me,” he said.Moments later, the mother began scaling the tree trunk while the cubs began climbing on the metal ladder leading up to Zello’s tree stand.Though none of the bears reached Zello’s position and eventually wandered off, Zello said one of the cubs came within a foot of his feet.“Most hunters will never see one in the woods, even when hunting an entire lifetime,” Zello told Storyful. “It was definitely a rare, once-in-a-lifetime experience to be that close and personal with wild black bears.” Credit: Tim Zello via Storyful