The Dog Everyone Thought The Bears Had Eaten
take someone under one’s wing: to protect, guide, and help a less experienced person
When the stray dog that lived in Ust-Kamchatsk disappeared, people thought the bears must have killed it. The town sits on the eastern coast of Kamchatka, in Russia, where bears became more and more common in 2018. During a record year for salmon fishing the waste dumped outside processing plants attracted wild animals. Brown bears came out of the forest to feed there, and so did a young stray dog. It was a laika. Nobody owned it, but people knew it by sight. Then, early that year, it stopped coming.
Months later a guard was checking the plant grounds with a small drone. He was not searching for the dog, but there it was on his screen, alive, far out in the forest. It was walking beside a mother bear and her cubs. The dog circled the cubs and play wrestled with them. The mother let it come close, and she did not chase it away.
A biologist named Pavel Glazkov watched the video and explained why the scene was so strange. Laikas were bred to hunt bears. He also said the mother bear must have known the dog for a long time. A mother bear does not allow a stranger near her cubs. It is unclear whether she had taken the dog under her wing or was only tolerating her new companion. Watch the footage below and see which one it looks like to you.
Sample sentences
When I started at the company, an older engineer took me under his wing and showed me how everything worked.
He never had children of his own, so he took his neighbor’s son under his wing.
My aunt took me under her wing after my parents divorced.
