Stories3 min(s) read
Published 11:43 26 Aug 2021 GMT
Two terrified teenagers have gone viral after scrambling to get away from a wild bear in their friend's yard.
The incident took place in Minnesota on Tuesday, August 24, when Hailey Nelson, 17, and Dori Arndt, 15, were helping out with their friend Hailey Nyberg's gardening, CBS Local reports.
However, as they worked in the 17-year-old's yard, Nelson saw what she thought was Nyberg's dog, but as the viral video showed, it wasn't long before they realized it was, in fact, a black bear.
Watch the teens scramble to escape the bear below:Nelson and Arndt ran for the front door as soon as they saw the bear, but to their horror, it was shut.
"So I'm pounding on the door saying, 'Let us in!' Screaming our heads off, just wanting to get inside! Then [Hailey Nyberg] pokes her head around the corner," Nelson said.
Thankfully, they were let inside by Nyberg's dad Brian, who shouted for his daughter to shelter herself from the animal.
"I heard them screaming and my dad came outside and is just like, 'Why are you still out here? A bear just walked past our… front yard!' 'I'm just like, 'What?'" Hailey Nyberg said. "And then he's just like, 'Get inside!'"
Brian said that when he first heard the screaming, he thought the girls were being swarmed by bees when it was actually something much worse.
When the teens watched their lucky escape back, they were more than a little amused by Nelson's and Arndt's actions when they saw the bear.
"I think it was funny that the first thing Dori went for was her water bottle [laughs]!" Hailey Nyberg said. "She couldn’t think about anything else except her water bottle!"
"They both grabbed their phones," Brian said. "You can't leave your phones out there."
Brian went on to speculate that what they saw was a juvenile black bear, which was around double the size of the family's 80-pound black Labrador Retriever.
While he was concerned about where the bear might go next, he said it went into a few more yards before finding its way back into the natural world.
CBS Local reports that the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources said that black bears find themselves in residential neighborhoods when they are lost and looking for food.
Their diet typically consists of berries, and it's advised that people should give the bears space and allow them to find their own way back into their natural habitat.
