Watch Out for Lurch

Walking to the cutbank monitoring site my partner and I saw a sleeping mass of bear.  We detoured around the bear and climbed up into our stand.  The platform we monitor bear behavior on is about 2 feet by 4 feet long.  Just enough room for two people to sit on.  It is ten feet off the ground and situated between four trees.  They are not big trees but big enough to attach the platform.  The front two trees have the ground being washed out underneath them that at the end of the monitoring season we will have to move the platform because we think the trees will fall in the river this winter.  So a half an hour into the session we notice a very large black body moving towards the river.  It is Lurch, a very dominant male.  He was the sleeping mass we avoided.  Good thing as I would have hated surprising him from a slumber.  We did not want him to know that we were on the platform so we both sat very still and did not say a word.  Then Lurch walk underneath us and we felt like he was rubbing his body on the tree.  Now bears will stand on the hind legs and scratch their backs against the trees.  My partner and I looked at each other and I asked her if she thought he was rubbing against the tree.  She nodded.  She reached for a can of bear spray.  We wanted to be prepared in case Lurch stood up to scratch his back because the last thing we wanted was to surprise him and his 12 feet of solid mass.  who knew what he would have done if he stood up and saw two humans looking him in the eye.  The rubbing stopped and we watched Lurch lumber through the trees and down the bank of the river. The ground shook and the trees swayed. We both breathed a sigh of relief.  Later when our session was done and we had climbed back down we noticed that the tree did not have rubbing marks that usually appear when a bear rubs against the tree.  We realized that Lurch wasn't rubbing the trees he had just gotten stuck between them and was trying to get out.  What a calamity that would have been, anything could have happened, such as, the front trees could have fallen in the water along with us.  Or the platform could have come loose from the trees and us on top of him.  Either way we would have had to do some scrambling.  Good thing he got loose so I could live to tell the tale.