Has anything other than a mean dog ever made you run for your life?  When I was stationed at miserable hell hole Ft. Campbell, Kentucky I had a friend, Buddy Whited, who was raised nearby.  His family had a farm in the beautiful, quaint little mountain town of Alpine, Tennessee.  Alpine was a place that time forgot, exactly like something out of the fifties.  My late friend Al and I would often spend weekends at Buddy's family farm in Alpine.
    On one occasion when it was just Buddy and I there we decided to go small game hunting.  He knew the area well, of course, so he led and I followed.  In those parts it was just fine for neighbors to cut through each others farms as they pleased.  We crossed many property lines until we came to a farm with a watch cow.
     She was a big, fat milk cow and she didn't take kindly to strangers on her land.  She made a couple of feints then full on charged us.  Well you just can't shoot a neighbors cow so we ran for our lives with Bossy right on our heels, bit fat utters flopping all over the place.  At the time it would have been funny but a cow is a big animal capable of doing damage.  We were young and in shape and fortunately able to outrun her.  In retrospect it was hilarious. 
    I also ran from a bull once, also in Tennessee, but that story isn't nearly as comical.
    So what kind of critter other than a dog has chased you?

When I was a teenager, I was working on an old farm. I was up on a ladder painting when I heard a sound that is very distinct and strikes fear and panic into everyone with in ear shot of it. The sound was that of one of those ginormous jug hornets, and it was getting louder as it turned the corner of the building I was painting, mythological in search for the cause of its disturbance and sighted me. It darted after me like its only mission in life was to jam its wickly big stinger in me for my presence of being there, and give me a what for. Well my quick wits and fearlessness as a demiwitted teenager kicked in and I jumped off the ladder before I thought twice about it. Well 10ft. and a split second later I hit the ground in a dead @ss sprint, as my fight or flight kick on the afterburners for full flight mode.
My brother, who was holding the ladder I had just vacated with my leap over his head, was armed with the can of hornet spray for just this occasion. But in his juvenile adolescent, he couldn’t stop laughing long enough to spray the anger hornet. So as I sprinted laps around the old building with the hornet in tight formation right behind  trying it’s damest to deliver is point. On the 4th or 5th lap and with my brothers lack of action on my behalf, I shouted out for him to hand off the can of spray to me as I went by in a blur. I would have made an Olympian Relay Racer proud, I came around that corner and snatched that can out of his hand like I was Spider-Man. Off I went, as I rounded the next corner there was a stream of hornet spray shooting out behind me as if the propellent from the can was going to give me an extra burst of speed. I blindly hosed everything behind me with that can of spray til it sprayed no more. I guess at some point I either hit the hornet or it gave up, for I never felt that jolt of horrendously painful hornets sting. Thanks goodness!

    I worked for our local Cable TV franchise that eventually became Comcast for fifteen years.  Much of our feed was underground with the equipment in pedestals. I'm sure everyone has seen them.  Unfortunately these pedestals make ideal homes for Yellowjacket nests. 
    We would try to use all due caution when opening a pedestal but most days we had a hellacious amount of work to do and we were almost always flying as fast as possible.  Sooner or later I'd get unlucky and open the wrong ped. 
     On these occasions you would see a huge, fat man run faster than you ever imagined possible.  It's a shame there was never any way to time my speed during these escapes because I know I was breaking some sort of track record. 
      Sometimes I got stung and sometimes I didn't.  In our trucks we always carried a good supply of BeeBopper (cans of very powerful, long range bee spray) so the last laugh was always ours. 
     One time while fishing with my late wife Marie and some friends in Vermont Black Flies made us depart in great haste.  As we walked deeper and deeper into a little slot canyon the flies got thicker and thicker.  We were trying to not be wussies but finally we realized we were getting torn apart.  To hell with being macho, we ran for our lives. Black Flies are an abomination. 

walter wrote on Apr 30^th, 2023 at 12:01pm:

Getting chased by five bears trumps all IMO.

Happy to say I have never been chased by anything that had any possible chance of harming me. Or much else for that matter. Only a playful frenchie when I was a kid and still afraid of dogs.