STEUBEN – Dan Leighton, 14, got the scare of his life last Friday when he found himself chased by a bear protecting her cubs.

“I never ran so hard,” he said Thursday. “I ran pretty far; I was scared half to death.”

The teenager had gone for a morning walk with his dog Grizzly. The pair crossed a blueberry field and followed a trail into the woods.

When Leighton looked up from the path, he saw a bear – as far away as the distance between two telephone poles, he estimated.

The bear saw him, too, and started after him. He figures he ran about 50 yards until he was back on the blueberry field. He turned back to see the bear had stopped.

Leighton is the son of Connie and Leroy Leighton of the Unionville area of Steuben. On the Thursday evening before the bear scare, he had attended his eighth-grade graduation from Cherryfield Christian Academy.

He said he hadn’t seen the cubs specifically, but his father told him later that the bear probably chased him to keep the cubs safe.

Bears generally don’t bother people, a wildlife biologist with the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife said Thursday.

“You need to be watchful if you’re out in the woods at this time of year,” Mark Stadler said. “You may get a situation if you get a little too close to Mom [bear], whether you know it or not.

“I’m guessing the situation in Steuben was that the bear’s intent was just to scare this boy from her cubs. She would have stopped chasing as soon as she felt he was far enough away.”

Maine has one kind of bear, the Eastern black bear.

“They are pretty fast,” Stadler said. “They can definitely outrun a human over a short period.”

Stadler said there have been one or two documented bear attacks in Maine since records have been kept. Just getting chased by a bear is “unusual,” he said.

“We hear about this maybe once or twice a year,” he said.